OK boys and girls, the fun is about to begin. LANL management is about to start "making plans for a Reduction In Force" something they have adamantly denied (refused) to be doing until last week.
We are smart people, we can come up with a "highly efficient" but "fair" way to make the "hard decisions". The Deer Hunter has nothing on us.
If we can find someone with P-card authority, we could buy one of these for each AD (along with 2500 rounds of "ammunition"). Anastasio could hold an "all-heads meeting for his upper management". He could pass these out, keeping one himself. This could be simulcast via LABNET for the staff. After Anastasio pulls the trigger on his own, if he survives, he would instruct all of his AD's and staff to do the same. If not, his second in command would step forward and repeat the procedure.
HR would be on hand to pass out pink-slips to the "unlucky ones".
Each surviving AD, or their (surviving) deputy, or a predetermined designee if all deputies of a directorate should "fail", would then call their own "all-head's" meeting for the their DL's and Division Staff who would be expected to repeat the process. GL's would be in attendance to observe but not participate.
By now, we should be up to nearly a hundred (somebody get the numbers, do the combinatorics for me?) very high paid employees who would never have left otherwise.
The GL's can then call all-heads meetings of their own, commit hari-kari themselves (or not) and then the staff, bolstered by the stoic performance of their upper management will be happy to participate in the final round.
A quick recalculation might show that in fact, the number of employees needing to be laid off has reduced significantly by the number of upper management leaving!
Now *that* is efficiency!
- Doc
7 comments:
How about instead of a 20% RIF everybody takes a 20% pay cut. There's no dead wood at the lab, right? If there was then management would have taken care of it before things got this bad, right? Right?
How about reducing the salaries of former managers who continued to get management level salaries ?
In the last RIF (95ish) several hundred of us signed a petition suggesting/offering just such a pay-cut (up to 10% at the time) and were rejected. It did not "address the issue" which was, at the time, described to be an imbalance of technical and support staff. The RIF didn't fix it, the resulting lawsuits compounded it, etc.
Yes, there is deadwood. The way the contract changeover was handled almost guaranteed that.
I do not like the term double-dipping (I was too young to take that option)... Those who retired on UC and returned under LANS have every right to do so. If, however, the process had not allowed for this to be automatic, many managers would not have re-hired some of their retiring employees. So called "deadwood". Deadwood happens at all ages and career phases as well.
This time around, I have heard suggested, a multi-pass "reaping" process.
1) Unfunded and underperforming.
2) Underperforming.
3) Unfunded.
With re-evaluation between each phase.
1) might be relatively easy if there are no quotas. If management is simply offered "this is your chance to thin your ranks".
2) might be a little harder as it is yet more subjective.
3) would be the hardest as it is unlikely that 1 and 2 would take more than 5-10% of the workforce.
This ordering might give the high performers a chance to either find a good internal slot or escape with careers intact. It might also give those who remain a chance to fill critical positions vacated by "managed attrition" and "underperformers" with "high performers". Not perfect but better than the alternatives maybe.
This is going to be a bad one.
- darko
Yes, this is going to be a bad one.
Not to dwell on our "misfortune" but it seems like the mean-time to another disaster is somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, depending on what your threshold for "disaster" is.
These all make my cut:
95 RIF
Wen Ho
NEST
Cerro Grande Fire
Pete Nanos
Bechtel
07/08 RIF
I don't live on the hill (though I used to) but my heart goes out to all those who already are or soon will be trying to sell their homes to nonexistent buyers.
I know a few who qualify as "deadwood" and expect this RIF will cast them adrift, but it looks like it will eject several times as much "heartwood" as "deadwood" to the loss of the laboratory and community.
Mostly "heartwood" has been providing Anastasio with his beloved "managed attrition" for over a year now...
I hope that all of us can be thoughtful of eachothers feelings as we go through this next wringer tits-first. No point in adding to the misery.
- Godelpus
I agree Doc, start at the top and work down. It has been done in industry... why can't it be done here?
20% of management could be identified for RIF first... just to prove that they *really do* "feel our pain" and to avoid 21% of staff needing to be cut to make up for their *LACK OF CUTS* .
Ha Ha "Godelpus", you are too fuckin' funny!
"Tits first".
I can feel it all the way over here in the next county... *that* has got to hurt!
With "Legal" and "Diversity" driving the RIF list, it's the over fifty white men who are prime candidates for the RIF. There will be no improvement to the producers vs. parasite ratio, and all the deadwood that got dumped from Bechtel Nevada will be in high cotton.
If you're a white guy without a PhD, you're at the top of the RIF list.
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