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Bad smell hangs over European Parliament’s restaurants

24 April 2016

Bad smell hangs over European Parliament’s restaurants

With thousands of employees and visitors per day wanting to be fed, catering in the European Parliament is serious business. The EP recently changed its catering contractor, the aim being to lower costs and improve quality. Now it turns out that the change has led to a grave deterioration in the working conditions of canteen staff increasingly employed on zero-hours contracts, under which they must stay at the beck and call of the employer without knowing when or for how many hours they will be required. This is an intolerable situation which the SP’s political group, the United European Left, wants to see changed, and rapidly. Food which has to rely on exploitation of workers leaves gives off a bad smell.

Foto: Europees Parlement
In actual fact there’s always a great deal of hoo-ha around the catering in the European Parliament, In the past we received a lot of complaints about the subsidies paid to the caterer in order to keep the prices in the canteen down, and everything was tried to reduce these subsidies. Sizable increases in the price of some meals didn’t go down well with everyone, but considering the salaries paid to MEPs and their staff members, this should not have presented any problems. It means in any case that our meals are no longer paid for in part by the taxpayers.

Prices have indeed risen considerably, which can’t be said for the quality of the food, even taking into account that this is principally a matter of personal taste. It is, however, difficult to understand why, despite the price rises and the lack of any improvement (at best) in quality, the working conditions of the catering staff have deteriorated enormously.

That applies in particular to those employees who bring the coffee and tea round during meetings. This used to be the norm, but the service is now supplied only to special meetings. Some weeks there’s more demand for coffee and tea for such meetings than there is at other times. Apparently it was too much trouble for the British catering firm, Compass, to fit such meetings into broader catering activities, which would guarantee all of their employees reasonably fixed working hours. Instead, they went for the simplest solution: zero-hours contracts with absolutely no security for the workers affected.

During the budget accounting procedure regarding the EP, attention was paid principally to the price and quality of the catering and to the availability of water during the meetings. This procedure is now almost complete for this year and we will have no more opportunities in this context to raise the question of staff working conditions. However, we are going to ask our group’s representative in the EP’s praesidium to put the issue on the agenda. Was there nothing in the tendering procedure regarding working conditions of catering staff? And if not, why not? How can an end be put as quickly as possible to the zero-hour contracts? Hopefully this will lead to rapid improvement. If not, then I don’t see myself making use of the existing catering any time soon, and together with other MEPs who feel the same, I’ll be calling for a mass boycott to continue until Compass starts to treat its employees decently.

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