EU staff poised for strike action

Staff give employers warning of strike action unless pay-rise demand of 3.7% is met.

Unions representing staff in the EU institutions have given notice to their employers of strike action if national governments do not agree on a 3.7% salary increase. 

The member states’ deputy ambassadors to the EU were meeting last night to discuss whether to approve the 3.7% pay-rise proposed by the European Commission.

Staff at the Council of Ministers are threatening to strike on Monday (14 December), which would disrupt a meeting of fisheries ministers that is set to agree quotas for 2010. Unions in the European Parliament are threatening to strike next week, which would disrupt the plenary session in Strasbourg. Commission staff have not yet decided which day they might stop work. The Commission staff unions have convened a general assembly at 1pm today (10 December) in the entrance to the Berlaymont building to discuss further action.

Agreed method

The 3.7% figure was arrived at using an agreed method of taking the average increase in the pay of national civil servants in eight EU member states combined with a cost of living allowance for Brussels.

Last week, ambassadors from 20 member states opposed the increase, saying that it was hard to justify in times of economic crisis and while public-sector salaries were being cut in some member states.

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Staff unions believe the Council will eventually accept the pay increase this year, not least because the Council’s legal service has said that rejecting the figure produced using the agreed method would be open to legal challenge. But they fear that governments will try to renegotiate the method early next year. The existing system was agreed in 2004 and was supposed to remain in place until 2012.