The Foreign Service Journal, March 2011

M A R C H 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 A FSA’s Labor Management office tackled a workload of between 350 and 400 e-mail, telephone and in-person inquiries every week in 2010. These issues covered all as- pects of Foreign Service employment, in- cluding promotions, evaluations, assignments, travel, housing, retirement, investigations, discipline and security clearances. The numbers include ongoing work on the hundreds of grievances that our staff has assisted employ- ees in filing both at the agency level and in the appeals process, before the Foreign Service Grievance Board. In 2010, the Department of State changed the manda- tory low-ranking percentage by promotion panels from 5 percent to 2 percent for any class numbering more than 20. This is an important change, for which AFSA has been lobbying both the department and Congress for many years. Dating back to the late 1990s, this requirement had its genesis in the need to reduce personnel numbers. Twelve years later, this is no longer a priority and boards routinely struggled with the task of meeting the 5-percent quota. While AFSA’s ultimate goal is for the Department of State to adopt USAID’s procedure, where promotion panels are not forced to meet a minimum quota but can low-rank as they deem appropriate, we believe the 2-per- cent figure is more reflective of reality. We won an important victory in 2009 in the case of newly promoted Senior Foreign Service officers who had been denied the opportunity to compete for performance pay. 2010 saw its follow-up, with four separate boards con- vened to consider some 1,035 files that included the 205 Senior Foreign Service officers who had been newly pro- moted in 2006 and 2007 and were found to be eligible for consideration for performance pay in 2007 and 2008, re- spectively. Ultimately, 67 people have received either per- formance pay or pay-for-performance payouts in accord- ance with the appropriate precepts, including several em- ployees who received performance pay awards of either $10,000, $12,000 or $15,000, along with commensurate pay increases. This includes 55 SFS generalists and 12 specialists. In 2010, we assisted Diplomatic Security agents who entered the Foreign Service in late 2008 and 2009, and whose entry step had been wrongly assessed by the State Department’s Human Resources Bureau. As a result, sev- eral dozen agents have had their entry step raised from FS-6, Step 3, to Step 4, and have received back pay with interest. In addition to our representation of individual employ- ees and discrete groups, AFSA negotiated or consulted with the HR Bureau on a wide variety of issues in 2010. These include the extension of language pay for hard lan- guages, the need to restrict the number of linked assign- ments (despite their expansion to employees volunteering for service in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan), the annual procedural promotion precepts and the rules for assign- ments. We were also closely involved in the most recent up- date of the core precepts, which were revised to include sections that highlight the particular contributions made by the 21 specialist groups, and how their duties differ in emphasis from those of generalist officers. Finally, we have been able to assist many members in their dealings with various commercial entities, success- fully persuading some property, cell-phone and vehicle- leasing companies to allow Foreign Service employees to cancel their leases when proceeding overseas on govern- ment orders. ANNUAL REPORT American Foreign Service Association 2010 The Memorial Plaques ■ B Y P ERRI G REEN , S PECIAL A WARDS AND O UTREACH C OORDINATOR T he first AFSA Memorial Plaque was unveiled in 1933 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson. There are now two plaques in the C Street lobby of the State Department honoring mem- bers of the Foreign Service who have died in the line of duty, bearing a total of 235 names. In 2010, new names were added at an emotional ceremony on Foreign Af- fairs Day, May 7, at which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton eulogized Victoria DeLong (killed in an earthquake in Haiti), Dale Gredler (died of a massive cardiac arrest while on tour in Almaty) and Terrence L. Barnich (killed by an impro- vised explosive device in Iraq). Labor Management Office’s Advocacy Efforts Meet with Success ■ B Y S HARON P APP , G ENERAL C OUNSEL