Out of 52 voters,
- 28 have never contacted their congress person in 2007
- 20 did it fewer than 5 times
- 2 did it 5 to 10 times
- 2 were a pest!
The sad truth is
- There were only 52 voters? When the blog was started, I expected a traffic jam!
- 20 people would not even care if they were run over by a bulldozer.
6 comments:
I'll tell you why I didn't.
Because I feel that Congress was a major reason behind the rape of LLNL. Asking them for help would be like asking a burgler to help retreive your stolen TV.
Bush didn't do this, no president bothers with details like lab operations. The career folks in DOE and congress did it and will never be held accountable.
What damage congress causes, congress can repair. They may not
hear us now and may not be able to save those being RIFed soon but if our voices grow louder, they will pay attention in Nov 08. The reason
congress has their way is because many people do not persist!!
For some employees, there is no further reason to contact congress, they are just going to leave the lab and be done with this fiasco.
NNSA/DOE played the cards out..the game is over. The best and brightest have already left the building, or are preparing to. I guess that is what LLNS wanted, to mob out the workers and replace them with Bechtel folks. Not much you can do about that. There are laws in Europe about replacing workers in this way, but not here in the USA.
The people that should really be angry are the taxpayers. The huge capital investment in hiring and training LLNL employees is just being squandered. Not to mention the security clearance fees invested in the RIFed workers, or the added security fees that must be paid for the bechtel new hires.
7:54,
You are right - and people are leaving, both Flex and Career. I don't want to witness this disaster anymore and won't risk the life I've built by getting laid off, so I am out the door tomorrow off to greener pastures and I know several other people in my area who have done or are doing the same. Someone told me we were like rats jumping off a sinking ship and I take no offense to that - those rats are going to be the ones who survive.
i think the reason you didn't see a larger response is most people understand that what is happening at the lab has been anticipated for years. Not only that, but they understand that the restructuring at LLNL and LANL and the angst it has created is really small potatoes. Large defense contractors dump the equivalent of the entire LLNL workforce routinely.
Face it, a few thousand people moaning about their "lost retirement" and poor management will never be a debating point during an election cycle.
The previous commenters, at least to me, have part of the story right.
Here are a couple more likely pieces.
1. Employees at LLNL, for many reasons, are not people who would contact their congressman or form a team that would give them effective power against Congress or even management.
2. Congress can repair the damage, but only if they know about it and if the damage is presented to them in terms that they care about. For instance, strengthening LLNL will gain you 10,000 votes in the next election because we have checks ($2,300 each) from 10,000 people. These checks will be used as campaign funds for you or your opponent. The threat implicit in the last sentence is too crude to be useful. The point is that the congress person has to see it as being in their own interest to help with the cause.
3. The critical problem at the moment seems to be that Congress is no longer willing to devote as many dollars to nuclear weapons as they were in the past. The secondary problem seems to be that DOE/NNSA wants to curtail work for others at national labs. (I am involved in talks about creating diversified research organizations near but not in national Labs. We will see how this goes.)
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