FirstEnergy assaults workers and consumers in power station closures
Earlier this month, FirstEnergy Corp. stopped producing electricity from the Hatfield’s Ferry generating plant in Greene County and the Mitchell plant in Washington County.
In the next few days, 380 Pennsylvania families will lose their livelihoods because of decisions made by FirstEnergy executives in their corporate suites in Akron. The employees losing their jobs because of this misguided corporate decision include 170 members of Utility Workers Union of America System Local 102.
While FirstEnergy apparently is offering replacement jobs elsewhere to some white-collar and administrative personnel, management refused even to consider new positions for hourly utility workers unless their union first accepted painful cutbacks in living standards for hundreds of other employees throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland.
In short, FirstEnergy is using the hardship management has imposed on nearly 200 loyal employees as a bargaining chip to try to extract millions of dollars in concessions from other workers’ family budgets.
The company has made no effort to find willing buyers for these two power stations, preferring instead to simply shutter the plants with no regard for the devastating impacts on workers and the surrounding communities. This is especially cruel for loyal employees and their families, since there is a huge shortage in other job classifications within the company near the Hatfield’s Ferry and Mitchell area.
The cutbacks FirstEnergy is demanding in labor negotiations with utility workers will also hurt customers. For example, management wants to eliminate the entire “customer satisfaction” clause from the Local 102 contract, meaning that “ready response” trucks will vanish from many service areas resulting in longer delays in emergency service restorations for consumers.
The company also wants to hire more outside contractors to deliver essential public services, instead of relying on highly-trained utility workers.
FirstEnergy’s unrelenting demands for takeaways from workers and consumers are very different from the public relations pronouncements the company issued at the time of its merger with the former Pennsylvania-based Allegheny Energy in February 2011. At that time, FirstEnergy CEO Tony Alexander boasted about the benefits of a larger, stronger company for customers, shareholders, and employees, and claimed the merger would “underscore the company’s focus on regional operations.”
This corporate happy-talk has now been laid bare by FirstEnergy’s decisions to close two Pennsylvania power plants, throw dedicated employees into the street, and then attempt to hold the same victimized workers hostage to management’s demands to impose unfair concessions on other employees.
As far as utility workers can tell, Alexander and other top FirstEnergy executives are the only people who have gained from the merger with Allegheny.
Since 2010, Alexander’s total compensation has more than doubled – from $11.6 million before the merger to a staggering $23.3 million in 2012. Last year, FirstEnergy doled out $40 million in compensation to only five senior executives from the revenues collected from ordinary ratepayers.
Alexander and other top executives in Akron find it all too easy to blame a host of factors for their own decision to shutter two productive power plants in southwestern Pennsylvania.
For the working families left stranded by this decision, however, the closures of Hatfield’s Ferry and Mitchell represent yet another chapter in a long history of FirstEnergy actions designed to bolster corporate profits and top executive salaries at the expense of workers and the public at large.
Utility workers are fed up with corporate executives who care little for the interests of ratepayers or hourly employees.
If you agree, please urge your state legislators to sharply question FirstEnergy management about company decisions that are so clearly against the public interest.
Robert Whalen is the President of Utility Workers Union of America System Local 102.