Frequently Asked Questions about the LLNL Transition and Collective Bargaining
We‘ve compiled this set of frequently asked questions and answers from our membership meetings, employee e-mail queries, and the 10/19/2006 panel discussion (where many employees had to be turned away to avoid overcrowding the room). They offer an independent perspective that we hope you’ll find valuable. Though we have a reputation for being critical of Laboratory management, when speaking about the transition and the possibility of collective bargaining, we’re focused not on the present organization, but on a future with different management operating under a very different basis.
In gathering information on the transition, we’ve attempted to offer something beyond the “official version” given by the Lab’s transition planners. We also recognize that pure speculation about what employees could face is worthless for planning purposes and would cause unnecessary stress. For this reason, when projecting outcomes, we rely on what we know about the law, about DOE/NNSA’s past practice, and about the events at LANL through the eyes of our peers there. We expect that as events unfold, we’ll add to this list and update our answers.
1. How will working under the new employer be different from working under UC?
2. What specific changes could the change in employment basis bring about at LLNL?
3. How has the day-to-day existence of LANL employees changed since their transition?
4. Why would we need or want a contract with the new employer?
6. Would bargaining for wages at LLNL spell the end of merit pay?
8. Could a contract include language to protect retiree health benefits?
9. SPSE has been around a long time. Has it always been a union? Who runs it?
10. What is UPTE-CWA and how is it related to SPSE?
12. Can I be retaliated against for signing the authorization petition or for joining SPSE?
Additional Information
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1. How will working under the new employer be different from working under UC?
Lack of information at this early stage of the transition process makes this question difficult to answer. Without knowing which bidder will win the LLNL contract, the best we can do is explain planned changes in the legal basis for operations at LLNL and comment on how they played out at LANL. The broadest changes will come from the shift in our status from public sector to private sector employment. As UC employees we now enjoy pension protections written into California law as part of a public employer’s responsibility. These will vanish. Also, career indefinite employees at LLNL (approximately 85% of us) currently enjoy property rights to our jobs. This means, among other things, that before we can be terminated, management must have a defensible reason, and must follow prescribed steps, also known as progressive discipline. California law also gives us the right to contest (grieve) acts of discipline or dismissals. These rights, too, will disappear at the transition unless they are explicitly granted back to us in a contract. In formal terms, we will serve at the will of the employer. This is what is meant by “at-will”. The best illustration of this shift comes from the LANL transition. LANL employees who wanted to continue working under LANS had to fill out and sign employment applications that included a passage at the bottom making the new agreement explicit:
“The employment relationship with Los Alamos National Security LLC at Los Alamos National Laboratories is by mutual consent. This means that employees have the right to terminate their employment at any time and for any reason. Likewise LANS reserves the right to discontinue employment...Further, nothing in these policies and procedures in intended to create an express or implied contract for employment.”
In other words, to continue to work at LANL, each transitioning employee had to relinquish job rights guaranteed by UC as a higher education employer.
2. What specific changes could the change in employment basis bring about at LLNL?
NNSA’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for LLNL requires the successor contractor to provide a defined benefit (pension) plan that is “substantially equivalent” to the current UCRP. The LANL RFP had an identical requirement. This language leaves the contractor considerable latitude in how to meet the obligation. As happened at LANL, the takeover of LLNL by a private sector employer will mean an end to type 457 deferred contribution accounts. While this is a matter of law, other changes under LANS, such as the end of the lump sum cash-out option, probably stemmed from economic necessity; the replacement pension fund simply lacks the depth and flexibility of UCRP. LANL employees we’ve spoken with are distrustful of the new pension accounting methods and see greater risk to their retirement incomes. Beyond the forced change in pension benefits, the most radical change at LLNL will be instant loss of job security for former career-indefinite employees. Management will have the freedom to fire individuals for any reason whatsoever (barring clear acts of discrimination). Now, many view this as a step forward. Finally, they say, the dead wood will be rooted out. A private company, the logic goes, will have the profit motive to guide it in making reasonable choices about who to promote and who to fire. That’s fine until you stop to consider who would be doing the rooting-out. The new company will be forced to rely heavily on the existing line management to run the Lab for some time at first, and may find it expedient to do so into the future.
Other changes are likely. Again reflecting concern over events at Los Alamos, they could include:
--Layoffs, likely starting with sub-contracted employees
--Loss of transparency into salaries and salary increase/decrease decisions
--Changes in rules governing vacation and sick leave
--Change in employee health and related benefits (e.g., reduced benefits at greater cost)
--Fewer and simpler legal hurdles for RIFs
3. How has the day-to-day existence of LANL employees changed since their transition?
Rich Montoya, a Facilities Management Team Lead at LANL and an officer in the local UPTE chapter there, has spoken candidly with us on several occasions, including at SPSE’s panel discussion on October 19th. He reports that in general, LANS employees at LANL are at a low point of morale. Lab management was caught off-guard by higher than anticipated transition costs that DOE refused to underwrite, and a staggering state gross receipts tax bill that arrived shortly after the switch. Labor intensive departments like Rich’s were asked to revise their budgets downward by 10% this year, and to prepare for an additional 10% cut next year. Employees are “waiting for the other shoe to drop”. Though Director Mike Anastasio declared a one-year moratorium on RIFs, fulfilling this pledge for the legacy UC employees required the sacrifice of hundreds of subcontract workers as the full extent of the LANL’s budget shortfall became evident. (The moratorium expires on June 1, 2007, and many fear deep cuts in the legacy workforce.) Rich has personally observed other changes:
--A flock of managers (>100) and corporate staff from Bechtel, abruptly moving in and displacing LANL technical staff from choice facilities. (A significant action given the number of subcontract personnel that later were let go.)
--Higher FTE cost, especially to work-for-others (WFO) sponsors
--Tiger Team-like investigations on safety. Employees fear the results will be distorted and used to make firing decisions.
--Anecdotal accounts of a higher rate of health and safety incidents, the most serious of which was reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican back in June. (Since LANS is a private company in New Mexico, accidents suffered by its employees at LANL are no longer discoverable under the California Public Records Act.)
--Every employee asked to write a resume’ just prior to the transition. Again, this raised fears about how the information might be used.
4. Why would we need or want a contract with the new employer?
We all operate under a de facto contract right now: LLNL’s Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual (PPPM). The PPPM is the legal instrument that governs our relationship to UC as our employer. It embodies requirements of state and federal law, as well as the wishes of Lab management. Unless we negotiate a contract of our own, the new LLNL employer will rewrite Lab policies, but this time with fewer laws to constrain them. In short the new LLC will get to dictate all the terms and conditions of our employment and will do so in a manner that is of greatest benefit to those running the company. We’ve been given advance copies of the new LANS policies and procedures in draft form, and their content bears this out.
The alternative to this bleak situation is to exercise your legal right to organize into a unit of employees with similar backgrounds and then negotiate the content of the agreement that you will work under, i.e., the terms and conditions of your employment. The beauty of collective bargaining is that any contract that a bargaining unit votes into force will reflect their priorities.
The days of getting top quality total compensation from LLNL, without effort on your part, will soon be over. The key to gaining some influence over how you will be treated and compensated in the future is to organize now for collective bargaining by signing the authorization petition. The more involved you become, the greater are your chances of influencing the outcome.
5. So if I become a member of a represented bargaining unit, who would be negotiating a contract for me?
Once a bargaining unit is recognized, members of the bargaining unit complete a survey to identify their priorities. Next, they hold an election to choose bargainers to represent them. (To be eligible, prospective bargainers and voters must be both members of the bargaining unit and members of the union.) Then after the contract is negotiated, voters from the unit decide up or down to accept it or reject it Being in the union as well as the bargaining unit would give you at least three ways to influence the outcome, and more if you’re elected to be a bargainer yourself. Getting informed about and involved in the issues will be work, but think of it as the cost of regaining a measure of control over your future.
6. Would bargaining for wages at LLNL spell the end of merit pay?
No. A unit contract could, for example, establish a wage structure not much different from the current ranking-based curves used to determine salaries. Or a unit might prefer to stress maturity curves in the basis. In either case, bargaining would serve only to establish salary floors, not salaries proper. Or the unit might decide that wages are simply not a priority in bargaining and omit them from negotiation altogether. The point is that the members of a bargaining unit themselves decide what they want in their contract. Once a bargaining unit gets official recognition, bargainers are chosen from within the unit to represent their colleagues in contract negotiations.
7. Say we win collective bargaining status for a category of employees. Will they have to pay union dues as a result?
Being a member of a collective bargaining unit does not make you a union member. However, by law, the union may charge so-called fair share fees once a contract has been negotiated and approved through an election of the membership of the unit. This fee amounts to 1.3% of the salary of represented members, but would be assessed only after the contract is approved by them in a vote. As a practical matter, any contract that doesn’t promise increases to the salary floor that more than offset the fair share fee would stand no chance of being voted into force. Also, by law, non-union members within a bargaining unit may request a refund of the portion of their fair share fees that accounts for activities unrelated to their bargaining unit.
8. Could a contract include language to protect retiree health benefits?
Yes. Nothing would prevent bargaining for contract provisions that affect how retiree health benefits are supported. In fact, this year all three of UPTE’s collective bargaining units (RX, TX, and HX) did just that. They negotiated a continuation of retiree health benefits for the employees they represent on the UC campuses.
9. SPSE has been around a long time. Has it always been a union? Who runs it?
The Society of Professionals, Scientists, and Engineers was established in 1973, in the wake of several rounds of layoffs at LLNL in the period following the end of the Vietnam War. Its founders—Lab employees all—shared the conviction that the decisions about which employees to lay off were being made based on management’s personal likes and dislikes, rather than objective criteria of worth to the laboratory. SPSE is a legally recognized 501(c)5 nonprofit union in the state of California, and was from its inception. It began as a chapter of the California State Employees Association (CSEA) and this accounts for its name, which follows a convention that CSEA used at the time. The affiliation with CSEA lasted until 1984. In 2002, SPSE informally began a new affiliation with UPTE-CWA Local 9119, the union for researchers and other staff on the UC campuses. A vote by SPSE’s members in July 2006 made the affiliation formal. Membership is open to all UC employees at LLNL who are not already represented by another union. It is run entirely by its members who are all UC employees at LLNL or retirees—100% of them volunteers. It is funded entirely through dues paid by its members. For these reasons, we bristle at being characterized as an “outside organization.”
10. What is UPTE-CWA and how is it related to SPSE?
UPTE—the University Professional and Technical Employees union at UC—represents over 10,000 researchers, technical staff, and health care workers on all the UC campuses and at the UC-run medical centers around the state—and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (It has a local chapter at LANL, and another at LLNL through SPSE. So far neither Lab has organized for collective bargaining rights.) It advocates for the full spectrum of employee rights and works to enhance their overall work life, including compensation. Before recommending the formal affiliation with UPTE in the spring of 2006, SPSE's Executive Board sought and got assurance that we could continue to develop and pursue our own policies and set our own priorities. We believe we have forged a partnership with UPTE that will benefit SPSE, and, through our joint legislative initiatives, help preserve the rights of Lab employees through the contract transition and beyond. To its credit, UPTE has pledged to continue supporting and advising SPSE, irrespective of whether UC participates in the next Laboratory contract.
UPTE is also Local 9119 of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), an international union with over 700,000 members. We're counting on the solid experience of CWA in the private sector to help us transition, along with the Lab, to life under the new private-sector contractor.
11. We’re going to have a new employer starting October 1, 2007. Will they recognize SPSE and the status of any collective bargaining units we succeed in qualifying before then?
Yes. The RFP specifically requires the successful bidder to recognize labor organizations, and the rights of employees to collective bargaining. Section H-35 on Labor Relations states:
“The Contractor shall respect the right of employees to organize and to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through their chosen labor representatives, to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and to refrain from any or all of these activities.”
12. Can I be retaliated against for signing the authorization petition or for joining SPSE?
Not legally. We would be irresponsible to say that no employee will ever come under threat of retaliation by management, but for management to threaten retaliation in any form for union-related activity, let alone follow through on it, is patently illegal. We believe that any such threat would be local and temporary, since LLNL’s Staff Relations Division would recognize the danger of legal exposure and would be motivated to rectify it quickly. SPSE takes such threats very seriously, so if you are threatened or witness threats against others, please contact the SPSE Office immediately at 449-4846.
13. What actions have SPSE and UPTE taken to counter the negative effects of the upcoming transition?
SPSE and UPTE have acted on two fronts. First, the UPTE Labs caucus (composed of delegates from LLNL, LANL, and LBNL) undertook a lobbying initiative in Washington DC. Using UPTE’s longstanding contacts with members of congress and senators involved in oversight of DOE and the Labs, and by approaching directly the NNSA contract officer responsible for the transition, they succeeded in getting two significant changes to the RFP for LANL (later cloned to create the LLNL RFP). The original draft of the LANL RFP required only that the new employer provide “a market-driven retirement plan”. While it didn’t specifically say “401K type defined contribution plan” it implied as much, since such plans are now the market norm. SPSE and UPTE proposed new language that stipulated that the successor plan be a defined benefit (pension) plan and that it be substantially equivalent to the current UC plan. The revised RFPs for both Labs contained this language, though their wording leaves “substantially equivalent” open to interpretation. In calling for the change, SPSE intended that the successor plan offer true reciprocity (about which more below) with UCRP. We’ve since seen that the LANS interpretation of “substantially equivalent” falls far short of reciprocity, and UPTE has made addressing these shortcomings a major focus of its current lobbying efforts.
Though relatively few LLNL employees rate preserving intellectual and scientific freedom as a priority (compared to retirement and benefits, according to a recent telephone survey) SPSE and UPTE raised the issue with congressional leaders and with NNSA early on, even before the draft LANL RFP appeared. We apparently succeeded; a provision on intellectual and scientific freedom, including language that SPSE-UPTE proposed, appears in the RFP section H-36.
UPTE’s second major initiative was prompted by the difficult choice that LANL employees were being forced to make last spring, between giving up their UC retirement in exchange for a guaranteed job, or keeping their UC retirement but taking a gamble on getting rehired. UPTE’s response to this was to sue UC and LANS in California Superior Court for violating California law [1] by coercing employees to choose between their UC pensions and their jobs. The lawsuit included a call for immediate injunctive relief for LANL employees (to stop LANS from forcing them to choose) that the judge did not act on. The case has yet to come to trial (the defendants have moved for a change of venue) however shortly after the lawsuit was filed, LANS agreed to allow transitioning employees to take advantage of UC’s 120-day “loophole” wherein they could file retirement papers and take up to 120 days to decide whether they would indeed retire. (This change gave employees the freedom to sign on with LANS, and then formally retire from UC.) We hope that this same option will be offered to transitioning LLNL employees as well, though we will not know for sure until (at least) the winner of the contract competition is announced. Logically speaking, UPTE can’t claim that its action with the court caused LANS to relent on requiring employees to choose beforehand. (And UC and LANS would deny any connection.) Still the close sequence of events suggests a link.
[1] Article XVI, Section 17, Part B of the California Constitution imposes upon the UC Board of Regents as administrator of UCRP, full fiduciary responsibility for the plan and for the interests of participants. Specifically it says:
“The members of the retirement board of a public pension or retirement system shall discharge their duties with respect to the system solely in the interest of, and for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to, participants and their beneficiaries, minimizing employer contributions thereto, and defraying reasonable expenses of administering the system. A retirement board's duty to its participants and their beneficiaries shall take precedence over any other duty.”
14. Given that you’re a society of professional scientists and engineers, why should those of us who aren’t scientists and engineers trust you to represent our interests?
The name “Society of Professional Scientists and Engineers” * is a vestige of the way we formed back in 1973. In fact SPSE is now a local of UPTE-CWA, which is the union for all UC employees on all the campuses and in all the laboratories and hospitals of the University of California. Two years ago we opened our membership to every job class at the Laboratory, so that now all UC employees at the Lab who are not already represented by another union are eligible to join. Our new members come from every job series and the makeup of SPSE-UPTE’s Executive Board now reflects this diversity.
For this reason, the question’s premise is mistaken; no UC employee at LLNL has to trust SPSE-UPTE at all, since they are free to join and represent their own interests and those of their peers.
* SPSE began as a chapter of CSEA, the California State Employees Association, and our name reflects a convention CSEA used at the time for its professional units. Also, the group that started SPSE was indeed composed largely of scientists and engineers. We’ve kept the name mainly for easy recognition, and to keep from having to throw away a lot of stationary.