Job insecurity: what a waste!

Union Syndicale is opposed to job insecurity. It is bad for staff and bad for the service.
Staff and their families are in a situation of existential instability; their worries about their futures make them less efficient on the job. At the same time, job instability disrupts the smooth functioning of a service, which wastes time and money in the unending search for new staff and training them. Job insecurity is therefore doubly wasteful!

In the case of contract agents (CA) and of the institution that likes to think of itself as “the best public employer” (to quote VP Siim Kallas!), the Administration and the majority trade unions and staff organizations (OSP) failed to make the most of the new Staff Regulations. Instead, they made colleagues – often already well-established in their jobs – sit expensive exams that, in practice, proved to be u pointless.
This defies logic and goes against the labour laws of the most socially advanced European countries.

In 2004, Union Syndicale proposed, negotiated and won, for thousands of colleagues with auxiliary or private law contracts, the possibility of such contracts being transformed into unlimited duration contracts, along with better working conditions and the same social rights as officials (health insurance and statutory pension schemes included). Since then, over 2000 unlimited duration positions have been successfully created!

For those colleagues whose contracts are limited to three years, a policy worthy of its name is conspicuous by its absence!

Most services manage such colleagues as they please and increasingly entrust permanent :

• Extend AC 3b contracts to six years.
• Give first contracts of three years, renewable for a further 3 years.
• Create an inter-institutional pool of AC colleagues and guarantee that all colleagues on extended absence, whether full or part-time, be replaced.
• Authorise successive CA and temporary agent contracts, using transparent and fair procedures.
• Create new openings for unlimited duration contracts through existing and future agencies and offices.
• Completely review the current recruitment procedures; make them more professional and abolish the use of foreign languages in examinations, especially for the lower grades!
• Encourage the career advancement of AC 3a colleagues with unlimited duration contracts by improving the way they are appraised and re-graded.
• Equal pay for equal work: bring the salaries of CAs who replace officials more into line with the colleagues they replace.