The Foreign Service Journal, April 2012

A P R I L 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 back in the States — and then some. State’s own numbers confirm that finding a job — any job — while your spouse or partner is serving overseas is not easy. Of the 11,056 Eligible Family Members abroad in 2011, more than six in 10 were not working. Now for the good news. It’s be- coming less difficult for EFMs to find meaningful employment overseas. According to 2011 data provided by the State Department’s Family Li- aison Office, the percentage of family members working rose from 35 percent in 2004 to 41 percent in 2010. The figure slipped to 37 percent last year, but the overall trend is encouraging. Despite the progress, the picture is still disheartening for spouses and partners who want or, for financial rea- sons, need to work. The American Foreign Service Association is making the case to State Department lead- ers that much more could be done to help spouses and partners, notes AFSA State Department Vice President Daniel Hirsch. Hirsch says that more spousal jobs at posts should be centrally funded to ensure that they are there, regardless of any financial difficulties the post may face. Leaving it up to individual missions to find the money for family member jobs “makes it optional and frequently one of the first pieces of funding to disappear in tough times,” he ob- serves. Second, AFSA wants State to set up a central job bank of all family member positions and a skills bank listing the experience and education of the family members who want to work. By publicizing all that information during bidding season, Foreign Service employees and their spouses could make more informed choices about where they want to go. For their part, posts would be able to offer spouses more challenging work because they’d have more assurance that people with the skills to do the job would be available. Finally, Hirsch says that the department should de- velop teleworking opportunities for family members over- seas, enabling them to telework to jobs either from one post to another, or from overseas back to Washington. “While not all jobs lend themselves to telework, many do,” Hirsch notes, adding: “Telework could dramatically in- crease opportunities to match skill- ed eligible family members with jobs needing their skills.” Still, Hirsch points out, spouses and partners have to accept that the burden will always remain on them to secure employment, and that the Foreign Service lifestyle will create headaches and conflicts. “You unfor- tunately have to realize that you may not be able to do ex- actly what you want to do. You have to be flexible,” he notes. Finding Work in the Embassy or Consulate Responses from active-duty Foreign Service employ- ees the Foreign Service Journal invited to comment on these issues earlier this year contained lots of helpful advice, on everything fromworking in an embassy to start- ing your own business, teleworking and finding positions on the local economy. Still, most spouses who find work continue to find it at the U.S. embassy, consulate or mission where their spouse is stationed. That was the case for two out of every three family members who held down jobs in 2011, according to FLO. Jobs in the mission are usually the easiest and safest employment for spouses and partners to secure. And thanks to federal employment rules, such positions con- fer the opportunity to quickly become a Civil Service employee, with all the rights and benefits that status en- tails. The drawback is that many top embassy officials don’t want to make special accommodations for spouses and partners, or see doing so as unwise. The reasons for this are sometimes understandable: Family members can take a while to hire, considering that many posts come with a security clearance requirement and spouses some- times quit early to handle the logistics of moving to the next posting. Often, it’s also easier and cheaper to find local employees to do the work. Numerous spouses who responded to the AFSA survey said nepotism rules, which bar hiring the spouses of cer- tain embassy officials, had prevented them from getting F OCUS AFSA continues to make the case to State that it needs to do much more to help spouses and partners find work. Shawn Zeller, a regular contributor to the Journal , is a free- lance writer in Washington, D.C