Dec 15, 2007

Updated RIF Information

Supplied by a reader on the previous post.

-Gus

_______________________________________________

Some RIF information:
487 applied for the Phase 1 SSP.
70 retracted their applications.
LANS required 750 FTEs leave to meet the optimistic budget scenario.

LANS refused to show anybody the DOE approved Phase 1 terms and conditions.

LANS remains silent on Phase 2.

Group Leaders sent funding estimate shortfalls to the Division offices on Friday.

Any guesses what sort of Christmas party LANS is planning?

16 comments:

  1. "Any guesses what sort of Christmas party LANS is planning?"

    Figgy pudding?

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  2. Heck no, they are planning on hosting all the top brass down at the Inn of the Anasazi or La Fonda, with open bar and full catered food. They will slap each other on the back and toast the new year.

    What are the rest of us going to do?

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  3. not a word for a month from fucking LANS... what a surprise.

    Senile Domenici can be proud of his boys

    ReplyDelete
  4. A Riffin' party, no doubt!

    ReplyDelete
  5. "LANS refused to show anybody the DOE approved Phase 1 terms and conditions."


    And LANS expects us to trust them?

    Oh, wait, I forget. They only expect us to fear them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Maybe the 70 changed after they saw the 450 number. I guess they figured the odds are not so bad now of being RIFed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm one of the 70 who rescinded. I did not change my mind, but rather, I needed the extra week to make up my mind. We were given very little time to see if we could make alternative arrangements and take the SSP.

    Even now, the ones who have volunteered for SSP must wait another week to see if they will be allowed to take it. So next Friday, Dec 21st, they finally receive formal approval. Then the lab shuts down completely until Wed Jan 2. The following Thursday Jan 10 they're gone.

    That's so little time to make a professional decision, and further evidence that the SSP is just for the appearance that volunteers were recruited first, before the real riffing started.

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  8. Nobody was recruited to take the SSP. The people who signed up either had a new job somewhere else, were close to retirement and made an informed decision, were fed up, or figured that they could get an additional week of severence from the RIF.

    What is problemmatic here is that LANS was able to get rid of people in order to make their fee. And yet, with declining budgets, the DOE and NNSA continue to let them increase indirect, provide no efficiency, or for that matter, do anything that would serve to reduce the cost of business. The RIF exercise will only make Los Alamos MORE expensive across the DOE complex, not less. This reduces the WFO opportunities which will drive the need for further reductions in staff. For each and every one of us who are here, we can expect our healthcare costs to increase, our work load to increase, and management working against us and not for us.

    We all publish here anonymously so as to avoid being placed at the top of the RIF list.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Has anybody at the DOE or in Congress
    thought about the amount of work that is not being done due to the additional $200M in annual costs that have resulting from awarding the contract to LANS?

    This is scandalous!

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  10. You are correct, we were not recruited to take SSP, that was made clear from my lower management that no one was to feel pressured. But if NNSA were serious about having the professional staff evaluate the SSP, then they would have allowed more time for an orderly evaluation and transition.

    For example, there's no reason why the volunteers could not have had more time to rescind or leave, while still then initiating the involuntary RIF process in parallel.

    This was just a "check-the-box" to the question, "Did you ask for volunteers first?"

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  11. Can you believe these guys didn't come to LANL? I wonder what nearby DOE Lab they're talking about?

    http://tinyurl.com/2oluhf

    "Bell Labs Is Gone. Academia Steps In.
    ...
    A vanguard group of universities is giving corporations greater access to ivory-tower laboratories — for a price. Stanford has paired with Exxon Mobil in a deal worth $100 million over 10 years. The University of California, Davis, is getting $25 million from Chevron. And Intel has opened collaborative laboratories with Berkeley, the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon.
    ...
    But corporations hope that universities can help them take innovations to the world faster and more efficiently. Last month, BP pledged to spend $500 million over 10 years on alternative-energy research to be carried out by a new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which will manage work done at a nearby Department of Energy lab and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
    ..."

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  12. "Maybe the 70 changed after they saw the 450 number. I guess they figured the odds are not so bad now of being RIFed"

    Don't know if I'm interpreting this statement as intended.

    Anyway, no one I know who volunteered thought they would be involuntarily riffed.

    Assume you are part of the RIF and will leave voluntarily or involuntarily:

    1. The RIF severance financial package is pretty much the same between voluntary and involuntary.

    2. Apparently, you cannot come back as a guest scientist and work for free under the involuntary.

    3. If applicable, you get rehire preference under the involuntary.

    4. You do not sign an agreement to not seek employment at DOE, NNSA, and its contractors for a year under the involuntary.

    5. Another few months of work under the involuntary.

    + ?

    ReplyDelete
  13. "Stanford has paired with Exxon Mobil in a deal worth $100 million over 10 years." - 9:22 AM

    This works out to about $10 M per year. With the high FTE rates at LANL and our bloated, bureaucratic policy-induced inefficiencies, you wouldn't get much work done at LANL for only $10 M per year. Even a wealthy oil company would find LANL to be an extremely expensive place to fund research (and, yes, I know that Chevron currently has a CRADA with LANL).

    ReplyDelete
  14. It costs $1M per day to run LANL.
    SO, the $10M annual fee to Stanford would last two weeks at LANL.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Only $1 million per day? Nah, 3:59 PM, it costs much more than that to keep LANL running.

    Think about it for a minute. One million per day for about 240 work days is only $240 million per year. But the LANL budget is almost an order of magnitude larger than this, being about $2.2 billion per year.

    LANL burns cash at the phenomenal rate of about $1 million per hour! How's that for gross inefficiency.

    A single snow day at LANL would eat up most of that $10 million of funding in a single day if was used to run the whole lab. It's mind-boggling, isn't it?

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  16. Oh, and furthermore, given our dismal budget situation, don't count on LANS issuing ANY snow days this winter.

    LANS knows very well what issuing a snow day means to the budget. If you want a snow day, better have some vacation time saved up.

    ReplyDelete

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