Eurocrats burn out under ‘insane’ Green Deal
workload
Delivering on the numerous promises of the Green Deal
is putting Commission staff under increased pressure.
The
Commission is unlikely to recruit many more additional staff due to budget
constraints, officials say |
BY LOUISE
GUILLOT
June 25,
2021 10:00 am
Brussels is
picking up the pace on turning its climate ambitions into law, but European
Commission staff are warning that they're buckling under the workload — and
that burnout could undermine the bloc's ability to deliver on its goal of
reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
The
workload is "insane" and "deadlines are often impossible [to
meet]," a Commission official who has worked at the institution for more
than a decade said on condition of anonymity.
"People
are resisting but they are reaching the end of the rope," the official
said. "I have colleagues in burnout."
The
Commission is racing to get its big legislative revamp to slash greenhouse gas
emissions by 55 percent by 2030 across the line by July 14. That package —
called Fit for 55 — involves the directorates-general for climate action,
energy, mobility and taxation and is largely on track, officials say. But the
wider long-term strategy into which it fits — the European Green Deal, which
aims to make the EU climate neutral by 2050 — is causing concern.
Officials
in the Directorate-General for Environment, DG ENV, have been working around
the clock to implement a number of new strategies presented as part of the
Green Deal, including action plans on the circular economy, biodiversity,
chemicals and pollution.
That
involves revising legislation to integrate more than a dozen new proposals and
strategies into existing rules. It's time-consuming work that is being done
under enormous pressure, as the Commission wants to put forward all proposals
by the end of its term in 2024. To meet that timeline, civil servants often
have just a few months to draft impact assessments that would usually take a
year, the official said.
The work
"makes sense" and gives staff a sense of purpose which helps them
"cope with the situation," according to the official. But the
pressures of remote working and the difficulty of separating work from personal
life during the pandemic isn't helping stress levels.
"HR
are worried ... they want to do something about this but they don't really know
what," the official said.
The
pressure on staff means the Commission's ability to deliver on all of its objectives
and targets under the Green Deal "is seriously endangered," according
to a second official with two decades of Commission experience. Staff are
"working twice the normal hours and [on] weekends" to keep up.
Deadlines
are being met "by the skin of [our] teeth," said a third Commission
official working closely on the Fit for 55 package. Given the scale of the
legislative effort, "there's incredible work being done," the
official added. "Everyone is managing.”
Short of staff and short of time
The
Commission is unlikely to recruit many more additional staff due to budget
constraints, officials say, raising the risk it could miss its own targets in
delivering on its flagship climate package.
When the
second Commission official raised the issue of overworked staff with managers,
"the reply is that there is no money" for additional resources.
The
Commission is working under "tight resource constraints" following
"reductions for human resources financing for the Commission" in the
bloc's long-term budget, a Commission spokesperson said.
The
institution is currently trialing a managers' training program on dealing with
burnout and has reallocated staff resources to departments "that are under
higher pressure to deliver" on the Green Deal, the spokesperson added.
Several
pieces of legislation are already facing delays. In March, Mattia Pellegrini,
head of the waste unit in the Commission’s environment department, said delays
to the revision of the Waste Framework Directive were in part related to staff
struggling to keep up with an "unprecedented" workload that is
"beyond any work-life balance."
The
department is dealing with a high number of revisions with limited staff, which
has resulted in "colleagues who are collapsing" and took "zero
vacation in 2020," Pellegrini said.
Matjaž
Malgaj, the head of unit in the Commission’s environment department who
coordinates work on Brussels' plan for the revision of EU-wide ecodesign rules,
said he "recognized" the need to increase staff to fully implement
and develop the legislation. The European Court of Auditors made the same point
in a report last year.
“This is
not something we should be shying away from addressing,” Malgaj said earlier
this month. “It simply will not be credible to set out the ambition that we did
[under the Green Deal] without having a proper improvement in how things are
enforced.”
The problem
is likely to snowball, officials say. New Green Deal legislation entails
additional oversight and enforcement requirements, again increasing workload
that — without additional resources — could overwhelm staff and create
backlogs.
At this
month's meeting of EU environment ministers, Commissioner for the Environment
Virginijus Sinkevičius argued against extending the scope of the EU Aarhus
Regulation on access to environmental justice, saying that allowing more
opportunities for people to challenge EU decisions suspected of breaching
environmental rules risks burying Commission staff in paperwork.
“We should
avoid a situation where the system will be unable to cope with an avalanche of
requests and where effective case handling becomes impossible,” Sinkevičius
said. “This can also have a negative impact on the capacity of the Commission
to deliver on our joint priorities,” he continued, referring to the Green Deal.
But
extending the scope of the Aarhus Regulation is essential to holding the Commission
accountable during the implementation of the Green Deal, environmentalists
argue. Because “a lot of the Green Deal will be delivered through
administrative decisions, it’s really important to be able to hold
decision-makers to account … and to have access to a review procedure,” said
Anne Friel, environmental democracy lawyer at the legal charity ClientEarth.
European
lawmakers are also becoming increasingly concerned that the Commission is
running its staff into the ground — and harming its own priorities.
"I
wonder how long the Commission will be pretending that it holds a grip on the
situation," said Renew Europe MEP Martin Hojsík. "We see legislative
proposals and policy actions being postponed, we hear about officials burning
out or running away ... The European Green Deal is the flagship of this
Commission, the institution should adapt its HR strategy accordingly."
Eline
Schaart and Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting. Giovanna Coi contributed data
analysis.
This
article has been updated to clarify the Commission official saying that people
are managing the workflow
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