State Dept employees have good reason not to go to Iraq

A lot of Department of State employees publicly objected to the proposal that DoS would begin involuntary assignments to Iraq. They got a lot of flack for their objections, since military people have been simply assigned to go to Iraq and have no option. It turns out that the DoS people had a really good reason for objecting to being sent to a combat zone.

The Department of State treats its employees just like Republicans want ALL employees treated. Send them to work anywhere regardless of the risk, and when they are hurt on the job, forget them, even fire them. Employers are not something that exists to make life better for people and families. People exist to work for employers and business. That's why Republicans hate unions which allow employees to talk back to managers.

This story is from CQ:

The Marines like to boast that they never leave their wounded behind.

You won’t hear that line at the State Department these days.

That’s because of Foggy Bottom’s dirty little secret: Its bureaucrats can’t be counted on to take care of their own casualties of war.

And that’s why, say the foreign service’s defenders, State Department employees are wary of going to Iraq: Unlike soldiers, they can’t count on a safety net if they’re hurt.

Wrecked physically and mentally from terrorist attacks or duty in combat zones, State Department employees from senior diplomats on down to foreign aid workers say they have too often had to fend for themselves when they were hurt.

“The idea of being killed or injured is real,” says Frank Pressley, who was badly wounded during a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998, “and if you are injured, you had better believe that you will be forgotten by the very employer that asked and needed your help.”

Pressley is one of several former and present foreign service officers who told me unsettling stories of their travails with the State Department — and the Labor Department’s Office of Workers Compensation — over the decade since they were wounded.

Pressley was a veteran communications officer at the Nairobi embassy when a powerful al Qaeda bomb blast ripped through a wall, leaving holes in his face and shredding an arm, requiring a series of surgeries. His wife was also injured.

In 2002, he told The Washington Post, “I get no assistance, no options, no real help.” By the time the piece was published, however, the bureaucrats had suddenly came up with a check.

Last week I called Pressley to ask him if the system had changed since then.

“Honestly, nothing much,” he said. “There was some improvement with the Department of State, as they created an office to work directly with the [State Department] Director General’s Office for Victims, such as myself. But, in the long run, the system is broken.”

Pressley eventually healed enough to go back to work. But then he was checked again by bureaucratic indifference.

He asked for an assignment to Ankara, where his Turkish wife’s family could help take care of him.

Sorry, that’s taken, the bureaucrats said. How about Germany? “There’s lots of Turks there,” he was told.

“They were heartless and totally without compassion,” said Pressley, who is still on a regimen of pain killers and antibiotics.

There are more stories of State Department indifference to employees injured on the job in the CQ article. Unlike the Army and the Marines, the DoS does NOT take care of its people.

This is the Republican ideal world where employers hire workers at the lowest possible wage, send them into places and jobs where they are injured or killed, then tell the survivors their injuries are their problems, not those of the employer.

Hey, it saves the employer money. Got to do something to cover the CEO's exorbitant pay.

[ h/t to Laura Rozen at War & Piece. ]