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At UN, Closed Door Meeting on Labor Strife Finds Competing Confucius Quotes

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 24 -- The UN deals with war and peace but is also a workplace -- or "a family," as Ban Ki-moon said Monday in a speech urging the New York and Geneva staff unions to rejoin a Staff Management Coordination Committee process that both union have said is broken.  On Tuesday, Ban's deputy Asha Rose Migiro and his incoming head of Management Angela Kane made a closed-door pitch to staff on the same topic.

            Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, began Anna Karenina with the ageless line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Just as it's said that families does expose their dirty laundry, from Tuesday's Town Hall meeting, the Press was asked to leave.    

    According to Inner City Press' sources in the meeting, an attempt was made to work around the New York staff union, which rebuffed entreaties by Ms. Kane's predecessor to rejoin the SMCC. Some in the meeting wondered if this would ever be allowed in a truly unionized workplace, that management could make such a directly pitch even in the run-up to union elections. When the Staff Union president said that he hoped those in attendance hadn't been forced to come, Ms. Kane reportedly said she rejected that, no one had been forced to come.

   Inner City Press asked the UN Peacekeeping spokesman Nick Birnback to confirm or deny that the Department of Field Support emailed its staff to tell them to go to the Town Hall meeting. Birnback to his credit answered right away, "DFS staff were reminded about the meeting and encouraged to attend." Similar "encouragement" was confirmed in other parts of the UN.

Takin the oath -- of secrecy? Time will tell

   Before Ms. Kane took office, Ban's senior advisor urged that she be written positively about. But there has yet to be a briefing, and this first meeting was closed.  The question of why, even when posed to Ban's deputy spokesperson, was answered only by "it's always been that way." But why?

  Having only documents to go on, there are competing Confucius quotes from Ban and the Staff Union. Ban cited, "to put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order," etc.. The Staff Union shot back that "faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage," noting an "administrative miasma replete with inertia and playing musical chairs with the top jobs." Staff grumbling not only about the reports made public Tuesday about December's Algiers bombing, but also about the withholding of reports about staff safety on UN aircrafts, particularly helicopters. Transparency, it seems, would help and not hurt Ban's Confucian project.  We will continue to follow these issues.

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Click here for a Reuters AlertNet piece by this correspondent about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click here for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an undefined trust fund.  Video Analysis here

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