One Rule for You: Eurocrats Get Raise After Telling Member States Not to Bump Worker Pay to Fight Inflation

Eurocrats in Belgium and Luxembourg have been given an inflation-busting raise despite the EU telling its member states to avoid pumping worker pay for fear of supercharging inflation.

Bigwigs in Brussels have reportedly remained adamant that EU member states should avoid tying pay increases automatically to inflation, saying that such measures will only make inflation worse.

However, despite this, officials in Belgium and Luxembourg have now been handed one of these automatic inflation-busting raises the EU itself so maligns, which officials up to the senior commissioner level getting 2.4 per cent wage increases.

According to a report by Politico, EU bigwigs have insisted that member countries should avoid automatically hiking the wages of their workers to help them better deal with inflation, warning that such moves may only end up entrenching the problem.

“…an important element for inflation not to become entrenched is to avoid price-wage spirals and correspondingly there’s also a substantial responsibility of social partners to find the right balance,” the publication reports one major Eurocrat, Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, as saying regarding such a measure last month.

While many workers within the union would no doubt find this statement dissatisfactory at the best of times, the fact that the EU has now engaged in what appears to be the exact practice that it has warned its member states not to engage in is likely to cause discontent.

Politico claims that workers for the transnational org located in Belgium and Luxembourg — including at least some EU commissioners — have received 2.4 per cent pay increases to help fight inflation.

To make matters worse, these pay increases are even backdated to January, with officials reportedly expecting the net cost of the rise to be €78 million (~$82.7 million).

A spokesman for the EU has seemingly tried to excuse the increase by saying that it was “automatic” and occurred “without any political discretion”, while also claiming that the rise is not designed to fight inflation per-se, but to keep pay packets of EU officials in line with national civil servants.

How convincing EU taxpayers will find the excuse is yet to be seen.

While European mandarins figure out what to spend their new pay increases on, citizens in the bloc who have not had the luck of getting such an income bump are encountering more and more difficulty with the ongoing cost of living crisis.

This situation is hardly being helped by the EU’s ongoing political hostilities with Russia as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the fallout of which has included Brussels implementing a partial ban on the import of Russian oil and Moscow partially or completely cutting off certain countries from their Russian gas supply.

Although many in Europe seem to push the claim that the sanctions imposed by the bloc are putting pressure on Russia’s economy, others have begun to question their effectiveness, with one major Russian critic of Putin now saying that they are doing the union more harm than good.

“At the moment, energy sanctions are hurting Europe, not Russia,” Politico reports Mikhail Khodorkovsky — an energy sector veteran — as saying.

“My point of view was and remains the same — what on earth are you doing?” he reportedly continued. “How much has the West lost in revenue by introducing all kinds of energy sanctions? $100 billion, $200 billion? Had Ukraine got at least $50 billion worth of weapons instead of $10 billion, the situation would be completely different now — without any energy sanctions being introduced”