In October the European Commission announced that the EU officials’ salaries will be reduced by 0.4% next year. According to Euractiv, the European Commission said in a statement "EU civil servants share the pain with national officials when their salaries go down. This illustrates the effectiveness of the Method, which ensures parallelism between the changes in purchasing power of national civil servants and the European civil service…"
However, the European Commission has recently proposed to raise the salaries of 50,000 EU civil servants by 0.4% in 2011. According to the Commission “The definitive annual adjustment figure is higher than the provisional figure announced in early October because the information Member States provided to EUROSTAT has changed.” The Commission decides on civil servants’ salaries according to a staff regulation formula based on two factors: trends in civil service salaries in eight member states, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the cost of living in Brussels.
The Commission said that “The total impact on the budget will be a spending increase of 9.7 million €” which is “an increase of the salary and pension mass in the budget of +0.2%.”
While several member states have been applying pay freezes to their civil servants, the EU civil servants would enjoy another pay rise. They already enjoy high salaries, for instances a senior director general may receive over €17,000 per month, plus all the benefits such as family allowances, expatriation allowance, installation allowance, travel expenses, removal expenses, daily subsistence allowance as well as low taxes.
The Council is required to take a decision on the Commission's proposal by 31 December.
It is important to recall that last year the Council has decided to amend the Commission’s proposal “in light of the financial and economic crisis.” The Member States agreed to cut the proposed wage increase from 3.70 percent to 1.85 percent. However, according to the Commission the 3.7% increase was legally-binding. The Commission took the view that the Council by failing to agree the pay rise based on the staff regulation’s calculation method was in breach of its legal obligations to respect EU law. Hence, the European Commission decided to bring an action for annulment before the ECJ against the Council decision reducing to 1.85% the salary increase of the EU civil servants, including ECJ judges.
The ECJ is expected to rule on the case in the first half of 2011. If the Court decides in favour of the Commission the member states will have to pay the rest. According to Euractiv a Commission official said "We have set aside enough money in our budget planning to make sure that we have enough if we win the case…”
