The House That Cannot Unionize by Edgard M. Seikaly

The House That Cannot Unionize

The United Nations asks the world to honor collective bargaining. It asks its suppliers to honor it. Then it goes home, closes the door, and tells its own staff: you do not get those rights here.

Edgard Mounib Seikaly 

May 04, 2026

I have spent over more than two decades inside that house. I know where the drafts come in.

The architecture of managed dissent

There are currently three federations serving staff associations and unions across the UN system. CCISUA, the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations, FICSA, the Federation of International Civil Servants’ Associations, and UNISERV make up that triumvirate, collectively covering staff associations and unions across the common system. Each agency has its own body, typically called a staff association or staff union, affiliated to one of these federations. They sit on advisory committees, present statements to the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, and send representatives to observe pension board meetings. They are heard. They are rarely heeded.

The federations carry weight in some forums. They have a formal role in high-level bodies including the International Civil Service Commission, the High-Level Committee on Management, the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund, and the Inter-Agency Security Management Network. This is not nothing. But formal presence in a consultative body is not the same as the power to negotiate, to strike, to compel, or to hold an employer to account through binding collective agreement.

Because UN staff work for an international agency, they are protected by no national labor legislation and no international convention. Although freedom of association is written into the UN staff regulations, national unions are not recognized, and terms and conditions are negotiated directly with representatives of the member states. The first collective agreement recognized anywhere in the UN system was signed with the ILO Staff Union in the year 2000, over half a century after the system was founded. That single data point should tell you everything.

This is not a union in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a consultation mechanism with an elected face.

The Global Compact problem

In 2000, Kofi Annan launched the UN Global Compact, calling on businesses worldwide to align their operations with universal principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption. Principle 3 asks that businesses uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining. Principle 4 calls for the elimination of forced and compulsory labor. Principle 5 for the abolition of child labor. Principle 6 for the elimination of discrimination in employment and occupation.

The UN expects its own suppliers to recognize the freely exercised right of workers, without distinction, to organize, further and defend their interests and to bargain collectively, and to protect those workers from any action or other form of discrimination related to the exercise of their right to organize or to carry out trade union activities.

The UN expects this of its suppliers. It does not expect it of itself.

Globally, 74% of countries exclude workers from the right to establish and join a trade union, while 79% of countries violate the right to collective bargaining. The UN rightly identifies this as a global crisis. But the institution that identifies the crisis is itself among the offenders, shielded only by the sovereign immunity it has constructed around its own employment practices.

The word for this is hypocrisy. Not irony. Not tension. Hypocrisy.

What a real union would require

When I served as Vice Chair of the UNICEF Staff Association in Geneva, and later as Chair in Copenhagen, I understood the limits of the role before I sat down at either table. You were elected by staff, but you worked for the same employer you were meant to hold accountable. Every word you said in a negotiation meeting was heard by the people who signed your performance evaluation. Every position you took was weighed against your career trajectory. The incentive structure was not designed to produce courage, and the system knew it.

I ran for these roles because I believed in something simple: that someone needed to speak truth to power, and to be a voice for the voiceless inside an institution that had built an elaborate architecture for appearing to listen without actually doing so. The retaliation for that was real, and it was not reserved for the global stage. It came in Geneva. It came in Copenhagen. It followed the pattern, because the pattern is the point.

When I ran for global chair of the UNICEF Staff Association in 2020, I ran on a specific proposition: that the time had come to form a cross-agency union, one that would represent staff across the system and speak with a single, unmediated voice. Not another federation of associations. A union. With teeth. The consequences of that campaign were the most visible, but they were not the first. By then I already knew what the system does to the people who refuse to manage their dissent quietly.

Compare this to the Federal labor model in the United States. Federal employees cannot strike, but they have the right to organize, to form unions, to bargain collectively on conditions of employment through the Federal Labor Relations Authority framework. The unions are independent of management. The representatives owe their accountability to members, not supervisors. European Union institutions have their own versions of this: staff committees with genuine negotiating standing, backed by legal frameworks that the institutions cannot simply override.

Why not the UN? The answer is not a mystery. It is a choice. A choice made by member states who find it more convenient to manage staff through controlled consultation than to grant them the standing to actually negotiate. A choice sustained by an institutional culture that confuses loyalty with silence.

The case for retired leadership

There is a structural solution hiding in plain sight, and the institution refuses to look at it.

If the principal vulnerability of a staff representative is their continued employment, the most logical reform is to allow leadership by those for whom that vulnerability no longer exists. Retired staff, people who have given decades to the system, who know its pathologies from the inside, who have no contract to protect and no performance review to fear, should be eligible to lead these bodies.

The objection will be that they are no longer staff. But what the current system produces is leadership that cannot fully represent staff, because that leadership is itself staff. The retired colleague who runs for union chair owes their accountability to one constituency and one constituency only: the membership. They cannot be reassigned. They cannot be passed over for promotion. They cannot be quietly moved to a less visible post. Retaliation, the system’s most reliable enforcement mechanism, is rendered useless.

The minimum requirements are obvious and could be designed with care: a minimum number of years of service, a period of no longer than a defined number of years since separation, a demonstrated record of engagement in staff representative bodies during active service. These are not insurmountable criteria. They are the kind of criteria any serious institution would welcome, if it were serious.

We should also have this conversation honestly. I know what it feels like to run for office inside this system on a platform that challenged its comfortable arrangements. The cost was real. That cost would have been zero, or close to it, had I already been separated from service. The argument is not theoretical. It is personal. And it is right.

What this is really about

The UN will continue to ask the world’s employers to uphold collective bargaining rights. It will continue to publish reports on labor violations. It will continue to send delegations to ILO governing body sessions. It will do all of this while maintaining, inside its own walls, a system that denies its staff the very protections it champions.

The staff associations do important work. The federation presidents who address the Fifth Committee do it with professionalism and commitment. I do not dismiss what they have built inside the constraints they have been given. But constraints chosen by the powerful to manage the less powerful are not neutral. They are political. And they deserve to be named.

The question is not whether UN staff deserve genuine labor representation. They manifestly do. The question is whether the institution is capable of confronting the contradiction at its own foundation, or whether it will continue to export its principles while quietly exempting itself from them.

I know which way I would bet. I also know that someone needs to keep saying it.

Edgard M. Seikaly is a senior independent consultant with over 30 years of experience across 60+ countries. He served as a senior UNICEF official with postings in Geneva, Copenhagen, Nigeria, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, and beyond. He is the author of The Tale of the Wooden Spoon and writes on humanitarian systems, governance, and the politics of institutional power.