Union-enthused workers at a northern Illinois power plant overwhelmingly voted to join Downers Grove Local 15, and leaders of this 5,200-member utility local hope that the campaign will help fuel future drives to bring more workers at similar facilities into the IBEW.
“Local 15 is always looking for ways to increase our membership and help more middle-class working families,” Business Manager Chris Riser said. “We’re excited for this opportunity and honored to be part of this adventure.”
About 20 people work at Invenergy’s Nelson Energy Center, a gas-fired plant that began operating in Rock Falls in 2015. Soon after the facility’s launch, the company added a couple of peaking generators to help the center handle occasions when customer demand for electricity threatens to exceed the plant’s maximum baseload generation capacity.
Workers at so-called peaker plants are not traditionally unionized, said Regional Organizing Coordinator Lynn Arwood. “We have work to do to pick up these plants,” she said.
A worker at Nelson and an IBEW member at one of the nuclear power plants represented by Local 15 happen to be brothers, Riser said, which helped facilitate organizing conversations. “There were a couple issues that they wanted to talk to somebody from Local 15 about,” he said.
After the Nelson workers had exhausted nearly every avenue of communication with Invenergy to address their concerns, Arwood said, they opened a formal dialog with the IBEW. “They made a pact with each other and decided that this is what they needed to do,” she said. “This group is more bonded than anybody can imagine.”
It was an eager group, too, Arwood said. During their first official organizing meeting with Local 15, for example, the workers wanted to sign union authorization cards right away, something that doesn’t usually happen so early in the process.
“They were begging for cards, so we gave them the cards,” Arwood said.
Local 15 received a healthy 70% majority of cards authorizing a unionizing vote, Riser noted. “We talked to these guys about what their issues were and then took it to the company,” he said. “We went out and just kind of ‘grassrootsed’ it.”
Within weeks, Riser said, “we had filed a petition for an election with the [National Labor Relations Board] and then represented the employees at the election Sept. 4.”
Seventeen of the 20 workers voted in favor of becoming Local 15 members, the business manager said, noting that Invenergy did not challenge the result and that the local has received no real pushback from the company throughout the process.
“There were a lot of questions asked, a lot of ‘We’ll get back to you’ on things,” Riser said. “But there hasn’t been a lot of anti-union stuff at the plants that we’ve heard of.”
A negotiating committee was assembled soon after, with discussions toward a first contract between Local 15 and Invenergy remaining underway as this article was prepared.
Meanwhile, there are more than 50 other peaker plants in Illinois, and Riser said he wants his local to be at the forefront organizing them. “Once we get Nelson done, we’ll have a track record on what it takes to go forward,” he said. “We’ll have a record to build on.”
