The European Commission: Achievement or Retirement?
The dream job for Brussels immigrants: to get a job in the European Commission. This is what they fight for, this is what they dream. But is it really a job they are looking for, or is it just stability, a guaranteed salary, privileges?
Oh, I forgot: no possibility to get fired. In the worst case scenario, you become an “advisor”. It is still better than the Belgian “allocation chomage”, the unemployment allowance from the most indebted government in the western world.
As one Commission official once said, “they even do it on purpose: they get in the Commission and then they get pregnant”.
If you choose one random day in a week, you walk into a random Unit even in a fancy DG (Internal Market, Competition...) you will notice that at least one person in the Unit is absent.
You might think it is just bad luck, because he or she is on holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, at training: but you would be wrong.
If you make an experiment on a 6 months basis, you will see that at least one person is missing EVERY SINGLE DAY throughout the whole period.
Birthdays are also a good occasion to celebrate: no Unit in the Commission lacks supplies of wine, beer, coffee, biscuits and other appetizers. At a convened signal, everyone is called into the boss’s office (except the ones on maternity leave, holiday, sick leave etc...) and for half an hour work is suspended: every important decision can wait, celebrations come first.
A legend says Commission Units have more money for parties than for missions...
If you are still scared of the amount of work these people do, let’s take a look at the holiday time: twenty-four days at the entry level, Easter Thursday and Friday (like at school...), Schuman day, ten days for Christmas (from 23rd December to 3rd January) and the whole lot of Belgian holidays except 11th November (the Germans were against the celebration of a day that is mourned in their history).
Still not impressed? Ok, a Commission official rarely works after seven o’clock in the evening, almost never does Saturday and Sundays and YES: they cannot get fired. Sometimes you will look at the chart and see that some random official has become “advisor”: well, it basically means they wanted to fire him but they could not.
So, is this a useless overpaid job? Of course not, many officials work hard: but they are more the victims of this system than the benefited. Unfortunately, when you want to work hard in the European Commission, you are torn by a completely stupid and useless bureaucracy, destroyed by some hideous mechanism that forces you to buy a plane ticket at 7 times its real price. Not a long time ago, the Commission was looking into the regulation of financial services: officials did not even have the money to go to speak at conferences - and they can’t accept to be invited - but they still had money for parties.
Here we go: I think we found the pattern. If you want to be lazy, the European Commission is the best place for you. But if you intend to work and be ambitious, be prepared to become just one more frustrated European “fonctionnaire”.
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