La
lettre d'U4U
pour EUROCONTROL
Having cut its spending on coffee, pens and rolls of paper towels, our inventive management has had a new idea for making savings to the detriment of the rest of the staff: encouraging our reporting managers to award lower ratings in our performance appraisals (as recently announced in an email to all staff). Management is probably aiming to avoid having to distribute too many "rewards" to high flyers mollycoddled by their bosses, thus making substantial savings.
But what about the others?
The email discreetly refers only to the three higher categories, which are for "good performance". It is clear, however, that if the appraisal ratings are lowered overall, there will be more people in the two other categories, which are lower, and that, unfortunately, this will not always have been done with complete objectivity. Again, management is aware that a rating in the lowest category, or two ratings in the next-to-lowest category, not only delay step advancement but also trigger a procedure "to improve performance to a satisfactory level", which may result in the dismissal of those unfortunate enough to be incriminated. This time, management could really hit the jackpot by dismissing a number of officials without having to pay them any compensation.
You can imagine the burden that will weigh down on the unfortunate victims of their appraisals, who will be under threat without any need for an accusation of professional fault. The reporting managers need to fully understand the result of their potential actions: a simple cross in a box could lead to extreme cases – officials being thrown out onto the street, with their (expatriate?) family if they have one, regardless of their seniority, simply for being "average". And as usual at EUROCONTROL, their colleagues will be too scared to react.
This is simply an incitement to staff harassment. We have entered the era of inhuman policies on human resources, which have already been implemented by other organisations, some of which have made the headlines (IBM with its Personal Business Commitments system and of course France-Telecom with its terrible “modernisation” policy).
Management is incapable of motivating its staff by positive means, so it is encouraging reporting managers to be party to an appraisal process that is unfair, demotivating and dangerous.
Curiously, the Staff Committee has not reacted to the email with which we take issue. In any case, we call upon reporting managers to award ratings to their staff in good faith, and urge all staff to react to any attempt at abuse with all the necessary vigour. We will give them our support.
ETS staff's right to vote in Staff Committee elections
The CSC (Officials) rightly decided at its meeting of November 2010 that staff leaving on ETS would not be able to sit on the Staff Committee, and would thus lose their status as members of it when they left on ETS. However, one important point still requires clarification: should staff leaving on ETS keep their right to vote in elections to the Staff Committee, and if so in what form?
An initial response in formal terms is that the Annex derogating from the provisions of the EUROCONTROL Staff Regulations does not provide any information on this matter. This means that the Staff Regulations apply by default and that therefore, as the texts (Staff Regulations and Rules of Application) stand, staff leaving on ETS must logically keep their right to vote in the electoral division corresponding to their final place of employment, in the same way as staff on leave on personal grounds or long-term sick leave. This is because staff leaving on ETS keep their status as officials of the Agency and are therefore more comparable, from a legal standpoint, to these staff categories than to retired staff.
Let us add to that that from a more factual perspective, officials of the Agency must all be represented by the Staff Committee, and the only way to be represented, of course, is to take part in the elections; any other type of representation would be non-democratic in nature and could therefore be legally opposed. It has been decided to maintain the status of ETS staff as officials, and in order to be consistent with this decision, since there is no statement to the contrary linked to the Annex derogating from the provisions of the Staff Regulations, those staff will keep all of their attributes, including the right to vote for the Staff Committee in the electoral division corresponding to their final place of employment. When all is said and done, this is fairly logical, as they will be affected by most decisions relating to other officials.
It is therefore important that the Staff Committee and management incorporate this point of view in any revision (at the planning stage) of Rule of Application No. 1 governing the Staff Committee elections.
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