Electric Utility
Consolidated Edison, which supplies electricity in New York City and
Westchester County, has continued to lock out 8,500 workers for the second week in a row, despite
a series of brownouts (carefully
directed at low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn), manhole
explosions, injuries to managers, a loss of electric capacity, and unprecedented
heat wave.
Another Con Ed
transformer exploded on Saturday underneath E. 56th Street in busy
midtown Manhattan, setting off an explosion in a parked vehicle and sending
flames up the scaffolding around an adjacent 16-story building. This was the
most recent in a series of accidents and injuries related to the lockout. Con
Ed is attempting to maintain an overtaxed infrastructure with a force of 5,000
managers, who have been brought in to replace 8,500 locked-out workers. Two of
these managers have already been hurt in accidents. Most
recently, a Con Edison manager filling in for a locked out union worker was
injured Wednesday in a manhole explosion on the Upper West Side. His face was burned when he was working underground in front of
145 W. 70th St. just after 1 p.m., according to the NY Fire Department
said. The Fire Dept expects that the
explosions are directly related the current heat wave…exacerbated by the loss
of a knowledgeable workforce in the field.
While brownouts
continue in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Con Ed has removed locations of outages from
its website and is providing little or no public information on the status of
its systems.
"This is what we have been saying all along, that the company
would run into these problems when the weather heats up. They needed to reduce
voltage because they could not keep the system up," John Melia, a union
spokesman, told Reuters. "This is
an extremely dangerous situation for the people of New York," Melia said,
noting that replacement workers were getting hurt every day due to a lack of
experience.
It should be noted that the workers did not go on strike; rather,
they were locked out by Con Ed Management.
Con Ed, which
made a billion dollars in profits last year, is demanding substantial
concessions in health care and pensions from the union that negotiates for the
workers, the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Local 1-2. The company
locked the workers out July 1 when the union did not agree to give advanced
notice of possible strike action. Meanwhile, CEO Kevin Burke received at least 11
million dollars in compensation in 2011 in cash and stock options. In fact, all
of Con Ed’s Officers make over three-quarters of a million dollars each.
Jose Torres, a
locked-out union worker with five years service at Con Ed, said, “The issues in
the lockout are wages, pensions and health care. They are trying to break our
wages down to nothing. They want to give us a 1.5 percent wage increase over a
four-year contract.”
One Con Ed customer
service representative said, “I’m not very happy about this. I was here
Saturday night when the contract expired. I thought it was going to be OK until
2 AM. There were about 150 of us here at about 10 PM. Union reps let us know
what was happening. At midnight they kept talking, and it still sounded good.
Then Con Ed locked us out.
The work here is
not like Verizon where they can turn people off with a switch. We have to go to
every location to turn a customer’s power back on and repair the wires. I don’t
think management can handle a big power surge or a blackout. They don’t have
enough people to handle this. I would say only 2,500 of their 5,000 could do
field work.
Con Ed has
already threatened lives and caused widespread suffering by calling the lockout
on Saturday. We always send teams to help out with power outages and disasters
around the country. With last week’s storm along the East Coast, power was out
in New Jersey and on Long Island and many other places for long periods of
time. Con Ed locked us out so we couldn’t send out teams as we regularly do,
and the people along the East Coast were forced to suffer with power outages
and breakdowns longer than they should have because of Con Ed’s action…
They should leave the pensions alone. We do a
dangerous job. You have to go down in manholes where there are live wires. The
firefighters and police don’t go down there. Sometimes there are explosions and
fires. People call the fire department when this happens, but they don’t go
down in the manholes. If it is 100 degrees up on the street, it is 130 down in
the manholes. There is the same kind of danger dealing with transformers and
wires up on the poles. We come out to fix them, not the Fire Department or
police. They should leave our pension like it is.”
Another worker
reporter,
“They have
stopped our health benefits. I have heart trouble, and I was supposed to go for
a stress test. Oh my god. I am disappointed that none of the politicians have
come out to condemn this. I know a family whose daughter needs constant medical
care. She needs a number of medications and care. This might stop because Con
Ed stopped our health care, and the father is the only one in the family
working…. We are aware that all the other unions are watching this. We know
this is critical. Everyone is looking at us, and we can’t let them take this
back. I look at this personally as a civil rights struggle. Enough is enough,
and I’m not going to take it anymore. In an ideal world, all the other unions
would come out with us, especially Verizon and transit. We are making a stand,
and I am asking all other unions to come out and support us. I don’t think the
union leadership will issue a call for others to come out because they are too
close to the company. But we shall overcome. We have to. It is do or die.”
.
[It should be
noted that under the federal Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, “sympathy strikes,”
where a union strikes in solidarity with another union’s treatment, are
illegal.]
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