Employees who are eligible to take the Voluntary Self-Selection Option Program may sign up beginning today (Feb. 12) at 8 a.m.
The VSSOP is a self-select option participation is entirely voluntary. It allows career indefinite employees to request consideration for separation with severance payment. Accepted employees will receive severance payment of one week’s pay for each year of continuous full-time equivalent service, up to a maximum of 26 weeks. VSSOP-eligible employees' applications will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.
VSSOP eligibility criteria:
• Full-time or part-time career indefinite employees working a fixed percentage of time as of Jan. 31, 2008.
• Minimum of one year of service based on last hire date.
• Not part of any group specifically excluded from participation.
• Employee must submit an application during the application period.
• Employee may be on an authorized leave without pay, except for personal leaves for the purpose of temporary outside employment as of effective date.
The VSSOP is not available to:
• Career indefinite employees working indeterminate-time schedule.
• Flexible term, retirees, postdocs, on-the-job trainees, post-college appointees, or any other non-career appointments.
• Employees on authorized leave without pay for temporary outside employment.
• LLNL key personnel, or parent company transfers.
• Employees dismissed pursuant to LLNL Personnel Policies and Procedures Section K separations.
• Employees who are part of any group specifically excluded from participation.
• Employee does not submit an application during the open application period.
Employees may sign up for VSSOP beginning at 8 a.m. today (Feb. 12) through midnight Feb. 26. Employees may change their decision within seven calendar days of submitting their application. In addition, employees may elect to participate in VSSOP, change their mind and then decide to elect again as long as that process falls within the application time frame of Feb. 12-26.
To find out if you are eligible for VSSOP, sign on to LAPIS.
To calculate your service to severance for VSSOP, use the calculator. The service displayed in LAPIS is an estimate only. All service calculations will be validated prior to your seven-day withdrawal period. Employees should not wait for recalculated service to apply.
The Voluntary Self-Selection Option Program (VSSOP), approved by the National Nuclear Security Administration, is part of the Lab’s 3161 Specific Plan for workforce restructuring.
For more information on VSSOP, see the viewgraph presentation.
21 comments:
I'm hearing by 9:30AM, Tuesday, 2/12 (opening day), it was at around 250 that had signed-up. Your "transaction ID number" tells you where you are in the queue.
Apparently not all of them came to the blog and voted. I still say SPSE should do their job and get people involved by sending out a mass e-mail with the blog URL on it.
Ok, everybody grab your transaction number and get in line:
http://www.af-moma.no/images/guillotine(0).jpg
With a generous UCRP monthly retirement annuity and now a fat LLNS severance check, I'll step around that guillotine, look back, thumb my nose, and wave bye-bye. The RMS LLNL has struck the iceberg and I'm on the first lifeboat away from the disaster.
February 13, 2008 7:53 AM
I wish I could join you in that lifeboat but unfortunately I have far to many years to go as a TCP-2 employee and am a long ways away from social security, which I'm sure all of us will need to pay our portion of our medical insurance.
As it stands now every day I go to work I feel like I'm walking on egg shells and on the verge of being IVSSOP'd. I no longer am feeling confident that I'll make the years I need to acquire the funds I need to retire. So, as I wait for the hatchet to fall I'm taking what little time I have left and starting to look for new employment outside LLNL to compensate for the loss of a once great UCRP pension plan. Understanding how well I got screwed by those in power it's become very evident that I'm one of those who will have to work until death. So be it.
Someday many more at LLNL will come to the same conclusion as soon as the light bulb comes on. They'll recognize the working class will have to welcome the global economy service oriented world of the U.S.of A. and when they do just maybe their understand how they're on the wrong end of the stick. At that time I hope the American people recognize they've been idiots for allowing the greedy corporate America giants to control them in this fashion and what we've become is slave labor to the controlling rich. When they do, just maybe they'll muster the intestinal fortitude to rise up and start an American revolution of some sort; resulting in the abolishment of those in power by breaking the backs of those in control. Nothing else will ever make the changes needed to once again balance the wealth.
If the people of LLNL are having a hard time, what about the people of lower incomes, people trying to get by working 3 jobs. Will this country become like Brazil, where the rich have to fly in helicopters to get above the slums? Is this America's future?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42332-2002May31
It sure looks like that's the way we are going. I did hear that some of ULM are being escorted from the parking lot to their buildings. I don't know if this is true but it kind of tells you they are the protected elite who have some fears and deservingly so. Two more years of this and security escorts will be expected.
New World Order
Brazil's Elites Fly Above Their Fears
Rich Try to Wall Off Urban Violence
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 1, 2002; Page A01
SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Michael Klein, a 52-year-old executive known as the Home Appliance King, switched off the lights in his cavernous office, took a private elevator to the gusty rooftop of his fortress-like corporate headquarters here and caught his evening ride across town -- in a helicopter.
Beefy bodyguards guided Klein into the dimmed cabin of his midnight blue Agusta A119 Koala. Within moments, it lifted off, joining other airborne limousines darting over the hazy skyline. Klein is one of hundreds of new helicopter commuters in Sao Paulo, the world's fourth-largest metropolis, where the rich and powerful soar high above exploding urban ills.
En route to his mansion in Alphaville -- a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100 -- Klein quietly stared out the window. His pilot clipped low over the honeycomb-like slums and clogged highways below. More than halfway through a nine-minute commute, the copter grazed over a cluster of inner-city prisons. A squad of machine-gun-toting guards stood near a perimeter wall, their gaunt faces squinting upward as Klein's copter buzzed by.
"The perspective is different from up here," remarked Klein, a graying hulk of a man and executive director of Casas Bahia, one of Brazil's largest electronics retailers. Over the din of the blades, he told a reporter that "it even looks beautiful sometimes. Up here, however, it is safe. Down there -- ." He paused, staring across the metal and glass horizon. "Well, it's another story."
Sao Paulo -- a city of 18 million, populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between -- is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world. As homicide and kidnapping rates have soared to record levels, civilian helicopter traffic here has become what industry executives describe as the busiest on Earth. Helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared with 10 in New York City, allowing the rich to whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church.
It is, sociologists here say, a sign of the way urban society in Latin American's largest nation is changing. Amid rising crime and overpopulation, the rich are retrenching into hyper-insulated lives.
In this sprawling nation of 170 million, sociologists call it the price of social inequity. Brazil has one of the most marked disparities of wealth in the world, with the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent. The disparity is particularly visible in Sao Paulo, a financial and commercial capital where many of Brazil's richest people live and work.
One result is city life dominated by fear. The homicide rate in greater Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, has more than tripled during the 1990s, to about 60 murders per 100,000 residents, compared with 7.4 in the Washington metropolitan area and 7.8 in New York. Already 63 kidnappings have been reported this year in Sao Paulo, up from only 15 during the same period last year, according to police statistics. The surge in abductions has produced a cottage industry of plastic surgeons who specialize in treating wealthy victims who return from their ordeals with sliced ears, severed fingers and other missing body parts that were sent to family members as threats for ransom payment.
Despite a lackluster economy, a $2 billion-a-year security industry is thriving across Brazil.
Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war. A wealthy Sao Paulo businessman, who spoke on the condition his name be withheld, said he allows his daughter to boogie at nightclubs only under the eyes of a commando turned bodyguard. In a city where the wealthy are known for ostentation, many are now buying low-profile economy cars to fool kidnappers and thieves.
"We have become prisoners in our own homes," said Ellen Saraiva, the elegant wife of a construction magnate, as she sat in her tasteful living room in a heavily guarded building in Sao Paulo's fashionable Jardims neighborhood. After a series of high-profile kidnappings on nearby streets last year, she and her husband paid $35,000 to bulletproof their understated gray Volkswagen. The armoring cost twice as much as the car.
"I pray to God every time I leave my building," she said. "I live in fear for myself and my family. One of my daughters is studying abroad right now, and as much as I miss her, it makes me feel at peace to know she is not here living through this nightmare."
Sao Paulo experienced an industrial boom over the past century, luring millions of poor Brazilians from the destitute northeast to settle here. Most traded destitute rural lives for urban misery, piling into ever-growing slums that have become dens for gangs dealing in drugs, kidnapping and arms.
Many of the wealthy have responded by moving into guarded, walled communities such as Alphaville. Only 7 1/2 miles from the city center, Alphaville is home to 30,000 of Sao Paulo's most privileged residents. It has three helipads and four entrances and exits, all monitored 24 hours a day.
Inside the compound, visitors are recorded by cameras at guard checkpoints in residential zones. In the communal areas, children can attend well-guarded schools and enjoy afternoon sports on fenced-in fields watched over by Alphaville's black-clad security guards. At night, on "TV Alphaville," residents can view their maids going home for the evening, when all exiting employees are patted down and searched in front of a live video feed. The local gym, which specializes in self-defense classes, is called CIA. To enter the local shopping center, customers must first pass through a guarded gate.
"The elite have made a decision. Instead of looking to better Brazilian society in general, they are abandoning it and finding their own personal protection behind guarded walls," said Teresa Caldeira, a noted Brazilian anthropologist and author of the book "City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo." "The rich are retrenching, restricting their lives in incredible ways and living their lives in an increasingly paranoid fashion."
Carlos Polacco, a Sao Paulo sailboat dealer, calls his decision to move his family to Alphaville in 1998 an issue of survival. The family bought its elegant, nautical-themed home here after the Polaccos' grown son, Rodrigo, was kidnapped while driving in the city. After he faked a heart attack, his abductors stripped him of all but his boxer shorts and threw him from a moving car.
"This is not about sealing yourself away from the rest of the city," said Polacco, who enjoys sailing to ports across the Atlantic seaboard. "But the violence has forced us to change our lives. When I thought about the chance of losing my son, I realized that we had to do whatever was necessary for our protection. This place gives you a chance to exhale."
A recent study by Veja, Brazil's largest newsmagazine, found that the number of Brazilians living in walled communities doubled to 1million over the past five years. Sao Paulo has more than 300such communities.
Heloisa Leuzinger, 40, an English teacher whose husband is a banker, moved into another closed community just beyond Alphaville about 18 months ago. As a woman who grew up in Rio de Janeiro and revels in urban life, she worries that her two young children "are growing up in a bubble."
"They go to school here, they play here, their friends are here," she said. "When we go into the city, the older one sometimes asks, 'Mommy, why is that man begging?' or 'Why do those kids live on the streets?' I try to explain to them about the social injustices, but I worry sometimes that they are living sheltered lives.
"But I have no choice but to risk that," she continued. "Their safety comes above all else."
The helicopter craze here started in the early 1990s, initially in response to safety concerns, but also to frustration with traffic. Public transit is woefully lacking -- the subway system is far smaller than Washington's while serving a population four times as large -- and highways are clogged and narrow.
As organized crime in Sao Paulo has increased, with the rich almost always the target, helicopters became a way to safely travel across town. Owning your own helicopter, however, is only for the wealthiest residents. The most basic models cost more than $400,000, and more lavish ones run $2 million and up.
But "helicopter collectives" have popped up. At Sao Paulo's Helisolutions, more than 100 members share the costs of purchase, maintenance and pilot time on a fleet of copters. It brings the price down to a one-time fee of $40,000 along with monthly expenses of about $1,500.
Klein uses one of his family-owned company's two helicopters. He hops in for daily commutes, trips to the company's distant warehouse and excursions to business lunches in the city, where nearby helipads are sometimes easier to find than a good parking space. Convenience is one reason, but safety more so.
"Here in my building, I know I'm safe," he said. "At home, I'm safe. But once I leave, I need other ways to have peace of mind."
Special correspondent Nadejda Marques in Sao Paulo and researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
I signed up for vssop on 2/14 and my transition ID number was lower than 250, so that number is not accurate for a total count.
I invite others to sign up, see where there number is, then opt out. It would be interesting to see if these numbers are sequential.
Indeed. It would be an interesting "game" to play, and might help anyone who is still on the fence waiting to see how many actually have opted for the VSSOP. I'm afraid that most who have already pushed the button did so with the real intention of getting the VSSOP and would be wary of losing their place in line - first come, first served, don't you know. Plus, the readership here seems to be a very limited subset of all LLNL employees. But if anyone wants to go through the exercise of signing up and then withdrawing, and then reporting the results here, I'm sure we'd all be interested. Even if it didn't work to show the real numbers, it'd be more info than we're getting from LLNS.
February 15, 2008 8:01 AM
You are absolutely correct. LLNS is terrible with the dissemination of information and that's why no one likes them or trust them.
Lets take the current VSSOP count or for that matter the current count of all career, term, post-doc and supplemental labor that's coming and goes at LLNL daily. All of these numbers should be _"live and up to date on the fly counts"_ available on the main LLNL home page for all to read, but no, what does LLNS do. They have their division meeting where they tell the supervisors to say nothing and keep their ears open for anyone that may be telling rumors or have suspicions of what may or may not be happening. I am surprised that LLNS hasn't established a toll free number such as 1-800-SNITCH for those who want to make brownie points. The word on the street is, everything's a secret, even who the names of those who got huge raise this year from now on. Sheeeeh!!! It's a secret.
We don't want the workers to know what's going on nor do we want them to know the long term plans for LLNL that shows real project numbers of each classification they wish to abolish or should I say reduced considerably. It's a secret and we must protect our empire, keep the people stupid and then when they least expect it we'll open the trap door and dump the load. It's all about cost savings.
The bottom line is this people. LLNS / ULM knows just how they're going to screw you and who they are going to screw but they won't give you any warning. So my question to you LLNL employees is this. How does it feel to come to work each day not knowing if there is going to be a tomorrow? How do you like the stress?
IHMO, that is what LLNL has turned into for anyone on the outside that may be reading this blog. It's no different than LANL / LANS. If anyone has been reading their blog you'll see where they warned us a long time ago of LLNL was going to turn into under the control of the non affiliated LANS / LLNS hijackers and sadly to say they to were absolutely correct and told you no lies.
The LAPIS transaction ID is not relevant to the application and is not not a true indicator of your application status. The date and time stamp are the important components because VSSOP is a FIRST COME first serve program. If you opt out, you lose your place in the application line.
Well the transaction ID could very well be relevant if it is a counter of how many have selected the VSSOP. Although it starts with "200...". I'm doubting that its a random number. So it might be helpful to know what number someone who signed up recently actually received. Either that, or someone who will play the apply/withdraw game.
The first-come first served game is really just a psychological ploy by LLNS to try to force people into a hasty decision. Do you really think they're going to get enough numbers to make the timestamp important? In reality, I'd be willing to wager that there will be absolutely zero number of employees get get turned down no mater when they happen to apply.
fyi,
Signed up on first day ...just in case. Withdrew, and shortly afterward, re-signed to restart 7-day window (still evaluating options ...). Transaction id: 202xx on withdraw ...transanction id for resigning ...bumped up by 1 (202xx + 1)
The transaction number does appear to be a counter. I know one person who applied earlier than I did and got a lower number as well as several people who applied later and got higher numbers. The transaction numbers got higher as time passed on Tuesday morning.
I'm guessing that a transaction number is also generated when someone opts out so, assuming some people opted in and then out again in order to see the count, the transaction number is probably not a reliable indicator of the number of people who applied and intend to leave.
It is entirely possible to not get the VSSOP even if you apply. The aggregate CAP numbers are much higher than the 750 number. This is true all the way down the line.
Organization A has a cap of 100 and is made up of twenty business units, all of which have a cap of 10. Total cap at the business unit level, 200 or twice that at the organization level. Imagine ten people sign up in each of twelve different business units. Every single one of those 120 people were within the cap for their business unit, bu 120 exceeds the total cap for Organization A. Net result, the last 20 people to sign up are SOL.
Likely? I have no idea. It is however very false to claim that it can't happen.
February 15, 2008 8:57 PM
The point is NOT to take the VSSOP but make management lay you off. See topic a few above this one Just say NO to VSSOP.
Fine, don't take it and risk having to stay another year if the involuntary does not in fact happen. Or a change in the EBA policy that removes the ability to be EBA forever, etc.
Life's a gamble. Assuming anything else is likely to lead to bad planing.
February 16, 2008 5:31 PM
"Fine, don't take it and risk having to stay another year if the involuntary does not in fact happen."
And how will this affect things? Only those who have a reason to leave should leave.
So lets say they put you on the EBA list next year. What does that have to do with anything that you should do now. If that's the fear then all 7,300 of us should put in for the VSSOP immediately. LLNS has seen to it that we're going to have this threat hanging over our heads every day we are there. We are all "at will" and "non of us" except ULM knows if we'll have a job tomorrow morning. Don't let their instilled fear become your guide.
As far as the EBA rules, I'd say you should bank on the fact that the rules for the EBA list are going to change, The rules will probably be as it was stated during the Q& A period of the transition. ( _No funding, no job, out the gate you go_.) This is what LLNS wants and it would have been done just that way until EX-UCULM saw 200 or more engineers and scientist in a pickle and were in fact slated to get the boot if LLNS had their way. At that time and because there were professionals on the hit list the EBA list went from a _good idea of how to down size LLNL_ to as so called _useful tool_. You know , protection of their own kind syndrome.
So there you go. It's a gamble and YOU have to figure out what's best for you. My advise is stay as long as you can, get out of debt and set yourself up so that if and when you get your pink slip you can walk out that gate with the international piece signs raise high in the air with a smile on your face and never look back. By doing this you'll be able to caulk up your LLNL experience as just one more unpleasant hurtle of life.
Please don't forget to take the time to say goodbye to your friends before you go unless LLNS has an armed guard by your side and escorts you out the gate on a moments notice. Typical SOP.
Anyone know of any new hires that came on board and are happy right now? Just curious. If I was a new hire in this environment, I'd just walk right back out the door.
February 16, 2008 11:48 PM
You have to remember. LLNL has gone from a career environment to just a job environment. You're only here for a wage. It's eight for eight and then out the gate. There's no more long term employment. The FTE's that remain after 2010 are the last of a breed that will never be seen again. You now have a JOB. One more reason to avoid all the months spent on ranking for pennies.
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