By ZHEN HUANG
Los Alamos

First, I want to be very clear: I Support Vaccination. Ever since I was a school kid, the story about Dr. Edward Jenne was always fascinating to me, and his thinking out of the box that led to his invention of the first vaccine for smallpox has also inspired me all these years.

As for mandatory vaccination, I am not necessarily against it. However, I don’t think that LANL has a Management Mechanism required for the mandatory vaccination policy working to its goodwill, in addition to its built-in defects. 

The LANL Management mechanism is built upon a power-tiered Responsible Line Manager (RLM) system. There are two distinctive characteristics of the LANL Management mechanism. First, “Mandatory” Report Responsibility to the upper RLM, but “Voluntary” Service Responsibility to individual employees; second, the power-tiered RLM system operates exclusively in a black power box for decision making, with no lights shed from individual employees. 

Under such power-oriented Management Mechanism, it is not surprising what you have seen… 

There were times when a RLM could suddenly become visible around the workplace when those random drug test vans were in place around the lab, while he could totally forget about a sick employee’s FMLA paperwork for weeks. 

There were times when a RLM could bug you three times in an hour at the upper power RLM’s request for bookkeeping records, while he could leave your request for workplace ergonomic solution unattended for a full year. 

Why? It is because the Report responsibility to the upper power is Mandatory while the Service responsibility to the people is Voluntary. The RLM could get disciplined by his upper powers if any of his employees missed one random drug test, but could easily get away from his responsibility if his people’s FMLA rights were voided, or his people kept suffering ergonomics problems for extended periods, just by operating some magics through the black power box. 

Mandatory and Management, both start with “Man” – – – “the people”. Without a “the people” oriented Management Mechanism, a mandatory policy is not far from a dictating rule. When it comes to a health policy that has life-death implications for “the people”, such as the LANL Mandatory Vaccination policy, its destructive impact on “the people” could be foreseeably fatal.