As every year, 2016 ended with the Council Week
The Finance Committee met on 14 December 2016. This Committee is comprised of delegates representing national administrations and deals with all questions related to the financial contributions of the Member States, the budget of the Organization and the expenditure of the Laboratory.
The main decisions with a direct or indirect impact on the financial and social conditions of the personnel were:
- non-indexation of salaries as of 1st January 2017, and for six consecutive years, with a negative memory of -0.4 %;
- negative cost-variation index of -4.93 %;
- acceptance of proposed changes to the CHIS (CERN Health Insurance Scheme) Rules, primarily on CERN Health Insurance membership conditions.
However, the highlight of this Finance Committee was the Director-General’s announcement of her decision to recruit 80 additional staff on limited-duration contracts.
The Staff Association supported this decision with a declaration by its President at the Finance Committee. It was emphasized that the current personnel is under considerable pressure to achieve the objectives of the Organization and to respond to the growing demands of the Laboratory.
The Staff Association would like to recall that it has on numerous occasions expressed the concerns of the CERN staff regarding the shortage of personnel to ensure the supervision of students, the implementation of increasingly complicated projects and other activities. Indeed, the ratio of staff members to other members of the personnel (fellows and associated members) has more than doubled over the last ten years. Lastly, the Staff Association stated that the long-term viability of the Laboratory’s activities relies heavily on a stable and very experienced workforce, which requires more than just the 80 limited-duration positions announced by the Management, and should include also positions with indefinite contracts.
Evolution of various categories of personnel with time
Challenges for 2017: burning issues and finalizing the implementation of the 2015 Five-Yearly Review
Now, at the beginning of 2017, the issues that require our full attention are related to the annual MERIT exercise and the Promotion exercise. These two issues are highly sensitive and of great importance to the staff members because they concern your advancement and your career development prospects. We will come back to you shortly with a detailed article on these issues.
Moreover, in 2017, we will work with the Management on internal mobility, career development interviews and the internal validation of skills acquired through experience (VAE, validation des acquis de l’expérience). All of these issues are part of the 2015 Five-Yearly Review package. These processes must be implemented as soon as possible and by the end of 2017 at the latest. Again, we will keep you informed of the progress.
At the beginning of this New Year, we would like to remind you that the Staff Association represents all members of the personnel (MPE and MPA) in discussions with the Management and the Member States. Please do not hesitate to contact your staff delegates and enrich the discussion by sharing your views on the issues we are currently working on or any other topic. Your contributions are invaluable to us. It is also very important to support the Staff Association by joining and engaging in the activities of the Association that will renew its Staff Council at the end of 2017.
Lastly, as a year comes to an end and a new one begins, we wish you and your loved ones all the best: health, happiness and success for 2017.
Declaration at Finance Committee by Staff Association on paper CERN/FC/6065/RA
Thank you, Madam Chair!
The Staff Association would like to first state its strong support for the position presented by the Management to recruit some 80 additional staff on Limited Duration posts. The analysis provided by the Management matches and exemplifies many of our own concerns and our current knowledge of the situation across the Organization.
The CERN Management comes first to state that the “current staff complement is under significant strain to continue meeting the objectives of the Organization […] and to satisfy the increasing demands being made on the Laboratory.” Further the paper mentions “concerns […] expressed by Member State delegates, by the SPC and the CERN Directorate at meetings of TREF, the SPC, the FC and the Council about the shortage of staff in key fields…” The Staff Association would like to recall that it has on numerous occasions also expressed the concerns of the CERN staff regarding staff complement reductions that lead to such shortage in many important fields.
The analysis presented by the Management further gives very valuable information in section 2 titled “History and motivations”. The second paragraph in particular shows that the initial intention to reduce the staff complement by one thousand FTE was actually achieved by reducing the number of Indefinite Contracts by one thousand, from about 2700 in 1994 to about 1700 today. The efforts by Management to maintain a viable level of staff complement were materialized in the increase of the fraction of Limited Duration contracts, from 10% to now 30%.
This leads inevitably to two effects. The first effect is that we observe a loss of expertise in some areas of the Organization. When Limited Duration posts succeed one another, without any tiling, there is no longer an opportunity to transmit knowledge and know-how. This was pointed out by the Review Committee for the Cost and Schedule review for LIU and HL-LHC: “In many cases the expertise required does/will not exist (anymore) at CERN and must be recruited as soon as possible, be trained and brought into the projects.” The analysis is correct and the remedy of providing a number of Limited Duration contracts appears to be as well, because this concerns a couple of large scale projects which are time limited. However, there is significant extra cost in the hiring and training processes that come along.
And this brings us to the second effect which is the supervision effort required of the remaining staff on Indefinite Contract. With a higher fraction of staff on Limited Duration contracts, the investment to hire and train new LD staff falls upon the IC staff to a large extent. Beyond this extra cost, this is also lost productivity felt by the experienced long-term staff. However, we do recognize that training young professionals and giving them an opportunity for a work experience at CERN is one of our missions, and rest assured that all staff at CERN take this to heart and are eager to share their knowledge. We know that such training is essential for the Member states and constitutes a very valuable return to their own laboratories and industry. It remains that there is a significant shift of activities, for many IC staff, from production work towards training and supervision.
In Section 3 the Management points to another but similar effect: Figure 1 shows that the ratio of staff to all members of personnel (employed and associated) has more than doubled in the last ten years. Associated members of personnel and fellows also require supervision and services, which are provided, to a large extent, by the stable workforce of the Organization.
Figure 2 gives further insight concerning users on the one hand and fellows and students on the other hand. Users expect a certain level of service to be provided by the Laboratory but the ratio of users to staff has been multiplied by 2.5 in 20 years! Fellows and Students require active and significant supervision – they should never be thought as replacing missing staff as is sometimes the temptation – and the ratio of fellows to staff has been multiplied by 4.5 in 20 years!
The CERN staff fulfils its missions in a very enthusiastic way, be it to directly participate in forefront research in physics, provide and operate the accelerators and high technology equipment and tools required to carry out this research, provide all site services to support these activities, but also to supervise and train young scientists coming from all our member states. The trends regarding the workloads are however worrying, and we see little short-term relief. With new member states and associated member states, we look forward to welcoming on site more users, more students and young scientists. We are very happy and excited to work with our new colleagues and we really want to give them the service and attention that they deserve. But we are anxious to know whether we have the means.
Further, we would like to point out that, while the transfer of funds from “budget lines that have shown a slower time profile than planned” is certainly a sound decision, the technical infrastructure consolidation budget is also directly affected by the lack of personnel in key areas. The consolidation of the laboratory’s infrastructure must be considered with priority as well, and appropriate staff complement allocated in order to carry out the work and meet the timeline.
In conclusion, we would like to again state our strong support for the initiative of the CERN management to relieve the strain that has been placed on CERN staff over the last decades. However, this strain relief should be extended, beyond the scope of the high priority projects identified by the Management, to other key activities of the Laboratory, which in turn requires more posts than the number of 80 quoted by the Management. We also want to point out that the long-term viability of the activities of the Laboratory strongly relies on a stable and very experienced work force, which means also the need for an increase in the number of Indefinite Contracts in the staff complement.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
