THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2026 61 AFSA NEWS AFSA/MARK PARKHOMENKO AFSA’s OGC team gathers to honor Sharon Papp (front right) in Washington, D.C., on May 7. From left: Zlatana Badrich, Ed White, Colleen Fallon-Lenaghan, Heather Townsend, Neera Parikh, Brian Himmelsteib, Papp, Erin Kate Brady, Raeka Safai, and Patrick Bradley. workers in New York City in an Equal Pay Act case alleging that maids were paid less than the male char force for substantially similar work. Sharon spent days in the Waldorf Astoria and other hotels shadowing a job evaluation expert as he documented the comparison. It was a crash course in how labor law actually works on the ground. Arriving at AFSA By 1992 the firm where Sharon had clerked and later worked had dwindled to two attorneys, and the senior partner was preparing to retire. She answered an ad in The Washington Post for legal counsel at AFSA. The puzzle ring, the Aramco connection, and a thorough grounding in employment and labor law did the rest. Sharon arrived at an AFSA in transition. The Labor Management Office had only five staff members: two attorneys and a handful of grievance counselors. Her predecessor had been let go and had filed an EEO case against AFSA. A new executive director, Susan Reardon, would arrive shortly after Sharon did. Colleen Fallon, who would become a long-standing colleague and friend, had joined just months earlier. James Yorke, who retired in 2025 after nearly 30 years of service, had come on a few weeks before Sharon. It was, by any measure, a fresh start. What followed was the kind of career that is built case by case, document by document, in archives and grievance hearings and late-night reviews of bargaining notes. Building the Record A defining early case involved the State Department’s appointment of a Civil Service employee as deputy chief of mission (DCM) in Lima. AFSA argued this senior position belonged to a member of the Foreign Service. The legal challenge was technical: DCM is a management position, outside AFSA’s bargaining unit, and bargaining over how nonbargaining unit jobs are filled is permissive, not required. AFSA had to prove the department had elected to bargain over such issues in practice. Sharon went to AFSA’s offsite archives and began pulling boxes. She emerged with documentary evidence that won the grievance and established a precedent AFSA has drawn on ever since. Subsequent challenges led to negotiated language in the Foreign Affairs Manual codifying the procedures the department must follow before assigning someone from outside the Foreign Service to a Foreign Service position. “I’m very proud of that,” Sharon recalled in a 2023 ADST oral history. “I think that was pretty significant.” She brought the same approach to the meritorious step increase (MSI) grievances that began in 2013, when management declined to grant MSIs to officers recommended but not reached for promotion, citing budget sequester. Sharon dug back through years of negotiated promotion precepts to demonstrate that management had never previously exercised a “zero option” and that the agreed-on language did not permit one. AFSA won the 2013 case, lost the 2014 case on appeal in a decision Sharon still considers wrongly decided, and ultimately prevailed for the 2015 and 2016 grievants. Quiet, Lasting Work Some of Sharon’s most consequential work has been the kind that members never see directly. She helped establish the AFSA Legal Defense Fund in 2007, naming it after the late Richard “Dick” Scissors, a beloved retired FSO who worked in the Labor Management Office. She drafted its standard operating procedures. Years later, when Foreign Service officers were called to testify before Congress during the 2019 impeachment hearings on Ukraine, the LDF made it possible for them to retain the legal counsel they needed without going tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. She has worked alongside affinity groups including Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (glifaa) and the Asian American Foreign Affairs Association (AAFAA) on issues ranging from security clearance practices to assignment restrictions, that eventually produced an appeals panel outside Diplomatic Security (DS), a defined timeline for decisions, and greater transparency for affected employees. Sharon has negotiated MOUs governing how DS conducts recorded interviews, ensuring “recording in progress” signage, private rooms for AFSA consultations, and access to recordings in defined circumstances. She has supported AFSA’s work on the EEO class action that ultimately reformed the State Department’s worldwide availability policy. She has saved jobs at the Foreign Service Grievance Board, including one case in which an officer overseas
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=