DATELINES
The Texas Syndrome FORT WORTH .TEXAS Charles Atchison of Azle, Texas, never thought he would be a whistleblower—at least not in 1979, when he signed on with the Houston-based Brown & Root, Inc.,...
...He took his case before the local NLRB, which ruled within weeks that Atchison had been dismissed illegally: He had been "properly reporting safety violations," an activity protected under a 1978 whistleblower statute...
...No exceptions," read a sign in the kitchen...
...Today, the soft-spoken, affable Atchison is struggling to clear his work record as a quality control inspector and win the back pay and court costs awarded to him by the National Labor Relations Board...
...C U B was heralded as a noble experiment that would reaffirm Wisconsin's BRENT NICASTRO Kathleen O'Reilly hopes to rescue Wisconsin's CUB...
...But to the U . S . Government, Rama is a communist or an anarchist—or both...
...I am for this academic freedom," Rama says, "but not only on the West Bank—also on the east bank of the Potomac...
...An occasional horn sounds as automobiles hurry past...
...Still, I'm going to try and see this all the way...
...It could be years before final decisions are reached, "I may win big down the line," Atchison says, "but in the meantime, I'm about to lose the first house my wife and I have ever owned, and I have a fourteen-year-old daughter who wants to quit school and go to work...
...Others are bound to benefit...
...Still, she feels uncomfortable...
...But Mercury of Norwood was told that Atchison was a "troublemaker," and within an hour he was fired, the N L R B noted...
...CUB was set up to change all that...
...She belonged to no political party, she didn't follow the news, and up to that day she had heard nothing of the arrest and imprisonment of the protesters or the vigil at the prison...
...The organization recently hired a new executive director with strong credentials: Kathleen O'Reilly, a consumer reporter and former attorney for the Consumer Federation of America, the nation's largest consumer group...
...And C U B appears to be putting its affairs in order at last...
...shortly thereafter, she hired on as a consultant for the utility companies, advising them with seminars on such topics as "current consumer threats to regulatory stability...
...Though it has attracted almost 60,000 members, C U B has failed to inspire grass-roots enthusiasm...
...The workers' lengthy petition spared no detail of their hapless struggle in the basement of a "free world" citadel...
...In three separate rulings, the NLRB found Brown & Root and two other nuclear contractors guilty of firing Atchison illegally...
...By the time he was fired, he had discovered that since 1977 the pipe whip restraints had been "installed to the wrong specs, and the N R C [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] as well as everyone else had missed that," he says...
...Atchison is currently employed by a small military contractor in Fort Worth...
...Mathias's committee is studying the union question and will submit a report to the full Senate in the next "three or four months," says one of his aides...
...Although C E O G activists say they're fighting mainly for human rights, they have plenty of down-to-earth complaints, such as "dangerous and unsanitary" working conditions and infestations of roaches and mice in the kitchen area...
...Their celebration lasted an hour and a quarter before police arrested them...
...But last April, he was suddenly fired and accused of "overinspecting and witchhunting...
...A Breach of Peace LONDON A February night, cool but not cold...
...she lives nearby and intends to spend the rest of the evening at the prison...
...I was on a holiday, visiting friends in London, during the sentencing and imprisoning of the New Year's demonstrators...
...O'Shea ordered Brown & Root to reinstate Atchison with back pay, expenses, and full benefits...
...To his students and colleagues at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, the self-exiled Uruguayan is a brilliant scholar of Latin American literature...
...We embarrass them," one woman says...
...People could throw a brick from a moving car...
...Bearing Down on the Utilities MADISON, WISCONSIN Every six months or so, Wisconsin residents find a surprise in the envelope that brings their utility bill: a leaflet denouncing the utility companies...
...The events smacked of a conspiracy to prevent Atchison from giving his testimony...
...These efforts have been met with indifference, hostility, and buck-passing by the bureaucracy of the Senate Food Services, the Capitol Architect's office, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and by the honorable Senators themselves, conservative and liberal alike...
...Rosalind Bayley is a twenty-seven-year-old Oxford graduate who works as a journalist in London...
...It was a British feminist march: peace through love, not fear, and it was the beginning of the women's peace camp that has remained at Greenham Common ever since...
...Individual scholars, writers' organizations, and human rights groups have appealed to Washington on his behalf...
...I have two children, and I have to get them to school, so there's not much I can do," she said...
...Brown & Root appealed, only to be overruled by Administrative Law Judge Ellin O'Shea, who accused the company of making "unconvincing, unbelievable, and irrational charges" against Atchison...
...It's depressing," says Bealle, who earns about $11,000 a year for her forty hours a week over the grill...
...The defective welds were showing up in pipe whip restraints manufactured by Chicago Bridge & Iron in 1979," Atchison says...
...Rama is the author of twenty books of literary essays and thirty anthologies and collections of literary criticism...
...Rama, however, denies having communist or anarchist leanings...
...Though it has enjoyed some success holding down rate increases, the infant organization has recently been rocked by scandal and mismanagement...
...Rama himself wrote Secretary of State George Shultz, who recently criticized Israel for imposing an oath of loyalty on university professors in the West Bank...
...But the day he was scheduled to testify, after being out of work for three months, he was suddenly hired by another nuclear contractor, Thompkins- Beckwith, Inc., for work at the Waterford III plant near New Orleans...
...As hard as we work, the Senators should do something for us " — C A L V I N G . Z O N (Calvin G. Zon is a writer for Press Associates and was for eight years a reporter at The Washington Star...
...Human Rights Equal Union Rights—CEOG," proclaim the buttons...
...As it turned out, Feitlinger's apprehensions were borne out a few months later, when CUB's former bookkeeper was indicted for embezzling more than $8,000 from the organization...
...The barrier fence around the military base is decorated with family ornaments—photographs and toys and babies' diapers...
...Just how this tangled state of affairs came about is not entirely clear, but some C U B insiders place part of the blame on the organization's first executive director, Sharon Chamberlain...
...To the restaurant workers, it was just another demonstration of the management's insensitivity—just another reason why the workers are seeking recognition of a union...
...The green-lettered buttons the workers pin to their starched white uniforms despite management disapproval often draw puzzled looks from tourists...
...The articles exposed C I A financial support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization of writers who shared an ant^communist stance...
...B E T T Y BRINK (Betty Brink is a free-lance writer from Texas who specializes in nuclear issues...
...For eight months, the organization drifted without an executive director at the helm...
...The fliers urge recipients to join the Citizens' Utility Board, which will represent them before the state's Public Service Commission when it determines gas, telephone, and electric rates...
...He told the workers they are not entitled to union recognition because Congress has traditionally exempted itself from the laws it enacts for others— such as the National Labor Relations Act and the Civil Rights Acts...
...The INS, in fact, has refused to allow him dence used to make the decision...
...some were owed to the utility companies...
...Public Service Commissioner Branko Terzic says this shortcoming stems from CUB's origins...
...I think you have a contradiction in terms here...
...Fifty-seven-year-old Mary Bealle, who has worked as a short-order cook in a Senate carryout operation for the past fifteen years, says poor ventilation leaves employees covered with a thin layer of grease...
...On New Year's Day, 1983, about forty women climbed a fence and invaded the base, singing and dancing...
...Informed that the organization was so deep in the red that it could not pay him immediately, Feitlinger packed up and headed for the exit...
...they were too obvious," says Atchison...
...A blond woman, about forty years old, called me over to where she was sitting at the prison fence one afternoon...
...CUB has also suffered from poor management...
...All to no avail...
...Camden Road, multiple lanes of busy city traffic, providing background noise and gusts of dirty wind...
...Atchison was scheduled to testify," wrote N L R B regional director Thomas Killeen, "thus rendering him unavailable for testimony...
...After holding temporary teaching positions at some of the leading universities in the United States, Rama received an offer to be a tenured faculty member at the University of Maryland...
...It's unbelievable what lessons have to be learned through experience...
...Twenty women sitting and lying on mattresses on the concrete sidewalk in front of London's Holloway Prison...
...I told B&R [Brown & Root] that all of those installations should be reinspected and I told my coworkers that I would go to the NRC if they didn't do something...
...They're trying to evade the issue, thinking that we'll get tired," comments Ruth Bennett, a six-year veteran of the Senate cafeteria and a member of C E O G . "But we've gone too lone and we've come too far...
...That means they support us," a twenty-five-yearold woman says...
...This upset the workers...
...A week or so after being dismissed by Thompkins- Beckwith, Atchison was hired by a jobber in Dallas, Mercury of Norwood, another Waterford subcontractor...
...others don't, and have left home to join the camp...
...It's a sellout," says one irate board member from western Wisconsin...
...In addition, they were warned that they risked dismissal unless they disbanded C E O G and withdrew their complaint to the I L O . Management also accused C E O G activists of spreading communist propaganda in the workplace...
...With the support of consumer advocates and organized labor, C U B was formed to plead the ratepayers' cause to the state's three appointed Public Service Commissioners...
...But Rama has received no reply...
...M A R C E I S E N (Marc Eisen is city editor of Isthmus, a weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin...
...I'm still in a daze about what happened next," says Atchison...
...After the workers went to the I L O , Mathias dashed off a worried letter to the Senate majority and minority leaders, noting that the Labor Department was "concerned that the allegations will be used at the next meeting of the I L O to counter the effort by the United States to obtain condemnation of the Soviet Union and Poland for their treatment of the Solidarity movement...
...But the workers at the U.S...
...More than two years ago, sixty women marched from Wales to the military base at Greenham Common, borough of Newbury, Berkshire, west of London, to protest the scheduled installation of American nuclear missiles...
...Many of the women at the camp outside the prison are young and have children, though there are participants of all ages...
...Federal, city, and most private employees were given time off to attend a big parade...
...It's a tightly knit group," Atchison's lawyer, Marshall Gilmore, says of the nuclear industry, "and in this case, obviously, Chuck was set up...
...Two bobbies wearing the familiar high police helmets stand around, shifting from foot to foot...
...The INS sent him an unequivocal reply last summer...
...Atchison directly corresponded to the date of hearing at which Mr...
...CUB's defenders maintain that for all its difficulties, the organization has built up a substantial membership and established a credible presence before the Public Service Commission...
...Quoting the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, the Government agency branded him a subversive and declared that he is "inadmissible...
...He writes on political themes only as they touch on the problems of writers in society, defending freedom of thought and expression...
...Two days after reporting to work, he was called back to Fort Worth, under subpoena, to give his testimony before the NRC...
...Chamberlain defends her new job as a good-faith effort to acquaint the utilities with the consumer position, but the current C U B leadership sees it as an act of betrayal...
...I think the board wanted to be strong, so they hired a weak leader," says one of the CUB's early boosters...
...It seems better to be active close to home...
...She comes to Holloway at night, getting a few hours' sleep before starting work early the next morning...
...But in its first three years, C U B hasn't lived up to its billings...
...I'm making about half what I would make in the nuclear industry and my new boss is restless 'cause I'm off so much dealing with these cases," he says...
...They don't know what to think...
...SHARON BUTLER (Sharon Butler is a free-lance writer in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...Critic at Large COLLEGE PARK, MARYLAND As one Colombian newspaper put it, Angel Rama is about as subversive as orange pound cake...
...Last fall, one prospective leader, Billy Feitlinger, came on board only to find the books in such a mess that he was unable to compile a monthly financial statement...
...He does not know whether he will be allowed to return to the United States...
...I've thought of going to Greenham Common to spend a week, but I just haven't gotten around to it," she said...
...As soon as he returned to work, he was fired...
...CUB, as it is known to most people here, has been inserting its fliers into billings since 1979, when it was authorized by the state legislature to do battle with the utilities...
...In February, Rama left for Spain on a Guggenheim scholarship...
...The McCarran- Walter Act, a legacy of the McCarthy era, prohibits any foreigner who is affiliated with communist or anarchist organizations from entering the United States...
...Denying him residence, it said, will "hurt this country" and "carry with it very unfortunate repercussions abroad...
...Atchison's work record at Brown & Root was filled with "good" to "excellent" evaluations, and he won several promotions to more responsible positions...
...In seeking recognition, the organizing group has tried every tack—formal petitions to the Senate, letters to every Senator, leafleting, and picketing...
...C E O G , the Capitol Employees Organizing Group, has a constitution, holds regular meetings, elects officers, and has drafted a sixty-nine-page contract proposal under which strikes would be avoided by binding arbitration...
...The lack of interest is "very embarrassing," CUB board member Peter Anderson concedes...
...It's very strange to be sleeping out...
...Immediately after her appointment, O'Reilly announced she would hold a series of public hearings throughout the state to drum up the sort of grass-roots involvement that CUB's sponsors had in mind when they originally conceived the idea of a Citizens' Utility Board...
...Before C U B , the utility companies would typically get their way by tapping sympathetic "expert witnesses" to drown out the testimony of any alarmed consumer who might protest an increase...
...He has condemned the assassination of Salvadoran poet Rogue Dalton by a leftist guerrilla group, the expulsion of writer Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba, the suppression of academic dissidents by communist bloc governments and military regimes in Latin America, as well as book banning in the United States...
...At a meeting called by management last May, employees were told that their grievances over working conditions would not be considered...
...Its experiences may provide some lessons for other public-interest reform groups...
...Rob Kennedy, a C U B board member from Madison, takes a longer view...
...I went several times to the prison to sit, for a time, and talk with the women camped outside...
...For more than three years, the people who prepare food and wait on Senators in their private dining room and cafeterias have been asking for something that is guaranteed to most American wage earners—the right to bargain collectively...
...Senate eating establishments were not: "Senate Restaurant Employees are not authorized to leave for the Redskin Parade today...
...Of the Senate's 200 food workers, 130 have signed union cards...
...His transgression was to report faulty welds in critical safety areas of the plant...
...This material, collected from State Department files and unnamed "agencies," is classified, the INS claims...
...This afternoon, Tom," she motioned to a man, about the same age, sitting nearby in deep discussion with two young women whose hair stood like wild mops above their heads, "Tom came by and told me, and I just blew up," she said, shaking her carefully coiffed hair...
...But I can sit here...
...And sit they will, until the missiles arrive, exposing the British government to the full force of its own female disobedience movement...
...A Dallas antinuclear group, Citizens' Association for Sound Energy, enlisted him to testify at local Nuclear Regulatory Commission proceedings last July concerning the safety of Comanche Peak...
...And she worries...
...I was told then by my supers not to report on vendor welds because they were 'outside my area of responsibility.' "When the defects popped up again in 1980, I was again told to keep 'hands off,' but I couldn't...
...The man who fired Atchison for the second time, Tony Orsini, says the forty-one-year-old inspector was dismissed because his "termination from B&R was not acceptable...
...Frustrated by the Senate, C E O G took its case to the International Labor Organization (ILO) based in Geneva...
...My hell began with this moment," says Rama...
...in fact, it's still frightening...
...It feels subversive...
...The day of hiring of Mr...
...Organized according to Congressional districts and governed by an elected board, the operation is financed entirely by its consumermembers...
...Subsequently, he asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to classify him as a permanent resident...
...He describes himself as a social democrat, and does not know how he came to be labeled by the U . S . Government as a subversive...
...Some enjoy the support of their husbands...
...She was excited, talking fast and puffing on a cigarette...
...In a recent C U B election, fewer than 1,000 CUB members even bothered to vote for the six candidates that ran unopposed for seats on the governing board...
...An old woman with a cane, a young woman with fringed hair dyed yellow told me the same story: They stood for the only hope they saw—an end to the military madness threatening the world...
...Once again, the board ordered a company to reinstate Atchison...
...It was an instantaneous populist movement set up by the state," Terzic contends...
...Unfairly dismissed from one job, Atchison now was being fired from other jobs because of the initial injustice to him, thus "perpetuating a violation of the [whistleblower law] ad infinitum," the NLRB ruled...
...He told his immediate boss at Thompkins- Beckwith, who gave him permission to leave...
...Mathias's fears were apparently overstated, but the ILO did ask, in language similar to its request to Polish officials, that Senate workers be allowed to "carry out normal trade union activities in full conformity with the principles of freedom of association...
...The women camped outside Holloway Prison this February evening are planning a twoweek stay, a vigil protesting the imprisonment of the thirtyeight women who were sentenced to fourteen days in jail for participating in the New Year's demonstration...
...K A T E WALTER (Kate Walter, a free-lance journalist in LaFarge, Wisconsin, returned recently from London...
...But Brown & Root wasn't interested in Atchison's findings, so "they fired the bearer of the bad news," he recalls...
...He belittled our organization with the workers standing right there in the back of the room," said Stu Smith, a Justice Department employee who has been advising C E O G as its executive director...
...The numbers changed, the group changed and yet stayed the same...
...They are charged with breaking the peace," one woman told me, "but really they are trying to keep the peace...
...Two of the companies may have engaged in a conspiracy against Atchison, the NLRB says...
...There are two rules at the camp: only nonviolent action, only women...
...When the Washington Redskins charged home early in February to receive accolades for their Superbowl victory, the nation's capital seemed to grind to a halt...
...The smoke gets all in my lungs because there's nothing to pull it out...
...Even the president of Colombia, Belisario Betancur, took up Rama's cause, pleading with Ronald Reagan when he visited South America last December...
...It was, he says, "a disaster...
...But Bailey senses the urgency of putting her body on the line...
...The NLRB ordered Thompkins-Beckwith to reinstate Atchison with back pay and court expenses...
...Progressive-era reputation as a laboratory for democracy...
...Even Commissioner Terzic, whose appointment was opposed by C U B , praises the consumer group, saying its technical presentations have influenced the commission's deliberations...
...The Texas Syndrome FORT WORTH .TEXAS Charles Atchison of Azle, Texas, never thought he would be a whistleblower—at least not in 1979, when he signed on with the Houston-based Brown & Root, Inc., prime contractor for the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant...
...I was very frightened the first night...
...This is closer to home...
...Rama is "one of the absolutely top scholars" in his field, says the International Comparative Literature Association...
...Serving Up Justice WASHINGTON, D.C...
...Chamberlain stepped down in July 1982...
...But the cases are far from closed, since all three companies continue to appeal the NLRB rulings...
...Maybe that's what it will come to," she suggests, "thousands of women lying down in the road...
...More and more as I talk to people who are on the boards of nonprofits, I realize they go through a period where they're damn immature and have to figure things out," he says...
...Rama guesses his troubles with the United States date back to a series of articles he wrote in the 1960s for the Uruguayan weekly, Semanario Marcha, condemning C I A involvement in cultural affairs...
...In response to one Senator's question during a recent committee meeting, Mathias referred to C E O G as a "socalled organizing committee...
...I live way on the other side of London, and I don't drive, so I just said to him, Take me over there right now!' " I asked her why she had come...
...He found unpaid bills that were three to six months old...
...Senator Charles Mathias, who heads the Rules Committee, has jurisdiction over Senate operations and employees...
...C U B claims to have saved ratepayers more than $75 million in 1982 by whittling down proposed rate increases...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
