Public Staff Meetings – thank you for a large attendance

The public meetings of the Staff Association which took place recently were attended by about 500 staff, a large fraction of them young and on a limited duration (LD) contract. The audience mainly shared the worries of the Staff Association concerning the low number of IC post openings in this and the coming years. Moreover, after the meeting several LD contract holders contacted the Staff Association to express their point of view and to put forward their ideas to tackle this problem.

As explained in those meetings, the Staff Association emphasizes that personnel policy should not be guided by self-imposed quota, even under pressure by the Member States. As we have repeated several times, CERN needs a total staff complement well beyond the baseline ceiling of 2250, the number agreed by Council, if it has to guarantee an efficient and excellence level of service to the ever-growing user community, which has almost doubled over the last decade. Moreover, the indefinite contract (IC) component should stand at least at 80% of this baseline number of 2250 staff, thus well above the limit of 1750 IC contracts mentioned in Finance Committee last year. Such an approach would permit a number of IC post openings that would allow the Organization to keep an adequate number of experienced, dedicated and trained staff beyond the five years of their LD contract.

Our arguments on this topic were further developed in an article in Echo № 173. This article also contains a study of the average effective annual cost of LD contracts versus IC contracts, which shows that a succession of LD contracts is financially substantially more expensive than awarding an IC contract after the LD contract.

We thank all staff for supporting our efforts to guarantee a genuine motivating working environment at CERN.

The slides of the presentation are available from the Indico page https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=250563.

by Staff Association