Sheer coincidence?

The UN administration has never shown any sign of social consciousness. But as soon as the post of Chief of personnel became officially vacant, some fairly innovative social measures began to appear.

About four weeks ago the Secretary- General issued a circular setting out the options for staff members to work from home two days a week, or to work 80 hours in nine days instead of ten, or to have flexible working hours. This is still a far cry from France’s 35-hour working week, but it’s progress nevertheless…

Why do these measures come at a time when there is no official Chief of personnel? Simply because personnel managers are recruited to manage human “resources” and not people. Their primary objective is to exploit the “resource” without regard for the human implications. That’s the way it was in ancient Rome and in the 19th century, and now it’s making a comeback.

Let’s hope that the next person to occupy this post will have a bit of the finesse and the courage of one of his/her predecessors, Mr Kofi Annan. He was the only chief of personnel to have proposed a very simple measure to motivate staff and make the organization more efficient: in-post promotion. What our future Secretary-General proposed at that time was the possibility of having a career while remaining good at one’s job.

The system must have been too simple and too good because the Member States immediately turned it down. It is so much more reassuring to have obscure rules and whimsical computer programs to manage us “resources”. This enables bureaucracy to prosper and delegates to complain.

Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz