Staff
The Commission's civil service is headed by a Secretary General, currently Catherine Day. According to figures published by the Commission, 23,043 persons were employed by the Commission as officials and temporary agents in April 2007. In addition to these, 9019 "external staff" were employed; these are largely people employed on time-limited contracts (called "contractual agents" in the jargon), staff seconded from national administrations (called "Detached National Experts"), or trainees (called "stagiaires"). The single largest DG is the Directorate-General for Translation, with 2186 staff.
European civil servants are sometimes referred to in the anglophone press as "Eurocrats" (a term coined by Richard Mayne, a journalist and personal assistant to the first Commission president, Walter Hallstein).; high-ranking officials are sometimes referred to as "European Mandarins".
Read more about this topic: European Civil Service
Famous quotes containing the word staff:
“In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“When the reviews are bad I tell my staff that they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.”
—Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919–1987)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)