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"Show me the money." This is what employees told us in the recently completed employee survey conducted by SPSE. In the part of the survey, Section A, in which employees were asked to rate a large number of issues as to whether each issue was "no issue", a "minor issue", "some interest in issue", or a "major issue", seven of the top 10 major issues relate to pay and benefits. These include base salary (ranked # 2), the medical plan (#3), the retirement plan and savings (#4), vacation time (#5), the dental plan (#6), preventing increased costs and service erosion of health care (#8), and pay equity issues (#9). The growing salary and raise differences between management and non-management employees came in at #11 as a major issue, and the ranking system at #12. The order of the top five issues is the same in two different methods of analysis of the raw survey data: the percentage of total responses checked as "major issue," and the calculated average for the four possible responses for each issue. The next five issues are all in the top ten regardless of the analysis method, but their specific rank order does depend on the analysis method (rank according to the first analysis method is quoted here).
By a very large margin, however, the #1 issue for employees (79% of respondents marked this as a major issue, compared to 62% for the #2 issue, salary) is the continuation and maintenance of the DOE/UC contract. This concern was also reflected in the written comments. Many employees have clearly expressed their concerns to us about how the Lab's ties to UC may be affected, or even severed, by all the difficulties that have beset the Lab in the past year.
The other two issues that made the top 10 are accountability of management (#7) and concerns about the "brain drain," i.e., the Lab's ability to recruit and retain highly qualified employees (#10).
The written comments reflect the same ordering of employee concerns and priorities.
The survey was sent to nearly all 100-series, 200-series, and 300-series employees, a total of 4896 people. We received completed surveys from 417 people. The survey respondents were overwhelmingly white (84.7%), male (75.0%), FTE's (88.6%), over the age of 35 (88.8%) and with 11 or more years of service (68.2%). 60.5% have advanced degrees (32.8% Ph.D.'s). These demographics are a reasonably close mirror of the overall target population, which is 82.6% white and 67.1% male averaged over the three series. Even though less than 10% of employees responded to the survey this percentage is, nonetheless, more than twice the typical percentage response to direct-mail solicitations. The total number of respondents is more than twice the total SPSE membership (only 42 respondents identified themselves as SPSE members). Thus, it does not look like only one employee category --- the 100-series, for example, which has a larger percentage of female employees than does the 200/300 series --- greatly skewed the survey results. There is some uncertainty, however, in how well the respondent population samples the overall population because we did not collect data on the employee series of the respondents.
It is also interesting to note the issues that are the least concern to employees. On the bottom of the list --- in both methods of analysis --- is child care. This is true even for only the female respondents. The other issues in the bottom five, with the specific order dependent on the analysis method, are the dependent care benefit, commuting subsidies and pre-tax benefits, and SPSE seeking union affiliation. Indeed, in Section B of the survey, which required either a yes or no answer to several questions, 67.0% of respondents said yes to SPSE remaining an independent union and not seeking affiliation. On the other hand, 75.7% said they would like to have employee representation in the UC/DOE contract negotiations. The same percentage wants to decide what benefits are offered, and an even larger percentage say they want to have more influence in LLNL decisions that affect their job and work life.
The survey asked employees to tell us in their own words what is the one thing SPSE could do to attract them to join. We got a large variety of responses, including many who said they oppose unions and would never consider joining. Many others thought the dues are too high, and the largest fraction told us that they need to see a clearer personal benefit of membership.
We provide on the SPSE web site (www.spse.org) our complete analysis, in the form of a set of bar-chart summaries, of all the survey responses; the written comments are also summarized in bar charts. All the raw data, including the individual comments, are also available on the SPSE web site, so you are welcome to do your own analysis. /Jeff Colvin
Survey Results
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