GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

member states. The first collective agreement that was recognised by the UN

system was signed with a CCISUA affiliate who is the ILO Staff Union. That

allows for staff representative bodies to be established at each UN organisation

or mission and for those bodies to represent the interests of the staff which is in

our UN staff rules. Therefore, each UN mission or organisation then

establishes its own union or staff association and these are affiliated with either

CCISUA, FICSA or UNICEF.

The UN staff face many of the same issues as workers in national economies

and CCISUA affiliates represent both blue collar staff, such as security guards,

as well as white collar UN civil servants. CCISUA affiliates do not represent

the UN peacekeepers who are made up of military and police personnel

contributed by member states, they are answerable to their own member

states. There are a number of industrial relation issues that are peculiar to

working within the UN system. The most important of that is perhaps the fact

that UN staff are not protected by labour legislation, which means all

conditions, as I said, need to be negotiated directly and also of great concern

are the dangers to staff working in conflict and other non-secure locations.

Many UN staff, as you probably have heard, are killed in the line of duty.

Another area of concern is the prevalence of short term contracts in the UN

system. There is a lack of job security and long term career development and

the right of redress that the UN staff have is to a body called the United Nations

Dispute Tribunal and the Appeals Tribunal.

Therefore, at CCISUA we service a platform of a collective bargaining

mechanism in the International Civil Service Commission, the ICSC, our main

interlocutor. What currently we continue to grapple with right now is the

continuous erosion of staff entitlements, be it the general service category or

the international professional staff. On the basis of pressure of various

member states right now, the biggest challenge that we have is that the ICSC,

due to pressure from member states, have actually deduced a 7.5% pay cut of

all UN professional staff salaries in Geneva and there has been a lot of

pressure and a lot of discussions among all the UN staff federations and unions

in Geneva and we are losing an entitlement. Slowly by slowly we seem to see

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