ABQjournal: LANL Needs To Face Reforms

Sunday, January 18, 2004

LANL Needs To Face Reforms

By Juan Jose Peña and Chuck M. Montaño
Guest Commentary
    The Hispano Round Table of New Mexico is a consortium of 43 member organizations that together represent over 36,000 individuals. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, similarly a major stakeholder in New Mexico, has historically behaved as though it were an island unto itself with little or no concern for neighboring communities, or those who reside in them. This has led to numerous contentious disputes over the years with many different LANL stakeholders, including employees.
    More recently, the Round Table has found itself locked in a struggle with LANL to bring to surface the true extent of employment bias existing there. Ask anyone who's worked at LANL for more than a few years and more often than not they'll corroborate this. In the late 1970s it was the American GI Forum who took LANL to task over this same issue.
    For over 50 years LANL has followed a familiar pattern of spin-doctoring and denial whenever questions of bias have been raised. Typically, we first encounter LANL efforts to discredit the critics, as in the recent Glenn Walp and Steve Doran fraud investigation fiasco. If pressures persist, then comes the feigned willingness to do what's right. But even before this, comes the study or survey that's used to gloss over and/or minimize the problem. If this doesn't work, then enormous sums of taxpayer resources are applied to litigate and stonewall. After pressures finally ease up, then it's time for retrenchment— going back business as usual.
    This is a recurring pattern at LANL, suggesting reforms that are lasting and meaningful— that challenge entrenched behaviors— aren't likely to occur willingly. This is why the Round Table recently became party to a lawsuit intended to press for such reforms. This has nothing to do with "nay-saying" or skepticism, but simply being a realist.
    At bare minimum LANL should be willing to institutionalize the same reforms the University of California Board of Regents last month approved for implementation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These reforms planned for Livermore will be implemented as part of a settlement agreement stemming from a pay disparity lawsuit filed against that laboratory. The university manages both LANL and Livermore, so one would think that what's good for Livermore should be good for LANL as well, right? In reality this has never been the case. For example, until January of 2000, LANL employees were specifically denied labor rights by California statute, even though Livermore workers possessed such rights themselves.
    Indeed, if the university has now changed shouldn't it then be willing to step up to ensure the same reforms now being slated for Livermore to reduce employment bias, are implemented at LANL as well? For example, if Livermore is required to eliminate subjective performance evaluations that provide little more than cover for institutionalized bias, shouldn't the same be done at LANL? Or will the university look the other way as it has so many times before, allowing LANL to once again play by its own rules? Case in point: its use of subjective factors in the infamous Welch Study to explain away much of the pay disparity existing at LANL.
    Clearly any solution based on this study would be similarly flawed, but this is precisely what LANL has done. Its recently announced salary adjustments, questionable as they may be and for a minimal number of employees, has been widely heralded by LANL spokespersons as representing the dawn of a new age in enlightened leadership. Would we assume as much if Enron executives were to offer to purchase devalued company stocks from bankrupt investors? Indeed, minimal gestures and hollow promises aren't the way to build trust.
    Peña is the current chairman of the Hispano Round Table and Montaño is the former chairman.