On Thursday, 15,091 Washington, D.C.-area residents were without power for the sixth day in a row, according to utility company Pepco spokesman Marcus Beal. As D.C. residents face record heat waves, many are upset and attribute the lack of power to incompetence on Pepco's end. However, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1900 members claim the failure to restore power outages is due to chronic understaffing and Pepco's shift from hiring union utility workers to non-union temporary contractors.
"We have half the linemen we had 15 years ago," says IBEW Local 1900 Business Agent Jim Griffin, whose union represents 1,150 Pepco workers. "We have been complaining for a very long time. They have relied for a long time on contractors. They are transients, they don't know our system, and we typically have to go behind them to fix their mistakes. It's very frustrating. We take ownership in our work, we make careers out of this."
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3 comments:
I lost my power for literally 5 seconds during the storms. I live in DC. Some people not 2 miles from my house are still without power for whatever reason. But I didn't lose mine, so I'm good.
But on the lineman, it's a career of need at this point. The average age of a lineman in the USA today? 53. It pays very well, great benefits, etc. It's just hard to get people to sign up. I actually am becoming a lineman. The pay is excellent. On top of that, I'll be living down south, where a lineman who comes in for a hurricane/emergency situation can earn up to his entire years wage in a 1-2 month span helping out with disasters.
BS - Like those who claim the detractors to Barack's failed economic policies are racially motivated. If the outages were preventable PEPCO certainly would have saved gobs of cash by preventing rather than repairing. If Barack was white & tried to implement the same policies what would the scapegoat be then?
In 1977 I was an employee of Delmarva Power when the a nasty ice storm hit Salisbury. At the time I was a drafts-man, an office job and also a union member. Every able body person was asked to assist in getting power back on for the customer. I volunteered and spent 2 days and one night with a trouble and service man, only breaking to eat. They were the days when all employees did whatever we could to for the customer, as we took pride in saying that we worked for Delmarva Power. Then things changed and the powers up in Wilmington took charge of operations down here and things began going down hill, and quite frankly, have never been the same since.
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