The European Central Bank has been accused by members of its own staff of behaving in an “anti-democratic” way, in the latest escalation of tensions between the Eurozone’s top monetary authority and its employees.
In a letter to ECB president Christine Lagarde, seen by the Financial Times, its staff committee said the bank’s own governance failed to respect the very rule-of-law principles that she recently praised as one of Europe’s “critical comparative advantages”.
“We regret to see that these principles expressed outside the institution seem to be given little value inside the institution by its power structure,” the chair of the staff committee, Carlos Bowles, wrote to Lagarde.
The letter was sent as the ECB has so far refused to back down in a row over the Frankfurt institution’s works council, an influential group of elected employees.
The ECB has proposed forcing elected representatives to devote some of their time to their day jobs. Under German labour law, they are able to focus full time on advocating for the best interests of staff while collecting their normal salaries. However, as an extraterritorial institution, the ECB is neither subject to German labour laws nor to similar rules in other EU member states.
As such, the ECB was an “unaccountable legal fortress”, Bowles claimed in the letter.
In the four-page document, he argued that the ECB’s treatment of staff had led to “widespread complaints of favouritism, [ . . . ] high burnout rates, and the...
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