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[Previous entry: "Birdwatching from one's desk"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "L'ennui du fin-de-guerre, darling"] 06 May 2003: "Typical UN? Or just typical?"
Since I've cast myself in the role of an informed commentator on UN-related matters, I suppose I'd better comment on this incident last week at UNHQ, in which a wildcat strike by the food workers union resulted in staff members helping themselves to lunch in what—not entirely unfairly—has been described as "looting." The story ran in Time and on NewsMax.com (it's essentially the same story, written by the same guy, Stewart Stogel).
[The Delegates Lounge] was where NewsMax caught up with a well-known U.S. diplomat. When asked how many free drinks he had, he replied: "I don't know, I stopped counting the bottles."A "well-known U.S. diplomat," Stogel says; i.e. not a UN staff member, but an employee of the US federal government. In fact, Stogel makes a number of references to "diplomats," and that means that the "looters" included not only UN staff members, but also various members of the diplomatic corps of the member states, including that of the United States. Alternatively, it means Stogel is not averse to sacrificing accurate reporting for the sake of more sensational-sounding copy, since UN staff members are not "diplomats." Or maybe Stogel is simply fucking ignorant. (Oh, as an aside: "no coffee for Kofi"? That joke had gotten old about four years ago, i.e. roughly a year after Annan became Secretary-General. Using it now is more or less on a par with rhyming "fire" with "desire" when writing song lyrics, and the perpetrator of either offence deserves to be locked in a room for thirty minutes with Phil Spector while he's in an amorous mood.) Okay, this is where I start equivocating. As one variant of the saying goes, "Civilisation is one day and three meals away from collapse"; the only difference with what happened at UNHQ is a matter of degree, and this is explained to a very large degree by the amount of downsizing UNHQ has gone through over the past decade. These are people who aren't very certain of their jobs, and when they see what looks like a free lunch, the response is predictable. As a hypothetical scenario, imagine the kitchen staff in your office staged a wildcat strike right before lunch hour. How would you and your co-workers react? Confronted with this sort of situation, you just know the entire cast of Dilbert would make off with the pans, the utensils, the microwave, several refrigerators and the espresso machine, anything they weren't too lazy to lift. (And besides, this is Manhattan, people; you try getting a lunch reservation at such short notice.) An Aramark executive told NewsMax that a rough estimate of the lifted food was between "$7,000-$9,000 wholesale"Out of context, that doesn't tell me anything. UNHQ has a couple of thousand staff members, and then there's the delegations of the 191 member states. Let's take a conservative estimate and say 2,000 people a day lunch at the UNHQ cafeteria; let's say they purchase, on average, an amount of food which the catering firm claims cost it $4.50 wholesale, and voilà, there's your $9,000. But if Stogel were to have written "the amount of food removed but not paid for was about the same as would have been sold on a normal day" it wouldn't be as sensational, would it now? A U.N. security officer who was later called in to examine the cafeteria told NewsMax: "It is unbelievable, they even took the trays and the silverware; the place is stripped clean."That sounds bad, but let's not jump to conclusions. It's far from inconveivable that the staff members in question went to eat at their desks; to do, they would have needed trays and cutlery (I mean, "silverware"? Actual silver in an institutional cafeteria? Get a grip, we're talking stainless steel here.). There's no reason to assume the accoutrements won't be returned in due course; well, unless you're trying to make the story more sensational than it is, of course. But that would be like, say, reporting a wildly inflated estimate of the number of artefacts stolen from the Iraq National Museum, and we all know no journalist, certainly not one in New York, would ever do that, surely? A New York Post op-ed piece comments: And this is the outfit that wants to administer the rebuilding of Iraq?Bullshit; the obvious lesson is that UNHQ made the right decision in terminating its contract with Restaurant Associates Inc., whose refusal to cough up vacation pay due its employees caused the strike in the first place. Or, if you don't care much for trade unions, the obvious lesson is that Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union needs to be kept out of Iraq at all costs. |
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