Roughly 170,000 people applied for about 1,500 entry-level positions at the European Union institutions in early 2026. The ratio tells its own story: working for the EU executive remains one of the most competitive public sector pursuits in Europe. Yet among the 30,000 officials already inside the Berlaymont and its satellite buildings, a different set of numbers is circulating. Between September 2024 and the summer of 2026, the Commission's chief confidential counsellor received 960 reports from staff alleging harassment, from witnesses, from managers or from human resources correspondents. The counsellor has no power to investigate a single one of them.
The salary that silences doubt
A newly recruited AD-5 administrator, the standard graduate-entry grade, takes home between €6,000 and €7,000 a month before allowances. EU staff pay community tax rather than national income tax, a regime that almost always leaves more in the bank than equivalent earnings in a member state treasury. Family allowances, diplomatic-level car purchases and a degree of job security that national civil servants can only envy round out the package. Some officials maintain apartments in Brussels while their families remain in another country, commuting home on Fridays. The financial logic is hard to argue with.
The money partly explains why disillusionment does not translate into resignations. An internal survey conducted by the Commission found that 74 per cent of staff rated it an attractive employer, a six-point increase on 2023. The figure is real, but so is the gap it conceals: pride in the institution and satisfaction with day-to-day working conditions are not the same thing. At the European Central Bank, a 2025 staff survey found 85 per cent of employees were proud to work there, while fewer than half considered their workload manageable. Loyalty and exhaustion coexist easily.
Geopolitical weight, institutional strain
The Commission's workload has not grown in a vacuum. Russia's war in Ukraine, the strategic competition with China, and an increasingly volatile relationship with the United States have all pushed Brussels towards the centre of European decision-making. Files that once seemed technical now carry geopolitical weight. Officials interviewed for this article, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described an atmosphere in which every briefing note, policy paper and press release is treated with the urgency normally reserved for a crisis. Multiple layers of approval slow things down. Sprawling email chains and successive rounds of revision add delay. The pressure to act quickly and the institutional instinct to clear every sentence with half a dozen colleagues pull in opposite directions, and the people caught between them are the ones who burn out.
Nicolas Mavraganis, who has worked at the Commission since 1994 and now leads Union Syndicale Fédérale, an umbrella group covering roughly 20 staff unions across EU and international bodies, put it plainly: "The conditions are more and more difficult. There is more and more workload, which means more and more pressure."
Cabinets and Directorates-General: a structural disconnect
Much of the frustration traces back to the Commission's internal architecture. Each commissioner has a cabinet, a small team of advisers that operates as a political nerve centre. Policy work is done by the Directorates-General, the permanent administrative departments. The two sides are supposed to work in concert. In practice, according to officials in both camps, information flows badly between them. Cabinet members, already stretched by long hours and constant travel with their commissioner, cannot always feed the DGs the details they need. The DGs, in turn, wait for scraps of guidance that never arrive. One official in a commissioner's cabinet described the problem as structural: everyone is trying to extract information from everyone else, and no one has the capacity to provide it.
Days for cabinet staff routinely stretch from seven in the morning to seven at night, with little time away from the office except on official missions. One communications official recalled crying late into the evening because of the sheer volume of work. Another said, only half in jest, that they sometimes wanted to shoot themselves. The Commission's size compounds the alienation: even after twenty years, an official noted, most colleagues will never have seen you. You are a tiny molecule in a vast organism.
A complaints system without teeth
The most troubling allegations concern management behaviour. Several officials described shouting as routine in certain units. One senior cabinet figure has acquired a reputation inside the Berlaymont for screaming at subordinates. A former official recalled watching a colleague being berated over a leaked document in front of other managers. Most disturbingly, one official said their boss had punched them. The European Commission said it was committed to being a modern and respectful employer, pointing to an operational review launched by President Ursula von der Leyen and to anti-harassment training programmes. In the past two years, 14,000 staff have attended presentations on anti-harassment policy and 2,400 managers have completed mandatory training sessions.
The Commission hired a chief confidential counsellor in 2024. That counsellor, who reports to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, has received 960 reports since September 2024 from staff who feel harassed, from alleged harassers, from witnesses and from human resources correspondents. The number sounds substantial. Yet the Commission's own spokesperson confirmed that the counsellor "has no mandate to investigate and is not entitled legally to qualify the conduct as harassment as defined in the Staff Regulations." Staff who want a formal investigation must instead go to the Investigation and Disciplinary Office, known as IDOC, or to the European Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF. The Commission receives between 20 and 25 formal complaints of that kind each year. The gap between 960 informal reports and roughly two dozen formal complaints suggests that most staff either do not trust the formal process, do not understand it, or consider it too daunting to pursue.
Buildings that betray priorities
Physical working conditions have added to the sense that staff welfare ranks below senior comfort. During a heatwave in June 2026, employees at the DG AGRI building complained about inadequate air conditioning. At DG COMP's headquarters in Madou Tower, officials were told not to drink from certain water fountains because of possible contamination; the acting director-general conceded in an email that heating and sanitation systems were not functioning to an acceptable standard. At the Berlaymont itself, air conditioning was switched off on the lower floors during the same heatwave, but left running on the eighth floor and above, where commissioners and senior officials have their offices. One official described the contrast as feudal.
The lottery of the commissioner you serve
Experience at the Commission is not uniform. Several officials stressed that the commissioner you work for shapes daily life more than any institutional policy. Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra's cabinet was cited by multiple officials as supportive and well-run. Other commissioners have developed internal reputations for tolerating infighting, power struggles and toxic behaviour. The difference can be decisive. In a well-managed cabinet, long hours feel purposeful. In a poorly managed one, they feel punishing. The institution does not publish data on staff turnover or satisfaction by cabinet, making it impossible to quantify the disparity. What is clear from interviews is that the gap exists and that staff talk about it openly.
None of the complaints described here are unique to the Commission. National ministries, law firms and consultancies across Europe harbour similar frustrations. What makes the Berlaymont different is the combination of scale, political pressure and institutional self-regard. One official put it bluntly: people in the Commission develop what they called a weird God complex, convinced that their work carries the weight of European civilisation. When every file feels existential, the distinction between urgency and routine collapses. When the institution cannot investigate its own harassment complaints, the distinction between accountability and theatre collapses with it.
Asked over a plate of cold pasta in a Commission cafeteria whether they were happy, one official gave an answer that captured the paradox. They stayed because the work mattered, they said. The conditions were another matter entirely.
People mentioned
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Nicolas Mavraganis
Organisations
European Commission · Union Syndicale Fédérale · European Central Bank
