A diplomatic racket

In my Observer column on Sunday I mentioned in passing that in a crisis, elites have to be able to show that they are sharing the plight of the masses. Asking for ‘equality of suffering’ is too much, you will never have that, but there has to be a sense that — to coin a phrase — we are all in this together.

Christine Lagarde had just lectured the Greeks on why they must pay their taxes. She was in no way inhibited by the knowledge that as an official of the IMF she was a ‘diplomatic agent’ and hence exempt from taxes under the terms of the 1961 Berne Convention. The inevitable accusation from the Greeks that she was a hypocrite so lost in a world of privilege she could no longer know a double-standard when she saw it, took her and her colleagues aback.

But not all of them. A British reader who works for a UN agency sent me a description of the benefits he enjoys. I won’t name him or his agency. As in so many bureaucracies, the surest way to be fired from the UN is to tell the truth about it. He tells me that he is in his mid-20s. He works in a lowly position on a temporary contract. Nevertheless, the ‘international community’ pays him a tax-free monthly salary of around USD 7,500 per month, which the UN splits between a basic salary and a ‘post-adjustment’ payment, plus a tax-free pension:

As a temporary staff member I don’t get many of the benefits which permanent staff get (petrol vouchers, education allowance, rental subsidy, free flights home, access to the duty-free supermarket in the basement of the building) but the post-adjustment alone is higher than the average monthly wage in Italy – imagine the multiple of the average wage which UN staff based in sub-Saharan Africa receive.

To have this net income in a regular tax-paying job I would probably need to have a salary of over GBP100,000; here I am on the second lowest rung of the ladder. I am ashamed to tell my friends at home how much I earn. I don’t even know what to do with it. Given the nature of the work it is basically impossible to estimate how my salary relates to the value I create through my work. It makes a complete mockery of our supposed commitment to reducing poverty.

People here like to kid themselves that these salaries are necessary to get the best people. The money attracts the wrong people and it makes the right people stay for the wrong reasons. Many of the positions are filled by people who are second or even third generation UN – the lords of poverty pass their estates down to their children – sons and daughters of diplomats and high level politicians abound – few of these people got their jobs based on merit alone (though an international upbringing does tend to improve your language skills which are a pretty important part of the job).

I would dearly love to see the Guardian/Observer start a major campaign to expose this world. These salaries and benefits can only exist because no one knows about them. The countries which provide our funding are slashing salaries and cutting jobs in the public sector but we are more or less untouched. I hope that if the truth comes out the political pressure on the UN to do something about this situation will quickly rise. We are facing some budget restrictions this year but no one is even contemplating pay cuts, or reduced business class flights, or requiring provision of receipts for travel expenses – they would prefer that we reduce the quantity and quality of support we provide to our clients than consider reducing the 75% subsidy they receive for the EUR20,000 per year private primary school they send each of their children to so they can play with the sons and daughters of professional footballers and millionaires.

Sounds a good subject for a newspaper campaign to me.