80 SEPTEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL From 1970 through 2019, Ambassador Thomas Boyatt served on various AFSA Governing Boards as president, vice president, secretary, treasurer (multiple times), retiree vice president, and retiree representative. An FSO from 1959 until 1985, he served as ambassador to Colombia and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and chargé d’affaires in Chile, in addition to postings in Nicosia, Luxembourg, and Antofagasta (Chile). In Washington, D.C., he served as chief of staff for the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs and as director of the Office of Cypriot Affairs. This year both the Foreign Service of the United States and the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) celebrate their centennials. I would argue that the decade between the introduction of unions into the federal service (1969-1973) and passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980 was the most critically important period in the 100-year histories of both organizations. A Soft-Spoken Institution Builder Lars Holman Hydle 1940-2023 APPRECIATION BY THOMAS BOYATT My colleague, my opponent, and my friend Lars Hydle was one of the most important and effective leaders of that decade described by Ambassador Eric Rubin, former president of AFSA, as AFSA’s “Heroic Age.” Lars and I met under combat conditions in 1970. He was the president of the Junior Foreign Service Officers Club (JFSOC), and I was vice president of AFSA. We represented our organizations in the negotiations to establish the terms and conditions for unions in the Foreign Service that were to be incorporated in a presidential executive order. The other negotiating parties were the under secretary of State for management (or his representative) and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union for 200,000 federal Civil Service employees. In the ensuing debates before an administrative law judge, Lars and I both strongly supported an employee-management system in which there would be a single, worldwide bargaining unit for all Foreign Service personnel wherever located, and that negotiations would deal with personnel policies and procedures that governed all FS members in the system. The resulting Executive Order 11636 contained both provisions. Of the two million federal employees today, only those in the Foreign Service
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=