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obtained agreement from the Department to finalize the
2017 linked assignments agreement much earlier in the
year.
MSIs:
In 2016 the Department initiated formal negotiations
over a new pilot process for awarding MSIs in 2017 and
beyond. Throughout the negotiations, AFSA successfully
enshrined several protections for our members, such as
explicitly stating a percentage of MSIs the Department
must award per year with a safeguard provision that
requires the Department to renegotiate any proposed
decreases of this percentage in the event of a severe
budget crisis. The new MSI process not only maintains
the integrity of the rank order system used by the
promotion boards, but also maintains bidding privileges
for the top group of employees who are recommended
but not reached for promotion. An additional highlight
of the new process is the ability of employees tempo-
rarily removed from the list of MSI recipients due to low
rankings and/or discipline cases to receive retroactive
MSIs if their case is successfully overturned, with no
restriction on timeframe.
Shared Leave Programs:
The Department established a Leave Bank in 2015 to
provide a second shared leave program in addition to
the Voluntary Leave Transfer Program. In 2016, with
the strong support of AFSA, the Leave Bank Board
increased the cap limitations for the annual leave from
80 to 160 hours and the lifetime maximum from 240 to
480 hours.
Transit Subsidies:
Shortly after receiving a letter from AFSA asking the
Department to increase the transit subsidy to the new
amount authorized by Congress in December 2015, the
Department agreed to do so, resulting in additional
savings for Department employees using the program.
Vance Memo:
After several months of negotiations between AFSA and
DS/OSI, in June 2016 OSI began recording interviews
conducted in the U.S. of employees under investigation.
While OSI is not required to inform or remind employees
of their right to representation at the beginning of each
interview, AFSA did manage to get them to agree to
notify employees verbally that they are being recorded
prior to the start of every interview. OSI also agreed to
let AFSA review the recordings from initial interviews,
and to provide AFSA and the employee a private consul-
tation space when needed.
Of course, in addition to all of the above, we worked
through our quarterly meetings with CDA, DS, FLO, HR/
PE, IRM, and MED, as well as through our every-oth-
er-week collaboration meetings with the HR PDAS to
resolve a variety of issues affecting our members.
As always, should you have an issue or a concern you
wish for us to consider addressing, please reach out at
afsa@state.govand let us know about it. If you prefer
not to contact us directly, feel free to reach out to your
AFSA Post Rep instead. Many of the above policy chang-
es were the direct result of members letting us know
about problems affecting them. We can’t fix
everything, but we certainly can’t fix what we don’t
know is broken.
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