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 41 opportunity that exclusive representation constituted to sweep away some of the cobwebs of outmoded practice in the Service. These included confidential annexes to effi- ciency reports, the archaic rule that female FSOs had to re- sign if they married, and the feudal hierarchies of Foreign Service wives under the chief of mission’s wife at overseas posts. It quickly became clear just how badly the Foreign Service needed an organization to pursue employee rights more broadly, and how little senior management could be counted on to stick up for them. As chairman of AFSA’s Members’ Interests Committee, which was charged with labor-management negotiations in the late 1970s, I took up the issue of duties, taxes and import limits being im- posed by many host governments on Foreign Service em- ployees assigned abroad, in violation of the Vienna Convention. We proposed an obvious mechanism for ending such in- equities: establishing reciprocal rules for the embassies and consulates of those governments in the United States. This idea ran into a wall of resistance, for neither the Secretary of State nor our ambassadors in those countries wanted to encumber our bilateral agendas with such matters. The department complained that reciprocity would require bur- densome, detailed accounting rules for each country, which the department lacked the manpower to meet, and argued that too much interagency coordination would be required. But in the end, State relented. In 1982 it set up the Of- fice of ForeignMissions, and began to apply the same stric- tures to foreign diplomats based in the U.S. as were being applied to our personnel abroad. Just as AFSA had ex- pected, foreign governments quickly lifted many of their improper restrictions. Bread-and-Butter Issues There was resistance, too, when AFSA pressed man- agement to raise Foreign Service salaries to match what Civil Service personnel in comparable jobs were earning. Budget-conscious managers argued against the idea, claim- ing that the Foreign Service enjoyed compensating bene- fits such as rent-free housing abroad. In the end, AFSA found sympathy on Capitol Hill, which incorporated more favorable comparability linkages into the Foreign Service Act of 1980. Despite such successes, tensions persisted between AFSA’s new union responsibilities and the old fraternal as- sociation role. As post representative in Brussels in the early 1970s, I had to suppress my own traditionalist instincts to take on a politically powerful ambassador to NATO on two personnel issues that the deputy chief of mission was unwilling to raise with him. (In both cases, the ambassador wanted to disregard provisions of the Foreign Affairs Man- ual he found inconvenient, but he wisely decided not to proceed once he understood the consequences.) Some traditionalists found it hard to adjust to AFSA’s new focus on bread-and-butter issues. When it sought overtime pay for junior officers working 12-hour shifts in the Operations Center or as staff aides, for instance, Sen- ate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., expressed indignation. The idea of overtime pay had never even occurred to him or anyone else in his own days as a junior FSO (1945-1952). AFSA’s obligation to defend the rights of individual members in trouble also sometimes proved to be costly. While I was AFSA president in the early 1990s, I had to answer for our legal counsel’s defense of a senior officer who was found to have had the official representational sil- ver packed and sent to his home in the U.S. on reassign- ment, for which he was severely punished. He claimed that it was inadvertent, but several senior officers in the de- partment’s management branch said he should have known better, and resigned from AFSA in disgust at our willing- ness to represent him. Nor is our “union” image always helpful when resource issues play such a prominent role in our relations with Con- gress. For instance, we are still struggling to implement fully a tremendous, multiyear initiative to recoup the ben- efits of locality pay for personnel assigned abroad— an ef- fort eerily reminiscent of AFSA’s long struggle to get local-currency rent and cost-of-living allowances raised after Washington went off the gold standard in 1971, and the dollar’s value sank by about a third. Year in and year out, AFSA presidents have beaten the halls of Congress supporting the efforts of successive Sec- retaries of State to obtain adequate resources to run the de- partment. Legislators tend to run for cover when they see AFSA coming to call, because they know that our pitch is going to be “send more money!” — even though much of each year’s budget request goes for the training, staffing and overhead to run an effective organization, not into our members’ pockets. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that we will be obliged to repeat the litany this year and probably for years to come. AFSA’s secondary identity as a union has other draw- F O C U S