Did Parney have an all hands meeting last Wed. to discuss FY14 and if so, what was said?
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...
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...but you all need to cut back on your travel...because, hey, budgets are tight.
Explanation of why lab didn't pay $88m in to pension as they had stated they would in a previous all-hands. (lobbyists got a change in the pension pay-in formula snuck into the MAP21 transportation bill), so lab no longer "legally" had to do it.
Employees, however, had to go to a 7% pension pay-in because we need to maintain "substantial equivalence" with UC pension.
(No mention that that is an apples and oranges comparison, because the UC employee pension pay-in is pre-tax and LLNL is post-tax.)
Mention that UC is going to 8% employee pay-in July 2014.
LLNS Defined Benefit Plan Contribution Briefing
May 2 & 3 2012
Slide 26:
"Will employer contributions increase?
LLNS will be requesting DOE approval to increase employer contributions to $88 million"
Has Parney been trying to spin this recently, yes he has.
But the facts are that when they laid the pension contribution on us, they said they would be contributing $88m. Which they did not.
Correct. $88m employer contribution was briefed to employees.
Other interesting tidbits:
Parney said pension was 109% funded.
Projected LLNS Pension Pay-in Schedule:
2013: 40m
2014: 60m
2015: 80m
I was at this meeting, and have my notes. The 88m was briefed and was on a slide, as described.
They employ only a handful of personnel now as most have quit or moved back to LLNL. Of those remaining 1 actually does meaningful work, 2 are underemployed former managers with ZERO on their plate ( this is for the last 24 months people) and
one Office Leader that is nothing more than a Bureaucrat with an overly inflated ego of himself with little to no respect for those that are forced to work around him. The LLNL Office leader does nothing to promote work being brought to Nevada for LLNL, instead he discourages it by constantly pissing off the M&O contractor and the local Federal Staff.
My point exactly.
It needs to be a two-way street. Everyone takes a piece of the pain, and we get it back in the black. No problem with that.
I have a problem with the BS "substantial equivalence with UC" (when their pay-in is pre-tax, ours post-tax, ie 2x theirs), LLNL playing actuarial games with their contribution (allowing them to not pay it) and gambling on future rates, while employees have to pay ever-escalating pay-in, and the employee contribution continues to rise and will never go back down (per comment at an all-hands).
We need a clear, transparent read on where the pension is at, shared sacrifice to fix it, regular updates on our progress towards the goal, and no games.
Parney commented that he keeps getting all these pension questions, if he just did the above that would take care of it.
At the pension contribution meeting, the problem was laid out, and the solution too. It was sold to us as shared sacrifice. I think everyone was concerned, but clear about the issue/solution, and ok with that.
The deviation from that initial story is where the trouble came in.
Did LLNS, Parney, and DOE buggers deliberately orchestrate a pension payment bait and switch?
Did TCP1 member employee contribute $40M last year to a pension plan that its partner, the US government did not see the need to contribute it's half?
Why was it collected if it is not needed? If it is needed why did the government not pay its share? Is this true?
If so, LLNL employees should reject his leadership, wholesale. If so, he is not truthful and is unfit to be followed.
It appears that at first he promised that if LLNL employees acquiesced to significant, large salary reductions for renewed employee TCP1 pension payments to cover a portion of the dubious TCP1 shortfall that the government would pay its equal share.
(An aside -- TCP1 is currently 120% overfunded. The government appears to have declined to pay its share of the shortfall. Pensions do not return excess contributions to heirs. TCP1 has returned to historically normal returns. Pension excess is owned by the employer.)
Now Parney appears to serve up an ruse why our partner bailed out but we must continue with our half anyway. If so, this kind of leadership should be ignored. By his actions he has proved himself unfit.
In defense of this apparent bait and switch The Penrose cites the lie of the need for substantial equivalency to UCRS, which unlike the solid TCP1 is currently underfunded by 15% and striving to achieve full funding. To achieve this, UC employees pay half of the shortfall and UC pays half of the shortfall. Meanwhile TCP1 has no shortfall. Yet it penalizes employees with an unneeded contribution that the govenment partner, the party responsible for TCP1 solvency, sees no neec to make.
If this it true, that the goverment sees no need for current contributions to an overfunded plan, how can The now Reeking Penrose, in good conscience, continue to ask for contributions?
If the facts above are true, it appears that Penrose Albright is a liar and and cheat, and that he should be ignored and shunned. He must feel the pain or he is not going to act on your behalf.
If this is true.
At the bottom line, we have to contribute more (which is essentially a pay cut) while the company is contributing less than it is supposed to.
And I can't believe that we're trotting out the "substantially equivalent" words again, Parney. You do realize that those are fighting words for everbody in TCP-1, don't you?
You really need to do something, Parney.
"Substantially Equivalent" is triply not true:
UC employee pension pay-ins are BEFORE-taxes.
LLNL employee pay-ins are AFTER-taxes.
Huge difference.
UC is putting in their employer portion.
LLNL is ducking theirs (and gambling on the future)
LLNL pension is OVERfunded at 109%
UC pension is UNDERfunded at 85%
Does anyone know what LLNS put into the pension in 2012?
We (employees) started contributing in 2012, LLNS said they were going to put in $88m.
How much did they actually put in for 2012?
As an aside: I feel odd asking this on a blog, this information should be easily available on a website. It's bizarre how we have to piece together details about the pension from little asides Parney drops during all-hands or when he answers questions.
Name calling doesn't advance your argument, nor our knowledge or understanding or credibility or progress on any front.
Let's try to keep it on the facts.
This blogs been more informative about LLNS little secrets than anything you'll ever get from your managers and it's been that way before the scumbags LLNS and LANS took over and always will be. Want to know the dirt, come here and tell it like it is for the PUBLIC to read.
It bothers me too that Parney seems to always be very annoyed that people want to know factual things about the state of our pension.
If he just put the facts out there on a website, or a quarterly mailing to us, then fine. But they don't. And anytime we get any visibility into the pension, it's clear they're playing games.
I wonder if Parney had 25-30 years vested into our pension if he might feel/act a lot different.
Have a sense of deep stewardship, instead of annoyance.
For us, it is our retirement. We have no Fed Pension (like Parney has) or Bechtel bonuses/whatever he gets (tough to know, since, again, it's not public). TCP1 is our retirement, so obviously we care a lot about it. Why is that so hard for Parney to understand...
Parney is UC, so he gets his bonus from them.
September 1, 2013 at 2:15 PM
No, he gets his bonus from LLNS, of which he is President, like all the other "key personnel." He gets his pension, which is neither TCP1 nor TCP2, from UC.
If you look through the UC Regent minutes on ucop.edu you will see from May 2011 joint finance/DOE Lab committee...
"The (UC) President be authorized to expend, for the following purposes and in the following amounts, from the University’s net share of Los Alamos National Security (LANS) and Lawrence Livermore National Security (LLNS) LLC income earned between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011, the following amounts:
Supplemental compensation and other payments (including accruals) approved by the Regents for certain LANS LLC and LLNS LLC employees..."
Did DOE actually approve this amount?
Not biting. If so why was this not made clear? No it we get no information and that can only be for one reason and that is they are hiding something. Sorry the trust is gone between management and the workforce and it is never coming back. It is us vs them, class warfare, winner take all, perception is everything reality is nothing. I do not know who you are but you need to wake up the real world and get with the program, in this system you are a lion or a gazelle, a manager or a worker.
Exactly, yet we're paying more than our full contribution, while the lab ducks it's full contribution.
You're using one set of calculations to make us contribute and an entirely different set of calculations (based on a lobbyist inserted change to how pensions are calculated inserted into a transportation bill called MAP21) to allow you to "legally" duck your full obligation.
The BS and weasel-wording you management guys engage in is sickening.
Whatever they pay you, it's not worth living a life of constant lies and spinning. Some day you'll realize that.
Only in the way Bechtel does layoffs. There is a ton of added management fat that could be easily cut...especially now that we have way fewer employees. But the lab continues to merrily hire new folks on overhead.
That argument is disingenuous and a typical scare tactic. Let's put together an employee committee and figure out where to cut in order to make our pension obligations. I think it would resolved in short order.
Remind me, what happened to the last overhead surplus.
September 4, 2013 at 1:45 PM"
It went into the huge salary increases of managers and the extra people from the LLNLs brings into cover for the three years. There is a formula to maximize overall profit which a combination of the fee and "leverage profit". The leverage profit is how much extra you can get out by moving people into the new company, getting building contracts, extras and anything else you can legally get away with. NASA has been destroyed this way, we are in the process. The entire military is next.
How would either of you know?
Salaries are no longer public, so we have no idea what salaries/benefits managers are receiving.
Seems both of you are speculating.
Please don't insult our intelligence.
We also know that a % of a big salary is more actual dollars than a % of a small salary.
September 5, 2013 at 8:12 PM"
What on earth? What planet are living on, leveraged profit is now standard practice anytime a private or LLC runs a former government operation. LLNL's is no different. You are the one living in the land of fiction. As for the managers salary this comes in 2 forms. (1) The actual pay went up and they get a bonus. The min bonus is 50k the max is 500k, of course this is just rumors since we no longer know what the salary is but there are leaks, not to mention that a number of them have much nicer cars, clothes and vacations in the last 5 years. By much nicer and mean really nice (2) The number of managers has grown since the contract change. There is a plot that was done about a year ago and it was even posted on this blog showing the large increase in the number of managers.
Finley if you really do work at LLNL or LANL just look around you, have you seen one improvement? The workforce is now demoralized and does not trust the management, a number of the best people left, and we never get any kind of clear information. These are facts how can you deny them?
Given that the data on that LANL plot is now at least 1 year old and even more staff has fled this demoralized institution over the last year, the ratio of managers to worker-bees must look even worse today!