2: Bridging the information gap

Changing Attitudes

In October’s UN Special, I argued that we staff members need to change our attitude to our representatives if we are to increase their effectiveness. An important step in that process is to understand how the staff representation system is structured, where we have representatives, what they are supposed to do and how we can hold them accountable. This information is not easy to obtain. It is time to address this vast information gap.

I will describe the system and highlight its most obvious deficiencies, including our lack of negotiating rights, which, as you will see, is a major obstacle to adequate staff representation. I will not discuss the electoral system.

Bear in mind that the purpose of a staff representative system is to protect staff from arbitrary action by administration and management.

UNOG Staff Coordinating Council

UNOG staff’s sovereign body is the Staff General Assembly, where we can call our representatives formally to account every year for the way they discharge their mandate and handle our finances.

UNOG staff have no negotiating rights. We are allowed to “consult” with the administration through the UNOG Staff Coordinating Council. The Council is elected annually and consists of 25 of our own colleagues who claim to be capable of defending our interests in discussions with the UNOG administration. The Council is financed in part from contributions levied from staff members’ pay. These contributions are voluntary and if we wish to make them we have to notify Payroll Section. At present, few people make these contributions: among Professional staff, for example, there are just two (2) contributing staff members.

The Council has a quorum of 13 and is required to meet at least once a month to decide on policy on staff’s behalf. At its first meeting, the new Council elects a seven-member Executive Bureau, plus the President and Vice-President of the Council, who attend Bureau meetings but do not vote. The Executive Bureau is responsible for informing staff of Council policy and presenting that policy to the administration in consultative meetings. It is not a decision-making body but an executive body and is accountable to the Coordinating Council. The Executive Secretary of the UNOG Staff Coordinating Council is also the Chair of the Executive Bureau and the official spokesperson for UNOG staff as a whole.

Official time

It is very important to remember that members of UNOG Staff Coordinating Council are granted official time to discharge their duties. Once we realize this, we can begin to require them to organize their time to suit staff members, who are their constituents or clients. The Executive Secretary is on full-time release from his or her regular United Nations post. In fact s/he is our only full-time representative, for 2,500 or 3,000 staff members. (New York has three full-time staff representatives.) Members of the Executive Bureau are entitled to eight hours per week, and other members of the Council to 10 hours per month. The Council also has full-time secretarial staff, although the administration recently unilaterally cut that in half. There are serious deficiencies in how both representatives’ and secretaries’ time is used.

When I was on the Council, I found that few staff representatives asserted their right to official time for consultations with individual staff members. If staff representatives cannot assert their own rights, how can they stand up for the rights of others? It is true that some managers are somewhat reluctant to release their staff for official duties – even, in some cases, for actual Council meetings, but if our representatives have a problem with their manager, they should solve it through the Executive Bureau.

Training and transparency

However, there is also a problem of training. Many of our representatives haven’t the least idea how to deal with a staff member in a difficult situation. To begin with, many simply do not know how to listen, or even where to look for the information the staff member needs. In addition, many staff representatives do not understand that their primary task is to defend staff members. It is natural, then, that they should feel somewhat insecure. We should require the Coordinating Council to organize an official training course at the start of each term of office for all staff representatives.

Transparency, too, is a major issue. Council meetings are open to all staff members, and are held in conference rooms with remote listening facilities (extension 70901), but meetings are not publicized and the minutes are not published, not even on the STAFF_COUNCIL_ACTIVITIES bulletin board on cc:Mail. Indeed, information as a whole is perhaps the single biggest problem in staff representation. No Council member has specific responsibility for information; and there is no Council web site or Intranet site - again unlike in New York. It is this lack of information that keeps our representatives so remote from their constituents.

The other bodies on which staff are represented are (a) the Sectoral Assemblies (Assemblées de secteur), which are staff-only fora within each occupational sector; and (b) the joint bodies (organes de coopération), which are fora for discussions of specific issues with representatives of the administration.

Sectoral Assembly

The Sectoral Assembly is a potentially valuable tool for mobilizing staff, yet staff have little idea of its purpose. Again, a lack of publicity is to blame for that. However, the system was clearly invented in Absurdistan, since before electing an Assembly President, sector staff must first request the establishment of a new Sectoral Assembly every year. This is one example among many of the way our own rules obstruct UNOG staff representation.

The Sectoral Assembly is supposed to “submit proposals, comments or requests” to the Coordinating Council concerning issues directly affecting staff at the local level. The Assembly President is also required to inform the Council of any plans for discussions with the sectoral administration (e.g. Chief of Service), so that the Executive Bureau, as the official interlocutor, can send a representative to provide support in the discussions. In practice, however, the Council liaises only sporadically with the Sectoral Assemblies. Of course, the outcome of any discussions with the Chief of Service depends on the Chief’s ability to see that a mutually-agreed solution is always more constructive than an imposed solution. In effect, s/he has the discretion to overrule any such “agreement”.

Staff often feel that even the President of their local Sectoral Assembly is rather remote. One way to shorten that distance is for the sections within a sector to choose representatives who can meet regularly with the President in an informal “bureau”. This has been relatively effective in the Languages Service Sectoral Assembly, where the bureau has monthly meetings and publishes minutes. However, Sectoral Assembly representatives have no official time to perform their duties. If they happen to have an enlightened manager, they can probably claim the time against productivity goals, within reason.

Alas! how dependent we are on the goodwill of our managers, in the absence of proper staff 
representative structures and labour rights! And how that dependency undermines constructive working relationships!

Joint bodies

Every year, or, in some cases, every two years, staff elect representatives to the joint bodies; and at the same time, the Secretary-General appoints “representatives of the administration” to the same bodies by some mysterious process of selection of the great and the good.

The joint bodies offer us our best chance of discussing specific day-to-day issues with the administration. Yet we know nothing about how they work. Except at election time, no public information comes out of them. No notice of meetings, no agendas, no minutes, no reports, no membership lists. The only joint body that issues information is UNSMIS, the medical insurance Committee.

A major problem with the joint bodies is that anyone we elect can act with impunity, since accountability is non-existent. According to the Rules on Staff Representation, staff representatives on the joint bodies are accountable to staff through the Coordinating Council and are required to submit a written report at the end of their term of office. This practice is defunct.

To be fair, I have found in my own limited experience that discussions in these bodies often amount to negotiations. However, the administration can, if it wishes, arbitrarily and unilaterally overrule any conclusion reached by the two sides at the meetings, since the joint bodies, like all other staff representative bodies, have no more than consultative status. Their function is “to advise the Secretary-General”. Again, their effectiveness to staff is severely restricted by our lack of negotiating rights.

Harassment

The single most important gap in the UNOG staff representation system is a body to deal specifically with harassment. A harassment tribunal, such as ILO now has, would be a major step forward in  staff-management relations in UNOG. At present, as I found when I was a staff representative, senior managers commonly meet staff members’ complaints of harassment with sympathy and understanding and tell them it is a problem of “personality clash”. Despite developments in Swiss and French labour law, UN managers find it impossible to see harassment for what it is, an abuse of power, and therefore a management problem. It is hard for people who have not been in that situation to understand the scale of the humiliation. But you never know: if you get a new boss, YOU could be next. We should require our staff representatives to prioritize the establishment of a body to deal with such situations.

As you can see, there are many basic deficiencies in the UNOG staff representation system. The choice for us is either to throw up our hands and say “What’s the use?”, or to use the channels we have as actively as we can, holding our representatives accountable under the relevant rules and requiring them to give us information about their activities. We, too, must take our share of the responsibility for solving our own problems. This is time-consuming, but that is the nature of problems. By choosing to be more active, we can show that we believe in the importance of staff representation in providing much-needed protection in the workplace.

The relevant staff rules are Staff Regulation 8.1 and Staff Rule 108.1.

For information on your representatives on the various bodies, contact the President of the Polling Officers (Collège de scrutateurs), who is currently Miranda Patel on 74545.

For a copy of the Rules of UNOG Staff Representation in French or English, contact the secretary of the Coordinating Council, Liliane Jacquemoud, on 73400.

Nigel Lindup, the author is with the UNOG Staff Coordinating Council, 2000/2001.