Vacaville, CA – “The union is outraged to learn that the CPUC’s Safety Enforcement Division plans to make the names of many hourly employees public in its upcoming report on how PG&E complies with requests to ‘locate and mark’ underground facilities prior to excavation in the area,” said Tom Dalzell, Business Manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1245, which represents over 12,000 workers at PG&E. “In a post-wildfire environment where many frontline PG&E employees have already received death threats — although they had nothing to do with the fires, except for their heroic contributions to rebuilding the grid in the disaster’s aftermath – this move by the PUC would only serve to make a difficult situation even worse for these dedicated, hard-working individuals.”
“Up until now, it has been standard operating procedure to redact the names of such workers, as it should be. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: departing from this policy and releasing the names of people who are working hard to make the system safer puts them in immediate jeopardy and presents a general privacy concern that should not be taken lightly. We strongly urge the Safety Enforcement Division to promptly reconsider this totally unjustified decision, and in the interest of public safety, redact all the names of frontline workers in this report.”
The Coalition of California Utility Employees, of which IBEW 1245 is a part of, has filed an emergency motion with the PUC to amend this decision. Read the motion here.