27 June 2001
FICSA Update No. 29 2001
First Week of ICSC’s 53rd Session Yields Mixed Results on General Service Salary Surveys
The International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) is currently holding its fifty-third session in Montreal, until 29 June 2001. FICSA is represented at the session by President Bernard P. Grandjean and General Secretary André J. Heitz; it is thus renewing participation after a boycott that lasted, with a short interruption, for more than a decade.
The Committee concentrated in the first days on the surveys of best prevailing conditions of employment for the determination of General Service salaries.
Rome
The list of employers
The Commission’s deliberations started with an unexpected, lengthy, discussion on the choice of the surveyed employers. The criticism expressed included the following: over-representation of the financial institutions, non-representativity of the public administrations, non-representation of agricultural institutions, absence of permanent missions other than that of the United States of America. The list of employers was finally endorsed, after more than half a day discussions, partly on the ground that the Commission could not disavow its Chairman (who had approved the list) and partly on the ground that "what Flemming ordains is that the General Service staff have pay and other terms of employment that match the best on offer at their duty station..." (Judgement No. 1713 of the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization (ILOAT), in re Carretta and others).
This does not augur well for the surveys that are yet to come and for the revision of the general methodology for salary surveys in 2003.
The language factor
The battle over the language factor is on again. According to the aforementioned judgement, "it is right to adjust pay by a language factor when jobs that do not require proficiency in a second language are matched with jobs that do. But it is wrong so to adjust pay when the matching is with outside posts that require proficiency in a second language and that requirement is not compensated". In the survey, FAO, IFAD and WFP jobs, which all require knowledge of an official language that is not Italian, were almost exclusively matched with outside jobs that required knowledge of Italian only.
.Amazingly, the Commission chose to ignore the judgement. In fact, some members chose to defy the Tribunal, whose judgement was dubbed "neither fish nor fowl". Prominent among those members was the Chairman, who stated on several occasions that the language factor recompensed the Italian staff of the organizations for speaking their mother tongue, and also that he had always said
that the Tribunal had erred. Those members did so despite the unified views of the Rome administrations and staff, the additional supporting evidence provided by them, and FICSA’s statement that the judgement was clear and compelling.
Elimination of the language factor gained support from seven Commissioners (in addition to the Chairman) on the morning of Tuesday, 12 June. In the afternoon, the Chairman unexpectedly feigned to appeal to the Commission to reconsider its position. Commissioner El Hassane Zahid (Morocco) remarked that the Tribunal was technically as competent as the Commission, and that the Commission should have an eye on its credibility and also a political vision. To no avail.
Enough funds available?
The survey yielded an increase of 4.25 per cent. The announcement of the result, on Thursday, 14 June, gave rise to a comment by the Chairman of the Commission that one should not be too greedy and that the result was not bad for Rome. There was also a discussion as to whether it was reasonable to recommend such an increase, given that there was a decision to come on Professional salaries and that the Rome-based organizations (read: Member States) might not have funds available.
The limits of the consultative process
"The matter is not one of money in the back pocket", Ms. Margaret Eldon, Secretary-General of the Union of General Service Staff of FAO and WFP, stated at the end of the discussion. "The impression was that, in the Commission, it was a foregone conclusion." Despite the evidence produced by staff and administrations, the same arguments were put forward by the Chairman and some Commissioners in support of the abolition of the language factor, even those that had been ruled out by ILOAT. The process has been unfair, she added, and it was the responsibility of the members of the Commission to improve the consultation mechanism.
Geneva
Initial shambles
The Geneva-based organizations had not been able to complete the survey exercise so that they came with a request for postponement. Moreover, a last-minute controversy broke out between the staff representatives and the Chairman of the Local Salary Survey Committee (LSSC) on the composition of delegation of staff representatives that was to come to Montreal; the Chairman, in retaliation, unilaterally decided to submit his own conference room paper, rather than the one agreed to by the LSSC. And the Secretariat of the Commission responded to that paper basically opposing all proposals from the LSSC.
The controversy was eventually settled, not least through the firm positions taken by the FICSA President and General Secretary, and the Geneva administrations and staff were able to unite their forces.
List of employers
The LSSC had agreed, with the blessing of the Secretariat of the Commission, that there should be a single list (rather than a main list and a reserve list) of 41 employers and that, where relevant, the LSSC would, with the authorization of the Commission, review the responses from the employers and strongly recommend the best employers to be retained for final analysis. That proposal was more than reasonable as it would have enabled checking the reality of the labour market without recourse to a presurvey which might have jeopardized the participation of the employers in the survey itself. The proposal was defeated, not least through the Chairman’s emphatic statements that it was contrary to the approved methodology.
Gender discrimination
The LSSC had also recommended a survey procedure that enabled data to be captured on gender discrimination. Again, the Secretariat had tried to defeat the proposal on the ground that studies in 1990 and 1995 had led to the conclusion that no adjustment was justified on this count. This led to a tough battle, in which the FICSA delegation had to remind the Commission that it should, like the United Nations, be at the forefront of the battle against all forms of discrimination. The Commission eventually agreed to a separate study being conducted.
June 2001 interim adjustment
The third contentious item was the interim adjustment of salaries that fell due in June 2000. The adjustment is of the order of 1 % and applies to a bare fifth of the Geneva General Service staff, namely those recruited after the Fall of 1995. The Chairman of the Commission wrote on 18 May 2001 to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, urging him not to grant it. To that end, he relied on Resolution 47/216 of 23 December 1992, despite the fact that it responded to a totally different situation. He also relied on the currently applicable methodology, stating that "if the survey schedule is amended the interim adjustment to salaries would be suspended until such time as the comprehensive survey is completed". However, he omitted, in so doing, to read and quote the full text of the provision, which starts with the word "generally" and thus calls for a decision.
The discussion on this point was very short, in small part because it was time to break for lunch and in a large measure because the Chairman of the Commission stated that he did not see why the staff should be penalized.