My timezone is EST05EDT04,..., so yes, it takes summer time into account. We are on standard time now, which means you 
have to add 5 hours to local time to get UTC. During daylight time, you'd have to add 4 hours to local time to get UTC. 
What's apparently happening is 6 hours are being added to local time, which isn't right in either case.

This could be explained if the realtime clock were set off by an hour by the host operating system or VMware's emulation
. I just tried:

export TZ=utc00
/sbin/rtc hw
date

and see that it is still showing an hour ahead, so it appears that the host OS (XP) is somehow setting the rtc an hour 
ahead, or the VMware layer is doing that.