Is a NWS Reorganization Coming?

To all my friends and former students in the National Weather Service (NWS), I want to wish you good luck in your negotiations. To NWS management, I hope that negotiations will not be conducted following President Reagan's strategy used with air traffic controllers. According to the Seattle Times, the NWS has canceled its union contract.

Dan Sobien, President of NWSEO, and crew do fine work for this nation. The weather "enterprise" is changing for sure, but you won't be able to replace the human element, and NWS management should be (and probably is) exceptionally mindful of social science research related to high stress (and often rather boring) jobs that require community connections, local and scientific expertise.

Think about triage at a hospital that requires minimal staffing levels. Let's try to be realistic here.

And how's that search for NOAA leadership coming? Seems important at the moment.

I've long been a member of educational unions myself, first in Florida and then in Oregon, but find myself for the last two years a member of middle management. In this role I've been both frustrated by and honored by the role that union management at my institution plays in securing employee rights of both the #LCCEA and #LCCEF.  I grew up in New York, and as a teenager worked for my father and uncle in their non-union sheet metal factory and learned how to appreciate the idea of labor rights by seeing how employees were not necessarily treated well. I still worry about how former Senator Rick Santorum's efforts to largely privatize the NWS a few decades ago, aided by some large private weather corporations, may be back on the table.

I've been a proud supporter of both NWS management and employees over the years, and was proud to work with so many great individuals in collaborative projects involving NWS/NOAA employees in  education, satellite and data services, and line employees in collaborative research projects in Oregon, Colorado, Washington DC, and the Southern Region. The telling situation of nearly 700 vacancies across the NWS puts a strain on workforce. What is the breaking point, I ask as an outsider?

Collaboration is required for unions and management to work together. I hope that these coming negotiations will be good for the NWS, its employees, and the mission of the NWS which is designed to help protect the public. That's all of us.