Workers at waste-to-power facilities in New York and Pennsylvania overcame intense corporate resistance to unionizing and won elections to have IBEW locals represent them.
“They tried to drag it out as much as possible,” said John Scherrer, business manager of Niagara Falls, N.Y., Local 237. A majority of workers at a Reworld facility there elected to join the IBEW on Jan. 30.
So did workers at a Reworld plant near Harrisburg, Pa., about a week earlier, voting to align with Reading Local 777.
Reworld facilities generate electricity by burning garbage. “They’re calling it some kind of environmental company, but really they’re a generating company,” said Local 777 Business Manager Daulph Kline. “It makes them think they can pay us less.”
Workers at the Niagara Falls plant, for example, process more than 810,000 tons of waste per year, generating nearly 200,000 megawatt-hours of electricity along the way.
“They’re making decent money, but it’s apparently a nasty job,” said Steve Rockafellow, a Third District international representative who helped with organizing at both facilities. “There’s smoke in there and ash and things like that.”
It can be dangerous, too, said Third District Lead Organizer Michael McGee: “You’ve got operators, you’ve got maintenance people, but your field people? Those guys are out there having to look over their shoulder constantly to make sure a fork truck’s not blazing through.”
Workers at both plants had grown increasingly disgruntled with the company’s restructuring of benefits, Rockafellow said, plus the deletion of annual bonuses.
“Management just decided, ‘We’re not doing that anymore,’” he said. What fueled workers’ ire, he added, was how company leaders talked openly “about how they had record profits and then announced that the management people still got their bonuses.”
Workers’ first try at organizing — with another union in 2023 — failed by a razor-thin margin, said Nick Coyle, a Local 237 organizer. “The company made them lots of promises,” he said. “But that all went away as soon as the election was over.”
A Reworld employee was talking to a Local 237 member at their kids’ wrestling tournament about conditions at the plant. The member recommended getting in touch with Coyle, and by last October, the Reworld workers there had begun a peer-to-peer organizing campaign.
“Some of them felt the IBEW was a better fit and maybe what they needed to actually get a win,” Rockafellow said. “They were getting union authorization cards signed pretty quickly.”
They also ran into Reworld-sponsored resistance, he said, including captive-audience meetings.
“It’s just every step of the way, they do everything they can to delay the election and everything they can to make it difficult,” McGee said.
What helped put workers at ease, Rockafellow said, was assuring them that the IBEW had their backs. “We tell them: ‘You’re not bringing in a union. You’re forming one with your coworkers,’” he said.
Although a vote Dec. 19 saw a majority of the workers voting in favor of IBEW representation, Reworld threatened to dispute the results after learning that a National Labor Relations Board agent had made a small mistake in ballot box handling that didn’t affect the election’s outcome.
The parties agreed to hold a second vote Jan. 30.
“I kind of am nervous of a rerun election,” McGee said. “They can be scary, and the statistics aren’t favorable.”
Also nerve-wracking, Scherrer said, was that Reworld hired more workers before the second vote. “We were afraid that maybe they were stacking it,” he said.
The results of the revote, however, were better than those of the first one. IBEW staffers and local labor leaders with first-contract experience were still meeting with workers and assisting the local’s negotiating team as this newspaper was being prepared.
“I feel like we have a lot of leverage,” Scherrer said. Much of what the Niagara Falls plant processes is brought in across the state by rail from New York City. “Any interruptions would have a real impact on them,” he said.
Meanwhile, Reading Local 777 organized Reworld workers at a municipally owned facility in Harrisburg. After a plant worker last fall contacted the International Office for help, organizing got underway quickly, said Business Manager Kline.
“My business rep and I went over for a couple of meetings, and [Harrisburg] Local 143 helped us out, letting us use their union hall,” he said.
Workers’ issues in Harrisburg mirrored those in Niagara Falls. “They said the same exact things,” Rockafellow said, “that the trend is every year they get a little less and the company is going to come after something else. They wanted to organize before then.”
McGee said that Reworld’s anti-union tactics there were similar, too. “Everyone got called into the office, one at a time. They repeated: ‘You need to vote no. You’re going to lose your retirement.’”
Reworld’s union-busting attempts were a bust in Harrisburg as well. About half of that location’s enthusiastic bargaining unit had quickly turned in signed union authorization cards, Kline said, and more than 77% of those voting Jan. 21 favored IBEW representation.
Negotiations toward a first contract are in progress.
