Economic Issues of Foreign Service Spouses
Linda Louis Embassy of Switzerland
Let me introduce our Association:
We just celebrated this summer our tenth anniversary, so you can see, we don't have a long, traditional existence, but as you all might know, the Swiss are known for being slow and measured. We are an organization based on a voluntary membership with approximately 76 % of all possible members. We represent the spouses of rotational civil servants as well as single parent civil servants. There is a board of seven volunteers, seven, because we copied our government which is composed of only seven ministers. We publish twice a year a bulletin, we have worked out several manuals ( it is more than that, we call it a dossier) so f.i.
About health
It contains how to treat tropical diseases, alcohol - and stress problems etc
About transfer
It gives you practical hints for the preparation and the carrying out of a removal
About coming back to the central office
You would call it Ottawa for beginners with a lot of useful addresses based on personal experiences as f.i.
- The dentist where I can go with my small children without being embarrassed when they howl like a banshee
- We put lists of schools in Switzerland and abroad at our members' disposal and inform them about the conditions of admission for the schools as well as for universities.
- We organize regularly further education seminars in Bern both for the spouses living in Bern and for those living abroad.
- We have an input into the decisions concerning the furnishing of the residences - not always with a lot of success, I have to confess, but tastes are known to be different.
- We participate in a dual career network This is a group of Swiss and Berman multilateral companies which we can ask for available jobs in our postings and as a countermove we inform their spouses about vacancies in the Swiss Embassies.
- We help in the cases of the death of a civil servant or in case of a divorce.
- And last but not least we offer a model of a provision of our old age.
About this I'll tell you further on a little bit more, because I think it is example to be copied and we have given birth to this baby during my presidency. But I should stick to the point as our subject this morning is the Economic Issues for Foreign Service Spouses. Well, I can tell you, I myself, I am worth monthly CDN $1,709.22, which makes yearly round about CDN $20.644. But I don't get it, it's of course my husband who receives this amount and I wonder sometimes whether it is given to him as a compensation because this poor guy is married to a person like me or whether it is a compensation for me because I am working so hard for the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This $20,600 $ is made up of 4 differed issues:
The rotational allowance
From the third transfer on, every civil servant benefits of a fixed sum and the spouse gets 10% of it, perhaps because they think a move means only ten percent of stress for her.
The inconvenience or hardship allowance
This differs, of course, as it depends of the posting, again the spouse receives 10 % of the civil servant benefits
The Representation allowance
The spouse gets approximately one third of the civil servant, what I think it is not bad it is enough to go three times a year to Rinaldo and to buy a new dress at Holt and Renfrew - if it is on sale
And the fourth allowance
This is a real benefit only for the spouses and has no relation to the career-level or the posting of the civil servant. Only in relation to his account as again he is the one who receives the money first. It is a sum of CDN $6,400 per year paid as compensation for not being able to contribute to a professional pension plan during a posting abroad. The spouse shall use it for her private old age provision. There are two reasons why we fought for this. First it is a question of fairness, the spouses under normal circumstances will not find a job in a foreign country paid in Swiss Francs with a compulsory Swiss pension plan, so for years she is unable to contribute to her insurance. Second in case of a divorce the spouse can suffer from great financial distress, because the alimony due by the divorced civil servant ceases upon his death and if he was married more than ten years for the second time the former spouse has no entitlement to his pension. She will receive only a minimal pension from the national insurance of old age. When we had drawn our members' attention to the holes in their security scheme, we thought we had to offer them also a definite option in remedy. So we started to ask different institutions such as banks and several insurance companies to offer solutions, explaining to them the particulars of our situation: no personal salary, civil servants' variable salaries and so the difficulty of a planned budget over the years. To make a long story short, the Association has made a collective contract with a Swiss insurance company based in Nassau. We hesitated to become the contract partner and tried a long time to convince our Ministry to take over this role but they refused as we could not give them an exact amount of participants. Hen and egg Only a year after this pension plan was realized they decided for the solution to allocate to each spouse the above mentioned sum of CDN $6,400 to enable her to take advantage of this Insurance.