The initial discussions

We all discovered during the Director-General's first address to the personnel, on January 13^th, his desire to improve “maternity/paternity offering” by “doubling the paternity/partner leave from 2 to 4 weeks” and removing the need for breastfeeding to extend a maternity leave by 4 weeks. While we were surprised, the Staff Association (SA) welcomed the idea.

Concertation quickly kicked in, with the principles of such a change being discussed at the Standing Concertation Committee (SCC) on January 27^th. During this meeting, the SA proposed improvements and, while it did not oppose the proposal, clearly signaled that a better solution could, and should, be built together.

Informal discussions immediately began, and it was quickly agreed that the changes should not go to the Tripartite Employment Conditions Forum (TREF), the Finance Committee (FC) and Council in March but in May and June, following a more standard calendar while including retroactivity to not prejudice the personnel.

The exchanges and improvements  

After proper brainstorming on both sides, the SA and HR met on February 19^th, where the SA proposed ideas that included making the pre-natal maternity leave fully optional, a medical certificate only being required to work the last two weeks the due date; an increase of two weeks for maternity leaves to mirror the paternity/co-parental leave change; and extending doctoral students (DOCT) and limited contract (LD) for any maternity or paternity/co-parental leave (Graduates already being covered here).

HR, including the service directly managing these leaves, built a new proposal, which was welcomed and approved by the SCC on March 3^rd:

• Replace the current maternity leave structure – 16 weeks plus 4 (taken in 94% of cases) plus 3 (50%) weeks subject to conditions – with 24 weeks leave in all cases, with flexibility regarding the final 20 days;
• Reduce the prenatal part of maternity leave to 2 weeks in all cases;
• Replace the 10 + 5 days structure for paternity/coparental leave by 20 flexible days in all cases; and
• Extend DOCT and LD contracts for maternity leaves

The final home stretch

With the principles agreed, the detailed work started: building the texts for our legal system. This is a part of the process driven by HR, where concertation through the SCC Sub-Group 1 (SG1) only makes sure that the proposed text is understandable by every member of personnel and matches the agreed principles.

During this phase, a new change was pushed forward, to ensure the neutrality of the text and simplify it: the flexible 20 days for both parents were grouped together and called “remunerated parental leave”. This introduced the unfortunate complication of having to replace the existing “parental leave” by “unremunerated parental leave” in all texts, something the SA took particular attention to, requesting several changes.

With SG1 catching and fixing issues in the texts, the proposed changes of the Staff Rules and Regulations were approved [1] by the SCC on April 23^rd, by TREF on May 13^th, by the Finance Committee on June 24^th and by Council on June 26^th. Changes on Administrative Circulars were approved at the SCC on June 30^th.

Conclusion

This process has been a great example of why the established concertation processes are so important and how well they can work. The collaboration on this subject is a great sign for the relations between the new administration and SA mandates. Looking back, one thing that could be improved is to leave more time between the final Circular approval at the SCC and the planned change, allowing for proper publication of Circulars, in time, in the two languages used at CERN.

[1] For all committees except Council this “approval” is in fact a recommendation to the next level.