LLNL - The True Story -

  Carl Axness (former SNL retired employee) gives scathing review of SNL illegal lobbying: http://www.abqjournal.com/633395/news/sandia-corp-pays-4-8-million-fine-for-improper-lobbying.html Carl Axness · Polytechnic University of Catalonia As a retired SNL employee, I am not surprised. Upper management frequently gives contracts to retired upper managers and the labs are a convenient place for the M&O company to unload unproductive upper managers. It has always been unclear to me why the labs need a private company to "manage" them given the huge number of managers that the lab has, most of whom are there to give motherhood and apple pie talks. Of course, there is a strong republican bias at the labs which explains the lucrative contract going to Heather Wilson. Hopefully DOE will punish some of the responsibles 

About the all hands LANL purpose statement Everyone I know found this debacle to be either pointless or demoralizing. One person said that it makes them very sad to think that 70 managers actually spent six months to come up with nothing. Some have said that is an insult to all the people at the laboratory. Others said that it was just a waste of time and not to waste another second thinking about it, which of course is the practical thing to do. Many people are just confused about why this even happened or what the whole point was and are worried that if this gets out it could really hurt LANL. It does not look good to have an all hands meeting where we say we had to hire an outside marketing firm to figure out the purpose of the lab by watching videos of people gesturing about slitting throats, babies using diapers, geese honking, selfies and chocolate, octupi eating people, and dishonest facts about crappy cameras. This is then followed by the Director describing a one-page viewgrap...

Hanford whistleblower wins; Tamosaitis to receive $4.1 million settlement" "...Hanford subcontractor URS has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by former employee Walter Tamosaitis for $4.1 million..." "...He also insisted that the settlement agreement include no confidentiality statement keeping the settlement terms secret, so that others would see that “integrity, honesty and forthrightness will lead to justice.” "...The $4.1 million settlement with URS includes almost $1.4 million for lost wages and $1.1 million for emotional distress and mental anguish..." http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2015/08/12/3691323_hanford-whistleblower-to-receive.html?rh=1

August 13, 2015  The Independent Cherry Murray, former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been nominated by President Obama to head the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. Murray, an experimental physicist, trained at MIT and worked at Bell Laboratories before coming to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2004. At Bell Labs , she conducted research and held a number of management positions including senior vice president for physical sciences. At LLNL, she served as Principal Associate Director for Science and Technology. She became president of the American Physical Society in 2009, a year that also saw her leave for Cambridge to become dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She served as dean for a 5-year term. Near the end of that time, in 2014, she was called to the White House to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. When her term as dean ended, she remained at Harvard as Benjamin ...

Sandia Corporation Agrees to Pay $4.7 Million to Resolve Allegations Related to Lobbying Activities http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/sandia-corporation-agrees-pay-47-million-resolve-allegations-related-lobbying-activities Comments: The $4.7 million covers 4 years so that's a little under $1.2 million per year. That's not a big hit on a contract that's worth $2.4 billion per year. It's just the cost of business. August 22, 2015 at 11:41 AM    Anonymous  said... The full story is detailed here: http://www.law360.com/energy/articles/694247?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=section August 22, 2015 at 1:20 PM   Anonymous  said... Oh, dear. Will this have any negative effects on next year's executive bonus? August 23, 2015 at 10:12 PM   Anonymous  said... Just have NNSA pay this puny $4.7M fine. Hell, they just paid NM State (i.e. Susana in the Highest) LANS $70M fine. It's all about NNSA "protecting" th...

The first "Periodic Progress Report" is now available. It is beyond pathetic, it looks like it was thrown together in five minutes. It states some glaring inaccurcies and says how great things are. Do these people have any shame. A pure disgrace to the LANL workers, the history of the lab, and the United States.

Did McMillan pay the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi several million of dollars to give LANS a "purpose" statement? LANS doesn't even pay it's own safety and security fines and but it pays for this this? LANS is out of control. The rumor is that the contract is done and that DOE wants to move away from a for profit LLC model to a more service based it may be LLC but not for little or no profit. There are rumors that it could simply be given back to UC. Also with the accident at LANCE when the results come out there will be alot heads rolling. The purpose statement appears to be out of desperation, as that upper management team will be cleared away. The other rumor about that DOE has been very disappointed by the new management culture and none of the changes they hoped to happened occurred. DOE may be a bit slow but I have been told that they where not very happy with large increase in managers and decrease in performance and this will change.

Are women or minority managers at LANL or LLNL treated differently or less harshly for ethical indiscretions in the workplace? Comments: Anonymous said... Ask Beth. August 19, 2015 at 5:40 PM  Anonymous said... So her 11th hour departure from LANS was not a sign of special treatment? August 19, 2015 at 6:24 PM 

The infamous "Rank & Yank", a worker rating process that is being dropped by many big corporations but is still used at Amazon -- and the NNSA weapon labs, of course -- is detailed in the NYT article below. The article deals with the leadership vision and working conditions of white collar staff at Bezos' company. It's a long article but well worth reading: .................................. Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-...

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q3/purdue-selects-national-laboratory-and-industry-veteran-as-next-discovery-park-chief-scientist,-executive-director.html Will he last longer than Ed Moses at GMTO?

 Are they taking American STEM jobs from US citizens. "Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program's lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities."   https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform

The staff of the sister Labs LANL and LLNL, helped fight and win the Cold War and are responsible for ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear deterrent.  As sincere gratitude for their decades long collective service, these employees will for the second time, be packaged and sold for public sale at an auction to the LOWEST LLC bidder, the LLC bidder with the slickest talking points, or a combination of the two.  The failure of an LLC walk the talk reciprocating career understanding heard by these employees? Every man or woman for themselves. "Attract and retain"? If "retain" means 2 years of service perhaps, otherwise good luck with that.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever-donald-trump-continues-sexist-attacks-on-foxs-megyn-kelly/ You try to act like one and then get treated like a man, and the wagons circle. Look familiar Livermore?

29 top scientists including Sig Hecker, Sid Drell, Richard Garwin and others praise the Iran nuclear deal.  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/08/world/document-iranletteraug2015.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/world/29-us-scientists-praise-iran-nuclear-deal-in-letter-to-obama.html

These sound familiar.... http://inc42.com/buzz/employees-quit/

August 4, 2015 by Frank Munger, Knox News A complaint filed Tuesday in Anderson County Circuit Court challenges a government contractor’s authority to change the vested vacation benefit for employees at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge. The lawsuit against Consolidated Nuclear Security — a contractor team that includes Bechtel National, Lockheed Martin and other companies — was filed on behalf of Richard Michelhaugh, a Clinton resident who has worked at Y-12 for the more than 28 years. In the complaint, Knoxville attorney Greg Coleman proposes that the action be broadened to include others actively employed at Y-12 — as well as some recent retirees affected financially by the end-of-year benefit changes. The retirees reportedly lost the payout for vacation time that had been accrued but unused. CNS did not immediately provide comment on the lawsuit. There has been a firestorm of complaints by Y-12 employees and retirees about benefits changes since CNS took over management o...

More delays at WIPP http://www.abqjournal.com/621349/news/wipp-reopening-date-pushed-out-again.html

The word seems to be all around the Lab today that LANL will get notice of a contract rebid in a few weeks. Is this based on anything other than wishful dreams? Comments: July 31, 2015 at 12:19 PM  I head December but who knows. I also heard that Bechtel is no longer interested in being part of any rebid. Other "rumors" are that TCP1 will be terminated, U Texas and U of California could be interested, and that the the system could go back to non-profit. Of course this is all just speculation. July 31, 2015 at 6:42 PM     While it is certainly possible that TCP1 could be terminated (frozen) for those who have yet to retire, there is no way that TCP1 could be changed in terms of the payouts for those who have already retired from LANL. Pension laws don't allow it. Termination (freeze-out) of TCP1 would lock-in the service credit of those who have yet to retire. They would keep the accumulated service credits they have at the time of the TCP1 termination bu...

The press read the blog! http://www.independentnews.com/news/ed-moses-leaves-giant-magellan-telescope/article_8f116aee-3666-11e5-917d-3f74aae93541.html?mode=jqm This must terrify lab management.