A New Jersey power company denied Friday that it is turning
away nonunion volunteer crews who want to travel great distances to help
reconnect power supplies severed by Hurricane Sandy. But an Alabama
utility is clarifying that it was the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers [IBEW] — not the company — that turned them away.
And a Central Florida utility worker told The Daily Caller that he
and his crewmates are still waiting for the union to back down before
they could go to Long Island.
Jersey Central Power & Light spokesman Ron Morano told
Cablevision’s News12 on Friday that his company has accepted help from
all crews. “We have not turned away any help,” he said. “Absolutely
not.”
And IBEW International President Ed Hill said in a statement to The
Daily Caller that “in times of crisis all help is welcome and we pull
together with everyone to meet the needs of the public. We have
communicated this to the office of New Jersey Governor Christie as
well.”
But Decatur Utilities in Decatur, Ala. told Huntsville’s WAFF-TV Thursday
evening that its crews were denied the opportunity to work in Seaside
Heights, N.J. because they’re not affiliated with a union. Some of those
workers, the company said, headed home. Others remained at a staging
area in Roanoke, Va.
And on Friday the company doubled down,
with general manager Ray Hardin telling Fox Business Network’s Stuart
Varney that “we were presented with documents from IBEW that required
our folks to affiliate with the union. And [that's] something that we
could not agree to. And it was our understanding, and still is, that
that was a requirement of working in that area.”
A Central Florida utility lineman who insisted on remaining anonymous
told TheDC in a phone interview Friday that his 12-person crew
waited ”all day yesterday” for their bosses to sort through the IBEW’s
demands.
“It was like, ‘What’s the hold up?’ he said. “It turns out there was a
300-page contract that the union controlling LIPA [the Long Island
Power Authority] wanted everybody to sign first. We don’t have time for
that. We’ve got guys ready to go. You need lawyers for this.”
“Get this,” he added: “Because we’re not union [members] — their pay
scale is about $47 per hour while ours is about $35 — the union’s
problem was that we didn’t make enough money and that my company
supposedly had to pay us union scale to participate.”
“We were like, ‘We’re not complaining about money. You can pay us
less. We don’t care. Just let us go up there. Two days later, we’re
still sitting here.”
“I don’t care if you pay me $5 an hour right now,” the utility worker
said. “Would you let us go up there and help? This is bull! We’re good
at what we do. Let us do it. This isn’t about money. It’s about helping
people who need help.”
“We’ve gone through this with hurricanes in Florida. We don’t turn
people away because they’re unionized or not. This is such crap. Let’s
get people connected again, and then you union guys can go back to
playing this silly game. And that’s what it is — a goddamned game.”
WAFF-TV has not retracted the Thursday story about Decatur Utilities,
which sparked the controversy. Two other utilities mentioned in its
report, however, said Friday that they had different experiences.
A Huntsville Utilities spokesman told the Mobile Press-Register that
some of his employees are on Long Island helping with recovery from
Hurricane Sandy.
“We are starting work this morning with Long Island Power Authority,”
he told the newspaper. “We were headed to a New Jersey utility but they
had all the crews they could handle.”
And a spokeswoman for the Joe Wheeler Electrical Membership Co-op said his crews are already unionized.
“We sent eight guys to Maryland, not New Jersey,” he said. “They have
been there since before the storm but they’ve finished work and are
headed home this morning.”
The International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers is a unit of the politically powerful AFL-CIO.
Many parts of coastal New Jersey are projected to be without electric power for at least seven to 10 more days.
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