Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un1caste022608.html
UNITED NATIONS, February 26 -- "The UN is like a caste system," an over-qualified General Service staff member told Inner City Press. "If you come into the system near the bottom, they make it nearly impossible to rise" to the Professional grade. On Tuesday one of the few opportunities came, when the so-called G to P exam was administered. Some 200 General Service staff take the test, vying to ten or so Professional posts. The process is far from transparent, and there are no appeals.
Throughout the UN system, one finds General Service staff and security officers with graduate degrees, who often are more knowledgeable that the people who supervise them. It all depends on how and at what level a person came into the system, and who they know. Inner City Press knows a security officer with a masters degree in international affairs, who is told he cannot rise. Meanwhile there are directors of offices with less academic credentials, and less knowledge.
The UN's caste system is more than bureaucratic, it was become a culture. A UN official to whom questions about a technician's death were directed remarked, "It's only a clerk." Questions were left unanswered, because the technician was not a staff member of the Secretariat, but rather of something called the International Computing Center, administered by the World Health Organization which has also refused questions. This ICC, it turns out, does not defend those who work for it. One ICC technician, faced with sexual harassment by a high UN official, was told by the UN in New York that nothing could be done, to reach over the Atlantic to the ICC. There, the answer was that the ICC does not process, or apparently favor, such complaints.
When Ban Ki-moon took over at Secretary General more than a year ago, he promised to bring not only transparency but also modern management methods, mobility for staff. So far, it has not happened. The previous Deputy Secretary General was confronted with leaked statistics, which showed the system's waste of talent. One of the complaints was that those hired at the G level were not told they could not rise, that they could not even take to G to P test until they had wiled away five years. What was the response? To make G level entrants sign a waiver that they knew they would be trapped, even in some cases committing not to seek to rise. This archaic caste system continues; the reforms promised by Ban Ki-moon have yet to be seen.
Footnotes: Mr. Ban himself was last seen launching a campaign to end violence against women, handing out little white whistles on key chains, to blow if and when violence approaches. One wag in the crowd said, at last, Ban's UN is finally encouraging whistleblowers. We'll see.
People who took this week's G to P exam tell Inner City Press that on the Public Information test, there was a question about bloggers, a question that in the real world the UN has yet to answer, or is answering negatively...
