Purchasing power Varese

21/09/2010 No comments
We are sorry to inform you that our doubts about the correctness of the establishment of the Correction Coefficient (CC) for Varese are growing more and more.
Although the yet to be established CC is still confidential and not official, we are very worried that we might see a dramatic and unjustified decrease of income for statutory staff in service in Ispra.
Our retired colleagues are covered by the CC for Italy (mainly based on the CC of Rome). This general CC has proven already to reflect the real cost-of-living situation in Ispra much better. Also our colleagues in Parma and Turin enjoy a much higher CC than we do.
There is little hope that we will receive support from others to address and mitigate the problem, and although we will thoroughly review the data used, we are afraid that the current political climate won't leave much space for major improvements.
Fact is that the specific CC for Varese (as opposed to the more general CC for Italy) does exist and that according to Annex XI Chapter 4 Article 9 of the Staff Regulations the Commission is even requested to present a proposal to create a specific CC for a selected place of employment if Eurostat confirms that the difference to the CC of the Member State concerned is appreciable (more than 5%) and sustainable.
So even if a CC for Varese were not in effect, the Commission would have the obligation to propose one if according to Eurostat the local CC were above 105% or below 95%.
The same article in the Staff Regulations foresees that a local CC already in place can only be repealed if the difference compared to the CC of the Capital of the Member State concerned is no longer significant and less than 2%.

Conclusion: our statutory possibilities are very limited.

R&D will now seek legal advice in order to study the options and possibilities to start a legal action on two subjects:

a) If the CC for Varese were to drop dramatically, ISTAT data should confirm that this constitutes "deflation" for Varese, which according our information is clearly not the case.

b) There is a major discrimination between active and retired staff living in the same place by awarding them different CCs. This fact alone already demonstrates in our opinion the blatant incorrectness of the system in place.

We would like to thank you for being a member of our Trade Union and we hope that you do agree that we will use a part of our financial reserves to finance legal action if decided so by our R&D Committee.

Please don't shoot the messenger...

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