From the Staff Committee 2015-2016	(202) 370-4645
February 19, 2016	FYI # 5 /15-16  Original: English
A Brief History of Parity with the UN at the OAS On July 27, 1969 by decision of the Permanent Council, the OAS established a policy of parity of salaries with those of the UN, based inter alia, on a report submitted by a group of experts in public administration and finance created by the Council. Seven years later, in 1976 the OAS unilaterally abandoned parity.  The General Assembly formally adopted resolution AG/RES.383 (VIII-O/78) abandoning parity in 1978, but by then, several hundred staff members had taken a case to the Administrative Tribunal for failure to pay salaries in accordance with parity. For twenty years, staff morale and productivity were low, and relations between staff and Member States, as well as the Administration, were often hostile.  The General Secretariat had to defend seven class action lawsuits – Judgments 37, 64, 66, 90, 91, 124 and 126 – three of which involved paying out millions of dollars to staff for breach of contract.  This period of labor unrest was extremely costly for the Organization, in many ways. In Judgment 37, the Tribunal stated that: “… parity with the United Nations in remuneration and working conditions is a contractual stipulation that forms part of the contracts between the OAS and its employees.” In Judgment 64, another case on parity, the Administrative Tribunal held that: “A reduction in salaries, when made unilaterally by the employer as in the present case, without the consent of the employees, constitutes a manifest disregard for the proper balance of the employment relationship, which cannot be justified in even the most difficult situations…” In 1982, the General Assembly adopted AG/RES.632 (XXII-O/82), which set out a policy calling for an annual review of salaries by the General Assembly based on a comparator index of three Washington-area institutions. For thirteen years that the comparator policy was in effect, the General Assembly never granted a cost-of-living increase that reflected the full amount of the comparator index. Staff brought another case to the administrative Tribunal in 1991, to enforce good faith compliance with the 1982 resolution.  In that case, Judgment 124, the Tribunal ruling said that:“… salary is the most important element of the employment contract, a human right protected by the various international standards on human rights and in particular, Article XIV of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man.” At that time, member states had reviewed options for resolving the salary policy question and had concluded that a policy of parity of salaries with the United Nations was the most satisfactory of all options considered. In 1995, the General Assembly adopted resolution AG/RES.1319 (XXV-O/95) implementing a policy of parity with United Nations salaries, which also required the implementation of the UN job classification standards, as required under both Judgments 64 and 124, the decision was submitted to the staff for approval in a referendum. Once approved, the policy entered into force on July 1, 1995 and thus after 19 years, parity with the UN returned to the OAS, and is the current system in place, approved by a referendum of the staff. In 1999, Member States asked the General Secretariat to report whether the OAS could achieve significant savings in personnel cost by departing form UN salary parity. The reply by the General Secretariat was no. “In fact, we estimate that if the General Secretariat had maintained the pre-1995 salary system with the automatic cost of living adjustment mandated by the OAS Administrative Tribunal in Judgment 124, the cost in salaries under that system would have exceeded the salaries paid to staff under the present system of parity since its inception in July 1995”. Benefits of the UN Salary System Parity 1.  The current salary system is working well, and staff are satisfied with it. 2.  It provides a salary scale that is generally competitive in the Washington, D.C. area, and allows the OAS to recruit and retain well-qualified staff.  3. The OAS incurs virtually no cost in administering the system since it is the United Nations that calculates cost-of-living adjustment based on extensive and costly labor market survey. 4.  The parity system provides a measure of predictability across international organizations in terms of staff qualifications, and honors the principle of equal pay for equal work among agencies.