Some Things to Celebrate Like many of us, at the end of each year I often reflect on the past dozen months. I’ve found these annual reviews useful for discovering areas in which I have grown and for acknowledging areas that need more work. Similarly, organizations can take this approach to both uncover areas for improvement and celebrate their achievements. As we turn the corner on 2024 and welcome the new year and new administration ahead, FCS has a tremendous amount to celebrate. I certainly am not one to gloss over the immense challenges that lay before us, nor the systemic process issues that continue to hinder our ability to serve our nation. I have and I will dedicate column space to those issues to prove whether sunlight really is the best disinfectant. Right now, however, let’s celebrate! I’m writing this shortly after an all-hands town hall call with FCS leadership. Hundreds of colleagues joined from the U.S. and around the world to hear our leaders share the outstanding successes we have achieved as an organization this past year. In fiscal year 2024, FCS supported more than 100,000 companies, helped to create or retain more than 588,000 U.S. jobs, and had an economic impact on our nation of more than $176.5 billion in exports and inward investment! These are staggering numbers for a small agency. Kudos to our colleagues for hitting these impressive milestones. A victim of our own success, we have set a new bar for the Office of Management and Budget and our appropriators. These wins have certainly come at a cost, however, and our FCS teams overseas are feeling burned out. And, with 75 percent of our seniormost officers leaving in the coming two to three years, the picture in the rearview mirror looks brighter than the road ahead. Nevertheless, there have been some other less measurable, but no less important, wins worth noting from the past year. AFSA fought furiously and successfully to overcome the potential lapse in overseas comparability pay (OCP). So many of us breathed a huge sigh of relief when that was resolved, for now. In the year ahead, I am committed to addressing the Senior Foreign Service pay inequities by collaborating with some internal champions. Slimmer budgets have slashed our training opportunities. Yet, thanks to the creativity of our members, AFSA will be helping to organize new “communities of practice” designed to enhance officer development through collaborative learning and shared expertise. Our goal is to create a meaningful forum that taps into the knowledge within our community to support growth and innovation. This peer-to-peer training initiative is just getting started, and I’m hopeful that it will help us all up our game in the year ahead. It’s also important to celebrate that FCS has a new compass and focused direction. With internal initiatives like the modernized Commercial Service and a detailed five-year plan, we have an organizational destination that is clearer now than in years past. FCS plays a major role in advancing our national security, and we have the plans and processes to do it. A key missing ingredient, though, is more people. There is hope that with these plans and renewed focus, funding will flow. It’s also imperative that we spike the football on a few other wins that will make FCS stronger. After more than 18 months of negotiations and litigation, the Foreign Service Grievance Board found that the special bidding opportunity process contravenes written agreements with AFSA (FSGB 2023-020). The Foreign Service Labor Relations Board (FSLRB) subsequently denied the agency’s appeal of the FSGB decision. In another case, the agency and AFSA resolved a petition for clarification of the bargaining unit that AFSA had filed with the FSLRB. There was a question about which positions in headquarters are outside the collective bargaining agreement and therefore ineligible for union protections. That question has been officially settled. All Foreign Service positions, with the exception of the Deputy DG and the career development officer positions, are again part of the bargaining unit represented by AFSA. Welcome home, deputy assistant secretaries and executive directors! These cases needn’t have been fought, and our association’s efforts could have been better spent fighting budgetary and other common challenges. Such issues came about likely due to poor advice to leadership, and their resolution unnecessarily took time and resources. Special thanks to AFSA’s Office of General Counsel and my predecessors for their exceptional work on this. With so much to celebrate as 2024 ends, we turn the page toward the unknowns of the year ahead. Let’s raise a glass and toast to a stronger and more focused Commercial Service! n Contact: burke@afsa.org FCS VP VOICE | BY JOSHUA BURKE AFSA NEWS 60 DECEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL
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