The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

only State employees play the security violation game by State’s rules: the Foreign Agricultural Service and other overseas agencies don’t partici- pate. State should learn from these other agencies and adopt more positive methods of dealing with violations that take place in alarmed controlled-access areas, accessible after hours only to armed guards and authorized employees. It should also strive to implement policies that are uniform for all agencies represented in each mission. Specifically, State should use methods that treat lapses in these areas as opportunities to strengthen security procedures and educate em- ployees to use better practices, instead of using violations to punish and deny promotion for offenses that by definition do “not result in actual or possible compromise of the informa- tion” (12 FAM 551.2). Withholding promotion and inflicting other penal- ties because of infractions that occur within the confines of CAAs is cruel and unusual punishment and should be abandoned. State also should make other secur- ity requirements clearer and make uni- form and speedy decisions on whether employees should maintain security clearances (see “Left in Limbo: Two First-Person Accounts of Problems with DS,” FSJ , September 2005; www. afsa.org/fsj/sept05/honley2.pdf ). Extend the Fair-Share Requirement to All While most Foreign Service per- sonnel follow bidding rules and duti- fully go to Baghdad, Kabul and other high-differential posts, some don’t. New employees learn in orientation courses that service requirements come first and that they must go where the department needs them, not where they prefer to be assigned. That’s true for the first two tours, but then the requirements for worldwide availability to meet service needs no longer apply to everyone. People find it easy to get around the fair-share requirement that bidders who have not served in a differential post of at least 15 percent in the eight years prior to their transfer must maintain three fair-share bids. Management’s recent efforts to improve the situation have this year included requiring unaccompanied posts to be staffed before other assignments are made, retroactively changing the differential require- ments that determine who’s a fair-share bidder, and instituting the gimmick of linked tours (serve in Baghdad and get a guaranteed tour in Accra, Dhaka or other posts). All these measures are desperate attempts to fix a funda- mentally flawed system. AFSA should work to establish a fairer, more comprehensive approach that extends to all employees, including those in the Senior Foreign Service. Because of the gigantic loophole of allowing fair-share candidates to bid on Washington jobs instead of serving in hardship posts, the fair-share sys- tem, despite its name, has never ful- filled the purpose of providing ade- quate staffing to high-differential and hard-to-fill positions. The need to fill one-year accompanied tours at high- differential posts has made this long- standing problem even more obvious. There are no statistics or other evidence indicating that this situation will be improved by any of this year’s improvised attempts to fix the system that AFSA acquiesced to, including the change allowing people to remain in Washington only five years instead of six (a return to the policy before State decided USIA’s six-year limit was a best practice and adopted it). What’s needed instead is a radical change in the way HR approaches fair share. If filling unaccompanied positions abroad is HR’s greatest priority, then all HR policies should reflect that fact. AFSA should support even-handed, fair assignment policies that eliminate non-medical exemptions to the fair- share requirement for employees at all grades. But as long as the rules requiring service at hardship posts don’t apply to many, the assignment system fails the fairness test, and AFSA should oppose it. All fair-share candidates who choose to bid on Washington positions should be required to bid only on hard-to-fill Washington jobs. In that way, fair-share candidates who choose to come back to Washington, includ- ing those whose medical status or other circumstances preclude service at hardship posts, would be able to help the department meet its most pressing needs, even though they opt not to go abroad or cannot serve there. Only when all those jobs have been filled should fair-share candidates and those precluded from service at hardship posts be allowed to seek other Washington positions. This policy would have the salutary effect of providing those who have served in high-differential posts with a greater choice of Washington jobs, and of providing lots more candidates for hard-to-fill domestic positions. There are many AFSA members with specific knowledge of other changes similar to these that could be made quickly. I hope the new Gov- erning Board will solicit their sug- gestions for improvements and ener- getically urge management to take action on them, following the as- sociation’s long tradition of working on behalf of the membership and the department. Hollis Summers, an FSO since 1986, is a former chairman of the Foreign Service Journal Editorial Board. Most recently, he was refugee coordinator in Pakistan from 2005 to 2006 and cur- rently works in the Avian Influenza Action Group. 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 S P E A K I N G O U T