July 5, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 4,1424

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations, which champions the cause of labour rights around the world, has shut down its own staff union, causing deep feelings of anger and resentment among hundreds of employees.

Senior UN officials sent a letter to the Staff Union on June 27 telling union leaders that their mandate had come to an end and that as of June 30, UN employees at headquarters would no longer have a right to their representation until further notice.

Deploring the decision by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, union leaders said that management had failed to come up with any compelling and solid reason to justify “this drastic action.”

“This is total nonsense,” Guy Candusso, vice president of the union, told a gathering of UN employees who wanted to know who would represent their interests in the absence of the union. “It never happened before in the history of the Union.”

The UN Staff Council represents about 5,000 employees, more than half of whom work on a short-term contract basis.

The union’s leaders said they were seriously engaged in the process of holding new elections, but the administration foiled their attempts by initiating a controversy over procedural matters. The administration took advantage of a “technicality” to dissolve their offices, they said, charging that recently the administration tried to block communications to the union’s members.

“The interference with the Staff Union election process indicate that the UN is intent on denying its staff of their basic human rights to due process,” said Rosemary Waters, president of the union.

UN officials defended the secretary-general’s decision, saying that the union’s leaders had failed to fulfill their obligation to hold new elections on time and therefore they had no reason to continue to remain in office.

But many workers believe that the union was shut down because it was relatively more assertive and aggressive in its efforts to address pressing issues such as workplace discrimination, inequalities in the income tax reimbursement system and lack of appropriate child care facilities.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.