Does it pay to be a patent examiner? Part II

'Shambolic pay system' was the heading that greeted this Kat when he opened an attachment to an email from Prospect, the union which represents patent examiners and other IP specialists in the United Kingdom.  Reading on, the Kat was informed as follows:

‘Prospect members at the Intellectual Property Office are to take industrial action in February after a ballot of members voted with a huge majority in favour. In a turnout of 65%, 88% voted in favour of strike action and 90% for action short of a strike.

Members will start their action with a walk out at 12:30 on Friday 8 February [that's tomorrow] and a half-day strike followed by a work-to-rule.

Over the week leading up to the day of action, members and staff will sign pledge cards committing them to a work-to-rule. As they walk out, their pledge cards will be collected and handed to the IPO. The work-to-rule will continue throughout February. 

Prospect negotiator Helen Stevens said:

“Members at the IPO have been treated worse than other public sector workers. Austerity for them has meant not only a pay freeze, but a freeze to their progression to the rate for the job. This has cost them large sums of money and left a pay system that is fundamentally unfair and frankly shambolic. Our members at the IPO are highly skilled and work hard to support British business [and indeed much non-British business too]. Any hope of economic recovery depends on people like them. If they were in the private sector [or, it seems, working for the European Patent Office: see Part I of this post here] they would be in receipt of bonuses.”

Eleanor Wade, Prospect branch Chair, said:

 “The government's policies on pay have left the IPO with an unfair and discriminatory pay system and with equal pay cases outstanding. Central government pay restrictions are stopping the IPO from using its own resources to make a fair pay offer to staff, putting vital support for innovation at risk. Prospect members at the IPO are committed to fighting for fair pay.” 

Stevens said denying progression also raises issues of fairness, equal pay and retention of staff.

“Many patent examiners are working extra hours because of problems recruiting to these posts. This level of personal sacrifice is too much. The result of this ballot shows members' determination to protest at such unfairness.”

The IPKat has met many examiners at the IPO over the years. On the whole he has found them witty, perceptive, highly educated souls who take their work very seriously and who display scarcely more militancy in their professional capacities than do the sheep that graze the Welsh hillside.  This made the voting figures cited above all the more remarkable.

Pays better than being
an assistant examiner

But what do patent examiners earn? Do they have a just case or, like the sheep, are they merely bleating in unison?  The salary of a new associate examiner, who will require an appropriate science degree and a reasonable quantity of literacy and communication skills starts at £24,536 (inclusive of a recruitment and retention allowance) and remains at that level until promotion to Patent Examiner after a minimum of 2 years (around 3 years on average).  This compares favourably with the £14,560 to £16,640 starting salary that he would receive for picking up litter from the streets.  However, it's far less than he could expect to earn from driving a train. One can make many other comparisons, if one so wishes.

Once you're a patent examiner, what happens next?  Eleanor Wade explains:

"There is no progression through the Patent Examiner span either, so after promotion Examiners can expect their salary to remain static again, at around £30K (including recruitment and retention allowance) until they gain promotion to Senior Examiner. Senior Examiners are paid £44,173 on promotion (again inclusive of a recruitment and retention allowance), nominally after an average of 7 years examining, and have no way of progressing further up the pay span. The highest paid senior examiners are on £56K and some have not had a pay increase at all for a decade while the pay scales caught up with them. Since progression was withdrawn (it was last paid in August 2009) staff below the top of their span across the IPO cannot move any further up it. So we have people doing the same job to the same standards for as much as 20% less than their colleagues".

Merpel is sure that, if there's one thing that is more annoying than not being paid a salary that is commensurate with one's education, training and experience, it's being paid less than someone else who is doing the same work as well as you are.

The Kat team is in agreement that, in principle, every person is entitled to expect reasonable remuneration for his or her work and that this principle applies as much to patent examiners as to anyone else.  It is plain that the IPO is not its own master when it comes to setting and implementing its own pay policy and allocating funds received in the manner of its choice.  Sadly, this is not a new problem. For years the United States Patent and Trademark Office saw its fee income siphoned off for other Federal purposes, leaving it at the mercy of a larger political debate and dangerously under-funded (even now, while officially in favour, the USPTO still struggles to control its own purse-strings: see eg here and here).

Being kind to patent applicants
is bound to make more friends than
opting for industrial action ...

This Kat is uncomfortable with any form of industrial action that hits bona fide users, such as strikes and walk-outs ["walks-out?" Merpel wonders ...], both because he has been personally inconvenienced by such activities in the past on the part of postmen, air traffic controllers, miners, London Underground staff, banking employees and others -- and none has really achieved the desired end. He wonders whether there isn't a much better way for patent examiners to bring their grievances to the attention of a far wider public.  Why not take a more applicant-friendly view of the patent applications before them, construe the prior art as narrowly as possible, with just a cursory nod to that confounded busybody the person skilled in the art -- and grant as many patents as they possibly can, in the shortest possible time?  That way, the British examiners will make loads of friends among patent applicants and, in probability, patent litigation lawyers, they will eliminate any backlog that might otherwise have been lurking in the niches of Newport -- and they will soon find that the EPO, WIPO and a dozen or so of the most patent-responsible governments in the world will be on the phone to the UK government in two shakes of a cat's tail, begging them to give in!