STU/66th Council/15/010
13 March 2015
DID YOU KNOW?
Non-Staff Abuse
In preparation to the 196th session of the Executive Board, the External Auditor in document 196 EX/23 Part III pointed out several shortcomings concerning human resources management at UNESCO.
One of them is the issue of long-term temporary assistance. This refers to all types of contracts, old and new, such as: service contracts, short-term contracts, individual consultant contracts, just to name a few.
Did you know that 63% of service contract personnel in the field have five years or more of service and can therefore be considered as quasi-permanent employees?
Over 2 000 non-staff have been employed in the current biennium 2014-2015, out of which hundreds were financed from the regular budget of the Organization amounting to several millions USD. This even includes former retirees of UNESCO and employees who are above retirement age.
But what is particularly alarming is that a significant part of non-staff perform functions that belong to the core mandate, priorities and regular programmes of our Organization, and that effective controls to avoid such a misuse of these temporary contracts has not been built by HRM, despite numerous and repetitive demands of the staff associations.
This situation has to be halted due to several reasons including, inter alia :
Ethical reasons. The existence of different categories of staff performing the same functions creates an unacceptable discrimination, contravening even fundamental labour rights and standards to fair remuneration, social security and other rights such as those to sick and annual leave. It also creates a permanent situation of instability that affects the staff morale and the organizational performance alike.
Mismanagement of human resources for personal reasons. Furthermore, while the stated and reasonable objective of hiring temporary staff is to cover a need that for reasons of regular staff shortage or non-expertise is not available, in practice there are very numerous cases of managers hiring non-staff to perform regular core functions, even when the regular staff in charge of them are present and available and have the expertise, but for reasons related to personal relations or discrimination are sidelined and put to work on other matters outside of their post description or even completely marginalized. This has the double negative effect of having non staff performing regular tasks and not being adequately compensated (as described above) and also of discriminating and destroying the morale and expertise of the regular staff marginalized from their duties.
Constitutional and governance. The abuse of non-staff contracts configures a violation of the international character and, consequently, of the independence of the international civil service. Non-staff colleagues do not enjoy the same rights and immunities established for the regular staff, whose purpose is to safeguard independence and loyalty to the organizations. They are also not subject to geographical distribution criteria, thereby paving the way for “nationalization” of the international civil service and, in a worst case scenario, to nepotism and cronyism.
Functional reasons. The abuse of non-staff has a destructive impact on human resources management at all levels, since those colleagues are at a disadvantage for career, job security, and mobility, to cite just a few examples.
Financial reasons. The abuse of non-staff gives Member States a false representation of the financial appropriations required to manage the human resources of the organizations, paving the way for cheap labour.
Legal reasons. We are convinced that solid grounds exist for legal recourse, due to blatant and regular circumvention of the relevant rules and regulations, which should be more thoroughly appraised.
We believe that the break-even point for adoption of immediate measures to stop this malpractice has come. Therefore, we respectfully request the adoption of measures aimed at rectifying this alarming status quo and take back the international civil service to its core nature, to better serve our mandate and the principles enshrined in the UN Charter.
We also request that an audit be conducted by HRM without any further delay on the current use of non-staff contracts, with the objective to identify all assignments that cover the core functions of the Organization and take immediate measures to find a permanent long-term solution.
In the meantime we shall make our best efforts to ensure that our colleagues defined as “non-staff” are granted access to the fundamental rights of association through the current representational structure.
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