Con Ed Locks Out Workers, Screws NYC

JULY 2—Consolidated Edison locked out 8,500 members of Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Local 1-2 shortly after their contract expired at midnight on June 30. With Con Ed out to gut pensions and double health care premiums, Local 1-2 members had earlier authorized a strike. As the clock ticked down, the union president maintained he would not concede on pensions. When the union did not buckle at the negotiating table, the utility ordered workers off the job. Increasingly, companies are turning to lockouts—justified by the anti-labor New York Times as “a defensive measure against the threat of a strike” (1 July)—to attempt to bust unions. About 5,000 management employees are working as scabs.

In gunning for the union of this skilled and highly specialized workforce, the giant monopoly is imperiling the lives and health of city residents. With the city suffocating under a deadly heat wave, Con Ed is exposing the sick, the elderly and others to possible heat stroke and death. Violent storms accompanying the heat in the mid-Atlantic have knocked out power and air conditioning to 3.9 million customers and done “catastrophic damage” to power grids. Con Ed is notorious for its antiquated infrastructure that has repeatedly failed under high summer demand, including just last month. It is a testament to the hard work of UWUA members under hazardous conditions that there are not even more service disruptions.

The union, which traces its roots back to a CIO organizing committee in 1938, unites electric, gas and steam plant workers with clerical workers. It derives significant social power from its key role in keeping the lights on in the center of U.S. finance capital. A successful fight by Local 1-2 members to defend their livelihoods would disrupt the current tide of lockouts, pension and benefit grabs and anti-union legislation that encouraged Con Ed to hardline it with the utility workers.

Solid picket lines reinforced by the ranks of city labor would be a good first step. Beware labor’s enemies, including federal mediators, whose purpose is to hamstring the union’s power, and capitalist Democratic Party politicians, such as former governor David Paterson, who brokered the 2008 Local 1-2 contract. His successor Andrew Cuomo has fueled the anti-union offensive, attacking state workers with a vengeance. Defeat Con Ed union-busting! Victory to the UWUA!