Wednesday, March 26, 1997
Editor's note: Trying of the lawsuit filed in response to the 1995 reduction in force at the Laboratory began March 3 in Albuquerque. The Newsbulletin will provide highlights and related information about the trial throughout the proceedings.
HR group and team leaders testify
In testimony Tuesday, Lab Human Resources team and group leaders testified on how the reduction in force was conducted in the division and why plaintiff Evelyn Jacquez was selected for the RIF.
Anne Khoury, former group leader for training and development, testified that all group leaders looked at their groups and tried to define the best possible team to meet the present commitments and future goals within the organization.
Khoury was the first witness who appeared in the fourth week of the trail heard by First Judicial District Court Judge Jim Hall as the Lab presents its side of a case in a lawsuit filed against the Lab alleging that 102 plaintiffs were improperly terminated during the 1995 RIF.
The Human Resource group leaders met, reviewed their matrices and placed people's names on sticky notes and stuck them to a board to be potentially placed on the RIF selection list.
Khoury told jurors the RIF process was a distressing time.
"I was very upset. I felt this was a body bag count, " she said. "I knew these people and their families. Some were my friends and neighbors."
Khoury told defense attorney Dave Davenport that no one at the division level or in the director's office changed any of the scores. She also said there was no criticism or mention of the memo that Jacquez had sent to Laboratory Director Sig Hecker and it did not influence her decision to place Jacquez on the RIF list.
Khoury said her decision was based on performance appraisals, team appraisals, notes, teaching and customer evaluations and letters, all of which still exist. None were destroyed.
Upon cross examination, plaintiff's attorney Morty Simon said that it was perhaps a bad move that Jacquez had been promoted because her performance had not really changed. But Khoury said Jacquez was not performing at the senior training level and she was rated against the other SSM 2s.
Upon re-directed examination by Davenport, he asked if there was a plot in 1993 to promote Jacquez so that she would get a poor performance appraisal and be selected for a RIF in 1995. Khoury answered no, they reviewed the four criteria and based decisions on those guidelines.
Manny Trujillo's former group leader, Tim Thompson, was the next witness called. He testified that he tried to find Trujillo a couple of jobs, but Trujillo was not interested. He said that he received input from team leaders about how employees should be rated.
Upon cross-examination, plaintiff attorney Carol Oppenheimer said that according to his deposition he did not rate individuals. She asked Thompson, who now works for a private engineering firm, if his work was vying for DOE dollars. Thompson said the firm had Laboratory contracts.
Defense attorney Scott Gordon asked Thompson if he was responsible for individual rankings.
Thompson said he used index cards for each individual and ranked each individual on their value to the organization. He testified that he had to go through and see who "scored easy and who scored tough."
Thompson said that some team leaders were very generous in their ranking and gave many individuals perfect scores. Trujillo's team leader was a generous rater, Thompson said.
"The team leaders helped the process, but I was ultimately responsible," he testified.
Just before lunch, team leader for training and development Lyn Berrigan testified about how she ranked individuals on her team and why Jacquez was chosen.
When questioned by Davenport on how she felt about it, Berrigan was choked up. "We were colleagues," she said, "We were friends ... at one point."
To fill out the matrix, Berrigan said she used performance appraisals and personnel files. She said she also reviewed individual monthly reports that employees did about their accomplishments and goals. Berrigan said she checked with other divisions and found one customer was unhappy with the work that Jacquez's team was doing for him and he said he was not going to use them again.
Berrigan said she sat in on some of the training sessions that Jacquez taught and that Jacquez was reading the material to the class directly from the training manual.
Berrigan continued her testimony after lunch citing several projects that Jacquez had not completed. She said that Jacquez left one project hanging just before Berrigan had to present it to senior managers. Berrigan said she could not locate Jacquez and found the project unfinished. Later, Berrigan found out that Jacquez had taken the week off because she worked more than her allotted part-time hours the week before.
Cross-examination became heated when plaintiff attorney Simon questioned Berrigan about her removal as team leader.
Simon asked her if she recalled a conversation with Mike DeMaria and Larry Gibbons about how upset she was about her office being cleaned out after she returned from medical leave.
"That's just not true," she stated. "My office is still there, come and see it, my drawers are still full."
Berrigan continued to explain that she had been given the opportunity to cross-train in the employee relations office when she came back from surgery. She said she is not a team leader anymore.
Simon continued his cross-examination suggesting that the reason fellow team leaders provided negative information about Jacquez to Berrigan is that they were rated against her in the final RIF decision.
Testimony continued into late afternoon Tuesday, with Katherine Brittin, director of Audits and Assessments, taking the stand. The trial continues all week in Albuquerque; closing arguments may begin next Monday.
--Kathy DeLucas
Safety theme of all-managers meeting
Monday's all-managers meeting in the Administration Building Auditorium began with Chemical Science and Technology (CST) Division Director Alex Gancarz speaking about the Operations Working Group's efforts to make the Integrated Safety Management plan easier to understand.
Gancarz acknowledged that even some members of the Laboratory Leadership Council do not fully understand ISM, how the Lab is going to implement it and what the milestones involved are.
He said part of the problem lies in there currently being so many goals and measures at the Lab regarding safety that sometimes it leads to confusion. He added the OWG has reduced the number of goals related to ISM to two, to do work safely and to provide operational excellence.
While the OWG has outlined the measures to be used for doing work safely, identifying the measures to be used for operational excellence has been much more difficult, Gancarz said. He added he hopes the OWG will have the operational excellence measures identified within the next several months.
Phil Thullen, program manager for ISM, then spoke about the line management safety responsibility chain, which details who is ultimately responsible for a worker's safety. The primary responsibility for an employee's safety always lies with the line management chain, he said. The chain extends from the employee all the way up to the Director's Office, with that employee's direct supervisor second in the chain of responsibility.
Thullen emphasized that when an employee works in a facility owned by another organization, responsibility for that employee's safety remains with his or her direct supervisor. He also said the facility manager still has the authority to set the work standards and norms for that facility.
Thullen added mechanisms already are in place to resolve conflicts should an employee's direct supervisor and a facility manager from another organization disagree on whether that employee can perform the work safely.
Michael Huvane of JMJ Associates, based in Austin, Texas, detailed the findings of a survey conducted last July and August of Lab contractors (mainly those with Johnson Controls World Services Inc.) regarding perceptions on safety issues. Huvane, who began his presentation with the premise that one can have a zero-accident/zero injury workplace, said those surveyed perceived an atmosphere of fear and paranoia at the Lab relative to safety matters.
The contractor survey results also revealed a pattern of low morale brought on by many perceptions, such as employees not having any input on new procedures and feeling like second-class citizens, a double standard between management and employees regarding safety, and a reactionary, incident-based and punitive approach to safety at the Lab.
The employees even questioned Lab management's motivations for pushing safety, said Huvane. He added incentives and disciplinary actions for those who follow and violate safety rules will not achieve an injury-free workplace.
While noting that compliance procedures are important, Huvane also said compliance never produces good safety judgment. "Lab leadership must transform safety from an organizational priority to an organizational value," said Huvane. He also said in his dealings with other organizations, there was no correlation between higher safety standards and reduced performance or higher costs.
Huvane also pointed to some of the steps that JCI recently has taken as part of its efforts to improve safety, including a management walk-around program, the formation of a safety leadership team and a requirement that all new safety procedures must have employee input before they can be implemented.
Walt Kirchner of the Laboratory's Department of Defense Programs Office (DoD-PO) then briefed the audience on the Program/Line Project, created to foster ways to improve communication between program and line management and the ways by which projects are carried out.
Kirchner said the Program/Line Action Team has come up with four ideas on how to improve in these areas: require joint planning exercises between program and line managers to facilitate general funding agreements for projects, infrastructure and capability development; update and codify management's roles and responsibilities, including the mechanisms needed to improve communication; require written agreements between group and project leaders for projects of $250,000 and more to improve project execution and communication; and institute a mandatory project management training plan for all new and current project leaders (to be done on a prioritized basis).
Kirchner noted that four joint planning pilots currently are being done at various sites around the Lab. Complete information on the project and the ideas mentioned above is available at http://www.lanl.gov/Internal/organizations/programs/pd on the Web.
--Ternel Martinez
Lab Web site has world-renowned fan
Lab scientist Paul Ginsparg of Elementary Particles and Field Theory
(T-8) now can count one of the world's best-known physicists among the fans
of his World Wide Web site xxx.lanl.gov,
which is an archive for physics and mathematics papers. In a March 22 New
York Times article on the Web ("Stephen Hawking, Wired for the Web,
Is More Switched on Than Ever"), Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University's
Isaac Newton Institute talked about a new computer that allows him to communicate
on the Internet, providing him with access to front page science news as
well as scientific research literature. Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig's
disease, notes in the article that his favorite site on the Web is xxx.lanl.gov.
Ginsparg, who established the site, will discuss automated archives for electronic communication of research information during a talk, "Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village," at 3:45 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in the Physics Building Auditorium.
Some people already have begun their pilgrimage walk to Chimayo. Thousands participate in the annual event, and many of them walk along heavily used roads, such as NM 502 and U.S. 84/285. Please be extra aware of your surroundings when driving on these and other nearby roads during the pilgrimage period, which runs through Friday. |
ISM component to be implemented in April
The Laboratory will begin a new "Management Safety Walk-around" program in April as part of the Labwide implementation of performance requirement LPR 307.01-0, Performance Assurance. The program is but one component of the Integrated Safety Management Program that was approved by the Lab last year.
The walk-around program is derived in part from walk-around programs already in place at TA-55 and the Accelerator Operations and Technology (AOT) and Engineering Sciences and Applications (ESA) divisions. It mainly involves having managers (usually deputy group leaders on up) walk their respective work areas to make sure Lab safety expectations are being met. The program is coordinated by the Performance Assurance Team, which was created last January to help the Lab effectively implement ISM.
Jim Loud of Internal Assessments (AA-2) and PA Team Leader said the real objective of the program is to have Lab management better work and communicate with employees to make their jobs safer. "This is not an attempt to catch employees doing something wrong," he emphasized.
Leaders of those organizations and facilities that already perform walk-arounds have said that it really adds value to their safety and work programs, Loud added. "The Department of Energy and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board are familiar with TA-55's walk-around program and have expressed satisfaction with it."
Under the program, Lab leaders of those organizations considered "low hazard" must walk their areas at least once a month; leaders of organizations considered "high hazard" must perform the function more frequently.
The dates of the walk-arounds and the persons who performed them must be logged in a database. The managers also will enter those activities they feel are noteworthy of praise from a safety or productivity standpoint, as well as those areas they feel need improvement, Loud said. The team currently is determining who should have access to the database.
If a Lab leader sees an area that he or she feels needs improving, that person must go first to the individual directly responsible for that area and relay that concern. If for any reason that person disagrees with the Lab leader's assessment, the issue goes to the next level of management for resolution.
Training on how to correctly perform the walk-arounds is scheduled for April 7. Director Sig Hecker and Nuclear Materials and Technology (NMT) Director Bruce Matthews are facilitating the training session. Loud emphasized that Lab leaders should go through the training before performing walk-arounds.
Additional information on the program is available at http://srv2aa.lanl.gov/msa/msa.htm on the Web. (NOTE: Some of the links at this Web site require Adobe Acrobat Reader). Or call Loud at 5-8719.
--Ternel Martinez
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