President Metsola addresses the EU regions on the Cohesion Policy post 2027
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OTHER European Parliament
Martis Gobinch
If not, then apologies again, but you will have to just make do with the poor sound and poor video that we have, unfortunately. Okay, okay, okay. Yes, microphone. I've now switched on my microphone for the Teams, so welcome everyone again. Apologies for the technical issues that we're experiencing.
We are still trying to resolve them. For the time being, we've started the meeting with this poor video and poor sound. Apologies, we'll try to resolve it and let's see, maybe a little later we will succeed. So, yes, let's get to the subject matter. We, what we want to present here this evening is the hub's technical setup and our working environment in the hub.
And we have someone here in the person of Caterina Balasso, who is now busy trying to set up the... Sorry, sound still unmute. Okay. Apologies once again. Can you hear me now, the people who are connected online?
They can. Sorry again for the technical issues. We have poor sound and poor video for the moment. We're working on it. We're trying to resolve it, but for the time being it is as it is.
So, yes, we will have a presentation of the hub's technical setup and our working environment there and questions and answers on that. We have a very competent guest here, Caterina Balasso of the technical working group. She's also a representative of Delint, the staff interpreters delegation. So, if you have prepared questions or if after Caterina's presentation you will have questions on the technical setup, then we'll take those questions right after Caterina's intervention. After that, we will go to the content of the amended working conditions and we will do a quick run-through of the main changes there.
That will be presented by my colleague Anne Moreau. And then we will attempt a quick summary and questions and answers again on that part. So, yes, we had planned to start with the technical issues, but since Caterina is still busy trying to resolve our issues here in this room, then maybe we can change the order around a little bit and start with Anne. Then I would have to ask you to come up here and then you can do the presentation so that the people online can also follow us. And let's see, it's from this slide onwards, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 5
Hopefully this works if I click here. Yes, sure. Right. I'll try to not make it too long and mostly give a summary because the texts are all available to you if you want to read any of the details. So our working conditions for interpreters, they are a decision by the Secretary General and are composed of one article and five annexes.
And the provisions relating to distance interpreting are will be published as annex number four. And this is what we negotiated over the past year, this new annex number four on distance interpreting. But we also had some adjustments to the main part of the working conditions and there were some requests by the staff delegation. Yes, sorry, you're muted again. I'm muted again?
Oops. How did that happen? Hmm, strange. Very strange. All right.
Back to the start. So our working conditions are published as a decision by the Secretary General with one article and five annexes. And in our negotiation, we negotiated annex number four, which is provisions relating to distance interpreting. And there were other parts to the negotiation as well and some adjustments to the main part of the working conditions and some things that are applicable mostly to our staff colleagues. So we will mostly be talking about annex four.
And the most important part of that is the safeguards and compensation for distance interpreting. So one of the most important things is that we have decided that distance interpreting has to be fairly distributed and equally distributed among all colleagues. And that includes the different booths, so the different languages and individual interpreters. So that means that there won't be any distinction made between staff interpreters and ACI colleagues. And a team leader will be assigned at the location of the meeting unless interpretation is only provided by distance interpreting, so from the hub, and then the team leader will be in the hub as well.
And we have negotiated a number of caps and limitations to distance interpreting, which means that colleagues will not be given assignments that exceed four hours on any given day. So that means that in practice you will only, if you have, for example, during a committee week, you only work either the morning or the afternoon from the hub and then the rest of the meeting the booths would be switched around. And if you are working in distance interpreting and you have another assignment that day that is not distance interpreting, then you will not be assigned to more than seven and a half hours on that day. And for distance interpreting assignments, you cannot be given more than seven and a half hours in any given week. So that means in practice that you could spend two half days working from the hub.
But this cap can be exceeded for unavoidable operational reasons. And in that case, then the excess time, so any time over that weekly cap in distance interpreting, will give twice the amount of compensation time. So say that you work thirty minutes more, that means that you get one hour that counts towards the compensation. I'll go down. Right.
And each assignment in distance interpreting will have a coefficient of two when it comes to calculating the weekly interpreting assignments. So that means that if you work a morning in the hub, say three and a half hours, that for your total counter of how many hours you've worked that week, it would represent seven hours. And if your assignments include distance interpreting, that means that if you work more than 24 hours in a given week, you will automatically be granted two hours of compensation. So that means that if you do distance interpreting assignments, your weekly cap of the number of hours that you can work in any given week automatically goes down, and you are granted compensation if you go over those 24 hours. And those two forms of compensation, so either going over the cap of seven and a half hours per week, which is compensated, you get twice the amount of time in compensation, and going over the 24 hours per week, that time is all added up, and if you reach four hours of accumulated compensation, you will be given half the amount of the daily fee as a flat-rate compensation.
And then to visualize it a bit more, oops, we have some practical examples here of what it would look like in practice.
Speaker 5
Right. So if you have a committee week and you have one hub assignment, so say, I'll try to say what it says on our screen, you work the Monday the afternoon, three and a half hours, a regular meeting, not from the hub. Tuesday morning, regular morning, not from the hub, three and a half hours. And then in the afternoon, you work three and a half hours from the hub. Those three and a half hours will then count as seven hours towards your weekly interpreting hours.
And then the rest of the week, Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and Thursday morning, you have a regular meeting, which is also three and a half hours. And that means that the actual hours that you work in that week are 21, but due to the coefficient, you get three and a half hours extra towards your weekly counter. So that makes for a total of 24 and a half, and that means you've gone over the 24 hours max per week with distance interpreting assignments, and then you automatically get two hours extra time in compensation, so that gets added to your counter. And this also means that you will not be able to be assigned on the Thursday afternoon, for example, because you've already reached your max hours per week. Then there's another, sorry, go on.
Speaker 5
Another example is where you have the same situation, but on the Tuesday, instead of three and a half hours in the hub, you do four hours in the hub. Then that means that those four hours actually count as eight hours. And that means that instead of your actual weekly hours, which would be 21 and a half, now it goes up to 25 and a half because of the hub hours counting double. And then your total hours with the coefficient is 25 and a half. You go over the 24 hours, so you are granted two hours in extra time.
So in both of those scenarios, you get two extra hours towards the counter.
You go over the 24 hours, so you are granted two hours in extra time. So in both of those scenarios, you get two extra hours towards the counter. So one difference with the weekly cap in distance interpreting is that if you go over the seven and a half hours per week, every minute that you go over that matters because you get that twice as much back in compensation. But for the 24 hour limit, you just get two hours automatically and there's no difference. Then we have other examples of mixed weeks where the workload is a bit lighter and those hub hours of course count double, but in a few examples we have, in some cases you stay under those 24 hours so you do not get compensation.
And then what you can expect concretely from working in the hub. Hub work will be possible in 2027 during 26 weeks. And we want to stress that there will not be any hub work during Strasbourg weeks because the hub will be in Brussels and when we go to Strasbourg, there's no renovations happening in Strasbourg, we have enough space there. And during green weeks there won't be any hub work either. And the heaviest months would be January, April and November.
And then one article that we as the EPPD found especially important is that the follow-up group on working conditions, and we always have an EPPD member who is an observer in that working group, they receive monthly statistics on how much people have worked. And there it will be monitored that the distance interpreting time and the compensations are granted in accordance with the new rules and that there is a fair distribution of distance interpreting assignments amongst interpreters. So as we said, between languages and between individual colleagues. And we managed to include in that specific article 5.1 that it includes between staff interpreters and ACI colleagues. So we have a guarantee on paper that it is not that the ACI colleagues will be sent to the booth, for example, there will be a fair distribution.
And we have had our three-monthly FUG meeting yesterday where we were told that they are still working out how to do this in practice because of course it is all very new and the colleagues in the different services need to adapt to these new rules. And probably the first few weeks they are still figuring it out, so don't expect it to be 100% perfect and fairly balanced between colleagues the very first month. But as colleagues are gaining more experience and know what it will look like in practice, because for the moment it is not even clear how much the hub will be used in practice, so all of that is still remains to be seen, but the follow-up group will keep an eye on it and flag any possible discrepancies between colleagues. I think that is it, right?
Martis Gobinch
Yes. Okay. Maybe we should open the floor for questions to Anne now.
We could open the floor for questions on Anne's presentation now. I think it was a lot of information for sure. We apologize again that the PowerPoint did not work. With that, it would have been perhaps easier to digest all these numbers about the soft caps, hard caps, compensations. It's quite intricate.
Does anyone have any questions here or online? We can also try to take questions online. Sorry again for the technical issues.
Speaker 17
Thanks. Sorry, I missed a bit of the presentation, but my actual question is the monitoring of the caps and their enforcement. Is there going to be some sort of IT tool or is it going to be done by human beings? Is it something... I think it's quite important because, like you said, it's a very intricate system. Should we also be keeping track of our own hub hours to flag any overshooting in our own workload?
What I want to understand, sorry, my question's not very clear, is to what extent do you think this system will work successfully and what degree of vigilance do you need from our end to provide you with information that could help in that assessment?
Speaker 5
I'll just quickly repeat what you said because I don't think the colleagues online can hear it. But the question was whether there will be an IT tool to follow up on the fair distribution of hub work between colleagues, or whether it is humans doing it, and whether ACI colleagues should keep an eye on their assignments to make sure that the distribution is fair. Currently, the colleagues in the different services already use multiple IT tools to keep track of where people are working and in what kind of meetings they are. If they have, for example, any online interventions during meetings, there's also a counter for that. So the expectation is that similar tools will be developed for that.
But as is currently the case, there is still a lot of human follow-up. And that is why we have these monthly statistics that we get with the follow-up group as well, that sometimes there are some people who have overshot their limits. There's always, of course, room for human error. So we would definitely encourage colleagues to keep an eye on how much they're working in the hub to see if they think the distribution is fair. And of course, we as EPPD, we are here to represent you.
So if there are any issues or anything you would like to flag, we would be very happy for you to reach out to us. But as we were told yesterday during the meeting, we do not expect it to be perfect within the first few months. So yeah, they have asked for some patience and I think we should grant them that because they're still figuring everything out.
Speaker 14
No, no, I think they will just activate their microphone as soon as you give them the floor.
Speaker 16
Let's try it. Then I would like to ask Anne-Marie Bonneau to tell us what she would like to ask, and hopefully it'll work.
Anne-Marie Bonneau
Hi everybody. I hope you're hearing me well and there's not too much noise because I'm in the street.
We can hear you.
Speaker 15
Okay, great. So it's going to be short. Have they planned anything about partially sighted people or blind interpreters using the hub? That's all. Have a nice evening.