International

In the past I’ve devoted my weeklog to the golden cage in which EU officials are trapped: they earn so much that nowhere else could they get the same salary. This week I read in the paper that many EU officials are also bored to tears and as a result are going into therapy in droves. So I’m renewing my call for a review of the salaries of top officials, if only for their own health.

In the national newspaper De Volkskrant of 30th September, the Brussels psychologist Steve Savels said that he regularly meets people in senior positions in the EU institutions ‘who have been doing the same thing for twenty or thirty years and encounter absolutely no challenges in their work, and who are even questioning whether it makes any sense.’ It’s a fact that EU officials stay put until they’re pensioned off. Recently the boss of those officials employed at the European Parliament, the EP secretary-general, in answer to one of my questions, said that last year nobody had taken another job outside the Parliament. The only ones to leave were a few who had gone on to pension.

Now it’s not entirely a bad thing if you work for a long time for the same employer. The SP wants to see precisely that - permanent jobs. It’s another matter if you find yourself trapped. What you actually really want is to leave, but you’re used to the high EU salaries and won’t find a job where you earn so much any time soon. And things become really dreadful if your work becomes superfluous or stops making any sense, and that now seems to be true in very many cases. The European Commission is putting forward fewer legislative proposals than in the past, which means that there’s less policy work. I’ve already asked the Commission about the consequences of this for the workforce, about whether a reorganisation was planned and in what capacity the surplus officials will be deployed.

That a reorganisation is very necessary can also be seen from information published last week in another Dutch daily newspaper, the NRC, on the pressure of work at the European Central Bank, whose employees are ‘in tears from the stress’. Perhaps some of the officials who are bored sick at the Commission could be transferred to the ECB.

Shortly will begin the annual monitoring of the books by the European Parliament Budgetary Control Committee, on which I act as spokesman for our political group. The Commissioner with responsibility for these matters. Kristalina Georgieva, can prepare herself now: I want concrete figures and a sound action plan.