Anonymous wants to know:
What impact does the salary freeze have on your behavior?
What impact does the salary freeze have on your behavior?
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
It is for new posts. wait for them to be posted before you comment:
Last year I received he worst raise of my 30+ year career. A salary freeze will now free me from wondering if I am going to be shafted again. Will it cause me to change my work habits? No, I will grumble a little but I work with a team and if I slack off I will hurt them more than I hurt LLNS/NNSA/DOE.
But in the near future when I walk out the gate at retirement, I'll flip the place the bird and not look back with longing in my heart.
For example, it was shown in press accounts that LANL's Director Anastasio is compensated to the tune of around $1 million per year in total (LANS/UC, 20% bonus, etc). SNL's Hunter was compensated at about the rate of $2 million per year. A recent post on this blog also demonstrated some of the outlandish perks that lab executives like Brett Knapp make.
These lab salaries and perks are several times higher than those that Directors, PADs and ADs made during the early years of 2000s. The new lab system of management has been extremely profitable for anyone on the LLC executive team.
To this situation, add in the low raises and benefit cuts of the last few years for the non-management staff coupled with the recent announcement of no possibility of raises for several more years. This has greatly de-moralized many employees at the labs. Trust in the top levels of management is at an all time low from what I have witnessed. It was never that high before the labs for-profit coup, but the sense of mistrust and feelings of outright betrayal is now becoming very common within the employees who remain at these NNSA labs.
Meanwhile, the LLC upper management team attempt to sugar-coat the situation and claim that morale is good and improving. This only worsens the feelings of those who see what has occurred over the last few years.
The impact of all this is extremely low morale, which results in performance that may meet the largely meaningless PBI metrics that NNSA and the LLCs like to constantly create but this low morale is the kiss of death to any truly creative science lab. In our culture, "value" is largely demonstrated by compensation. I'm pretty sure that the recent 10% increase in salaries of all the profession employees who work for Google has all of those employees working very hard and their morale at extremely high levels.
The true impact of this situation will come in the next few year once the employment situation improves and housing rebounds. I expect to see a lot of the younger and middle aged scientific staff head out the front doors of the NNSA labs and look for other institutions in which to practice their creative talents.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0111/012011l2.htm