11 June 2001

FICSA Update No. 27 2001

    FICSA Contributes to Resolution of General Service Salaries Dispute in Paris

  • Should the Contribution sociale généralisée (CSG - general social contribution) and the contribution pour le remboursement de la dette sociale (CRDS - social debt repayment contribution) be considered as a tax or a social levy? In the context of a General Service salary survey, if considered a tax, they would be deducted from the gross salaries recorded by the local employers, to arrive at net salaries and the scale of remuneration applied to the General Service staff. If considered a social charge, they would not be deducted.

  • From 1997 to 1999, the CSG and the CRDS were factored into the calculation of the adjustment of the salaries to the evolution of cost of living as a tax. Seven UNESCO staff members lodged an appeal that was heard in July 2000. The Appeal Board found in favour of the appellants, that the CSG and CRDS were social levies and thus had been improperly incorporated in the calculation of the yearly adjustments. The Director General eventually decided to accept the recommendation of the Appeal Board but reserved his final decision pending receipt of the results of the new calculations.

  • In July 1999, the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) decided, despite the strong representations from both the UNESCO administration and staff, to consider the CSG and the CRDS as taxes, but to factor them into the calculations progressively by deducting one per cent of the future yearly adjustments to the evolution of the cost of living. In July/August 2000, the UNESCO administration and staff went back to ICSC with a request to consider the CSG and the CRDS as a social levy - in accordance with a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Communities (see also in this respect FICSA Update No. 3/2000) and the French Cassation Court; the request was eventually granted. The CSG and CRDS were in effect excluded from the salary calculations as from January 2000.

  • You may wonder where the problem was! The problem was that the Human Resources Management (HRM) Department outsourced the calculations referred to in paragraph 2 above to two consultancy firms which provided the unsolicited (we were told) advice that the CSG and the CRDS were taxes. The new calculations requested by the Director General were thus not forthcoming and the atmosphere within UNESCO had become quite sticky.

  • The FICSA General Secretary, Mr. André Heitz, used his visit to UNESCO for the purposes of the Ad Hoc Inter-Agency Meeting on Security (see FICSA Update No. 23/2001) to meet with Ms. Diane Dufresne-Klaus, Director/HRM on 14 May 2001. He urged that a decision be taken without delay and offered FICSA’s assistance to clarify the issue.

  • The FICSA President, Mr. Bernard Grandjean, was in Paris from 21 to 25 May for both private and FICSA business. He used the occasion to visit both Ms. Dufresne-Klaus and Mr. Marcio Barbosa, Deputy Director General, and to press for the resolution of the issue.

  • The pressure exercised by the UNESCO Staff Union (STU), the International Staff Association of UNESCO (AIPU/ISAU) and FICSA was productive. On 24 May 2001, the Director General, Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura, confirmed to the staff his decision to accept the above-mentioned recommendation of the Appeal Board, "although it had not yet been possible to evaluate with precision the impact of the financial cost of those two levies on the budget". Moreover, he decided "for reasons of equity" to extend the decision to all staff concerned.

  • We wish to congratulate both STU and ISAU on their action and tenacity.

  • It is recalled that UNESCO is the lead agency for Paris, the rest of France and Monaco. It would be logical for the decision to be implemented also in the Paris offices of other UN organizations (ICAO, ILO, etc.), the Lyons-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and in the IAEA office in Monaco, and also in the organizations which, though not belonging to it, apply pay scales of the United Nations common system.

  • The "equity" referred to by Mr. Matsuura corresponds to nothing more than standard practice in the organizations which have accepted the jurisdiction of the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization (ILOAT). When a salary correction is to be implemented following legal proceedings instituted by one or more staff members from one organization, it is the practice that all organizations implement it to all their staff members. Such extended implementation was in fact recommended - willy-nilly - by ICSC following the famous Berlioz case (Judgement No. 1265 handed down on 14 July 1993) to ensure that the United Nations Office in Geneva (UNOG) would similarly correct the remuneration scales, and do so retroactively to 1990.