SFE wishes you and your loved ones a happy holiday season!

SFE wishes you and your loved ones a happy holiday season!

Dear members, Dear colleagues,

Dear friends,

This year, which will soon be coming to an end, has not yet been an easy one.

It will soon be two years that Covid19 has profoundly changed our lives, having a significant impact on our professional and private lives.

Vaccination has played an important role and we can only praise the work accomplished by our medical service and all those involved in the field. The challenge was not easy, but thanks to the joint work of many colleagues, several thousand of us, both active and retired, were able to be vaccinated internally and thus participate in the common effort.

This pandemic will have had a lasting impact on our society and all the efforts made will have to be sustained over time.

Major upheavals in our working conditions are also underway.

First of all, teleworking has profoundly reshaped our relationship with work and with others, and has sometimes exacerbated the shortcomings of an old-fashioned management style.

With the return to the office during the year, we also noted the importance of relations between colleagues, the need to be together and to share. Unfortunately, this period was short-lived, given the resurgence of cases and the new wave at the end of the year.

And then, the new arrangements, such as hot-desking, which the administration is trying hard to put in place in several departments. The effects of these installations on colleagues are obviously not well known, given the context which, in our opinion, does not allow us to appreciate the consequences, particularly social, organisational and logistical.

In any case, the generalisation of these installations should be better discussed/debated with the staff representatives, since at present the administration is acting without the slightest consultation, the trade unions being presented with a fait accompli.

This message could not be addressed without mentioning the Brussels staff elections that took place at the end of the year.

This year, our union SFE had decided to form a joint list with our partner TAO-AFI in order to pool our strengths and share the values we hold dear.

This year there were 6 lists in addition to ours.

We can only regret that the quorum was not reached at the end of the voting period.

If we can point to the lack of attraction for representation of a certain number of colleagues and the difficulties linked to the current context to exchange on important subjects, we can also regret that the administration did not provide a modern and easy to use voting tool (cf. the voting application dated from 2006 and was only compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox).

What does this mean in concrete terms now? A meeting with DG HR will be held in early January to launch a second round of voting.

We can only encourage all the colleagues who voted to participate in this staff representation election, because only a representation elected by the staff will be able to act and have an influence during the social dialogue meetings.

And finally, we will have a thought for the colleagues who, once again this year, will have suffered from this context, are far from their relatives, suffer from loneliness.

To all those who are on the front line, on the ground! To all those who hold high the principles of European construction!

We wish you a wonderful holiday season!

Please continue to take care of yourselves and your loved ones, until we meet again in 2022!