The University of California, already reeling under charges that its lax oversight let foreign spies steal defense secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is finding itself embroiled in another controversy: state legislation giving new collective-bargaining rights to 8,900 workers who staff the remote facility in New Mexico.
Earlier this month, the Democrat-controlled California Legislature voted along partisan lines to extend special workplace protections, previously reserved for employees at public universities in California, to the New Mexicans -- who, through a fluke of federalism, were covered by neither California, New Mexico nor federal employee-relations laws.
And while the vote represents a victory for labor activists in New Mexico, critics say it could end up costing California millions of dollars -- without directly benefiting one California resident. Higher personnel costs, critics say, could be a black mark against UC as the U.S. Department of Energy begins a review of the facility next week. The DOE is expected to decide by year's end whether to allow UC to continue running Los Alamos.
The bill now rests with Gov. Gray Davis; a spokeswoman says the governor has yet to decide whether to sign it.
If Mr. Davis does, then "right away, that gives us employee rights that are taken for granted by most workers in the U.S," says Brad Kemp, a Los Alamos purchasing agent who in February founded Local 1366 of the University Professional and Technical Employees union, which represents staff at other UC labs and campuses.
"Most workers have had labor laws since the 1930s to protect their rights, and California government workers have had rights for quite some time," Mr. Kemp says. "And we've been caught in a niche where federal laws didn't apply to us, because we are employees of a state government, and where California law specifically excluded us."
Mr. Kemp says he has already recruited about 70 workers as members; if Senate Bill 1279 becomes law, he says his union will push to bring the salaries of clerical and administrative employees closer to those at UC's Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories in California, where the university boosts workers' wages to adjust for the higher cost of living in the area.
But with UC's contract to run the national labs under unprecedented scrutiny, any benefit the workers gain may be short-lived. Other institutions are salivating at the chance to take over Los Alamos -- and its $1.45 billion operating budget, half of which goes to employee salaries and benefits. In 1996, the University of Texas tried unsuccessfully to submit a bid for the Los Alamos contract. It is expected to apply again. (UC's three national labs have a combined budget of $2.5 billion, from which the university draws $25 million in administrative fees.)
While the spy scandal -- in which a Los Alamos scientist is suspected of turning over secrets to the Chinese government -- has grabbed headlines, the workers' concerns have festered for far longer.
The lab was established in 1943 by Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb. "The fact is that Los Alamos National Lab was born out of secrecy, and for many years was a very insulated community," says Toney Anaya, a former New Mexico governor who is advising the Coalition for Los Alamos Employee Rights, an advocacy group. It sits "on a mountain with only one road leading in and one road leading out. There's a reason for that."
But a consequence of that isolation, Mr. Anaya argues, was "a lot of discrimination against the natives of the area, both Hispanic and Native American."
The lab managers -- appointed by the UC Board of Regents and unaccountable to any local authorities -- lavished pay and benefits on the brilliant scientists recruited for Los Alamos, but neglected the New Mexicans who did the lab's grunt work, he says. In fact, when the California Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act was adopted in 1979, Los Alamos workers were specifically excluded from its protections.
Three years ago, the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs agreed, in substance, with charges that Latino and Native American workers -- who can make as little as $14,000 a year -- were discriminated against during a 1995 layoff of 199 low-level administrative and support employees. Figures provided by the lab show that while 28% of lab personnel are Hispanic, Hispanics constituted 49% of the workers laid off.
Lab spokesman David Lyons says Los Alamos does not discriminate. And, as for the 1995 layoffs, "these were obviously very difficult decisions that were not taken lightly ... It has always been our goal to have a strong, vibrant, diverse work force." To that end, he says, the lab in 1995 established a high-level diversity office to promote "inclusion." That office supplements special committees established for employees of particular racial groups, and a diversity council, which advises the lab director.
It wasn't until 1998 that California legislators took interest in the workers' plight. Early that year, during a regional conference of the Council of State Governments in Sacramento, Mr. Anaya and New Mexico Senate President pro Tempore Manny M. Aragon dined with the heads of the California Legislature's Latino Caucus, Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D., Los Angeles) and Assemblywoman Denise M. Ducheny (D., San Diego). "When are you going to come out and visit the colony?" Mr. Aragon, an Albuquerque Democrat, says he pointedly asked them.
"And [we] said, `What are you talking about?'" recalls Ms. Ducheny. "It was sort of a realization." In May and November 1998, she and Mr. Polanco went to Santa Fe for joint hearings with New Mexico legislators over the lab, which is Northern New Mexico's largest employer. In February, Mr. Polanco introduced SB1279.
UC did not welcome the legislation; in an April letter to the senator, lobbyist Stephen A. Arditti warned that the California Public Employment Relations Board, which arbitrates disputes between employee unions and UC, "is unlikely to be able to enforce its decisions on employees and unions in New Mexico."
Mr. Arditti won an amendment to the bill requiring employee groups to pledge to abide by the board's decisions, and then took a "neutral" stance on the legislation.
Republicans, however, were anything but. Granting New Mexicans equal footing with Californians is "ludicrous," says Assemblyman Dick Ackerman (R., Fullerton). "A lot of companies have people working all over the world, and they don't try to impose the standards of their country and their state on them." The Polanco legislation "will cost the taxpayers," he says, and "have no positive impact on the ability to maintain that [laboratory management] relationship with the federal government."
Mr. Ackerman portrays the bill as a ploy by the Democrats to rake in donations from organized labor. Assemblyman Steve Baldwin (R., El Cajon) agrees: "It's a union power grab."
Ms. Ducheny sees it differently. "It is inherently unfair that [the workers] are not given the same rights as employees at their sister labs," she says. "It's just a good-government thing and an employee-rights thing."
Adds Mr. Anaya: "We've been trying to get changes made for years, and kept getting told to go home and quit meddling." California officials, he says, "were not good neighbors, but that is changing."
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