All three peer groups traveled to Local 77 in Spokane to the George Brooks Safety Initiative Safety Summit. The summit was held on Saturday, March 24. There was over 100 members who came on their own time to participate. It was a great day of speakers and breakouts. Our peer committee chairmen from KTC, CTP & HTP facilitated the break-out groups with great success. The group was very interested in our program and had lots of questions. We continue to support Local 77’s efforts and were recently invited to do another safety summit for the Seattle side of 77’s jurisdiction. This will be held sometime in September/October.
CTP has formed a keyhole subcommittee with a couple of the safety stewards who are on the crew who do the procedure. The committee and the workers are concerned that the procedure for this work normally is much more detailed and has less chance of error than the keyhole procedure. The keyhole procedure saves time and money and the company likes that. The subcommittee will be working on improving the procedure and presenting it to PG&E, hopefully influencing a change in this work procedure. This has been stifled by management’s desire to keep status quo because of the production numbers.
CTP participated in many of the field services safety kickoffs this year, mostly in and around the Bay Area. This was because we hit it very hard last year and didn’t want to expend a lot of the members’ monies going to all the same places again. CTP will be working to get pitches away from the company-produced safety kickoffs and into the individual yards to hopefully reach people on a more personal level.
CTP is working on developing new content for their presentation to keep it fresh. They continue to do presentations at the PG&E gas worker school and UGSR school.
HTP continues to present at the Livermore Training Center for the OH 1 apprentice group. PG&E recently let us know that we are no longer going to be presenting to both the pre-apprentice and then the OH 1 groups. Originally it was going to be the pre-apprentice group only, but after some discussion we will be presenting to the OH 1 group, which we felt was more important than the pre-apprentice group, since they are just turning out and will be in the thick of it right away, and we wanted our message fresh in their minds.
HTP has been tackling the PG&E GC groups in the north regions. So far, they have been well received in Santa Rosa, Davis, Grass Valley and Placerville, with Ukiah coming up in August. We have picked up a couple of safety stewards, which is encouraging.
The KTC group has been decimated recently by folks moving into management and/or other jobs or companies not associated with the IBEW. We have rebuilt the committee with new members and hope to be starting presentations soon. We completed a public speaking class for the new committee members. The KTC group has completed a round of presentations with all the Trees Inc. yards (6) and will be doing some for Family Tree and Davey later this year. Still no participation from Wright Tree, Utility Tree or Mountain.