44 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL rightly observed in his September 2015 retrospective FSJ article titled “The Foreign Service Act of 1980 Turns 35.” The FSA created the Senior Foreign Service, reduced the number of Foreign Service personnel categories, established a single Foreign Service pay schedule, added new benefits and allowances, authorized union activity, and set parameters for a grievance system. The act also strengthened congressional oversight by requiring regular reports from the Department of State on affirmative action, professional development, workforce planning, language skills, ambassadorial nominations, operations of the inspector general, and other matters. The legislation was not widely welcomed in its entirety by the broad sweep of Service members at the time. Many viewed the provision for a separate Senior Foreign Service as divisive, and its little-understood “threshold window process” resulted in the forced retirement of nearly 200 first-rate officers seven years later, when those who had “opened their windows” at the first opportunity collided en masse with the ceiling of promotion opportunities. A class action grievance brought no relief. Others were concerned that, in addition to creating a two-tier Foreign Service, the FSA stripped non-senior ranks of part of the status that had set the FS apart. The right (under the 1924 and 1946 acts) to have one’s name sent to the Senate with every promotion—a right every military officer continues to enjoy—was abolished, and all promotions below the senior threshold were to be approved administratively by department management. But the FSA unquestionably brought a number of improvements, the most important of which is that it broke new ground in labor-management relations, recognizing the value of labor organizations and codifying collective bargaining in the Foreign Service. AFSA had become a union in 1973, while continuing to serve as the professional association it had been since 1924. AFSA played a distinctive role in the FSA’s development. As Robert H. Stern, a retired FSO who was an AFSA State representative from 1978 to 1980, explained in a letter to the editor (November 2015 FSJ): “When the [AFSA] Governing Board first weighed in, State management told us that legislation was not a bargaining item; an administration had the right to seek legislation, and AFSA had no right to contest it. Essentially, shut up, kid, and go home. “Unwilling to take no for an answer, senior board members met with senior management officials and pointed out that while we had no legal standing, our input would provide Congress with a unified State Department position as opposed to our testifying against the proposed act. They agreed, and for the next two years, we met informally and unofficially on evenings and weekends with management, going over the proposed language line by line. … At the same time, we cultivated staffers on the key committees and testified before the Senate.” This willingness to work together to fashion a “unified State Department position” created a precedent for AFSA’s relationships with the department—namely, assertion of AFSA’s rights as a union where necessary, coupled with a willingness to constructively engage on areas that are not subject to mandatory union negotiations (although this varied depending on the administration in charge). The Act of 1980 in Practice Over the next 45 years, the act would guide the unique facets of the Foreign Service and the updated relationship between successive administrations and the Foreign Service. The FS as a unique personnel system with its own policies and benefits, and especially the fundamental concept of rank-inperson, all established and codified by the Rogers Act of 1924, became the accepted norm. As the official bargaining unit of the FS with defined areas of responsibility, AFSA would negotiate those aspects of the Foreign Service career deemed to be “mandatory” negotiating areas: assignment procedures, evaluation and promotion procedures, grievance procedures, procedures governing disciplinary action, and so on. This willingness to work together to fashion a “unified State Department position” created a precedent for AFSA’s relationships with the department.
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