Amid contractors strike at nuclear
plant, lawmakers eye federalizing security guards
Contributed by Jessica Holzer
Amid a strike by the contract
security guards at the country's only nuclear-weapons assembly plant, House
staffers are
drafting legislation to federalize the force
protecting highest-security sites that make or store nuclear materials.
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), the chairman of the investigations panel of the
House energy committee, said he aims to
attach the legislation to the defense
authorization next month, setting up a clash with the Department of Energy (DoE),
which is opposed to transforming the
force into one of federal workers.
Nearly 550 guards at the Pantex
plant in
retirement security that came just as more
stringent fitness standards were putting older guards out of work.
By federalizing the heavily armed
forces guarding such high-risk sites, DoE would be
able to implement human resources
policies better suited to the heightened
security levels since the
"We ask them to protect our
most dangerous, most secretive weapons and yet we treat them like they're
third-class
citizens," he said.
The guards protecting "category
1" nuclear sites, such as the
laboratories, long have been employed by a
patchwork of private companies offering varying benefits and pay. The
Pantex guards work for BWX Technologies.
A 2004 report from a DoE task force recommended federalizing the guards as the
best way of transforming them into an
"elite
protective force" capable of repelling the most aggressive attacks from
armed terrorists.
"In principle, the best long-term
organizational foundation for achieving the secretary's objective is the
conversion of
existing contractor protective forces to
federal status," the former administrator of the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA), Linton F.
Brooks, wrote to a former deputy energy secretary, Kyle McSlarrow.
NNSA is the DoE
agency charged with overseeing category 1
nuclear sites.
In January 2005, McSlarrow
endorsed the report's findings and ordered that its recommendations be
implemented. The
department later abandoned the idea, despite
the conclusions of previous analyses, noted in the report, that federalizing
the workers would not increase costs.
In a recent meeting with House
staffers, NNSA officials said they believed that federalizing the protective
force would
result in lower pay for the guards and
therefore would be unpopular.
Asked for the DoE's
view on the issue, a department spokesman Wednesday said: "We have taken a
look at this issue
in the past in a number of studies.
The department's protective force structure, coupled with our security policy
initiatives,
are providing heightened levels of
protection for our facilities that hold our sensitive national assets in the
current threat
environment."
Critics of contracting the security
at the facilities cite the potential for work stoppages due to labor disputes
and argue
that contractors' drive to increase
profits could lead them to cut corners on security.
The guards themselves are trying to
federalize, believing that they would gain better retirement security and
greater
freedom to move into less strenuous
positions as they age. They have cited frustration over what they call a steep
decline in security standards due to
contractor mismanagement.
"Once that's exposed, the
people that have allowed those security degradations to take place should be
held
accountable," said Mike Stumbo, a Pantex
guard and the head of the council of unions that represent the DoE protective
forces.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked
the DoE inspector general to investigate the plant
late last year after employees
sent a letter complaining of lax
security standards and poor working conditions. The senator also sent a request
to the
Government Accountability Office
(GAO) last year asking analysts to review the cost of federalizing the
protective forces.
A spokesman from the lawmaker's
office said Grassley was not planning to introduce legislation.
Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services
Committee staff has contacted the GAO on the issue in recent weeks, though it
has made no formal request for
information. And a staffer from the House Energy Committee said several
lawmakers on
the House Armed Services panel have
expressed interest in Stupak's legislation.
Federalizing the protective force
would be a complex task, both legally and administratively, but Stupak argued
that it
was a crucial step for shoring up the
security of nuclear sites.
"I just don't think you get the
dedicated employees when it's privatized," he said. "They see it as a
dead-end job, not
rewarded or appreciated."