Livermore Lab may chop 684 jobs
San Francisco Business Times - by Daniel S. Levine Business Times Staff Writer
An internal report from Lawrence Livermore National Lab is calling for the elimination of as many as 684 jobs or 10 percent of its work force by October 1997 as the lab restructures its staff to meet its changing role.
The report, the subject of a planned public hearing on June 27, broadly outlines the number of positions across a range of job categories at the lab and the number of positions that are considered protected among the 6,840-person Department of Energy laboratory. It places 475 positions as the minimum that will be eliminated and 684 as the maximum.
If the lab cannot reduce staff adequately through attrition and a voluntary incentive package, it will institute its first layoffs since 1972. The effort represents the first broad staff reductions at Lawrence Livermore since 1992, when 700 employees at the lab accepted a buyout.
"We need to get a job done on both the science side and the operational side," said Jeff Richardson, director of communications for the lab and part of the committee that put together the report. "We anticipated what those needs were and mapped it over our present work force to determine what positions are going to be extremely valuable and what are not going to be as valuable."
The current action at Lawrence Livermore comes as part of the Department of Energy's Strategic Realignment Initiative begun in 1993, an effort to slice billions of dollars from the department budget. Since then, 31,000 workers have left or been cut from the agency's facilities, including 151 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab last year.
Though not a total surprise, recent attention on the lab has focused more on staffing up then cutting back because the Department of Energy identified Lawrence Livermore as the preferred site for the $1.1 billion National Ignition Facility, which is expected to generate as many as 1,500 science, technology, manufacturing and construction jobs, including the preservation of 300 technical jobs at the lab.
Without the National Ignition Facility, the lab said employment there would shrink by 1,000 people by the year 2002.
The National Ignition Facility represents the next generation in laser technology and would replace the lab's Nova laser as the world's largest and most powerful laser. It would be capable of producing heat as intense as the core of the sun in a reaction that lasts one three-hundred-billionth of a second. It is expected that the laser will play a key role in the stewardship of aging nuclear weapons as well as helping replace the need for traditional testing.
But the National Ignition Facility and the cuts at the labs have not been good news to people who had hoped with the end of the Cold War that the lab would move away from its past as a weapons research center. They hoped the lab would focus more on new technologies that could solve problems too big for private industry while increasing the nation's economic competitiveness.
"What's been going on is that the labs have pulled way back on their tentative steps toward conversion and alternative mission and gotten additional funding under this Congress," said Ann Markusen, director of regional and industrial economic at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. "It's a retreat back under the nuclear umbrella. There's going to continue to be downsizing, but its going to be disproportionately on the non-nuclear side of the lab."
As an incentive to get employees to leave voluntarily, the lab is offering two weeks of severance pay for every year of service up to a maximum of a year's pay. The package also includes medical benefits for three years and up to $10,000 in educational grants for people who want to return to school.
Lab personnel will be able to apply for the voluntary package between July 15 and Nov. 27.
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