By Ron Cochran
February is coming to an end. There has been ongoing organizing, jurisdictional disputes, termination cases, class action grievances and one duty of fair representation charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board.
Business Representatives Liz McInnis and Junior Ornelas (standing in foreground) assist with member sign-up during a meeting with DC Construction employees.
Organizing has been a real team effort. Ralph Armstrong and Elizabeth McInnis have been putting in long hours. We have signed several contractors including Smith Electric, ABN Commodities, Ltd., Greg Shandel Construction, Terra Firma Excavation, LLC, and White Construction. We are still working to finish new member orientations from contractors we signed in January. We are also working with the Building Trades to help organize companies that will fall under their scope of work. We helped the Laborers Union sign three new flagging companies in February. All in all we had another great month for organizing. We have many new working members as a result of these efforts.
The jurisdictional disputes are just a drag in every way. Win, lose, or draw nobody really wins. There are a couple of issues that have been developing for years, but with the weak economy they are spiking.
The first issue is the in-fighting between the Inside and Outside branches of our work. When an Inside contractor bids substation work and refuses to follow the 9th District Jurisdictional Guide using Outside Line, we are compelled to fight for our work.
In the cases where we are not involved from the beginning, it creates a ripple effect. The Inside contractors don’t generally move dirt, dig trenches or footers, set forms, pour concrete foundations, perform oil containment, erect steel structures or set breakers, transformers, and regulators. They really become “labor brokers” and sub-contract all that work out. That leaves installing conduit, pulling cable and terminating control cable and buss connections as their main functions.
The net result is only a very few IBEW members get on the job; the rest are Building Trades workers or non-union workers. In the Outside Construction model, all the workers are IBEW. The Outside members perform all work except pulling of control cable, terminating control cable, control conduit, and lighting, which is performed by our Inside brothers and sisters. Again, all the work is IBEW.
I bring this up as we’re currently in the middle of a jurisdictional dispute for a substation project in the Berkeley, CA, area. We met with the Inside contractor that won the bid in late February, and they have sub-contracted nearly all the work away already. They used the term “labor broker” and now I’m re-using the term. It’s a growing trend to use second and third-tier sub-contractors and this is bad for our members. We train to construct substations from the ground up, not piece-meal them together.
No real news in the traffic signal sector, AC load control work and the Hiring Hall. All are running very smooth.
Pole test and treat is ramping up with ongoing problems with one contractor not advancing workers as agreed to by the contract. There has been a grievance filed and settled, but it seems the remedy hasn’t been implemented as agreed to. More work to do in that area.
AMI Success Story
The AMI work is a success story on all fronts. UPA is moving forward on the SMUD project—everyone seems to be happy. Some of their field managers would like us to bargain their health insurance as the union package is better than the management package, we’re told. City of Lodi is bidding an AMI package for meter exchanges right now. Our members at Wellington Energy are now exchanging over 17,000 meters daily. They are keeping up with PG&E’s ever-changing requests to modify meter replacement schedules.
We had a few members terminated from Wellington in the month of February. Two cases directly involved safety; not wearing PPE while exchanging energized electric meters. This is a very serious matter as we have had two different meter accidents in the last three years. One accident resulted in a journeymen being hospitalized with severe burns because he was not wearing PPE. We always stand up for safety and our members, but when members choose not to wear their PPE it puts the union in very poor position to represent them in a termination case.
Outside Line is slower than it’s been in some time. The major utilities have not been contracting very much work out recently. We do have some work and are barely keeping the local members busy. We just started a very small job in Monterey and will be starting jobs in Santa Clara and Oakland within weeks.
We also have been trying to set up OSHA ET&D 10-hour classes one Saturday a month but have had little participation from the membership. This is unfortunate as it becomes a special skills call as of January 1, 2011. This means you could be last on the out of work list and if no one before you has the training, and you do, you will bypass the entire list. That’s going to make everyone unhappy.
The Books
Lineman
Book I: 55 members
Book II: 74
Book III: 4
Book IV: 57;
Groundman
Book I: 23
Book II: 13
Book III: 94
Book IV: 111
Line Equipment Man
Book I: 17
Book II: 7
Book III: 13
Apprentice stats are not posted; we have roughly 240 apprentices with 80-90 unemployed at this time. We dispatched 17 members in the month of February and 41 in the month of January.
Ron Cochran is Assistant Business Manager, IBEW Local 1245