AFSANET: Update from AFSA State VP on new PCS travel rules, Iraq assignments, combat-zone training, SMA, and other issues

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The following is an update from AFSA State VP Steve Kashkett concerning just a few of the issues in which AFSA has been involved in recent months.

Business class travel for PCS
=============================

Over the past few weeks, we at AFSA have heard from hundreds of
members, especially those at our most remote posts, who take strong
issue with the Department’s decision to end the practice of
authorizing business class for those traveling PCS to and from posts
requiring more than 14 hours of flying time. In numerous discussions
with senior Dept officials both before and after the announcement of
this decision, AFSA conveyed the frustration expressed by so many
members and the widespread feeling that this austerity measure would be
yet another blow to morale at a time when life in the Foreign Service is
becoming ever more difficult. Along with many of the regional bureau
Executive Directors, AFSA urged the Dept to find a way to preserve this
important benefit.

Regrettably, Dept officials felt that they had no choice in the
aftermath of a government-wide directive issued by the Office of
Management and Budget that severely restricted agencies’ ability to
approve business class. OMB was reacting in part to two negative GAO
reports critical of State's spending on business class. Sadly, the
abuses described in those reports rarely involved ordinary PCS travel by
Foreign Service members to and from extremely distant posts. Moreover,
as we pointed out in meetings with the DG’s office and the Under
Secretary for Management, the OMB directive failed to take account of
the reality that the Foreign Service is fundamentally different from
most other components of the U.S. government. Our members do not ask
for business class to take short domestic trips to Chicago or Atlanta;
instead, our business class policy was meant to ease the burden of
22-hour, multiple-leg flights to Ulaanbaatar, Abuja, or Chennai with
maybe a spouse and two kids in tow, or to minimize the stress of the
long trips into and out of Iraq or Afghanistan for the hundreds of FS
members serving as unarmed civilians in those war zones. We have also
argued that there is a disparity with certain other USG agencies, which
have always seemed to apply more generous rules for their employees.

Regardless of these perfectly valid arguments, the Dept felt it had
little room for maneuver. We welcomed U/S Pat Kennedy's candid,
first-person ALDAC cable (State 17809) to the field about this.
Unfortunately, while AFSA can protest on behalf of our members, we have
no legal or statutory recourse to force a reversal of this new policy,
which only reinstitutes the rules that had been in effect until 2002.

Moreover, we at AFSA are frankly reluctant to speak out publicly about
this subject. We all know that there are uninformed, unscrupulous
journalists and longtime State-bashers out there who would be delighted
to exploit and misrepresent this story to the public. Considering the
unjustified public beating that the image of the Foreign Service took in
the media last fall over inaccurate reporting of Iraq assignment issues,
we have to assume that few would understand or have any sympathy for the
reasons why Foreign Service members believe they should get business
class travel when they go PCS.   Let’s face it: not many people
outside of the Foreign Service realize just how many of our overseas
posts require agonizingly lengthy travel, switching planes in distant
foreign airports in the middle of the night. Many of our colleagues
also fear that any public fuss about business class travel would hurt us
in our longstanding struggle to persuade Congress to fix the
ever-worsening overseas pay gap.

So the best we can hope for is that the Department will succeed in
making the case to OMB that the Foreign Service remains a special case
that deserves some flexibility, and that it is important to find other
ways to deal with the overall budget crunch rather than further
squeezing FS members at our most remote - and often most difficult -
posts.

A Multitude of Other Issues
===========================

AFSA continues to address a wide range of our members’ concerns and
suggestions in our discussions with senior interlocutors in Department
management. Just a few examples from recent months:

-- IRAQ ASSIGNMENTS: The Foreign Service is still hurting, both in
terms of internal morale and our external image, as a result of the
unfair and inaccurate reporting of last fall’s special pre-season
“prime candidate” exercise for summer 2008 Iraq assignments. We
are actively working to persuade the 7th floor and the DG that there are
more positive, more effective, and less divisive ways to structure the
process of filling summer 2009 Iraq jobs later this year during the
course of the normal assignment cycle.

-- TRAINING FOR COMBAT-ZONE POSTS: AFSA had repeatedly pressed the
Dept to expand the specialized training that FS members get prior to
deployment to combat-zone posts in Iraq and Afghanistan and had met with
HR and FSI to discuss ideas for doing so. We were therefore pleased to
see the improvements in such training that FSI Director Whiteside and
others have championed.

-- SEPARATE MAINTENANCE ALLOWANCE: We remain convinced that the
Involuntary SMA (for those assigned to mandatorily unaccompanied posts)
is woefully inadequate to make a meaningful dent in defraying the cost
of maintaining a spouse/family at an alternate location, especially at a
time when the number of unaccompanied FS positions worldwide has
increased exponentially over just the past decade. AFSA has ceaselessly
urged the Dept to increase the Involuntary SMA substantially, both
because it would provide a greater incentive for unaccompanied tours of
duty and because it is the fair thing to do for FS families. We believe
that senior officials including U/S for Management Pat Kennedy are
sympathetic to this argument and are working to implement a change.

-- HOME SERVICE AND FOREIGN TRANSFER ALLOWANCES:   It is now about
eight years since the lump-sum portions of these allowances were
increased to their present level of $500 for a single employee and $1,
000 for an employee with a family. In light of the more than 20%
inflation since 1999 and the fact that the itemized allowance (based on
the salary of a GS-13, Step 10) has increased by about 20% during that
period.   Bearing in mind that the lump-sum allowance is intended to pay
for expenses that are particularly susceptible to inflation pressures
(pet shipping, telephone and cable costs, etc) we have proposed that the
Dept increase the unitemized lump-sum figure to $625 for a single
employee and to $1,250 for an employee with family.

-- CHANGES TO FOREIGN SERVICE EXAM/ENTRY PROCESS: Since participating
in discussions prior to HR’s implementation of a modified FS written
exam and entry procedures, AFSA has continued to monitor the progress of
the new system and to talk to HR/REE about whether or not it is
working.

-- SECURITY TRAINING FOR MEMBERS OF HOUSEHOLD: AFSA persistently urges
the Department to address the many inequities for MOH’s overseas,
particularly for same-sex partners of FS members, in dealing with their
status in foreign countries, access to services and facilities at the
U.S. mission, medical treatment, and ability to work. We very much
welcomed the recently announced Dept decision that MOH’s will
henceforth be welcome to participate in security training for employees
headed overseas, on an equal footing with Eligible Family Members. This
is an important, but limited, first step in the right direction.

-- OVERWEIGHT HHE: During the past year, AFSA has assisted in quite a
few cases where members have run afoul of the weight limits for
Household Effects because the Dept-approved packing companies had
grossly underestimated the weight of the employee’s shipment. In some
cases, employees have been assessed overweight charges in the thousands
of dollars after they had already departed post.   Unfortunately, in
almost all of these instances, the Department has taken refuge behind
the rule that the traveler is responsible for ensuring that his/her
shipment is within the weight limit (14 FAM 612.3), and in general the
Foreign Grievance Board has supported the Department.   The lesson in
these cases is to schedule your packout as early as possible, not to
rely on the pre-packout estimate, then to insist on receiving the final
weight prior to your departure. This will give you time before getting
on the plane to ensure that items are either removed altogether or moved
to storage to bring your shipment under the limit.

-- COLLECTIVE GRIEVANCE ON BEHALF OF NEWLY-PROMOTED SFS MEMBERS: At
the request of a majority of those promoted across the senior threshold
in 2006, AFSA has prepared a collective grievance on their behalf to
contest their denial of any annual performance-based salary increase
merely on the grounds that the effective date of their promotion, which
is a product of the paper flow between the White House and Congress, did
not occur until less than 120 days from the end of the 2006-2007 rating
cycle. Nearly three-fourths of this promotion Cohort have signed on to
this grievance.

-- PTSD: AFSA continues to have productive consultations with MED and
HR on ways to better assist members who return from combat-zone
assignments with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we are
encouraged by MED’s efforts to hire new staff and to implement new
procedures for vetting and supporting Iraq/Afghanistan returnees.

-- DISSENT: We look forward to a meeting this month with the new
Director of the Policy Planning Staff, Dr. David Gordon, to urge that
S/P make a more visible effort to encourage and facilitate use of the
Dissent Channel, as required by the FAM

-- OTHER IMPORTANT ONGOING ISSUES: AFSA continues to lobby
aggressively for progress on a wide variety of fronts of longstanding
concern, including unfairly long security clearance suspensions by DS of
certain employees, the growing need for greater professional employment
opportunities for family members overseas, and the unique training
challenges of “post-conflict stabilization” and transformational
diplomacy work. We continue to seize every opportunity to defend the
Foreign Service in the national media, to paint an accurate picture of
the vital work that today’s FS professionals are doing in increasingly
difficult and dangerous hotspots all over the world, and to respond to
the cheap shots which appear regularly, such as a recent TIME magazine
item that insinuated that U.S. diplomats are resisting hardship postings
and want more time on the “white glove circuit” in Europe. And of
course, as AFSA President John Naland has articulated repeatedly in his
AFSANET messages, we continue to fight the battle to persuade Congress
to authorize overseas comparability pay and to approve the substantial
increase in funding/staffing that the Foreign Service needs in order to
fulfill all of the worldwide demands being placed upon us in the age of
Iraq, Afghanistan, and transformational diplomacy.

FS Journal Fiction Contest Deadline Extended to April 1 (no
foolin’!)
=======================================================

Good news for all you short story writers out there: The Foreign
Service Journal is extending the deadline for submissions to its annual
fiction contest from March 1 to April 1. Otherwise, the rules already
announced apply: Please submit only one original story, never before
published, no longer than 3,000 words. A Foreign Service setting or
theme is preferred but not required. Entries will only be accepted by
e-mail and should be sent to: Journal@afsa.org.   The FSJ Editorial
Board will select the winning stories, which will be published beginning
in the July-August issue.

Recent Op-ed Columns on Key Issues in FS Journal
================================================

Finally, we at AFSA continue to speak out on many key issues of concern
to our members every month in the FS Journal. For those whose paper
copy of the magazine is still on a slow freighter somewhere in the
Indian Ocean, you can see all of my State VP columns online, including
the most recent ones:

-- “Shooting the Messenger”* concerning the recent controversy
over AFSA’s worldwide FS opinion poll
( http://www.afsa.org/fsj/Mar08/afsa_news.pdf ).

-- “Iraq: The Blame Game”* concerning the efforts by our critics
to denigrate the heroic work of our colleagues in Iraq and to blame the
Foreign Service for anything that goes wrong there
( http://www.afsa.org/fsj/dec07/afsa_news.pdf ).

-- “Support for Separated Families”* concerning the urgent need
for State to begin to put in place support structures to assist FS
families separated by unaccompanied postings, similar to what the U.S.
military has done ( http://www.afsa.org/fsj/oct07/afsa_news.pdf ).

-- “PTSD and the Foreign Service”* concerning our efforts to focus
more attention and help for FS members returning from war zones with
symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
( http://www.afsa.org/fsj/julaug07/afsa_news.pdf ).

-- “Prisoners of Conscience”* concerning the question of whether
Foreign Service members can appropriately avoid assignments in which
they would be working on policies with which they may disagree strongly
( http://www.afsa.org/fsj/may07/afsa_news.pdf ).

Comments/feedback are always welcome. I can be reached at
KashkettSB@state.gov.

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