Skip to content Skip to footer

Con Ed Workers Back on the Job; Company Maintains Hard Line

It is not clear what effect the stepped up political pressure, or the return to work, will have on negotiations.

Against a backdrop of looming summer storms, locked out utility workers are returning to work after a four-week standoff with Consolidated Edison, New York City’s electricity provider, after state politicians stepped into the high-profile dispute.

Governor Andrew Cuomo brokered a meeting between the two sides this morning after sending a letter to the public utility commission asking them to convene talks between the union and the company yesterday. Within hours of Cuomo’s letter the commission announced talks, reversing its earlier position that federal law prevented it from intervening.

According to the union, half of the 8,500 locked out workers will return to work immediately.

For weeks the union has been calling on the Governor to take action, and union spokesman John Melia bristled at the Governor’s public statements pointing the finger at the union as well as the company. “To hold us accountable when Con Ed locked us out? Is the governor serving Con Ed and the board of directors or is he serving all of the people of New York?” Melia said.

It is not clear what effect the stepped up political pressure, or the return to work, will have on negotiations. The company has continued to push Utility Workers Local 1-2 to convert their traditional pension to a 401(k) and for workers to pay substantially more for health insurance.

The governor’s intervention was only part of the pressure from Albany. Yesterday the New York State Assembly held hearings on Con Edison’s safety plans following the company’s decision to lock out front-line technicians and call center workers.

In the hearings, Con Edison Vice President John Miksad defended the company’s safety record during the lockout. “This is the safest Con Edison has ever been,” he said.

Local 1-2 president Harry Farrell disagreed. “The scabs the company is bringing in from around the country don’t know how to work on our system,” he said. Twelve managers have been seriously injured during the lockout, including one sent to the hospital with burns to his face.

Con Edison has hired over 700 contractors to work alongside 2,500 supervisors in the field.

Farrell warned the Assembly members that inexperienced replacement workers could leave behind potentially deadly conditions for city residents and Local 1-2 members. “They’re going to be in here and gone. We’re going to be walking into potential bombs,” he said.

In yesterday’s hearings Miksad denied the company was planning for a lockout, although he acknowledged Con Edison put a contingency plan in place a year ago in preparation for the July 1 contract expiration.

Con Edison is following a trend by locking workers out to gain the upper hand in negotiations.

The past two years have seen an explosion in lockouts, from high profile disputes between professional basketball and football players and team owners, to less-publicized standoffs such as the 14-month lockout at Honeywell’s Metropolis, Illinois nuclear processing plant and the ongoing conflict between sugar beet workers in Minnesota, Iowa, and North Dakota and their employer American Crystal Sugar.

In the last two decades lockouts have comprised about 5 percent of all work stoppages, according to the news organization Bloomberg BNA. That figure doubled to almost 10 percent between 2010-2011.

For first-hand accounts of the impact of the Con Edison lockout, watch this recent report from Jaisal Noor and The Real News Network, posted above.

Reprinted with permission from Labor Notes.

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.

You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.