Delegation staff set to strike

Date: 18/04/1996

LOCAL staff in the European Commission's overseas offices will start a series of one-day rolling strikes next week in the latest stage of a battle over pension rights.

The strike action will be launched on Tuesday (23 April) by locally hired officials in the Commission's African delegations, followed two days later by those based in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The following week, it will spread to offices in North and South America and then to those in Asia and the Pacific. “We can keep that up for quite a long time,” predicted one senior staff union official.

The escalating protests by staff in the EU's 126 external delegations are directed at the continued failure of the Commission to set up a pension fund almost five years after it promised to do so.

After months of negotiations failed to break the deadlock, two staff unions - Union Syndicale and the Fédération de la Fonction Publique Européenne - organised a first one-day strike in all the overseas offices around the world on 28 March.

“You could say it was a 24-hour strike on which the sun never set. Of the 88 delegations which have contacted us, 77 took part in the strike. The participation rate was notably high in Africa, where the figures were 33 out of 36,” said one union official.

Under an agreement reached in July 1991, a pension fund was due to be established with the Commission and employees each contributing the equivalent of 5&percent; of local staff salaries. Almost five years later, the fund is still not operational.

In a number of centres - Washington, Oslo, Canberra and Ottawa - the Commission has set up local pension funds. But critics argue that this penalises officials serving in offices where such options do not exist. They also maintain that the system being considered is more of a savings scheme than a pension fund.

Full-time Commission officials are now guaranteed 70&percent; of their last basic salary when they retire. Figures released by the staff unions suggest that after 35 years of contributions at the proposed levels, local employees would leave with a sum equivalent to 3.8 times their final annual salary.

“That would probably translate into a 70&percent; pension for five years, then the money would run out. That is not a pension scheme. A pension gives you a guaranteed income for the rest of your life,” complained one official.

External Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek and Personnel Commissioner Erkki Liikanen are working to try to defuse the issue.

The Commission has offered to backdate its contributions - estimated at some six million ecu - to 1991 and pay interest which might have accrued. But it is insisting that it will only do so if local employees similarly backdate their own contributions.

Staff unions are refusing to accept this last condition, arguing that it was the Commission's failure to establish the fund which prevented local staff from making their contributions.