WASHINGTON Faced with the loss of some of its best and brightest talent and the breakup of some families, the State Department is beginning a pilot program to put ‘spouses of Foreign Service officers to work overseas,
The most controverial idea to pay Foreign Service wives for the entertaining and the good will work they do normally was scrapped when Secretary of State George Shultz and some key members of congress opposed it on philosophical and budgetary grounds. The pilot program, expected to be put into place by next year, would make the wife of a Foreign Service officer overseas eligible to take some junior staff jobs at embassies, ‘earning up to $20 ,000 a year.
The pilot program will probably start next year at overseas posts that would be a good sampling of the 135 USS, Embassies around the world. On the list of likely embassies and consulates for the project are Bangkok, Thailand; New DeIi, India; Tel Aviv, Israel, and Jerusalem; La Paz, Bolivia; Madrid; Athens, Greece; Cairo, Egypt, and Khartoum, Sudan. The idea arose for a number of reasons, incl ding the 1972 scrapping of a regulation that said a Foreign Service officer’s performance would be judged partly by how well his wife contributed to his diplomatic career.
That system of iron discipline for un paind wives was seen by feminist activists in the Foreign Service to be an outdated outrage and was dropped.
In 1983, Marlene Eagleburger, wife of Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, came up with a proposal that all Foreign Service wives be compensated for the work they do to help their husbands overseas.
She suggested 40 percent of the officer’s salary but that ran into heavy flak from some members of Congress and taxpayers. Critics said it was just a way of giving the Foreign Service officers a disguised pay raise after they already ‘were compensated in other ways.
Susan Low, of the American Association of Foreign Service Wives, said, “There was no Consensus on that ocmpensation program, so we came up with the other two programs.”
She and others who worked on the problem has the impression that the Foreign Service was not only losing some of its best people; “We are also concerned with the people who weren’t coming in, some of them because their spouses were involved in meaningful careers in this country that they would have to give up.”
William Bacchus, one designer of the program, said, “Generally, anybody involved in a career that requires some kind of license doctors, lawyers has to give it up if she’s overseas with her husband.”
‘That requires sacrifice to document, Bacchus says, but it was clear from the growing percentage of spouses who decide not to follow their Foreign Service mates overseas that such assignments create agonizing choices. Some senior diplomats began to figure out ways to stay in Washington to avoid overseas posts, yet foreign assignments are the essence of a foreign service career, Low said.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 21, 1986
