The happy bureaucrats!

A few days ago I had the happy surprise to see a very good friend of mine, a colleague in fact. He had come from the other side of the world to familiarize himself with the intricacies of « Galaxy », our famous new recruitment system. Why in Geneva? Perhaps because of its clear skies? Or perhaps because a « junket » was necessary to make this heavy system more palatable?

This little get-together must have cost the Organization a small fortune. Why then do I always find it so difficult to find money for training courses that useful for my work while the administration can happily spend thousands and in some cases millions of dollars on training people in heavy and useless bureaucratic procedures? And this is not the first time …

Cast your minds back to the mid- 1990s, when the 9,000 UN staff members were obliged to take a two-day training course to learn to use the new UN performance evaluation system, the (in)famous PAS. 18,000 working days were wasted – excluding of course those of the consultants who taught the courses – to try to understand a complex system of which, after much tinkering, nothing remains. The IMIS management system, which is not only heavy but also obsolete, spawned similar training courses. There always seems to be money available for such ‘staff development courses’.

This allocation of resources is again evidence that the Organization has been perverted by bureaucrats who impose complex procedures to justify their existence and that what counts is not our substantive work, but that these bureaucrats should be happy and the bureaucracy should thrive.

Editor-in-Chief: Jean Michel Jakobowicz