Good morning Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee:

My names Jim Dushaw and I am the Director of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Utility Department.  Mr. Chairman, IBEW International President Ed Hill thanks you for inviting the IBEW to comment this morning.

Of the 95% of investor-owned electric utilities that employ union members, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represents 98% of those workers.  We also represent the largest number of unionized employees working for municipal and rural cooperative employers, and the IBEW represents workers at federal electricity facilities, such as TVA and Bonneville Power.  Of the three-quarter million membership of IBEW, more than two-hundred-fifty thousand of them are utility workers, who are covered by some 1400 collective bargaining agreements in the U.S. and Canada.

It should be clearly understood from the outset that the IBEW does not believe that average Americans, workers and families, are calling for the commoditization and restructuring of electricity and, indeed, are becoming aggravated with the risks that are becoming more apparent; not to mention the huge transfer of wealth taking place, as real energy costs take a bigger bite out of household budgeting.

This morning I will briefly address the relationship between the American electric utility worker and the reliability of the electric utility system.  Some energy marketers would have us believe that reliability is, or should be, just a function of the market.  Some have urged that the nation should not afford a "gold-plated system" as before the drive to restructuring.  Others would have us accept less reliability as the quid pro quo for achieving competition.  The IBEW utility workers take serious issue with all of these philosophies.  For the overwhelming majority of Americans, reliable electric power is an essential service--not a market commodity. 

Beginning in 1990, in anticipation of the coming competitive marketplace, electric utilities, mostly the large IOU's, began downsizing workforces in order to cut costs and gain the edge they believed would secure success, or at least survival, in the marketplace.  The Energy Information Administration documents the cascade of utility downsizing over a 10-year period that has resulted in a 27% smaller workforce overall -- and that trend continues to this day. 

What do those numbers actually mean in terms of real-world reliability experiences?

The report of the U.S. Department of Energy Power Outage Study Team uncovered several factors common to the eight major outages of summer 1999, which were the object of their study.  The IBEW measured several of the findings as attributable to cutbacks in the workforce and maintenance.

The Keystone Study, released last month, found that from 1994 to 1999, Pennsylvania utilities decreased their workforce by about 6,500 people.  Perhaps coincidentally during this same time period, customer complaints more than doubled to over 10,000.  Electric utility outages (not including major storms) lasted, on average, 30 minutes longer in 1999 than they did in 1994.  

During the six years examined by the study, Pennsylvania's utilities reinvested just 5% of their profits in Pennsylvania's utility systems.  The rest, amounting to more than $15 billion, was spent elsewhere (often in other states or even in other countries).  The study concluded that utility CEOs (with 76% pay hikes in that time frame), and the electric utilities themselves have prospered most as deregulation has moved forward.  Consumers and workers ?do not appear to have gained?.  And investment trends raise questions about the long-run adequacy and safety of Pennsylvania's utility infrastructure. 

Pennsylvania has been touted as the poster child of electricity deregulation.  Residential customers have indeed enjoyed lower electricity rates--mandated by a legislated price cap (recently extended for up to five years).  No one in Pennsylvania has had to suffer free-market electricity prices.

With competition, the economic players pushing electric restructuring have no allegiance to the broader public interest.  Evidence:  how all the dealmakers ducked responsibility when California went sour.  The market is not designed nor equipped to address reliability issues for the average consumer.  We believe it will take a proactive public sector working with the appropriate government entities to safeguard reliability.

Common sense tells you that if the customer base for electricity is growing, and it is, and the workforce that supplies that electricity is shrinking, cut to the bone and then some, we've got problems.  And things are going to get worse before they get better, because there are other negative factors that impact the worker/reliability equation.

I've shown you a workforce dramatically diminished in numbers; add to that the Edison Electric Institute statistic that the average utility worker is in their forties, and top that with the fact that almost all utilities stopped funding apprentice training programs about 8-10 years ago.  In other words, we're facing a generation gap--there are few trained workers anywhere in the U.S. to step up and fill the jobs that even now are going begging.  Utility employers have cannibalized each other's workforces until there's nobody left to hire.

So where will this new, skilled workforce come from?   Obviously, the training of this new utility workforce will continue to be a key reliability issue.  Sooner or later it may, of necessity, become an important regulatory issue.

The IBEW and Edison Electric Institute, in accordance with the National Skills Standard Act of 1994, have been working with other industry stakeholders to develop skills standards for electric utility workers.

 The IBEW urges Congress to assist this process by endorsing guidelines for model codes and standards for training and reliability.

A national training standard would require every employer in the electricity industry to employ only workers certified to that standard, and to train them to that standard if they were not.  This would increase system reliability because industry across the board would be required to employ workers who are trained to established minimum levels, know their jobs, and be able to do the work efficiently and safely.

Congress envisioned that the 1992 Energy Policy Act would create a vibrant robust wholesale electricity market, which would lower bulk power prices and benefit all consumers. 

The ensuing years have brought forth everything but.  The electric power industry has become destabilized to the degree that industrial customers feel they must buy their own electricity generators to insure supply!  Reliability has become a function of the market all right -- go to the market and buy your own generator!

To summarize, system reliability depends in great measure upon a trained, experienced and adequate workforce.   Presently, the aging workforce has been diminished by layoffs, working longer hours on systems poorly maintained, with no relief in sight.  Training programs, buttressed with national skills standards, and having mechanisms to attract and retain qualified workers, are critical to the maintenance and expansion of the national electrical systems.

Additionally, Mr. Chairman, the IBEW recognizes your remarkable effort to distill the vital issues needed to be addressed in order to begin to calm the industry.  Among these, we would rank accelerated development and investment in the combined U.S. transmission grid system as most important 

On behalf of IBEW International President Ed Hill and IBEW members, Mr. Chairman, I thank you for hearing our concerns and look forward to supplying any further information with respect to this testimony and the range of issues covered in your White Paper on Electricity Legislation.