LANL Workers Get Labor Rights in 2000

By Ian Hoffman
Journal Staff Writer
SANTA FE -- On New Year's Day, roughly 7,400 workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory will gain collective bargaining and other labor rights for the first time in lab history.
California Gov. Gray Davis on Sunday night signed a bill giving an array of labor rights to all University of California employees at Los Alamos lab.
The most dramatic of those rights gives workers at the federal nuclear-weapons lab an unprecedented voice in management. Workers will be able to challenge labwide policies before an independent panel in California and choose unions to negotiate labor contracts.
Davis' signature brings LANL workers under California's 1979 Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act and makes those rights legally effective at the lab Jan. 1.
California Senate Majority Leader Richard G. Polanco, D-Los Angeles, and Assemblywoman Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego, were dismayed to learn lab workers were explicitly excluded from California's labor laws in the 1970s. Lab employees also are not covered by state or federal laws because LANL is operated by another state university.
"I am delighted that LANL employees will now be covered by California's labor laws," Polanco said in a statement. "It was ironic that the workers who have spent their lives protecting our freedom have not had the protection of federal or state labor laws for so long."
Moreno Ducheny praised Davis for signing the bill that she co-sponsored with Polanco. "Governor Davis' action gives the workers at Los Alamos a say in how their workplace is managed."
The bill emerged after hearings in Santa Fe in which New Mexico Senate President Pro Tem Manny Aragon, House Speaker Raymond Sanchez and former Gov. Toney Anaya derided university executives for resisting lab worker rights from the 1970s to the late 1990s. More recently, lab and university executives embraced the idea, but their proposals to extend labor rights to workers by policy were outpaced by the California Legislature.