Go back to the
SPSE Home Page http://www.spse.org/
SPSE Newsletter #2, April 1997
Editor: G. Craig
P.O. Box 1066, Livermore, CA 94551
510-449-4846
How would you feel if you lost your job because of a technical oversight in LLNL's Personnel Policies and Procedures (PP&P) manual? It happened to a term employee (TE).
Recall Director Tarter's assurances that the results of the 1995 diversity survey would be taken to heart. He said that problem resolution would finally be looked at and fixed here at the Lab. You'd think that an omission in the Lab's PP&P manual would not stand in the way of making things right, especially when that omission involves violations of state law and University of California policy.
TEs Denied Job Access
If you are a TE, you probably have read the special policy and procedures pertaining to your employment. One paragraph of those procedures states, "A term employee is eligible to apply for any position that they are qualified for."
In May 1993, LLNL made changes in the posting policy that were to be only temporary. They were designed to give career indefinite employees (most of us) first crack at jobs during the 1993 staff cuts (VERIP).
State Law & UC Policies Violated
State law and UC policy require LLNL to inform employees of changes in conditions of employment before making the changes. Employees must be allowed to comment on proposed changes.
The 1993 changes were put in place without informing the employees, or giving them a chance to comment. Despite the fact that the PP&P manual has been revised several times, none of the "temporary" policy changes were ever noted in the manual.
Temporary for Three Years and Counting
The inevitable happened. In 1996, a TE applied for a position and was told his application would not be processed. The employee pointed to the policy manual that said he could apply, but the Lab refused to accept his application. The employee filed a grievance. It was not until then that the Lab revealed to him the "temporary" policy change put in place three years before his application. His grievance asked that LLNL follow the published policy, that he be allowed to apply for open positions for which he was qualified. LLNL refused.
Dispute Goes to Arbitration
SPSE argued that since the employee never received notice of the policy change, he should be allowed to apply for the job. A Lab witness, Carmen Estrada, from the UC President's Office, testified that, by state law and UC policy, the employee should have been notified. Despite this testimony by their own witness, the Lab argued that, since no mention of notice is given in the PP&P manual, the employee had no grounds to grieve the Lab's violation of the law. This, they claimed, was a matter for the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).
Arbitrator Critical of LLNL
The arbitrator severely criticized the way the Lab manages policies. She wrote, "The true essence of Deneen's grievance is that he was misled in a fairly significant way, by the printed Manual about his rights as a term employee and that there was no reasonable way for him to discover what those terms were. Both of his contentions are true: the printed manual was absolutely wrong about his rights to apply for internal postings, and it further appears that there was no easy way for him to discover that the terms of his employment were significantly different from those set forth in the printed Manual."
Employee Loses By a TKO
Despite these findings, the arbitrator concluded that there is no requirement in the printed PP&P manual for the manual to be kept up to date. Therefore, technically speaking, she concluded, there was no policy violation and she denied the grievance. However, she went on to comment, "This case illustrates, however, the counterproductive results of the LLNL's failure to implement even a rudimentary effective notice system for its employees regarding the terms of their employment. While there is nothing in the Laboratory Policies and Procedures or in its past practices that requires temporary modifications in policy to be printed in the Manual, even (as in this case) after three years and with no end to the 'temporary' change in sight, it is at best short-sighted and at worst violative of fundamental notions of fairness in the workplace for there to be no systematic way for employees to be warned that the printed Manual may be out of date." (Decision, Andria S. Knapp, Arbitrator, LLNL vs. Deneen, Feb. 10, 1997)
The employee was not allowed to apply for the job. He is now a former employee, and he has lost several months wages. Unfortunately, the grievance procedure, which is supposed to be concluded within 90 days, dragged out for more than 6 months. Concurrently, the Public Employment Relations Board changed its statute of limitations policy for filing an unfair labor practice, leaving the employee without recourse at PERB. The only thing left is to spend more money on an attorney to try to settle this matter in the courts.
Lessons Learned
Does this sound like problem resolution to you? The Lab violated state
law and broke UC policy, yet they were totally unwilling to fix the problem.
Because of a technicality, they do not have to remedy the damage done. /Bruce
Kelly & Richard White
A recent notice about an upcoming retirement seminar asks interested employees to provide an account number to cover the $95 registration fee. The seminar requires about 1.5 days of attendance during work hours.
By requesting cost accounts, management is given the ability to selectively provide this benefit-related opportunity. This is bad practice, if not a precedent.
To be sure, many benefits-related opportunities have long been handled inconsistently within the Lab. An outstanding example is education, which often depends on management largesse and a fat budget. Programmatic need is often, but not always, a primary factor in approving requests for training/education.
There are more "benefits" related examples, like leave without pay or comp time, that are often handled at the division level and, therefore, inconsistently across the Lab. There are good arguments pro and con for allowing local control of some of these, though the pro arguments diminish as employee mobility is thwarted. (More on that in a future article.)
Retirement benefits, however, have always been completely out of the hands of local managers. The retirement seminar clearly straddles the line between education and retirement benefits, but it certainly doesn't qualify as education/training necessary for job performance.
SPSE would like to know if anyone is denied the opportunity to attend
this seminar through lack of an account number for either the reg fee or
the time at the seminar, especially in cases where the employee has not
previously attended a retirement seminar of such scope. /Dave Lappa
Looking After the Taxpayers' Dollars
In the words of the Government Accounting Office (GAO), the DOE is a high risk agency involving billions of dollars subject to waste, fraud, and abuse. For these reasons, the GAO has been bird-dogging the DOE for the past 8 years. They have published at least 50 reports concerning shortcomings of the DOE management. Their most recent report made the local papers because it criticizes the DOE and LLNL management for a 1-2 million dollar violation in the last salary freeze.
Each GAO report on the DOE was requested by a congressman or other government official. These reports typically contain an official DOE response, and a GAO comment on the DOE response. As such, this series of reports is more informative about what is going on inside the DOE than the usual DOE-UC-LLNL publications.
The DOE Strikes Back
In 1993, the Secretary of the DOE told congress that the DOE was not in control of its contractors. Following this, the Secretary formed a Contract Reform Team which made 48 recommendations "to work better and cost less." All of these recommendations are listed in Appendix I of the GAO report, which is titled "Contract Reform is Progressing, but Full Implementation Will Take Years" (12/96).
Reading the 48 recommendations makes me wonder if the DOE is even in control of itself. Consider these five examples taken from the Appendix:
#15: Obtain quality performance at the least cost, consistent with departmentally approved program-specific factors. (My wife and I do this all the time.)
#35: Develop a departmentwide policy on pension fund management and oversight. (Remember the DOE's attack on UC Retirement System last year?)
#39: Reexamine the need for advanced funding through special bank accounts. (Interest bearing?)
#45: Institute training in litigation management techniques. (DOE lawyer off-sites?)
Most of the remaining recommendations are similar bureaucratese. However, one of them jumps off the page:
#10 Establish compensation incentives for senior nonprofit laboratory personnel.
Incentives?
Recommendation #10 piqued my interest because it makes me wonder what do I have to do to get a good raise at LLNL? Also, who qualifies? This recommendation is checked off in the GAO report as completed in 1995, i.e., the DOE now has a written policy for this. However, a hard copy of the "incentive policy" has yet to surface.
Salary Stewardship
What does #10 portend for scientists and engineers at LLNL? Here are four facts to consider:
1. The DOE is under siege because its 80 Major System Acquisitions (e.g., NIF) have experienced significant cost overruns or schedule delays, and 31 projects were terminated prior to completion.
2. DOE management complains that some laboratories have a "higher concentration of highly compensated scientists and related technical professionals." (GAO Report, RCED-97-33, Jan. 1997)
3. Line managers at LLNL have requested downward adjustments in both salary and classification and the elimination of "career" terminology. (Cost Cutting Initiative Task Force, Preliminary Report to the Director, March 22, 1996)
4. In a salary review with his troops, an associate director said that compensation may be changed from annual merit raises to non-base building bonuses.
Rewards for Reducing Operating Costs
If LLNL managers are successful at reducing the Lab's operating costs, it stands to reason that the DOE will give them a kickback as a reward for helping them "work better and cost less." Since salaries are an operating expense, this process will lead to pressure to reduce salaries. Managers will understand that "negative raises" to most employees will cut costs and eventually contribute to their "DOE incentives." With the help of Human Resources, they will work diligently to make this happen. By the time there is any widespread employee indignation, Recommendation #10 will have become institutionalized.
Downsizing Retirement Benefits
There is a pernicious long term consequence of using non-base building salaries. For the last 20 years, under the University of California Retirement System, the retirement pay that you drew depended on your last three year salary average and your length of service. If your initial salary offer was 1x and you received a 3% salary raise each year your salary would be 2x in 23 years. Under the Lab's new proposal, your base salary could still be 1x by the time you retire. The actuarial difference in your retirement package could amount to several hundred thousands of dollars to your family and estate.
Your New Employment Contract
DOE Contract Recommendation #10 is a deliberate wedge to widen the manager-employee
wage gap discussed in the Lester Thurow article in our last newsletter.
This mechanism is now part of the DOE-UC-LLNL contract negotiations which
are proceeding along without public scrutiny. /George Craig
"Alas, poor Yorick..."
The ultimate subversive strives to be creative and searches for truth. Try this at work and see what it does for your performance appraisal. In the Middle Ages, minstrels and court jesters were practitioners of this art. They were tolerated by feudal authorities because they were sufficiently entertaining and powerless. Consider this article in a similar light, a picaresque entertainment of no particular threat.
"...money doesn't talk, it swears..."
A recent newspaper article (Nancy Mayer, Oakland Tribune, February 28, 1997) described the widening salary and wealth gap between LLNL managers and workers. In brief, eight Lab executives now earn over $175,000 annually, the previous year only four did.
In addition, our top fourteen managers were recently rewarded with bonuses from DOE because the Lab had excelled in a review by that agency. I vaguely remember Newsline reporting how pleased they were with our hard work.
A Dollar is a Dollar
My father used to say, "I can't pay the electric bill with percents, they want dollars." Four percent of $175,000 is an impressive amount of bill-paying potential ($7000). Obviously, a scientist earning one-third of this salary, and an administrative assistant earning one-fifth, would see fewer dollars at a four percent raise. Even though uniform percentage raises favor those with higher salaries, many people can accept this system as being one of "proportional fairness." What rankles here is that both bonuses and raise percentages are skewed towards the highest wage recipients. The wealth that comes into the Laboratory is disproportionately allocated. A small group of individuals is growing wealthy on the basis of the work of many others, including workers whose earnings are flat. Consider the following, from The Fables of Aesop, edited by Joseph Jacobs, and illustrated by Kurt Wiese, 1950, published by the Macmillan Company:
"The Lion's Share
The Lion went once a-hunting along with the Fox, the Jackal, and the Wolf. They hunted and they hunted till at last they surprised a Stag, and soon took its life. Then came the question how the spoil should be divided. "Quarter me this Stag," roared the Lion; so the other animals skinned it and cut it into four parts. Then the Lion took his stand in front of the carcass and pronounced judgment: "The first quarter is for me in my capacity as King of Beasts; the second is mine as arbiter; another share comes to me for my part in the chase; and as for the fourth quarter, well as for that, I should like to see which of you will dare to lay a paw upon it."
"Humph," grumbled the Fox as he walked away with his tail between his legs; but he spoke in a low growl--
"You may share the labours of the great, but you will not share the spoil.""
Aesop lived about 2600 years ago, and the fables collected under his name are of even greater antiquity, and of Asian origin. It seems pretty clear that when it comes to "sharing the spoils" at the Lab, we are witnessing an ancient system at work, though wrapped with modern and much less forthright excuses.
Don't Managers Deserve More?
A manager friend (not an oxymoron) tells me how difficult his job is, involving undesirable travel and family separation, tedious interactions, serial bureaucratic crises, tight schedules, and little involvement in science. Doesn't this merit more pay? Sure, I agree, especially if management jobs had term limits, and if there was a solid correlation between good management practice and retention of a high paying position. I could also accept higher management salaries if admittance to this group were open to any Lab worker who had the interest, ambition, and ability to give it a try, even without "connections" to current officeholders.
Good managers do two essential things: by example and encouragement they bring out the best in the workers they supervise, and they develop or sell new income-generating projects for the Lab. For this they deserve more pay. Bad managers do the exact opposite: they sour and discourage workers under their supervision, and they fail to generate business. The Lab has both good and bad managers. Once again, workers can accept a "proportional fairness" in which good mangers earn more, and are immune to layoffs and workforce restructuring. Unfortunately, at this Lab there are too many inferior managers reaping these rewards.
Note that my definition of good management practice excludes any mention of corporate politics, turf battles, or acting as a henchman for a higher-up. To many, these are the essentials of management, which is why encouraging employees and developing (not stealing) new initiatives may be absent from their attention. The Russians call this type of manager an apparatchik. In a real world of human beings, there is always some small amount of manipulating the "apparat," or the operational procedures of institutions, in order to meet your management and project goals. When an individual makes this manipulation the primary focus of their efforts, then they are no more than a parasite motivated by personal ambition. It is insulting to think of such individuals reaping rich rewards at the expense of many others.
Good managers focus on the basic engine of corporate income generation: worker productivity, and new products. For this mutual benefit, workers can accept these managers receiving greater absolute rewards of equal proportion. Workers would like their management to have the spine to weed out apparachiks. If this were to really happen here then the nature and disposition of many of the worker-management fights in which SPSE consults would be completely different. This Laboratory defends terrible managers, with unlimited financial resources and vigor.
We've Got to Pay Them More, Otherwise We'll Lose Them
One justification offered by Lab spokesmen for the ballooning wealth of our managers is that we will lose the people on whom the Lab's good fortune depends unless our executive pay keeps pace with the blue-chip private sector. God save the king. I would like to offer a modest proposal in this regard.
We agree that the Lab must save money and reduce its overhead expenses, and that salaries are the big meatball in the crosshairs (sorry if you're not a WWII aviation fan). Additionally, we must accept the overwhelming reality of today's global labor market: falling wages have been accompanied by a flood of talent at every level. For some years now the Lab has been trawling through the abundance of easily available talent issuing from our own colleges and universities, and even from the finest of Russia's science facilities. Our own, just-completed workforce restructuring was aimed at this very thing, modernizing the workforce and lowering its cost. Why assume that this new approach won't have as beneficial an effect in the management ranks as it is credited with having in the workforce? Do you really believe that nobody can do our current management jobs for under $80,000 annually?
Is there something extraordinarily special about our managers, or their vision, that makes them individually indispensable for the Lab's future? Are we talking about the American civil rights movement without Martin Luther King, or the Beatles without John Lennon? The labor pool, both inside and outside the Lab, is rich enough to offer suitable candidates for any Lab job (even with clearance hurdles and the "weapon's physics" filter, especially after the Cold War).
Some fear that our best managers would quickly move on to higher paying corporate, academic, or government jobs if we economized on management pay. What would be the harm in that? Wouldn't it be wonderful for the Lab to be an incubator of executive talent, and to sow that talent throughout the ranks of decision-making America? Imagine how helpful this could be in future efforts to land contracts. How do you think Harvard gets its endowment? Imagine the enthusiasm it would generate among Lab workers, seeing real accessibility to a continuing flow of advancement through the ranks. Creating opportunity for individuals is how you spread your philosophy, your name, and your ideas. Consider the analogy to the spread of UNIX, IBM clones, and Microsoft products (competitive pricing, market share).
For the truly horrified, yes, the bad managers are left behind. But if they're so unappetizing that industry doesn't want them, then why should we be paying them any higher? We pride ourselves on being originators of new ideas and technologies; "Laboratory" is in our very name. Why not do the experiment? What have we got to lose? At the very minimum we have the same management at lower cost, and at the most optimistic we see improvements across the board.
"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
If you believe this modest proposal to reduce management salaries is completely beyond the bounds of reason, good taste, and even thinkable thought ("beyond the pale"), then it is because we have completely divergent beliefs about what kind of institution the Lab should be. /Manuel Garcia
Go back to the
SPSE Home Page
http://www.spse.org/