SPSE Newsletter #1, March 1999
Editor: P. Weidhaas
P.O. Box 1066, Livermore, CA 94551
925-449-4846
Contents:
Editor's Corner
Last August, our Newsletter focused on the lack of employee rights
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Since then, thanks
to the intervention of California legislators, there have been
substantial employee developments at LANL (see
next article).
Livermore Lab Gets Perfunctory "A"
Ironically, while LANL employees are finally on the road towards
achieving rights comparable to those at Livermore, employees at
LLNL are losing out on several fronts. Employee rights, management
accountability and integrity, and the quality of our work environment
are all deteriorating. The Department of Energy and Sidney Drell,
chair of the UC President's Council on the National Laboratories,
may have given the Lab an "A" for performance (Newsline,
February 26, 1999), but from the employees' perspective that grade
ignores other problems.
SPSE Sees Need for "Letters to
the Editor"
What do you think of all this? Or how do you know
what I think? Newsline does not give us an opportunity
to share our views in the form of "Letters to the Editor."
"Dialogue" gives you answers, but isn't the answer:
it is overly concerned with confidentiality. If 100 employees
complained to "Dialogue" about, say, the weekly time
reporting, each would get a confidential reply, and none of them
would know that 99 colleagues shared their concern! Interestingly,
LANL's Daily Newsbulletin does encourage dialogue among
Laboratory employees, posting it on their website www.lanl.gov/newsbulletin. A review of this website gives a sense of LANL
employees' concerns.
SPSE believes that LLNL employees should also be able to publicly comment on the growing number of changes at the Lab. Therefore, SPSE will solicit and post "Letters to the Editor" on our website www.spse.org.
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Send "Letters to the Editor" Send letters by e-mail to spse@spse.org, or to Patrick Weidhaas, L-560. They must address UC and Lab issues. The SPSE Editor reserves the right to select and edit submissions. Anonymous letters are discouraged. We will publish the letters on our website, and possibly in our Newsletter. Letters are not restricted to SPSE members; we want to hear from everyone. |
California Rights in Sight
for Los Alamos
Workshop on HEERA
On January 12, I participated in a workshop at Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL). I represented SPSE on a panel about UC's employer-employee
relations under the California Higher Education Employer-Employee
Relations Act (HEERA). You may recall some relevant background
from a previous SPSE newsletter (NL
#2, 1998; on our website). Recently,
UC has come to an agreement with the California legislature that
LANL employees should have rights like those in HEERA. One consequence
of not having HEERA-like rights, is that LANL does not have any
independent employee organizations.
LANL's Employee Advisory Council, a Lab-sponsored internal communications group, in cooperation with the Citizens for LANL Employee Rights (CLER), sponsored the workshop. It was intended to give LANL employees an idea of the impact that "HEERA-like" rules would have on employee relations. Unfortunately, at the time of the workshop, UC and LANL had not yet released a draft that spelled out the new HEERA-like policy.
Employee Organizations--What's Out
There?
The panelists represented five organizations: the UC Office of
the President (UCOP), LLNL, CLER, UPTE1
(University Professional and Technical Employees),
and SPSE. The physics auditorium was packed and the event was
carried on LANL internal TV. The presentations were informative
and useful for LANL employees. Following the presentations there
was a lively one-hour question and answer period. It covered a
broad range of viewpoints. Some employees favored the idea of
employees organizing themselves, and asked how it would work.
Others worried about unions being self-servicing bureaucracies,
out of touch with employees, perhaps mirroring management's present
image.
UPTE serves as a good role model of an employee-controlled union. It elects its leaders from among its UC members, as is the case with SPSE. UPTE formed an affiliation with the Communications Workers of America, which provides specific services in exchange for a portion of the dues, but leaves control entirely with UPTE (see www.upte.org for more information).
How to Export HEERA to New Mexico
As far as LANL employees are concerned, a number of questions
remain, for instance, how closely will their new policy resemble
HEERA? How will the policy be implemented and by whom? In California,
PERB enforces HEERA--who will enforce the new policies in New
Mexico? In time these questions will be resolved--in any case,
LANL's employees are finally moving in a positive direction.
Meanwhile LLNL employees are sliding backwards. UC has decreed that new UC employee policies no longer apply to UC/LLNL employees. Livermore has eliminated the category of term employment and substituted a "flex term" category, into which many employees are being moved as their assigned terms come to an end. If we want to stop the backward slide, we must keep in mind how LANL improvements came about: through intense publicity, organizing, and lobbying (at the state level) by employees, retirees, and local officials. / Bill O'Connell
Singleton et al. vs. Tarter
and the UC Regents
On December 23, 1998, six women scientists, professional and technical
employees at LLNL, filed a class action sex discrimination lawsuit
against the UC Regents and Lab Director Bruce Tarter. The plaintiffs
filed the lawsuit on behalf of an estimated 3,000 or more current
and former female employees of the Lab. It alleges that the Regents
and the LLNL directors have engaged in a pattern and practice
of paying women employees less than the salaries paid to their
male counterparts for several decades. The plaintiffs also allege
that the defendants engage in a highly subjective employee ranking
process which has denied women employees equal compensation, as
well as equal opportunity for promotion and advancement. The action
was filed in State Court under California laws which prohibit
discrimination in employment and which guarantee equal pay for
equal work.
The lead plaintiff is Mary Singleton, a chemist who worked at the Lab for 22 years until she retired at the end of 1996. She said that the lawsuit is the culmination of many years of effort by women employees to achieve pay equity by working with the Lab. (An article about their 1994 study follows.) "The Regents and management at the Lab have known about this problem for a very long time, and have simply refused to take appropriate action to correct the historical and ongoing discrimination against women," she said. Plaintiffs in the class action seek back pay, punitive damages, and injunctive relief stemming from the defendant's continuing unlawful business practice of gender discrimination.
The Sturdevant Law Firm in San Francisco and the firm of Gwilliam, Ivary, Chiosso, Cavalli & Brewer in Oakland represent the plaintiffs. "This is a classic case of pay inequity resulting in a two-tier system for employment at the Lab--one for men and one for women, " Mr. Sturdevant said, in announcing the filing of the lawsuit. "It is not only wrong, but patently illegal and has resulted in grave inequality for women employees," he added. Additionally, Gary Gwilliam stated, "The Livermore Lab has a long history of complaints by women of unfair treatment on the job. This includes sexual harassment and hostile work environment as well as gender bias with regard to unequal pay for women employees. We hope this lawsuit will bring these practices to an end."
On February 24, 1999, a "Town Hall" meeting took place at the Livermore Holiday Inn. Its purpose was to answer questions about the class action suit. Mary Singleton introduced the legal team and the other named plaintiffs: Shirley Rogers Jennings, Katherine Lynette Fritz, Gloria J. Glasscox, Maura K. Spragge, and Jannelle Spann. Attorney Gary Gwilliam explained that his law firm has experience in handling cases in Alameda County, while Sturdevant's firm specializes in class action cases. The meeting drew over 100 people, about 75% women. During the question and answer session many women raised concern over openly speaking out against their employer.
1994 Women's Salary Study
Made News--
but not Newsline
In September 1994, shortly after Bruce Tarter had become the Lab's
director, a subcommittee of the Women's Association announced
the results of a salary study of the 100, 200, 300, and 500 series
job classifications at the Association's general meeting. Mary
Singleton and Luisa Hansen compared women's to men's salaries,
finding women's salaries significantly lower than men's for most
of the classifications. They also reported that in the 100 classification
men held the majority of high-ranking and high-paying positions.
Since the 100 series (in 1994) contained 663 women and only 381
men, they concluded that women were not promoted like their male
counterparts.
Singleton and Hansen emphasized at the time that they prepared the survey, for "information and educational purposes only. We are not doing this to raise a ruckus but to aid the Laboratory in correcting inequities." A staff member of Newsline intended to print the story and prepared a draft entitled "LLLWA Salary Study." The story affected all employees in those four categories and would certainly have received lab-wide interest. However, the Lab's censors prevailed and never printed the story. Newsline toed the line! / Patrick Weidhaas
Time Reporting--Tightening
the Leash
On January 1, the Lab's salaried employees began reporting their
time weekly instead of monthly. The purported reason for this
leash-tightening is to help managers better track account costs.
We are reminded of someone using a chain saw to cut lumber, only to then switch to a micrometer to measure its thickness. The Lab budgeting process involves considerable "guesstimating;" its accuracy resembles that of a chain saw. The only question then is, "Why does management suddenly need to track our time this closely?" SPSE certainly supports management in prudently tracking their budget, but we are quite frankly skeptical that that is the real motive behind the accounting change. Let's face it--management here and elsewhere won't shy from using out-of-favor employees' time charges against them. The issue can be complex; even the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue of how salaried employees can be worked.
More Reports and More Uncertainty
The change to weekly reporting also increased the "Heisenberg
effect" for those 4,200 employees who formerly reported their
time once a month. Those employees usually turned their time cards
in a few days before the end of the month, guessing their charges
for 2 days a month. The uncertainty amounted to 2 days times twelve
months, i.e., 24 days a year. Based on some SPSE members' experience,
employees now have to guess about 1.5 days' charges a week, leading
to a whopping uncertainty of 1.5 days times 52 weeks, i.e., 78
days a year. Not only has the uncertainty taken a quantum leap,
so has the paper work which is now quadruple of what it was before.
Confusion over the smallest time units that can be charged is rampant: some organizations say they'll soon begin reporting time in hours, but leave can only be reported in half-day increments. Does that make sense?
Monthly paid employees face another problem--technically, they do not have to work 5 days in a normal week, their time must add up to the required amount only at the end of the month. Provisions for "comp time" have always been vague; we urge employees to check with their supervisors before explicitly charging only 4 days a week when they worked 6 days the week before.
SPSE as much as anyone wants the Lab to be a professional, yet relaxed workplace. The change from monthly to weekly time reporting puts a dent into our work environment. As we tried to point out, it certainly raises numerous issues. In the future we'll do more to educate employees about their rights and responsibilities under the Lab's time accounting system. We'll address issues like overtime pay for salaried employees, their right to time off to vote, the legal aspects of limiting time charges to half-day increments, and more.
We have already heard comments like, "I'm beginning to feel like a blue collar professional." The luckier blue collar workers have unions checking management. For LLNL engineering and science professionals, there is SPSE. / Name withheld
New Officers and Board Members
The SPSE Board meets at noon
on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the Lab. We encourage
members to participate. Call the SPSE office for more information.
1999 Executive Board |
||
| Officers: | Members: | |
| President Bill O'Connell | Jane Dignon | Larry Madison |
| President-elect Patrick Weidhaas | Rollin Harding | Lee McVey |
| Secretary Sandra Brewer | Meridith Keating | Tom Reitter |
| Treasurer Sue Koopman | Wayne Krause | Ralph Riviello |
| Norman Thomas | Kalina Wong | |
SPSE Asks Lab to Place LLNL's
Personnel
Policy Manual on the Internet
In December 1998, SPSE requested that the LLNL Personnel Policies
and Procedures Manual be placed on a publicly accessible website.
The University's policies are already available in this manner,
as well as those of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Susan Angstadt, of Staff Relations responded, "We agree that it is desirable to have LLNL Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual available to the public via the internet. To that end, we have put this project into the queue. Assuming there are no technical obstacles which would prohibit us from making this change, we hope to have the manual available to the public at some point in the future."
SPSE looks forward to that day.
This plot shows the "S-curves" of salary distributions for LLNL scientists and engineers for FYs 94 through 98. These curves are derived by ordering the salaries (from highest to lowest) of all 200-series employees at the Lab. The "percentile" for a given salary is the percent of 200-series employees whose salaries are below that salary.*
These data can be used in the following way: Take your salary from each of the five years listed, and plot each on the appropriate curve. By connecting your five data points, you can see the upward or downward trend of your salary compared to that of all other employees in the 200-series.
Note: FY99 curves will be published on our website as soon as the data become available.
The chart above shows the decrease in the number of term appointees, and the increase in the number of flexible status employees in the 200 and 300 jobcode series. The Lab implemented the flexible status policy in April 1998.
In April 1998, 9.8% of 200 series employees were term appointees. In December 1998, 6.1% were term appointees, and 4.2% were flexible status employees.
In April 1998, 3.3% of 300 series employees were term appointees. In December 1998, 2.0% were term appointees, and 1.7% were flexible status employees.
Note: additional charts of the other jobcodes are available on our website.
| T2 = Term Appt. 200s | F2 = Flex Status 200s |
| T3 = Term Appt. 300s | F3 = Flex Status 300s |
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