Ala. utility, Fla. crewman blame electricians’ union for interfering with Hurricane Sandy relief
          
            
             
            A business coordinator at  a power company in western Georgia told The Daily Caller Friday afternoon that  workers from his electric-utility employer were not permitted to help restore  power to New York consumers because they would not join the International  Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).
            The revelation comes on  the heels of similar stories TheDC has reported about power crews from Alabama  and Florida who volunteered to fix downed power lines after Hurricane Sandy  left millions in the Northeastern United States in the dark this week.
            “We’re not a large utility, so we were only able to  send up two or three crews,” Glenn Cunningham, a business continuity  coordinator with Diverse Power in LaGrange, Georgia, said in a phone interview.
            “They worked in Maryland, and they went up to New York, and when they got up  there it was, ‘out come the union papers.’”
            “And our guys were like, ‘Hey, we’re not joining nothing.  We came up to help, but if you don’t want it, that’s fine.’ So they turned  around and drove all the way back here to Georgia.”
            On Thursday evening WAFF-TV in Huntsville, Ala. reported  that the devastated coastal town of Seaside Heights, N.J. turned away a crew  from Decatur Utilities in Decatur, Ala., saying they couldn’t do any work there  because they’re not union employees. 
            Decatur Utilities general manager Ray Hardin said Friday  during a Fox Business Network broadcast that ”we were presented with documents  from IBEW that required our folks to affiliate with the union. And [that's]  something that we could not agree to. And it was our understanding, and still  is, that that was a requirement of working in that area.”
            On Friday TheDC spoke with a veteran electric utility  worker from central Florida whose crew was kept idling for two days while his  managers dealt with the union’s membership demands.
             “It turns out there  was a 300-page contract that the union controlling LIPA [the Long Island Power  Authority] wanted everybody to sign first,” the utility worker, who wanted to  remain anonymous, said. “We don’t have time for that. We’ve got guys ready to  go. You need lawyers for this.”
            “We’re not complaining about money,” the Floridian added.  “You can pay us less. We don’t care. Just let us go up there.”
            Cunningham added in an email that, “[t]o have to return  without assisting, to see the mess that is up there, to hear the reports of how  miserable it is for many residents, just sickens me.”
            “When major storms happen down here in the South, everybody  just bails in and starts helping,” Cunningham told TheDC. “There’s 42  electrical cooperatives here in Georgia, and we work alongside Georgia Power,  which is all unionized. Most of the co-ops are not. When something happens  here, everybody works together. There’s no sending people away.”
            “We came up to help because we wanted to assist in getting  the power back on in an area that could use our skills and expertise, not join  the union,” he added via email.
            Cunningham told TheDC that he is a former IBEW member  himself, and that he hailed originally from Massachusetts, where that union is  particularly strong.
            But Diverse Power, he added, is “a non-union shop because  our employees have chosen to be so.”
            “We treat them well, have excellent wages and benefits  which result in a nearly zero turnover in employees.” . . . Read Article