Why this punishment?
CERN: sixty years of excellence
CERN is a great scientific and technological adventure. The excellence of the Organization is the sum of the skills and dedication of the men and women who work there. This unique human resource has allowed and allows the development of technologies that are the basis of important scientific discoveries, and thus of all progress of mankind.
CERN employees with their colleagues from other national and international research institutes, in high-energy physics and in other scientific and technical domains are an invaluable resource for innovation, experience and knowledge. This resource must be recognized, appreciated and developed so that CERN can remain a centre of excellence and of scientific reference that is able also to play a role in training the scientific and technical elites in a modern Europe, allowing the creation of jobs with a high added value.
In this year 2014 we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the birth of CERN. It is unfortunate that some Member States have chosen this moment to attack one of the pillars of social security of the staff by wishing to reduce their obligations to the CERN Pension Fund.
CERN and its responsibilities in the social sector
Under the obligations of the Convention for the Establishment of CERN and the social protection agreement signed with the Host States, the CERN Pension Fund was established by a decision of the CERN Council in December 1955. The Fund must provide adequate and sufficient coverage for the payment of pensions in old age, as disability insurance or for orphans for current and former employees of the Organization and their families. The Fund is a capitalized defined benefit scheme, for which the Organization guarantees the acquired rights of its staff until the cessation of the rights of the last beneficiary with the pension conditions fixed at the time the staff member signs the contract with the Organization. Indeed, as we explained in the editorial of Echo 198, CERN being an international organization, our rights are protected by international administrative law. In the case of pensions, this protection is further reinforced by the provisions of Article III 1.02 of the Fund’s Rules, entitled “Acquired Rights”. The presence of this Article shows that the Founding Fathers who created CERN sixty years ago, wanted to associate from the very beginning the scientific and technical excellence of the new laboratory with excellence in the social sector by emphasizing the responsibility of the Council in guaranteeing the rights of the employees of the Organization.
Why this punishment today?
- For having discovered and studied the intermediate bosons W± and Z0 in the 1980s and 1990s?
- For having had three staff members who received the Nobel Prize in 1984 and 1992?
- For having invented the World Wide Web in the 1990s?
- For having generated the first anti-hydrogen atoms in the 2000s?
- For having generated a gluon plasma and discovered the higgs in 2012?
The 2012 actuarial study of the Fund, and its update to 31 December 2013, show that the balanced package of measures adopted in 2010 and formalized in the 2011 Council Resolution, will allow the Fund to be fully funded at the horizon of 2041, as expected. Nevertheless, since the end of 2013 some Member States, bypassing the Fund’s governance structure, call into question our pension conditions, in particular by attempting to reduce, or even eliminate completely, the contribution of 60 MCHF paid by the Organization, an essential component of the balanced package of measures. The Staff Association and GAC-EPA have repeatedly expressed their disagreement with this approach, but so far without success. It seems that some delegations favour financial gains in the short term to the future and global interests in the development and training of specialists of the new generations.
Defend your rights; defend CERN
By defending our rights, we defend basic research and hence the interests of the younger generations, who have to construct Europe’s future.
To show your determination to defend your legitimate interests and to emphasize your support for a strong CERN, with adequate resources to fulfil its mission, come and join us in great numbers for a meeting on the day of CERN Council, Thursday, 19 June 2014, from 8:30 a.m. There you will also be able to sign a resolution of the Staff Association and GAC-EPA recalling our demands to the Member States, namely:
- to respect the commitment of the Organization to pay 60 MCHF per year for 30 years, taken when approving the package of equilibration measures in 2010;
- to respect and strictly enforce the competences of the governing bodies and the rights of all stakeholders.
