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?
Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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.