bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, p. 2
A few months ago, the executive of PAFSO swapped the normally-hurried week-day lunch for the expansive luxury of an all-day Saturday meeting. It was a strategy session, designed to reflect on what the organization was doing, where it needed to go in the future, and what it would take in order to get it from A to B. It was the type of think-in that needs to be held more often, preferably with the membership participating. One dominant theme was the need for better communications. The debate has continued at the executive and among the membership.
The nub of the problem, in essence, is two dimensional. On the one hand, there is a dearth of communication between the association and the management of External Affairs, and the vacuum tends to exacerbate problems and to harden positions before talks are joined. On the other side, there is a lamentable lack of information to the membership about what PAFSO is doing for its members on an immediate, day-to-day basis, how it is responding to increasingly serious concerns, and what results it can show for its efforts.
Let’s take the members’ concerns first. After four or five years of gradually-evolving communications strategies, we seem to have resigned ourselves to living with a difficult situation. Our problems are obviously more severe than domestic associations, who do not labour with the problems of far-flung operations and whose domestic constituents can communicate easily and cheaply. bout plays a part, as it should. But with a lead time of two months between composition and printing, our news is stale by the time it gets to its intended audience.
But a couple of prospects have now been identified for the more soluble problems confronting us. First, we need to communicate rapidly with members on items of urgency. For that, we have argued successfully for use of the Departmental telex system, and the solution seems to have worked, most recently in the case of a telegram on lateral entries into the Trade Commissioner Service, which went out in May. Successful court action has reinforced our claims to a system that functions well on an immediate basis.
Second, we need more regular, constant information on the inner workings of PAFSO — the activities of the executive committee, the sub-committees, negotiations, joint working groups, the professional committee and the rest. An impressive machinery built up over past years has been relegated to virtual anonymity by our collective inability to communicate its results. To EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK committee has recently authorized the creation (or the resuscitation, depending on your point of view) of a new communications vehicle, to be issued four times per year as an insert to bout de papier and at other times per year as the communications load demands. To the veterans it will resemble bout de papier of earlier days, cheap, basic and readable. It will become the standard-bearer of purely association news, and will convey on a timelier basis the inner workings of the organization.
After addressing the urgent needs, timely reporting and those longer-term professional concerns which are the essence of bout de papier itself, what more is needed? For one, we need two-way communications within our organization. We need regular meetings, perhaps monthly in a central location, where the executive can appear before the membership and discuss the issues currently on the table. Across a range of concerns, from negotiating the FSDs to the forthcoming salary strategy, the views of the members merit greater weight. The gradual democratization of the association over the past two or three years is a trend which is hard to resist. The doctrine of accountability now needs to be pushed to the logical next stage.
The communications gap between PAFSO and management is at once simpler and more complex. Constant contact, or life in the same environment, or living under the same foreign service system, should stimulate some sense of mutual understanding. But as the lateral entry episode demonstrated, we continue to live in restricted space, in relative isolation. Poor relations have been exacerbated by low morale and intractable budgetary difficulties, compounded by a frustrating sense that senior management isn’t coming clean. We don’t know about the battles fought with Treasury Board. We can’t find out about the secretarial shortages or the recruitment freezes. Frank exchanges have been replaced by platitudes, to the satisfaction of neither side.
Part of the problem has been a reluctance on the management side to admit to the problem, or, as a corollary, to admit the validity of PAFSO as an interlocutor. Some among senior managers argue the case for a “corporate” style, wherein the need to consult would be met through meetings with smaller groups of members with special interests, and where the consultations could be conducted privately, quietly, on isolated, individual issues. The advantages are obvious… from the management side. There would be no broad picture, no linkages among issues, no comparison of results. And no publicity. special consultative techniques, and we would be the last to argue against the merits of quiet diplomacy. Nor would PAFSO want to contend that it had exclusive proprietary rights over the hearts and minds of its membership. But it is hard to deny the logic of a relatively simple consultative system, involving the obvious players, the PASO executive and senior management.
And to the credit of both PAFSO and management, a start has been made. In response to a letter from John Lobsinger detailing a long list of items on which consultation and contact were desirable, a meeting took place on April 21, 1988 between the association side and Departmental mange-ment. Views were aired. Grievances came out. Suspicions were voiced in quiet, diplomatic tones. It’s much too early to judge whether a regularization of these sessions is one way to go. On some issues, such as patronage, the problem is beyond management control, and the meetings would be wasted on such items. But on issues like lateral transfers, streaming, FS re-structuring and a myriad of other questions at the core of the foreign service, it would be an ideal way of putting views across.
What of the other communications issues? What about PAFSO and its cultivation of the media? Or within the Department, in communicating on issues such as over-time pay, where confusion is rampant in headquarters and probably doubly so abroad. Part of our problem is the sheer magnitude of the tasks ahead, compared to the numbers available to do the work. As John Lobsinger pointed out in our last issue, PAFSO for its part is a voluntary organization. We depend for the bulk of our output on volunteers from among our members or their spouses. There are limits to what we can do, and there is always a large gap between what we would like to do and what we can do.
In short, the battle is half-won and the prospects for victory are bright. bout de papier will continue as the professional voice of the Canadian foreign service, communicating to a wide readership on items of varied interest. It will have as a new ally a fresh communications vehicle, yet to be baptized, to speak to the more direct and timely concerns of members at large. My chair as editor of this august journal will pass shortly to Barbara Martin, who will inherit the fresh faces and new enthusiasms of an editorial board assembled over the past year and more. As I leave the editor’s chair, I wish her success in implementing impressive plans for ensuring the future of bout de papier and meeting the communications needs of the members at large.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, p. 2. Read the rest of this issue →
