Disregarding Health And Safety At Work!
Since three years, the Union Syndicale Fédérale has been calling for a building management policy respecting health and safety at work.
Our trade union supports the necessity, in the post-Covid phase, to rationalise how office spaces are used while, at the same time, the staff need to part-time telework is met, in order to better combine professional and private life.
The Union Syndicale Fédérale recognises, in this respect, the institution as having exclusive competence when deciding on work environment and organisation.
However, the Union Syndicale Fédérale has been insisting for three years that the Commission, as an employer, is bound to respect the occupational health and safety standards applicable to new dynamic collaborative spaces (‘dynamic mode’), mainly configured as open-spaces.
More specifically, the US calls for office spaces and workstations consistent with the needs deriving from the activities the services perform, noise limitations in workspaces, tables adjustable in height (by crank or electrically) adapting to the morphology of each person, absence of direct light on screens and of air blowers pointed towards colleagues’ shoulders, as well as the possibility to customise the space.
The Union Syndicale Fédérale notes that the European Commission has so far not adopted the legal bases for health and safety at work necessary to guarantee these minimum requirements.
In this atypical context, the Offices for Infrastructure and Logistics in Brussels and Luxembourg (OIB and OIL) have been responsible for dynamic mode open-spaces proliferation in the past 3 years, without any action by DG HR (the Commission’s representative as the employer) to prevent related problems (in particular in the Loi 107 building).
On the contrary, OIB and OIL projects have been allowed to acquire momentum, applying the so-called ‘100-day’ policy, namely an ‘a posteriori’ inventory of remedial actions to be taken on the basis of complaints by staff lacking training in health and safety at work.
The Union Syndicale Fédérale has been advocating for months the definition, in consultation with staff, of workspaces corresponding to the reality of staff activities, based on health and safety at work analyses to be carried out prior to any change. Some tasks simply cannot be performed in open-spaces (dynamic mode), such as call centre, secretariat, personalised and confidential assistance, and work requiring a high level of concentration ...
The Burn-Out Factory "Real Estate Policy"
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In this context, we understand all the more the difficulties the joint committees responsible for health and safety at work are facing on a daily basis.
Considering the above, the Union Syndicale Fédérale calls for opening social dialogue on the general framework and services for health and safety at work in the Commission. This dialogue will cover, in particular, the development of dynamic collaborative spaces, issue which will remain relevant, as well as the timeframe for the implementation of the new building policy (until at least 2030).
The Executive Committee
Union Syndicale Fédérale
