Beyond the Article - the SOFA & Unpaid Labor

(Expanded Article)

"I was personally victimized by the SOFA," Beth Conlin said as she shared her experiences with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the deals between governments that dictate how service members and their families are treated while posted overseas, with a group of fellow military spouses.

Roughly 10 years ago, Conlin, like many military spouse professionals, found herself unexpectedly unemployed and living in a foreign country, far from family and friends. But Conlin's frustration with the SOFA was not just that these international agreements limited her ability to transfer her dream job to Germany, but that no one she spoke to with the Department of Defense seemed to know how to help her.

"When I moved overseas, I asked a question, 'If I moved to the Munich office [of her current employer], does that affect my SOFA status?'" Conlin recalled. "Nobody could answer me." Without guidance from the military, her employer, which had international offices and employees working in Germany, did not feel comfortable retaining her.

As she later discovered, her unemployment was totally avoidable. Conlin could have signed a German employment contract with her company to continue working, get paid in euros and pay German taxes, which would have helped her avoid a five-year gap in employment.

"Had I known that I was going to lose my job going to Germany; had I also known that nine days after we got there, my husband was going to deploy for a year, I never would have gone," said Conlin. However, future generations of military spouses will benefit from the painful lesson she learned.

Over the past 10 years, Conlin has spent much of her free time advocating for improvements to the SOFA. Her efforts picked up speed after she participated in the Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program (a program I participated in, though not at the same time), where she pitched her idea of forming a SOFA coalition and connected with other leaders working on military spouse-focused efforts. Her work helped inform a presidential executive order that requires that the DoD provide support for military spouses navigating complex employment requirements while stationed overseas and resulted in the American Bar Association's release of a legal opinion aimed at helping military attorneys better advise spouses as they navigate these opaque agreements…

Go Beyond the Article

Subscribe to learn what I have been told could be an underlying cause of the stagnant SOFAs…the reliance upon unpaid labor of military spouses living abroad.

“They think about spouses being nurses and they say ‘go volunteer at the Red Cross’, you know, give us some free (wo)manpower. Or ‘wait your time in line to get a job at the clinic on post’,” said Conlin during the November Dinner Table Conversation. “I had a girlfriend who was a doula in Korea, and she just she just did it with the families and charged them directly…She was ruthlessly persistent.”

“Was it legal? I don't know. Did she do it for two years? Absolutely.”

If military spouses are forced to work for free because of restrictive SOFA (or host nation policies) or operate under questionable legal circumstances, in the current fiscal environment many may choose the latter.