bout de papier, September 1983 // Septembre 1983, p. 10
The arrival of Fall brings with it an almost complete rotation of the PAFSO Executive. The vagaries of rotationality will be bringing you a new President, Vice-President and Treasurer: all in all, eight new members will have been added to the Executive, including the first representative of the newly-created Aid Stream. Before all the “old guard” disappear to points exotic, I’d like to review some of the aims of last year’s executive and see how far we succeeded in achieving them.
If there was one dominant theme in last year’s activity, it was grappling with the change in the nature of the foreign service as a profession. PAFSO is a curiously schizophrenic organization: it serves on the one hand as a traditional bargaining unit for its membership vis-à-vis management and Treasury Board, and on the other, as the forum and structure for the foreign service as a profession. Sort of a cross between the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Medical Association.
The imposition of Six and Five tended to place PAFSO’s role as a bargaining unit on the back burner. Nevertheless we did hold informal consultations on the contract with Management to see whether we could improve the fringe benefits package and played an active role assisting members in grievance questions. The hiring of a very experienced Executive director, Christine Manseau, should serve to strengthen our capacity on the collective bargaining side as we head into the next round of negotiations on the FSD’s and find out the federal government’s intentions post-Six and Five.
With collective bargaining in eclipse, and reorganization of the Department underway, the focus naturally shifted to the professional side of the organization; in this area, I believe we made significant progress. We played an active role in addressing our membership’s concerns about the many changes underway in the nature of our profession, from stream management to secondment policy to the incorporation of a new Aid Stream and the integration of CO officers into the rotational foreign service. But our real achievement, I believe, was that we succeeded in moving beyond responding to Management-inspired change to, in some cases, taking the initiative and forcing the pace of change.
We all owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of the Professional Committee for organizing a highly successful seminar on the nature of the profession, for bringing in a wide range of speakers who introduced new ideas to the often inbred thinking in the Pearson Building, and for producing remarkably thoughtful and practical white papers on such critical topics as training and development.
The Professional Committee is a flexible and effective instrument for dealing with issues which are not amenable to the conventional mechanisms of collective bargaining. PAFSO also pioneered this year in its response to the proposal to expand the use of Open Office Planning in the Pearson Building. The Subcommittee on Open Office Planning, which was largely made up of volunteers from outside the Executive, did tremendous work researching the whole question of office environments and lobbying for reconsideration of the initial decision; their ace in the hole was the management consultant and architect PAFSO hired to advise us on open office planning. This was the first time PAFSO had recruited outside technical help on a question of this kind; our success in keeping the walls from tumbling down is evidence that resorting to outside experts on occasion can make us much more effective spokesmen for our membership’s interests. These new mechanisms -the Professional Committee, special purpose committees, hiring outside experts – can make the difference in winning or losing our case with Management.
All this took time. The Executive added additional mid-monthly meetings to keep up with all the activity and every Executive member was tasked with special projects or committee work. The Professional Committee and its various subcommittees were equally hard at work. But there is much more that needs to be done. Last year’s Executive had great ambitions to improve communications between PAFSO and our membership in the field, expand the range of services available to our members, create whole new cadres of affiliate members, and to provide facilities for social activities under the PAFSO framework. We have made a start in this direction, but getting these initiatives off the ground will represent a major challenge for the new Executive; I suspect our effectiveness in achieving these aims will depend entirely on recruiting the active participation of many more PAFSO members.
PAFSO was particularly fortunate that George Haynal agreed to serve as President last year. He is living proof of the advice that if you want to get something done well you should give it to a busy man. George’s commitment converted the most hardened sceptics and his enthusiasm affected us all.
Like many members of last year’s Executive, this was my first involvement in PAFSO affairs. Although there were times when it was tempting to claim the pressure of work and outside activities as an excuse not to take on more chores, my involvement in PAFSO was immensely rewarding. With so much change underway in the Foreign Service, the individual officer, particularly the junior officer, tends to feel that the shape of his career, and his personal fortunes within the foreign service, is pretty much outside his control. By participating in PAFSO, we may not be steering the ship, but we do get to warn that the water supply is getting low and that there are icebergs ahead.
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Originally published in bout de papier, September 1983 // Septembre 1983, p. 10. Read the rest of this issue →
