This week, several dozen employees at the Spokane Mining Research Division, a branch of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, were notified they’ll be losing their jobs.
The letter assured them their layoffs are not performance or conduct related.
The employees are now on administrative leave and no longer have access to their building.
It wasn’t the first round of layoffs at the Spokane agency. Art Miller was a contract engineer in January when he received his termination letter. He talked with SPR's Doug Nadvornick on the day he got the news.
Art Miller: I’m an engineer, Jack of all trades engineer, I have several degrees. And I was hired as a researcher at this NIOSH facility, used to be the U.S. Bureau of Mines. My expertise is air quality, I do lots of different things, but my main one is air quality.
The government sent me back to school so that I could get a PhD, you know, because that's part of a government program to improve the quality of the researchers. So I went back to school, got my PhD and then I became like, you know, the NIOSH guy for air quality. And so I worked out here in Spokane for many years and mostly the last 20 years or so was focusing on air quality, diesel emissions, silica dust, that kind of stuff, stuff that's harmful to workers.
Doug: Did you work specifically for the agency or were you a contractor working for the agency?
Art Miller: No, I worked for the agency. I was a government employee, hired in 1988 and worked for the Bureau of Mines for 10 years before they closed and then more, not quite 10 years. And then when they, when NIOSH then opened with a mining research facilities, I joined that group and then I've been working for NIOSH under the mining division since then.
And then when I retired, I got cancer, which is a whole long story. Then I contracted back as a consultant to my old team because they hired some new people, young people, and I had this 30 years of experience, so they wanted me to, you know, be helping those young folks get up to speed. So I mentored and advised and, you know, edited, wrote papers, that kind of researchy stuff for the last two or three years. And then that contract ended abruptly. You know, I got a... Well, actually, I went to check my email one day and I couldn't get on the email. I'm like, okay, that's kind of weird.
Doug: So when you were laid off, was it still in the Biden administration? Or when you got your notification, I guess, as well?
Art Miller: Oh, no, no. It was the beginning of the Trump... I mean, within the first month, he made these executive orders, and one of them was to discontinue the contracts, federal consulting contracts, in particular, people exactly like me who were consultants. And I don't know what the rules were for who got it and who didn't, but in the Health and Human Services, which is sort of the mother bear of the agencies that I worked for, NIOSH is under the Health and Human Services, and lots of people in Health and Human Services lost their contract. And when I lost mine, I thought it was a glitch.
And so I wrote to the guy. There's sort of like a middle company that hires contractors like me to provide them for the government position. So I wrote to the guy that I deal with, and the middle guy said, is this real? I mean, is this a mistake? And he goes, oh, no, a whole lot of people that work through me just lost their contracts today. So I wasn't singled out by any means. It was just kind of a broad brush thing. Let's get rid of all these contractors, save some money. And what I found out later was kind of interesting is that my contract was saved for $50,000. So they saved the government $50,000 by getting rid of me. What they didn't say is that I only had $1,000 left on my contract.
Doug: Did it come as a surprise to you?
Art Miller: Yeah, actually, it did. It did. I think of our jobs with health and safety as being kind of important jobs. And maybe that's just me being full of myself. But I really think that why would anybody want to get rid of us people who are trying to keep workers safe? So I just assumed that we would be saved.
Doug: So you were retired anyway. So how does the, I guess you only lost $1,000, so maybe it wasn't a big financial hit for you?
Art Miller: For me, it wasn't a financial hit at all. I wasn't working for the money. I was working like many NIOSH people do because I'm committed to the mission. And when I left that team, I wanted that team to succeed in the things they were doing. And so I contracted back to help that team.
I didn't contract back to make money. That wasn't my purpose at all. And I think our lab has struggled a lot. And so a lot of the work that I did while I was there was, I did a lot of research, obviously, but a lot of work I did was trying to keep the lab strong and healthy so that we could do good work.
Doug: Why was the lab struggling?
Art Miller: Political winds. We were managed from the East Coast for quite a few years. And so we had a lot of obstacles. And it was during, I can't remember the exact year, but about 15 years ago or so, they kept not having us hire new employees. Because it's a small lab. And the people who were in charge just kept not letting us hire and not letting us hire. And we almost closed our doors. And so during that time, we got Patty Murray involved. And she pretty much single-handedly turned that around for us. And since then, our lab has grown and gotten stronger. So I was in the middle of all those years.
So I kind of stopped being a researcher during that time when the stuff was hitting the fan. And I started being more active in the management and trying to help the whole place stay afloat.
Doug: So what do you know about what happened today?
Art Miller: Since February, I don't have connection to the government network. I can't get there. And so I was not privy to any emails that came out or anything like that. And so this caught me completely by surprise.
Doug: So you got a telephone call this morning from somebody?
Art Miller: From a friend. From a friend saying, hey, this happened last night. It had nothing to do with the news or anything. It was just somebody who knew that I had worked there and had heard the news and said, hey, this is happening. And I'm like, what? So it caught me off guard. And then I started texting with people that I know who got riffed and people I know who were retired to ask them if they knew what was happening because a lot of retirees were very active in keeping our laboratory afloat.
And so I was part of the union and other people that hung out were part of the union. So I reached out to some of those people to see what they knew and what was happening, just kind of gather some information. So I learned more this morning than I had for the previous month or two because after I got cut, I couldn't access any of that.
Doug: Given what you had been worked on to rebuild that lab and given what has happened today, do you draw any conclusions as to what might the future be for that facility?
Art Miller: I mean, these people that work there are pretty committed and they're going to try to figure out a way, one way or another, to try to keep it open. I don't know how that's going to work for them because it's a pretty strange time that we live in right now. But I'll be surprised if it doesn't reemerge in some way, shape or form because it's a great facility. The vision of NIOSH was to have some type of presence in the Western USA because NIOSH started as an East Coast thing. And it's about workers. It's about worker safety.
And it really was fueled a lot through the coal mining, other factory work, that kind of stuff. But then the people that were studying out West were like, hey, we need to have a lab here specifically, not just for mining but for Western workers. So over the last couple of decades, we have evolved into a mine safety research lab and an other industry safety research lab. So we're doing research in firefighting and fishing safety and oil and gas safety, that other work groups are being addressed through our research currently. And I think that makes a lot of sense for that to be out West because a lot of what we do, we partner with industry to try to figure out big solutions to health and safety problems.
We were created to do research to try to improve health and safety in any way we can through research. And in doing that, we often partnered with companies in our research projects to go into that company, try some things that we had come up with, work on solving a health and safety problem, and then publishing the results, and in some cases influencing future decisions on regulatory processes.
