ECON hearing on ECB governance and staffing issues
Upon IPSO´s initiative, the ECON Committee of the European Parliament
organized a hearing on HR matters at the European Central Bank (ECB)
which took place on 26 October 2016. See here the video of the hearing on the European Parliament’s website.
The
hearing was split in two separate sessions, one with ECB management,
represented by the ECB’s Chief Services Officer Michael Diemer and the
Director General of the ECB’s HR function Anne-Sylvie Catherin and
another one with staff and union representatives Carlos Bowles (Staff
Committee) and Johannes Priesemann (IPSO).
Staff and Union
Representatives insisted on the constitutional anomaly that the ECB acts
as the employer and legislator at the same time. They flagged the
resulting large imbalance of powers at the European Central Bank and the
excessive interpretation of independence. They flagged operational
risks deriving from the precarious contracts, the role of personal ties
in appointments and promotions and excessive workload. They called for
intensified parliamentary scrutiny, full transparency of the law-making
materials in ECB’s own labour law setting and the adoption of good
practices as regards staff participation in decision-making (see the
introductory statements attached from Johannes Priesemann and Carlos
Bowles) and requested the recruitment of long-serving temporary agency
staff rather than the outsourcing of the work to external service
providers.
Parliamentarians, on their part, questioned the ECB
managers about the ECB’s decision to adopt the staff rules different to
those of other EU institutions, the lack of staff participation
mechanisms for the ECB as a European Institution, the generalized use of
temporary contracts for permanent tasks, and the ECB´s cherry-picking
application of the German legislation regarding the use of temporary
agency staff. Staff and Union Representatives, and in their view also
the members of Parliament, so far, were not convinced by the ECB’s
answers to these questions.
The MEPs present agreed on the need to
follow up on these issues and are working on a possible way forward to
intensify the European Parliaments scrutiny in these matters.
The ECB Representatives’ presentation can be seen in the video linked above.
Bowles Bullmann de Masi ECON European Parliament Priesemann Strasbourg