Story updated
The International Trade Union Confederation has taken the unpredecented action of attacking a key UN agency - UNRWA - for its treatment of Palestinian workers who have been on strike for several weeks.
The ITUC has written to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon criticising the actions of the UN’s Palestine Relief Agency UNRWA as a strike of its employees enters a third week.
UNRWA management have insisted that they will not talk to the workers’ union unless and until the strike is called off.
Some 7,500 employees and contract workers are on strike over claims for improvements in their wages and working conditions.
Refugees worried about health risk begin sit-in
The Ma’an News Agency has previously reported that the long unresolved strike is becoming a major public health risk for refugees living in the UNRWA centres.
Refugee camp residents are angry that the strike has gone on for so long threatening health across the Territories and abroad.
At one camp near Bethlehemn they’ve begun a sit-in protest demanding that UNRWA and the workers resolve their differences.
UNRWA calls workers’ demands absurd
UNRWA officials however have described the workers’ demands as absurd.
“This is a one-issue strike,” West Bank chief Barbara Shenstone says in a second Ma’an News Agency report.
“They want to be paid hourly wages they didn’t receive the last time they went on strike, and we’re not willing to do that.”
Hardline attitude unacceptable: ITUC says
But the ITUC head, Sharan Burrow has argued back that: “It is perfectly normal for unions and management to hold talks during a strike – that is how disputes are resolved.
” The hard-line attitude taken by the UNRWA to its own employees is not acceptable, and will only make matters worse.
” That is why we have written to Mr Ban today to ask him to help get the UNRWA to take a reasonable and constructive attitude rather than refuse to accept the legitimate rights of their own employees,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow.
The ITUC will continue to monitor the situation along with its Palestinian affiliate the PGFTU, and is raising the matter with major donors to UNRWA – countries which themselves respect trade union rights.