UNESCO Staff Fears Job Cuts, Goes on Strike

Striking employees paralyzed the Paris headquarters of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on Wednesday, in a work stoppage reflecting the collapse of morale and the fear of job cuts in the wake of withdrawals by both the United States and Britain.

Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the embattled director general of the organization commonly called UNESCO, summoned the agency’s entire staff and pleaded with them not to do anything that “will be used against us.” He likened the strike to “sawing off the branch on which you are standing.”

But the 64-year-old Senegalese, whose management of the organization has been derided in often-scathing tones by his critics, only partially met the demand of the strikers that employees have a major role in deciding who will be dismissed because of budget cuts forced by the funding withdrawals.

In addition to the walkout, officers of the main employees’ union began a hunger strike Tuesday. They said they plan to continue it and will meet today to decide whether their strike will also go on.

The strike mirrored the demoralization within UNESCO headquarters that followed the final decision by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain last week to follow the United States out of the organization. Most UNESCO staff members had believed that the British would remain.

The United States, which left at the end of 1984, had contributed 25% of UNESCO’s budget. Britain, which will leave at the end of this year, added 5%. Both nations cited mismanagement, politicization of programs and UNESCO’s persistent hostility to the West as reasons for leaving.

Deep distrust pervades the U.N. specialized agency’s modernistic headquarters on Paris’ Left Bank, with Africans accusing other staff members of racial bias against M’Bow, and non-Africans suspicious that African staff members are turning in reports to M’Bow about dissenters.

Above all, there is a widespread fear that M’Bow will not be fair in deciding who will lose their jobs. In his unusual session in the building’s massive assembly hall, he tried to assuage that fear by promising that staff decisions will be made with fairness, objectivity and “without the possibility of anyone trying to settle accounts with anyone else.”

M’Bow promised to consult with employees and their representatives and will consider appointing employees to a committee making the personnel decisions, but he did not give in to the demand that employees make up half the panel.

The director general said the budget cuts will force him to abolish 550 positions, about a fifth of the total staff in Paris, adding that most of the losses will come from early retirements.

Bruno de Padirac of France, 40, president of the UNESCO Staff Assn., representing 60% of the staff, started a hunger strike in the lobby of UNESCO headquarters Tuesday and said he will continue it until M’Bow gives in to the union’s demand that staff cuts be made by a joint employee-administration committee, or until the union members call a continuous strike.

Several other union leaders joined him in his fast, and the executive committee called a one-day walkout, announcing that it will decide today whether to go on.

In a brief interview, De Padirac said he wants “to protest arbitrariness in staff management.” As an example, De Padirac said that M’Bow, during the two years since the United States first gave its notice of withdrawal, had refused to suspend recruitment and had hired 300 new employes.

Without these new staff members, De Padirac said, there would be no trouble now in absorbing the job cuts.

The deep malaise within the organization was shown when a second, smaller union accused De Padirac’s union of racism. Z’Ahidi Ngoma of Zaire, the president of this union, the International Staff Assn. of UNESCO, announced that he is starting a hunger strike of his own that will continue until M’Bow assured him that staff cuts were made on the basis of competence, not geography.

After M’Bow addressed the staff, Ngoma, describing himself as satisfied with the director general’s assurances, called off his fast.

Members of the main union insist that the second union is a creation of M’Bow. Even if this is so, its issue of racism is a real one at UNESCO, reflecting a feeling by some staff members that M’Bow has packed divisions of UNESCO with fellow Africans.

M’Bow, often described as dictatorial and truculent, appealed to the staffers to safeguard their own image against critics.

“For two years,” he said, “this organization has been under assault. . . . Sometimes I feel hurt about what is said about ourselves, about high salaries, about laxness. It is as if all the people here are earning high salaries for doing nothing.”