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Labor Proposes Seven-Point Program To Assure Reliable Electrical Service

With support of the IBEW, the AFL-CIO adopted a statement February 13 that calls for federal and state governments to adopt the following principles to ensure a reliable, safe and low-cost supply of electricity for the United States:

Create safeguards and incentives to guarantee adequate generation and transmission capacity at all times, while ensuring that all existing environmental and labor standards are maintained for new power plants.
Enact policies to ensure the stability and integrity of wholesale electricity markets.
Create safeguards to minimize price volatility and prevent manipulation of power supplies to artificially drive up prices.
Support a policy of fuel diversity which also sustains all current generating options.
Encourage increased investment and incentives to promote energy efficiency, demand-side management and conservation and enact tough quality of service standards.
Enact adequately funded programs to make workers dislocated by electricity restructuring whole.
Expand support and subsidies to ensure that low-income families have sufficient access to affordable electrical power.

A new recovery plan supported by the AFL-CIO includes much of what the IBEW has been saying for nine years about deregulation, but with a fresh urgency because California utility companies are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Their debt started to mount on the exorbitant prices they were forced to pay to generating companies during a record summer 2000 heat wave and reached $12 billion before a bailout that has cost the state government $40 million to $50 million a day.

Saying we told you so to the powers that be may give us a certain satisfaction, but it wont save anybodys job or get us out of this mess, IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill told a meeting of Local 47 stewards in Los Angeles February 10. Local 47, in Diamond Bar, represents workers at Southern California Edison, one of the utilities threatened by bankruptcy.

Hill emphasized that there is no simple solution, but stressed that three principles must be applied. Peoplethat is, workers and consumersmust come first. Prices must come down at all levels. And utility company bankruptcies must be avoided at all costs, he said.

If IBEW members lose collective bargaining rights at these major utilities, then collective bargaining rights are not safe anywhere in the industry. What happens in California can spread across America, especially in states where deregulation is already in place, Hill continued.

Nor is the threat confined to the utility industry, Hill said. Construction starts, manufacturing processes, telecommunications and broadcast technology, railroads and every part of the Brotherhood dependent on reliable power are jeopardized when the nation is thrown into an energy crisis.

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