Government entities

Wednesday began with a metro ride over to Foggy Bottom. There, I went to both the State Department and was able to listen and talk with a woman who had spent her career working as a mediator with FCMS.

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The first stop was at the FCMS building. There, we heard what was essentially an extension of the class — what it was like to be a mediator, the things she had done, and tricks she had picked up along the way. One interesting aspect of her job was that it could go all hours of the night, and because of that she always brought a change of clothes and would sneak off to wash up and change so that she would always appear fresh and ready to go, which made mediating sound so much more like a game than one would ever hope.

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Instead, what caught my attention was her brief mention that “it was good that those employees were unionized.” As soon as she said this, I scribbled down a question to ask her later. So, following her presentation, I walked to the front of the room to discuss her thoughts on unions, as she is often the one directly working with unions and their disputing party to make a solution. Her thoughts were that the quality of a union depends on its leadership. If the leadership is out for what’s in their best interest, whether that be wealth or pride, obviously the union isn’t served well. But if they do have good leadership, she thought they were a good thing — she included the teamsters in this category. While this makes for more effective meetings between large disputing parties, I don’t think unions are good for broad policy changes.

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In between FCMS and the State Department, I had lunch at a place where, every hour, on the half hour, the waitresses and cooks come out to dance to a song amongst all the patrons. It was uncomfortable for me and for them, and to make things better, there were tourists with their cameras in the face of a poor girl who happened to be dancing near their table.

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The State Department, on the other hand, was impressive in our ability to visit it (albeit we weren’t allowed to see any of the building, not even the bathroom, without an escort), but our speaker was less than candid, making for a moderately engaging discussion on the U.S.’s efforts to combat terrorism abroad.