America the Untrustworthy

By PLS

Bill Fisher among others has already commented on George Packer’s recent New Yorker article describing the betrayal of Iraqis who have worked for America over the past few years. These are people who’ve put their lives bravely and loyally on the line—as translators, for example—only to get dumped, ignored or stiffed , by the US, when they needed help. For one thing, the U.S. hasn’t provided an expeditious route for receiving these risk-taking friends as refugees or putting them onto a fast track to U.S. citizenship, even though Iraqis tainted by association with the American occupation are favored targets for assassination.

As I read Packer’s article I felt shame and anger—and incredulity. How can U.S. policy makers expect the Muslim world (or anyone else) to buy American democracy or the American way of anything when those who actually serve us, either as direct hires or as employees of contractors funded by the U.S. government, are thrown away like garbage?

Words Are Cheap

Unfortunately I can’t even take refuge in the belief that the Iraq situation is exceptional. Too often, as a foreign service officer, I saw our local employees treated callously by the very FSOs who’d swear, in a florid public manner, that they couldn’t accomplish anything without their “wonderful” foreign service nationals, the Germans or Ghanans or Indians or Argentinians “who could run the embassy/consulate/post all on their own.” In really small posts, those with few Americans frequently rotated, such an assertion wasn’t even hyperbole. But when crunch time came, big post or small, the reality was: words and pay packets that didn’t match.

Those very same effusive FSOs would be complicit (if only by silence or passivity) in squeezing the salaries of their “wonderful” local colleagues to save money for the State Department or USIA or USAID. Admittedly, US foreign service agencies were consistently underfunded by Congress during my years of service. In USIA we had to run operations on the cheap (ask our American speakers what they got paid and how they had to travel) and we got very good at it, but there were some corners that shouldn’t have been cut.

In short, while we foreign service officers could still count on our yearly cost of living increases and step increases and a fairly reliable promotion process, our locally hired FSNs lived in dread of the periodic descent of the pay comparability mafia. What was this all about? Simple. Washington-based personnel people would visit each post in rotation to see if the salaries being paid to non Americans employees had got out of whack with prevailing pay practices. Were we paying more than we absolutely had to get or keep our positions filled? Once it came down to this: were we paying more than the Iranian consulate for similar services?

Compared to Whom?

Inflation might have averaged 10% a year for five years with no end in sight for the upward trend, food and other costs might be soaring, but if an employee at the US consulate was being paid more than someone doing supposedly comparable work for the Iranian consulate or any other local employer, that FSN would have his or her pay frozen until those on the comparability scale caught up. As if there could be any comparison between working for just any old employer in some highly stratified, elite dominated country and an agency of the United States at a time when we were (believe it or not) trying to sell the world on the US model for a prosperous middle class society: work hard; live well; end of story. For a USIS officer trying “to tell America’s [then inspiring] story” to a skeptical local audience the periodic pocketbook raiding could be very awkward.

The Job Description Scam

Another ugly way of saving on personnel costs abroad involved rewriting a job description, supposedly from observations “proving” that what an FSN was actually doing involved skills of a lower level than that presupposed by the existing job description and pay level. Once again, the best an FSN could expect from this situation was a pay freeze, but sometimes the result was a fairly immediate pay cut or an open-for-all-to-see demotion. Either way, a conscientious worker was demoralized by a blow to the ego and self-respect as well as the pocketbook.

Supposedly such periodic position-vetting was a thoroughly professional, objective process. I’m not so sure about that, though it’s hard to tell, since personnel-speak bears no relation to the English language or what real human beings actually do in the course of the work day. By the time you reduce the contributions of a veteran press assistant to some “human resources” boilerplate, his/her job sounds like nothing and gets paid accordingly. And then there’s this: I never saw a dramatic massive upgrading in job descriptions or pay levels resulting from these visits. The consistency in the downgrading or salary-freezing for people who toiled every bit as hard and intelligently as their workahalic foreign bosses (no sarcasm intended) is highly suspect. (Of course, there could be instances of which I’m unaware, but I served nearly 25 years in 8 posts on three continents—and I talked to colleagues serving elsewhere, so I’ll stand behind what I’m saying here.)

Sold Down the River

Contract workers were always more vulnerable to cost-cutting measures than direct hire FSNs. During my last posting, in a city where the annual inflation rate, though not brutal, could hurt if pay weren’t sweetened to keep pace, I protested the imposition of across the board pay cuts for all USIS contract workers, but lost the battle. Here’s what happened. It was time to renegotiate the group contract by which our receptionists, janitors and various aides were employed. Some of the people paid under this contract had worked conscientiously for USIS for 20 years. They were fully integrated into the workforce. Productivity was great. Morale was terrific. Suddenly a newbie contractor jumped into the negotiations and submitted a bid to supply the whole slate of workers at a considerable saving to the mission. Under this bid the faithful contract workers would lose their jobs OR, the low bidder generously offered, they could work for less (around 10% less) at the same job through him. I argued with personnel and with all my bosses that we’d be betraying terrific workers who actually deserved a pay raise. The whole business, I added, was also very bad public relations. Well, the deal went through and the employment situation in that city was so bad that the people came back to work on the new terms. So “human resources” was “right.” We saved a few dollars on the backs of our neediest employees. But the policy was inhuman. And believe me, if this hadn’t been my last posting, my challenge would have depressed my potential for promotion for the rest of my career. But, as they say, I sleep well.

A Kick in the Pants

Usually the guard force of an embassy or consulate and for FSO residences abroad is also secured through a group contract, and guards being essentially unskilled labor their pay is never very impressive, which is to say it's low. Very low. So I never put much faith in the protection potential of my poorly paid gate guards, who often worked both day and night to support a family. I certainly didn’t expect these guys to lay down their lives for me. Some of my FSO colleagues had higher expectations, but dubious methods for exacting stellar performance.

A State Department General Services Officer had preceded me in the house assigned to me in Dar-es-Salaam. While he was there, he’d suffered a couple of break ins, so my new boss was a little concerned. He had all the shrubbery chopped down so patrol cars could see trouble from the street. I did all I could to encourage the bougainvillea to grow back quickly! Anyway, my boss needn’t have worried. In a few weeks I'd got to know my Tanzanian neighbors and they told me the story. My predecessor had often come home late and most likely drunk. He found the guard sleeping, kicked him awake and cussed him out at the top of his lungs. The robberies were probably an inside job, according to my neighbors, and so far as they were concerned the guy got what he deserved. No one broke in while I was there, even though I never used my alarm system. I'd discovered that geckos would set it off in the wee hours, which would wake me and also disturb my good neighbors.

Cultivating Bad Relations

Gardeners also tend to be contract workers remunerated toward the lower end of existing pay scales, which means they generally have a hard time supporting a family, paying school fees, etc., even though they work full time for the US government. A Consul General at another post to which I was assigned never gave this a thought when he docked his gardeners a day’s pay for (1) spitting beetle juice on the grass and for (2) standing with hose water directed at the coarse wiry grass, which sometimes makes a little depression in the dirt below. “I told them not to do that!” the CG raged. He screamed at Americans, too, but that’s no excuse.

Salary squeezing. Institutionalized ingratitude. Petty personal abuse. The unfortunate pattern of interaction between official American abroad and local employees was set long before the Iraq invasion and occupation. When it comes to people who work for us, it seems, you just can’t trust us to do the right thing.