Dear Editor,
The recent industrial action taken by the labour union, NAACIE, against GPL, brought to the fore some related thoughts buried in the recesses of my memory. The first is the relevance of labour unions in today’s global economies and the second is the practices of GPL’s line-maintenance workers that negatively affect the utility’s revenues and cause customer losses.
I grew up in a working class household where my father, Eric Holder, was employed by the Transport & Harbours Department, and along with one of his friends, Carl Rogers, showed great sympathy to labour unions. Such organizations became essential during the Industrial Revolution when an oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and the absence of worker rights, led to their exploitation. Over the ages, labour unions helped their members and in so doing helped whole economies. By artificially keeping compensation high, unions were mainly responsible for creating the large middle class in the USA. Their bargaining power created a cycle of high wages, increased consumer spending, allowing companies to continue paying higher wages as long as increases in spending were sustained. It worked in a closed society where competition was thwarted by tariff barriers. Globalization changed all that and the union bubble burst. Because wages in unionized companies were unnaturally high, jobs shifted to the American non-unionized South, and foreign countries. Union membership and employment started declining resulting in the American ‘rust belt.’
Economies are now in a technology-driven era where unlike the industrial era, the skills needed are not in short supply. Exploitation is no longer a feature of the labour market. In a free labour market, workers are compensated based on their productivity and contributions to society. In such an environment, unions are a misfit and as long as economies have strong labour laws guaranteeing worker rights, labour unions are of little relevance.
GPL workers, who are unionized, have adopted maintenance practices which I have not experienced elsewhere. They do not, like linesmen I’ve been associated with, work on energized systems. I even saw a GPL crew de-energizing a secondary line from a pole transformer to work on my neighbour’s service (240 volts). Advertisements appear in newspapers advising consumers of areas scheduled for maintenance work implying outages during the stated periods. The effect is a reduction of utility revenues as most of the loss consumption is never recovered due to the use of private generators by affected customers, and non-discretionary loads that are not postponable.
I worked for a couple of decades at a large New York electric utility and never witnessed anything of the sort. Although my job was an office one, all employees with the capacity are trained in field work for storm restoration. This served the company well during a lengthy union strike when management workers took to the field for repairs and maintenance work. We worked 16-hour days, 7 days each week. Invariably, the first job on a Sunday morning was replacing a broken primary-wire pole (over 13,000 volts) caused by an intoxicated driver the night before. We, “novice workers” never once cut service to customers to carry out such repairs.
There is a simple electricity theory that guides safety – current flows only when points are at different potentials. Workers in other countries use this to ensure their safety. So, when bucket trucks are used in maintenance, a line is connected between the bucket and the energized electric line bringing them to the same potential and therefore preventing the flow of current. When linesmen have to climb poles, because of their location, rubber sleeves are slipped over the energized lines the linesman may come into contact with, thereby preventing contact with the bare line. Even on transmission lines (138,000 volts and higher), workers are lowered onto the line from helicopters. Hanging there, they make sure they are at the same potential.
I’m sure there may be some valid reasons for de-energizing a line before working on it, but I’ve never had a maintenance related electrical outage in my 30 years in the USA.
Labour unions have served a useful purpose improving working conditions of their members over the centuries, but now some of their gains have become obstacles to reducing unemployment especially in the USA. Some States there, such as Wisconsin, are taking measures to reduce union power and bring flexibility to the labour market. Unions there are in decline. Here, GPL’s linesmen practices are causing the company to lose revenues which would have allowed a better case for an increase in wages. In this new era, as labour unions become irrelevant and tend to increase society’s un-competitiveness, labour markets should be allowed to work unfettered and without union restrictions.
Yours faithfully,
Louis Holder
