The Foreign Service Journal, March 2003

I f I could address prospective Foreign Service spouses on the issue of overseas employment, my message would be this: nurses, teachers, artists, translators, writers/ editors, public health/development specialists and those already employed in the information technology world — your prospects for overseas employment are, well, fair. But if the rest of you hope to earn more than bus fare in a few years, when hubby or wife is deputy chief of mission, principal officer or ambassador at even the tiniest post, you’d better become a real, direct-hire employee now — or start planning your career as queen (or king) of the bake sales, fashion shows and ex-pat clubs. In his 2002 State of the Union message, President Bush looked into the camera and declared, “Jobs are a human right.” That got my attention. Might the State Department be spurred to show some interest again in spousal employment? Unfortunately, the folks of the Human Resource Bureau’s Office of Overseas Employment — State’s gatekeepers of overseas employment opportunities for spouses — must have run to the fridge during that part of the speech. For instead of striving to increase spousal employment over- seas, HR/OE seems to have devel- oped new regulations and enthusiasm for thwarting it, at least in the arena of anti-nepotism waivers. How We Avoid Nepotism Let’s get this straight: A State Department employee cannot “appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for employment in or to a Department of State position any individual who is a household member of that employee …” out of concern that “nepotism or the appear- ance of nepotism” may exist. In its effort to keep nepotism out of embassies, the department makes sure that one spouse is not supervised by anyone who is affected by the other spouse, using the “cut-out” system to grant anti-nepotism waivers for part-time intermittent employees and personal services contractors. For example, if a PIT were hired to be a consular assistant, her spouse could not oversee consular affairs. In theo- ry, a cut-out allows a selected candi- date to be employed as long as his/her supervisor is not rated or reviewed by the direct-hire spouse. That is, unless hubby/wife is a chief of mission, in which case the supervisory relation- ship doesn’t matter. Fortunately for some of the direct- hire crowd, the State Department extends itself to avoid putting well- connected tandem couples on leave without pay. For example, one ambassador’s wife, an officer herself, was installed in a newly created regional job, albeit without heavy travel responsibilities. At another post, the spouse of a DCM was assigned as a political officer, despite the fact that the DCM was closely involved with the workings of the political section presided over by the man who supervised her husband. Elsewhere, two officer-spouses, both gifted language-learners, were assigned to a year’s language training at full salary until their assigned jobs opened up. In one case, the officer in training already had better than a 4/4 in a very closely related language. In the other case, the officer spent a year on full salary studying a language, despite having already achieved better than a 3/3 in it and being with- out a firm future assignment. Neither of these officers, by the way, was assigned to a language-designated position. Now let’s contrast those spouse- officer assignments with some recent PSC/PIT employee cases. In one small embassy, a Human Resources section found itself with a budget & fiscal officer who arrived green, having had only the HR course, and three Foreign Service Nationals with no more than six month’s worth of cumulative experi- ence. The embassy needed to send the most promising FSN employee to the HR course for seven weeks. To Anti-NepotismWaivers: Let Them Bake Cake B Y G INA W ILLS M A R C H 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 S PEAKING O UT Perhaps there could even be a special, dissent- type channel established for nepotism whistle-blowers.