Con Ed Locks Out Workers, Endangers Millions in New York -
What You Do to Help the Union Workers

* 'When We Go Out, the Lights Go Out': Workers Locked Out at
Con Ed (Matthew Cunningham-Cook)
* ConEdison Puts New York's Power at Risk During Heat Wave
with Lockout of Workers (Michelle Chen)
* Tell the Public Service Commission to Investigate Unsafe
conditions at Con Edison (New York State AFL-CIO)

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'When We Go Out, the Lights Go Out': Workers Locked Out at
Con Ed

by Matthew Cunningham-Cook

Published by Portside

July 5, 2012

Hundreds of union members have descended on New York power
utility Consolidated Edison's corporate headquarters in
Manhattan following the company's decision to lock out 8,500
of its unionized workers in the midst of contract
negotiations. Workers were sent home on July 1 after Local
1-2 of the Utility Workers Union refused to agree to give
seven days' notice before a strike. Only weeks after the
debacle of the Wisconsin recall, and the subsequent
consternation among many in the labor movement, it seems
these boisterous union members missed the message that labor
is on its way out.

About 500 union members, most of them from Local 1-2 but
with contingents from SEIU Local 32BJ, CWA Local 1101 and
TWU Local 100, among others, have been picketing outside Con
Ed's headquarters each day since the lockout began on July
1. Today, however, that number increased to more than a
thousand, as Con Ed canceled healthcare coverage for Local
1-2 members as part of its effort to ramp up pressure on the
union. Other pickets have been set up at Con Ed job sites
around the region. The contract dispute centers on the fact
that Con Ed wants to get rid of defined-benefit pensions and
drastically increase union members' healthcare
contributions.

Lockouts have become increasingly common in recent years, as
employers have become more and more proactive at trying to
force givebacks on union members. Two of the three biggest
work stoppages in 2011 were lockouts. Despite a contentious
settlement at the Cooper Tire factory in Ohio, and the
continuing fight at beet sugar factories in North Dakota,
lockouts aren't always a losing game for unions - art
handlers at Sotheby's successfully pressured the company
into a new concession-free contract in May.

On the Con Ed picket line, Chris Spadafora, a mechanic for
the company, pointed out that this fight is about corporate
greed. "Were out here because the company didn't want to pay
us. They want to cut medical, they want to cut our pension,
they want to cut our wages," Spadafora said. "But they have
a CEO who makes $4,800 per hour!" Con Ed's CEO Kevin Burke
made nearly $11 million in total compensation in 2011, a
year in which Con Ed took in nearly $13 billion in revenues
and more than a billion dollars in profits. Burke is also a
vice chair of the Business Council of New York, the leading
lobby for the 1 percent in the state. According to
Spadafora, the average wage of a Local 1-2 member is $30 per
hour.

Con Ed has brought in management and supervisory employees
to do the jobs traditionally done by Local 1-2 members. But
as Michael Sutera, another mechanic, pointed out, "They've
called in 5,000 managers to do 8,500 people's jobs. They
can't do our jobs. We can." Spadafora agreed: "Even if the
managers came out of the union, they're still out of
practice. One little screw-up and they're dead. To me this
shows that Con Ed doesn't care about their people, that
they're willing to put them in harm's way." In fact, there
have already been injuries on the job, with one manager
injuring his head on the job on July 2 and another severely
burning his face on July 4.

That managers have been put in such unsafe conditions may be
one of the reasons Con Ed has agreed to return to the
bargaining table today - although they have made no
commitment to end the lockout.

Without giving notice of a strike, Local 1-2 gains more
strategic ability to protect the benefits currently received
by its members. CWA Local 1101 President Keith Purce, who
represents Verizon workers, explained the union's refusal to
give prior notice before going on strike: "We [Verizon
workers] went on strike last year for two weeks. And in
order to go back [to work], we had to give them an agreement
that we would give seven days' notice if we went on strike.
That's what Con Ed wants to get from Local 1-2. The only
weapon we have is to withhold our labor, [the agreement]
takes away our strength and our ability to fight." Local 1-2
spokesman Melia framed the issue as one of fundamental union
rights. "We cannot give up our right to strike. That is
surrendering, and it flies in the face of rational thought,"
he said.

The lockout also highlights some of the continuing friction
in labor's relationship with the Democratic Party. New York
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to be playing
both sides by sending a joint letter to Con Ed CEO Burke and
Harry Farrell, president of Local 1-2, requesting that Burke
end the lockout and that Farrell agree to "reasonable"
notice before a walk out, citing concerns about people
losing power during a heat wave. But the union's refusal to
provide seven days' notice is the reason Con Ed locked them
out in the first place, leading some union members to
believe Quinn is siding with management. The New York City
Central Labor Council, of which Local 1-2 is a member, has
supported Quinn in the past, but Melia argued that the kind
of support that Local 1-2 was getting from fellow unions in
the Central Labor Council and the New York State AFL-CIO is
more important than the positions of politicians.

Juanita Melendez, a technician at Con Ed, sees the company's
intransigence as an affront to her and other union members.
"we're out here because we got smacked in the face," she
said. "A month and a half ago we all got an e-mail
congratulating us for our safety and performance, earning
them all this money, and now they want us to pay double in
medical, take away our raises, and cut our pensions... What
are they doing?"

==========

ConEdison Puts New York's Power at Risk During Heat Wave
with Lockout of Workers

    The utility company has locked out 8,500 workers,
    leaving a skeleton staff of untrained managers to
    run the city's power grid during a searing heat wave

by Michelle Chen

AlterNet
July 4, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/156145/conedison_puts_new_york%27s_power_at_risk_during_heat_wave_with_lockout_of_workers

As the summer heat seared New York City, tensions between
the city's major electricity company and its union reached a
boiling point over the weekend. By Monday, a meltdown in the
talks over pensions and benefits left thousands of
Consolidated Edison utility workers suddenly frozen out of
their jobs. The lockout, a classic anti-union tactic, had
paralyzed both the negotiations and the livelihoods of some
8500 union members. But that afternoon, scores of locked out
workers assembled outside ConEd headquarters near
Manhattan's Union Square to show they would keep the heat on
their boss.

Mario, a 55-year old worker at ConEd's East River Generating
Station, wasn't shocked by the lockout. "It's corporate
America. A lot of greed, a lot of arrogance," he said.
"Blame the unions, blame the workers, take their benefits
away, and just keep increasing their bonuses."

As of Monday, ConEd was operating on an emergency staff,
with about 5,000 "managers" replacing the locked-out
workers. The company promised to maintain "essential
operations," though fears of electricity breakdowns loomed
large as scorching heat blanketed ConEd's millions of
customers across the five boroughs and Westchester. There
were no catastrophes immediately following the lockout,
according to local news reports, but outages hit some
neighborhoods, and a substation fire in Brooklyn injured a
manager.

Local outlets reported that talks with the union,Utility
Workers Union of America Local 1-2 stalled early Sunday
morning, hitting a major impasse on the issue of pensions.
The union said it was kicked out following a dispute over
protecting workers' retirement and health benefits, though
ConEd claimed it was open to extending the talks, as long as
the union agreed not to strike without first giving the
company "advance notice". The union blasted the move to
constrain its striking power, noting that this concession
would undermine its leverage during negotiations.

Debbie Thomas could have used some advance notice. The
customer service representative would normally have gone to
work at the headquarters but found herself stuck outside on
Monday, standing with her fellow union members at the
demonstration and getting ready to tap temporary
unemployment benefits as she waited for a contract deal.

"It was a shock to me," she said. " `Cause had I known we
would've been going out I'd be saving my money. I really
don't have no savings right now, and I never expected this
to happen. But it happens."

Union and ConEd representatives arranged to meet again on
Thursday, and there was talk of using a federal mediator to
try to salvage the negotiations. But the promise of resumed
talks didn't address the simmering questions facing union
workers as they challenged the city's power monopoly. Would
New Yorkers turn their ire toward labor if power outages
sprang up while services were suspended? Had the company now
wrestled the union into a weaker bargaining position?
ConEd's website has already rolled out anti-union propaganda
by assuring customers that management would work to maintain
services, while suggesting that the talks had been
obstructed by union leaders' "refusal... to accept the
company's offer to extend their members' contract for two
weeks." But for the union, the negotiations had
disintegrated because their boss wasn't interested in a
meaningful compromise, as ConEd kept rejecting basic demands
for a fair deal to preserve pensions and benefits.

Union spokesperson John Melia voiced concern about the
potential perils of using managers as emergency staff,
reported the New York Daily News: "They have placed their
customers and the public at great peril... These men and
women don't have the knowledge or the expertise or the
capability to keep the system operating long term... These
guys don't know how to go down into flaming manholes."

But even if Gotham doesn't completely short circuit, workers
are inflamed by the company's brazen dismissal of the union.

Fred, a 48 year-old mechanic at the East River station who
attended Monday's demonstration, said he was working a night
shift when the lockout was imposed, and was immediately
ordered out of the building, making way for the managers to
take over. The efficiency of the process seemed like part of
a well-planned strategy.

"This is not just something they whipped up a couple weeks
ago, when they knew the contract was coming up," he said.
"So, they see what's going on in the rest of the country, in
the world. And they say we have to cut costs, to keep the
stock profitable... They don't answer to us, they don't
answer to the customers out on the street. They answer to
the stockholders."

The number of large labor clashes nationwide has ticked up
since 2009. Last year, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, "there were 19 major strikes and lockouts
involving 1,000 or more workers and lasting at least one
shift." These actions stopped work for a total of more than
110,000 workers and cost about one million lost workdays.
This was a marked increase from the previous year, which saw
only eleven major work stoppages, impacting 45,000 workers,
and just five major work stoppages in 2009. But
statistically speaking, labor has overall grown less
confrontational as the industrial workforce hollowed out
since the Reagan Era; in the 1970s such work stoppages,
including lockouts and strikes, regularly topped two hundred
annually.

Sometimes a lockout can catalyze labor activism. When the
defense industry giant Honeywell International locked out
workers in Metropolis, Illinois in the summer of 2010,
United Steelworkers Local 7-669 campaigned hard and held out
for over a year, eventually wresting significant concessions
from the company in their contract. But fundamentally, a
lockout is an expression of corporate impunity. By
paralyzing the workplace before employees can even start to
mobilize for a strike, a company can instantly disempower
the union and intimidate idled workers to buckle to the
management's demands. As In These Times reported earlier
this year, since returning to their jobs, Honeywell workers
have reported ongoing workplace safety hazards and union-
busting campaigns by management.

However the standoff in New York ends, the issue at stake in
the ConEd negotiations is vital not just to the union but to
all the communities their workers serve: whether working
people can still have the kind of economic security that
past generations of blue-collar New Yorkers came to expect
from employers as part of a hard-fought social contract.

Standing outside the headquarters, a locked-out operations
analyst in his early 30s remarked, "When they hired me, I
looked at this company like this would be the last
company... 'Cause looking around - they're all seniors,
they're retiring. First job [is] the last job. But now, it's
totally different. There's no more insurance anymore."

Since he began at ConEd in the 1980s, Mario said it's been
"getting difficult to be a middle-class person in America.
It looks like we're taking steps backwards instead of
forwards [on] everything... that labor has fought for." Just
a few blocks from the steamy power station where he should
have been working toward his hard-earned retirement, he
stood in the summer swelter at the barricade outside his
employer's offices: "I'm sure they're in there nice and cool
right now."

[Michelle Chen is a contributing editor to In These Times
and a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working
In These Times, Colorlines.com and Pacifica's WBAI. Follow
her on Twitter at @meeshellchen or reach her at michellechen
@ inthesetimes.com ]

==========

Tell PSC to Investigate Unsafe conditions at Con Edison

New York State AFL-CIO
July 6, 2012

http://nysaflcio.org/pscletter/

Are you a Con Edison customer concerned about the unsafe
conditions created by locking out 8,500 highly skilled
workers? If so please take action below.

The New York State Department of Public Service is
responsible for regulating public utilities in New York,
including Con Edison.  The Department of Public Service
Consumer Service Department is responsible for investigating
complaints from consumers.  Please take a moment to tell the
director of Consumer Service to investigate the Con Edison
lockout and how it has affected you.

If you have experienced an outage since July 1 that you
believe was caused by the lockout, click here.
http://nysaflcio.org/pscconeddisruptions/

Sample letter to Public Service Commission
[you can send the letter via the internet. Click here:
http://nysaflcio.org/pscletter/

Subject: Complaint - Con Edison Lockout
Sandra Sloane, Director
Office of Consumer Services
NYS Department of Public Service
3 Empire State Plaza
Albany, NY 12223

Re: Complaint - Con Edison Lockout

Dear Ms. Sloane:

I write to complain about the service provided to me by Con
Edison.

On July 1, 2012, Con Edison locked out 8,500 skilled workers
and has since replaced them with management employees. I am
concerned that my service will be interrupted because of the
lockout. I am also concerned that the replacement workers
lack the current training, skills and experience necessary
to provide safe and reliable electricity, gas and steam. In
addition, it is simply impossible to take 8,500 workers off
the job and maintain comparable service.

My concerns are not unfounded - service interruptions and
reductions have been reported in various media outlets each
day since the lockout began. More serious are the multiple
reports of injuries to replacement workers.

I respectfully request that the New York State Department of
Public Service take action to ensure that the Con Edison
lockout does not jeopardize safe, secure and reliable access
to electric, gas and steam for consumers. I also request
that the New York State Department of Public Service conduct
an investigation to determine whether any links exist
between Con Edison's lockout and the recent injuries,
interruptions and reductions.

cc: Garry A. Brown, Chairman, Public Service Commission

Sincerely,

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