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Geneva Staff Speak of UN
"Bias," Management Sacrificed to Globe-Trotting Pursuits
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at
the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
May 21 -- With a scathing two-page letter from the UN Staff
Union in New York still unaddressed, the Secretariat of Ban Ki-moon has
now
received a similarly
critical two-page letter from the UN Office at Geneva
Coordinating Council. This letter, a copy of which Inner City Press
is putting
online here,
states that UN "Management was simply not
prepared to carry out any meaningful exchange of views," but rather
engaged in hostility and "bias." It directly contradicts Ban's Deputy
Spokesperson's statement
on May 20 that
"the Secretary-General, and
more specifically the Department of Management, have tried to solve all
the
requests put forward by the Staff Union of New York, and most
importantly, have
established a solid mechanism of negotiation.
Recently, it was discussed very seriously how to
extend this mechanism
on the global level and, therefore, the Secretary-General is surprised
to have
received this letter."
This "surprise" must have
been doubled this week with the letter formally notifying Ban that the
UN's
Geneva Coordinating Council is pulling out of "global mechanism" that
outgoing Management chief Alicia Barcena has promoted.
Ms. Barcena has ignored
previous requests for
comment on this news from Geneva. Her successor, Angela Kane, is
out of town
until she takes over the position in early June, the Spokesperson's
Office told
Inner City Press on Wednesday. On-the-record briefings by both Ms.
Barcena,
then Ms. Kane, have been requested, as has a briefing by UN Controller
Warren
Sach.
UN flag in Geneva, "meaningful exchange of
views" not shown
New York Staff Union officials on
Wednesday told Inner City Press that as far back as January 2008, Ban
Ki-moon
told them that on the questions like declining compensation, they
should call
and set up a meeting. They state that they have called a half-dozen
times but
no meeting has been set up. They point, with justification, to a UN
University
study of the UN as workplace, which refers at page 25
to "the tendency of
UN leadership to be uninterested in management... To add insult to
injuries,
there is a tendency to concentrate on the more 'noble' aspects of the
job (such
as political and diplomatic issues) on the expense of investing the
required
amount of time and work into management." Click here.
Ironically, this
study "especially thanks the UN Economic Commission for Latin America
and
the Caribbean" -- the very entity to which Ms. Barcena is headed. Only
at
the UN...
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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