Contributed by thief:
As the screws are slowly turned on the federal budget....has anyone heard any decent layoff rumors recently?
As the screws are slowly turned on the federal budget....has anyone heard any decent layoff rumors recently?
The budget has a 20% decrease to DOE office of science, 20% cut to NIH. NASA also gets a cut. This will have a huge negative effect on the lab. Crazy, juts crazy. He also wants to cut NEA and PBS, this may not seem like a big deal but they get very little money and do great things.
Comments
Wait, I thought I had tenure!
do NOT go through a 'Layoff'. Their contracts are just terminated and let go ... I don't think they (LLNS) consider these as a layoff.
Given the rising costs that have been generated by both NNSA and the LLCs, this could result in some staff layoffs later in FY 2011. Stay tuned...
The labs are one, vast "turkey shoot" to the good ol' Bechtel Boys who now run these labs for a tidy profit. They own the place and will run it exactly to NNSA specs... which is to say, straight into the ground. Compliance and risk aversion is all that matters these days, as the recent APS article so aptly states (Thanks for contributing those relevant comments, Sig!)
Regardless of all this, morale at the labs has actually improved a bit as more staff decide to finally give up and go through the motions of pretending to do science that matters under the burden of a huge, bloated bureaucracy.
Many of the very best scientists have long since left these labs for saner and better managed institutions not overseen by a politically connected and corrupt "construction company" (aka Bechtel). The upper management teams appear to be fine with that.
Should we all take this as an opportunity to apply our can-do to these challenges, we could see some very kool type weapons work shift into our arena.
Carpe chance.
Now that the labs are run by corporate types like Bechtel and BWXT, it's easier to just fire people for "cause" and hustle them through the exits when the sheep herd needs a bit of thinning. Only the few union employees at the labs seem to have anything close to what you might think of as "tenure".
If you don't want to worry about being laid off, then work hard, keep a "can-do" attitude, and follow all the rules to the letter. It's as simple as that.