Virginia Stacey travels around the world helping others with employment issues

Virginia Stacey is proof that a layoff is what you make of it.

When she was laid off from her job with the Idaho Department of Labor in 1995, Stacey says, her life could have gone in either of two directions:

"Most dislocated workers try something new or they become long-term unemployed and their lives go downhill. I took the first route."

It's a route that has taken her over a million miles. She's been to places as different as China and Tanzania. She's used her labor expertise to help hundreds of workers with employment issues in their countries and witnessed international news events in the making.

In her former life, she'd never been outside the United States.

Stacey is the head of Boise's Worldwide Strategies Inc. Actually, she is World Wide Strategies Inc., a one-woman business with a record of achievement that belies its small size.

Its motto is "Helping the World Work." The company began as part of the U.S. effort to support democracy in eastern Europe by helping create jobs in faltering economies after the fall of Communism and training workers in the skills needed for them. From its first assignment in Romania, WSI went on to assist workers in 21 European countries and help create more than 9,000 jobs there.

It isn't only workers in other countries who benefit. Better-paying jobs for them help our economy by raising the price of imports produced with unfairly low wages that make it difficult for U.S. companies to compete.

Today, either on her own or as a subcontractor for similar but larger companies, Stacey works in countries all over the world.

She has assisted employers and workers by retraining people for new jobs, educating them on their rights as employees and setting up worker-safety programs and dispute-resolution systems. She has organized programs to prevent women from being exploited as servants or sex slaves and helped countries become more competitive in the global market by modernizing adult education and streamlining employment systems.

When she isn't traveling, she uses the Internet to run WSI from her Boise home. She once had offices in Washington, D.C., and other countries, but now manages by herself with help from an accountant and temporary workers hired in-country as needed.

"Sometimes I feel like the Wizard of Oz with smoke and mirrors," she said.

Stacey also helps struggling countries and communities develop new businesses. That part of her job has led to experiences she couldn't have imagined as a state employee.

In Macedonia, she was taken aback to learn that the locals' idea of a promising economic-development idea was a morgue.

"The families there take care of their own dead," she said. "They thought that carrying bodies through the town put a damper on tourism."

In Tanzania, she "dealt with everything from people who had never had a job to pythons in the storage room."

In Poland, her company helped the people of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German) make the most of its infamous history.

"The community felt that it had a stigma and there was no chance for economic development because no one wanted to stay there. People would come to see the concentration camp and leave right afterwards. We helped them with a new way of looking at what they had. They created a center for human rights where people would come for conferences, stay overnight and eat in their restaurants."

Stacey was in Armenia this spring during an election protest that left nine people dead.

"There were tanks around my hotel," she said. "Political unrest is normal in the countries I visit, but I'd never encountered that before."

In China, where card games are popular and the World Trade Organization mandated worker-protection laws, Stacey had playing cards printed with cartoons and Chinese script explaining workers' rights. She also helped revise labor laws.

How does she do it all?

"Organization, energy and hard work," she said. "It's not glamorous; it's arduous. I travel coach and work long days. But I know I'm making a difference."

Tim Woodward: 377-6409