“People either love me or they hate me,” Bud Varnadore often said.
Indeed, Varnadore stirred the pot. He could be loud and he could be opinionated, and one thing people rarely did was ignore him. But, oddly, that’s what happened after Varnadore died at his home in Lenoir City on March 7, 2013.
A brief notice in the News Sentinel’s paid obituaries went largely unnoticed. Somehow I missed it, even though I try to skim the obits on a daily basis.
Varnardore’s passing at age 71 didn’t gain media attention until this past weekend, five months after the fact, when Douglas Martin of The New York Times reported it with a look back at the whistle-blower’s complaint at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The story attracted news coverage — nationally, as well as locally — throughout the 1990s.
Varnadore was a lab technician at ORNL, and he said he was subjected to hostility, poor performance ratings and other forms of retaliation after he reported on safety and environmental problems at the Oak Ridge facilities. In one notable instance, his assigned “home base” at the laboratory was a room used for storage of radioactive wastes and contained hazardous materials, including mercury.
The long-running case was filed initially in November 1991 and didn’t conclude until April 1998, when the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Varnadore’s complaints. That affirmed a decision two years earlier by Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who ruled that Varnadore’s original claim of workplace retaliation was filed too long after the alleged discrimination occurred.
Varnadore lost his case, but there were victories, legal and otherwise, along the way, and some viewed the final ruling as a technicality that didn’t really define the guts of the case. Many workers at the Oak Ridge plants simply appreciated the challenge of authority in a high-security environment that sometimes seemed overbearing and maybe abusive.
Fran Varnadore, Varnadore’s widow, said her husband was bedridden for the last two years of his life, but even as recently as a year ago he was receiving calls from Oak Ridge workers who wanted his advice on how to proceed with their workplace complaints.
“Some people have called him a hero,” she said.
Theodore von Brand, an administrative law judge who heard the Varnardore case in 1992, said the record indicated that Martin Marietta, then the lab contractor, deliberately tried to punish Varnadore, who was a recovering cancer victim, with such things as the “clearly inappropriate office space.” Von Brand recommended that Martin Marietta pay $30,000 in damages, expunge Varnadore’s poor performance evaluations and make other amends.
Even as he waited on Reich to rule on his case, Varnadore said he continued to feel like he was discriminated against for being a whistle-blower in the government’s Oak Ridge workplace. “I feel like I’m punished daily,” he said.
Despite the outcome, Fran Varnadore said her husband didn’t regret being a whistle-blower.
“He felt hopeful that he kept some other people from having to go through what he did,” she said.
© 2013, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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