Christie threatens ‘Disaster Control Act’ order to guarantee nonunion utility workers can help restore NJ power

 
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bristled at reports Friday that an electricians’ union stood in the way of some utility workers who wanted to help restore power to victims of Hurricane Sandy. He would use his emergency-management powers, he said, to guarantee that nonunion crews could help restore his state’s electricity grid without interference.
“I’ve been on the phone with PSE&G [Public Service Electric and Gas Company], JCP&L [Jersey Central Power & Light] and the union, and they’ve all absolutely promised me they would never turn away a single worker whether they were union or nonunion, and I wouldn’t allow it,” Christie told reporters shortly after 3:30 p.m. Friday afternoon.
“I would invoke my powers under the Disaster Control Act to prevent that from happening, but they’ve assured me we don’t have to.”
But a spokesman for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn’t reply to emails asking whether his boss would take a similar hard line. A spokeswoman for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo similarly didn’t return phone calls asking the same question.
Christie said Friday that “there was one incident of this in Seaside Heights” since Superstorm Sandy hit.
“First of all, the workers never came to New Jersey, okay? They weren’t turned away when they got here. They heard that New Jersey was a union state, coming from Alabama. When they stopped in Virginia, they called to see what they would do and they were given bad information.”
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Christie said his state’s major utilities and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) “have all said they do not have that requirement.”
The Daily Caller had published a report more than an hour earlier about electric utility crews from central Florida that idled for two days instead of working on Long Island, while their managers dealt with the union’s demands.
“It turns out there was a 300-page contract that the union controlling LIPA [the Long Island Power Authority] wanted everybody to sign first,” the  crewman told TheDC. “We don’t have time for that. We’ve got guys ready to go. You need lawyers for this.” 
An IBEW spokesman told TheDC on Friday that ”the IBEW did not send the documents” the Florida crew’s managers described, “nor did any of our locals.”
But he didn’t reply when asked if he had communicated with all 273 locals in the union districts where Sandy’s impact was felt. Those include 20 IBEW locals in New Jersey, 48 in New York, 10 in Connecticut and 52 in Pennsylvania.
A few hours after Christie spoke, TheDC reported on another case — this one involving an electric co-operative in Georgia  whose workers were turned away from New York because they weren’t union members.