Mid-Term Bargaining Issues Tabled September 13, 2005

We at AFSA Commerce (VP Donald Businger and Rep Will Center) tabled three mid-term bargaining issues on September 13:

Time-In-Class (TIC) Policies

TIC Policies are the Foreign Service equivalent of "Up or Out" in the military service, requiring mandatory retirement of officers who fail to get promoted to higher grades within certain time limits. Although posted in 2004 on the CS intranet, the "current" policy actually dates back to 1990 and is open to interpretation and, at times, ambiguities and confusion with regard to "exceptions". Our proposal is to update the TIC policy, eliminate ambiguities and confusion, and establish clear exceptions along the lines of the State Department TIC policy, without necessarily following their time limits. This would enable all officers to transparently know and understand their actual TIC and hence mandatory retirement date.

Non-FSI Language Testing for Incentive Pay

Competency in foreign languages distinguishes the Foreign Service from most other government careers such as military and civil service, and is a requirement for career tenure. Foreign service agencies spend large amounts of money on foreign language training and testing and provide incentive pay for certain "hard" languages based on the needs of the service. There are separate policies for incentive pay for the acquisition of a "hard" language while in the related post/country and for maintenance of a "hard" language while in a non-related post/country, but both policies currently require testing by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) as the "gold standard" for language testing for incentive languages. Concurrently, CS policy allows training and testing by non-FSI entities (for example, over time and by contract with Diplomatic Language Service LLC or DLS, among others) for assignment purposes only (not for incentive pay). DLS certifies that its tests are based on the same standards as FSI (the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable Proficiency Scale for speaking and reading S/0-5 and R/0-5). AFSA has proposed allowing non-FSI testing for incentive pay absent a strong rationale for FSI exclusivity.

Precepts for Promotion into SFS

In January 2004, the rules of eligibility or Precepts for Promotion into the Senior Foreign Service (SFS) were tightened to allow only officers who had served in Senior Commercial Officer (SCO) assignments to be SFS-eligible. (Officers who had already "opened their window" for consideration for promotion into SFS and would not qualify were "grandfathered".) Presumably, the rule change reflected a strong feeling that only SCO assignments developed leadership and management suitable to SFS and would favor bidding and assignments to smaller post SCO jobs relative to non-SCO jobs including HQ assignments even at senior levels, other domestic assignments outside Washington, D.C. such as Hub or Export Assistance Center Directors, and all Deputy SCO assignments even at large, significant posts and of senior grade. AFSA has proposed a general revisiting of this important and far from simple issue, but in the meantime has proposed a specific change to allow officers who serve in State Department assignments as Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) or Consul General (Principal Officer) to be SFS-eligible as it was deemed that these positions are equivalent to SCO in terms of leadership and management responsibilities.

These three issues are the focus of current AFSA/management negotiations and we look forward to their successful conclusion in a future report.