As per Wikipedia on the topic.

As of July 1, 2019, the monthly salary is of €8,932.86, or just over €107,000 per year.[15] MEPs also receive a general expenditure allowance of €4,563 per month.[15]

If I can be called in from vacation for €43k a year, these cunts can come in to vote for the fucking future of democracy for €107k.

Is it right to interrupt vacations? No. Does it matter in this case? Also the fuck no. The thing happened! They weren't there! If they want better rights or whatever I guess they should fucking unionise or whatever. Sitting out on a vote of this magnitude is beyond reprehensible.

I agree. I guess what I didn't say is that I do a bunch of work on the clock in order to ensure 99% of my responsibilities are covered. And then even the other 0.9% my coworkers can just deflect or work around.

But if a situation arises that actually hurts people imo that is no longer a work issue but a humanity issue, and if my fellows can't handle it then I do want to be made aware.

If this a regular occurrence then there needs to be some way to block or mitigate the damage, so that people can go on vacation and not worry they're coming back to a mess.

I mean how are there not people in your office, people you work next to, people who know about which issues you ought to be made aware of, that can reach out to you?

Right there should be, but there isn't, so until there is they need to have someone from their office on the spot to field important stuff like this.

The system should have safeguards in place.

But it doesn't.

And until it does, the privacy rights of millions of people is more important than a few politicians' vacation time.

But they knew the ramifications of the job when they accepted it.

If there's a threshold needed for a "yes" vote then it's functionally the same, even without counting as one. I'm just saying that threshold shouldn't go down just because someone is on vacation.