Euro servants strike to hold what they have

Padraig Flynn drove himself to Luxembourg yesterday to a meeting with EU Health Ministers. His usual driver was on strike, and the commissioner, although entitled to regard himself as an essential service, has made it known to his staff that he does not expect them to pass pickets.

Mr Flynn, responsible for encouraging harmonious relations between employers and workers in the EU, has diplomatically described the one-day strike by the bulk of the Commission's 16,000 employees as "a failure of social dialogue".

Word has it, however, that he is less than enamoured by the macho tactics of his fellow commissioner, Mr Erkki Liikanen, responsible for personnel. And trade union literature suggests that the cabinet of the President of the Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, is doing what it can to rebuild bridges with the unions.

The strike, embarrassingly one day before the euro summit, involved up to 90 per cent of employees, the unions claimed yesterday. It was provoked by the circulation of a paper by a senior British official in Mr Liikanen's directorate suggesting radical reform of the terms and conditions under which staff are employed.

Mr Tony Caston, a former personnel manager in ICI, was asked by his boss to work on the discussion document as a final contribution to his term in the Commission before retirement. The furious response of staff to the paper may well have made Mr Caston's retirement on Wednesday particularly welcome to him.

Despite being acutely aware of the danger of tabloid headlines - "Pampered Eurocrats strike", etc - the Commission's staff voted massively for a strike that is being seen as a shot across the bows of management.

At stake, they say, are potentially substantial cuts in their remuneration and conditions - notably suggestions that the annual allowance of 16 per cent of salary for living away from home should be phased out; proposals to make the firing of incompetent staff easier; the cutting of holiday entitlements - currently calculated in part to reflect the distance of officials from their native soil; the suggestion that pay should be related in part to performance; and short-term renewable contracts for the most senior staff.

Salaries in the Commission range from £17,000 a year for the lowliest messenger to £126,000 for the Secretary General of the Commission, with officials being taxed at special EU rates ranging from five to 45 per cent.

The extras are also important - a five per cent head of household allowance, travel home once a year, £160 a month per child, schools and university allowances for children, not to mention the expatriate allowance. Newly arrived officials are given two months' salary to help them settle in and those who use their spare time to teach can also get extra.

Mr Liikanen, who has been widely described as arrogant (though very media friendly), says the time has come to reform the Commission's personnel policy and that he is under pressure from member-states to cut out the fat. The Caston paper is not an official paper, he argues, and merely sets out a range of options. He has no intention of suppressing it - to do so, he argues, would violate the principle of the independence of European civil servants.

He even went so far as to suggest that such things were fine for the Stalinist states and the Catholic Church, but would have no place in the Commission. But you would not have to have been here long to remember the desperate attempts by the same Commission to suppress the writings of a certain Mr Bernard Connolly, archEurosceptic cuckoo in the nest. Mr Connolly no longer works for the Commission.

As for a full range of options, an Irish official remarked yesterday: "I don't notice any suggestion for less work and more pay!" The suspicion among staff is that Mr Liikanen has already bought the bulk of the Caston report and sold it on to the member-states, preempting the negotiations which he has promised to hold with staff.

Old hands here say they cannot recall such anger among the staff - 2,000 attended a mass meeting last week - although all acknowledge the need for some reform. They point out that although they may appear generous terms of employment their conditions are not as favourable as diplomats posted to the city and many families have lost a second family income of a spouse through coming to Brussels.

Many candidly admit they would not have come to the city except for the generosity of the terms and conditions and argue that the EU already has difficulty in attracting high fliers from capitals. Why then, the cynical might ask, did 90,000 apply for jobs here in the last open competition?

Staff are also worried by Commission attempts to impose a system of annual staff assessment, arguing that the multinational character of the institution often creates special problems between managers and staff of different nationalities leading to major inconsistencies in the way the system works.

Under-performance among staff there certainly is, but unions wonder how Mr Caston came up with a figure of one in 10 of all staff in this category.

Sound familiar? Like trade unionists anywhere staff here, by and large a talented and hardworking bunch, defend the principle that you hold what you have. And Mr Liikanen will probably learn the hard way that frontal assault is unlikely to produce results.