Center Point Local 66 Contract ...Its contract time for CenterPoint hands again

[CenterPointEX]

It's contract time for CenterPoint hands again... I did not know this before, but there is work out there that can carry you thru a strike. As I was out tramping across the country, I came across many a temporarily relocated striker. In a lot of cases they were making more money as a contractor than they did as a employee of their home company. One of the things that needs to be worked on is Seniority... It is good at this Point for nothing but vacation... As long as it stays that way, they have ya by the balls... Ya can fight all ya want, but they have the option of squeezing tighter. You young guys, step up to the plate, your future depends on it. When the boys of the 76 strike buckled, we all payed the price. You guys don't have any idea how good a place to work HL&P used to be... You probably don't have a clue how much worse it can get... Believe you me, I know... When you are treated worse than the contractors; as was the case in California, things will begin to change by default... It got so bad that Lineman who left the company after topping out were being charged for their training... Next time you see a contract crew working there in Houston... ask em how it is....

[CenterPointEX]

Corporate greed in America is at an all time high, and de-regulation is a prime example. Where else can you take a perfectly good product, mandate the inclusion of a middle man to generate profits for non-producers, while not improving the product one bit? Put a carrot on a stick, tell the public that it is great because now they have "Choice", decrease the rates to the major manufacturers (while taking up the slack from homeowners) and you have a win-win situation (if you're Enron and not a bill payer). Take away the utilities margins that they use for maintenence (they're wire companies now, not energy companies) and how do you make a profit for your shareholders? Hmmmm, what can we cut?
Texas Genco Reliant HL&P Houston Industries CenterPoint.. a shell game...keep your eye on da money?
.. have they no shame?
When HL&P split up, they gave those holdin HL&P(Houston Industries) stock, stock in the three resulting companies...Relinat the Energy traders(worthless)(They conned employees into the I.P.O. to bolster the gate price)( full share) and the wiresCenterPoint(cannibalized by maint. cut backs)(full share) and Texas Genco the generators(garonteed income)(20% share).The Generators went with a company called Texas Genco... for every share of HL&P they gave you only a twenty percent share of Genco... The other 80 percent was sold to the public. They planned on repurchasing Genco and had the first right to do so at the end of a predefined period at market value, supposedly that is how market value would be derermined... The market value would be determined by the stock price. Well if you are gonna buy a company you have control of, what are you gonna try and do to the value of the compay on paper? I held my shares of the other two resulting companies CenterPoint, and Reliant cause I thought Genco would be bought back at a discount. When it came time to buy, they were in a credit fix... they didn't have any... So any how the Genco sold... if you were holding Texas Genco you were force sold at fifty dollars a share. Which a bunch of us employees; ex or otherwise, were cause we were still holding trying to not sell at a loss i.e. the paper value kept the stock values depressed.... Genco was sold for nine hundred million, the company that bought it only put down three hundred million. Today, one year later, the buyer just resold it for several billion dollars to a company called NRG ? The middle man just pocketed several billion dollars... They ripped us off... What I would like to know is how many HL&P / CenterPoint / Reliant wigs got their fingers in the middle man company... This my friends was an inside job, no ifs, ands, or buts about it... The general public & stockholders, were fleeced. If you were holding stock and were a consumer, ya got double poked...

[CenterPointEX]

I heard Standish gave a presentation today. Anybody got any scoop on it? I still think he owes his rank to having the ability to lie with a poker face. He is professional if ever I met one.

[CenterPointEX]

Reliant announced yesterday a 650 million loss. They understand that is not good and will try to do better. I'm thinkin thats pretty **** good considering. They sold five billion worth of assets in Texas Genco for less than a billion, an still only lost 650 million? Just watch... the losses will eventually total up to around 4 billion. The rest of the story is still hidden "Enron Style" in the paper.

[CenterPointEX]

As you enter into negotiations, this article will give you and overview of whats going on in the industry... http://www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=3528

All the more reason to put some teeth into the Seniority Clause. If your young, N really don't give a rats ass about Seniority just yet... Think twice... it may just save your life...


...Have you even looked at the ages of most of the dead in the last ten years? This industry has seen a drastic change in the last ten years. One change in particular is the number of lineman that have been retired in this last decade. How many utilities have back-filled all of these vacancees created? None of them!
We now do what we once did with half the men.This has created one hell of a nitch for contractors to fill the void that utilities use to cover in house. Its a win win for major utilities. When a highly paid chief retires, not only do they stop paying benifits and salary they also lose a crew. this creates even more opportunity to contract out work.

If this was'nt bad enough, now we have contractors under bidding eachother just to get a foothold. When you under bid a job it causes big problems for everyone. In the end the crew chief gets the heat for lost productivity.

There is alot of talent in the trade today Union and non-union contractor and utility and every day a **** good hand drags up and heads for a better opportunity leaving behind a void in which the employer has to fill with a less expierenced hand.

In the end we all have to read about another 26 year old young man who's dead and leaves behind a wife and two small children and we somehow justify it by calling it a mistake or a accident!
BULL****.

........Good post TGRove... You are not alone in your tribulation... In the past Utility hands didn't have to compete with Contractors for work... they had the option of doing it the safe way no matter how long it took... Not so since the advent of Deregulation.... I don't know what the answer will be... I guess maybe if and when the Public has had enough of sub-standard electrical service... maybe when the carnage starts, maybe after a hot city goes thru a rampage after an outage of some duration... like those in California... til then I guess we gotta just stick togahter... call bull**** when neccessary... N get fired N move on if that's what it takes... That's pretty much the reason I don't work at home right now... Because of the situation with underbid work and the like... It's just not a safe or good place to be right now... I pretty much made the decision to leave just such a situation in Houston after a close call...
....I was in the bucket with an apprentice... We had built a new six pole line and we were in the process of connecting it to an existin dead end pole, which were converting to an inline pole... The job was out of hours... The foreman was pushin... it had rained some that day which slowed us down N it was late... It was 19.9\34.5... The line phases were in isolaters just on the other side of the pole we were working on (Hung with gloves not sticks I might add)... They should have been further down but we couldn't get a bucket there cause it was in the easement... So we put em as far out as we could reach with the bucket... I noticed an apprentice putting on his tools about three spans down on the new line... I should have stopped what I was doing... went down and discussed what was going on down there... But there was no time for that... Some how the neutral which was in web jacks got away from us... N bounced down toward "A" phase... I looked back the other way N noticed too late the apprentice at the top of the pole down the line with his hands on the neutral, the foreman had sent him up there to correct something... I looked back N watched the neutral bounce up N down N prayed... It came to rest inches away from becomming hot... how it didn't come hot I can only wonder... That apprentice topped out N right before I left California he showed up on the job I was working... This one made it out by the grace of God... Wanna guess how old he is?... There are places in the country that have figured this out... but it seems there are lot of places that are in the throes of a bad situation... caused by folks selling long term securitys down the river for short term gain... Testimonys to the double edged sword of greed...

[CenterPointEX]

TXU has been playing the same game played with utilities all across the U.S.
TXUs territory is a Rat Stronghold, where Union Labor has made little inroad, consequently their labor costs have been lower than the national average, thus by squeezing labor, they have maintained a stronger financial postion than comparable companies across the nation. Another "Fat Cash Cow" ;whos breeding, upbring, and trip to the feed lot has been financed by the public, is headed to the auction barn. Soon to be butchered and Bar-B-Qued on an altar near you...



GE, Macquarie Vie to Buy Stake
In TXU's Energy-Delivery Assets
By DENNIS K. BERMAN, REBECCA SMITH and KATHRYN KRANHOLD
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 27, 2006; Page A3
General Electric Co. and an investment fund of Australia's Macquarie Bank Ltd. are each vying to purchase a big stake in TXU Corp.'s electricity-delivery business, people familiar with the matter said. The transaction could be valued in the range of $5 billion or more.

TXU is weighing whether to accept the valuations offered by the two rival bidders, these people said. It could reach a final deal within a matter of weeks, they added, but also could decide against bringing in a partner.

Under the arrangement being discussed, Dallas-based TXU, the largest electricity company in Texas, would spin off its poles, wires and substations to a newly created company and would sell a 49% stake in that firm to an outside investor. TXU said it would weigh its options for the unit back in October, but the company has largely stayed mum since then. Spokesmen for GE and TXU declined to comment. A Macquarie spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment.

. . . The decision will be closely watched across the utility industry because TXU has become the top performer, by several measures, since Chief Executive C. John Wilder took the helm two years ago. Mr. Wilder has brought new thinking to the sector and his moves are examined, though not always imitated, because of his success.
The entire utility sector is under pressure to find ways to boost profits. Many firms stumbled badly in deregulated electricity markets after 2002 and have since taken a "back to basics" approach. Historically, utilities have been more enamored with the generation side of the business, which absorbed more capital and threw off a larger share of profits, than the energy-delivery business.

Both GE and Macquarie are scouring the world, looking for places to deploy large chunks of capital. GE's energy financial services, which has more than $10 billion in energy assets, has been looking to expand beyond investments in power plants and gas pipelines into transmission systems.

The GE unit's chief executive, Alex Urquhart, said last year that GE is looking to invest at least $10 billion in new projects through 2007. Most recently, Mr. Urquhart said he wanted to invest $5 billion this year in energy assets. GE previously has taken small stakes in electric transmission lines including one in Michigan and one in Chile.

If GE clinches a deal, it could enable the Connecticut firm to install "smart grid" technology in Texas that could help the joint venture win similar business elsewhere, perhaps even sparking transmission consolidation in Texas.

Macquarie, of Sydney, Australia, has diverse and far-flung interests, from a Chicago-area toll road, to stakes in the Copenhagen, Denmark, airport.

Back in the U.S., a modernized grid promises to move electricity more cheaply and reliably and could offer features such as "broadband over power lines" in which Internet and telephonic services are offered to consumers through high-voltage wires. Consumers access broadband over power lines simply by plugging devices into an electric outlet. TXU already has signed a deal with Current Communications Group LLC to roll out broadband services in the near future.

If struck at the right valuation, a spinoff could bring many advantages to TXU. It would reap a large sum of cash that it could reinvest in more profitable businesses, most likely power generation, while still preserving a chance to profit from transmission improvements. The risk is that it could take money from a stable moneymaker, the "wires" business, and dissipate it on other investments that might not pan out.

Mr. Wilder has said he wants to double TXU's coal- and lignite-fired generating capacity in Texas and already has committed to build two big plants at a cost of $2.5 billion. He has told analysts he could generate an additional $4 billion of annual profits, before taxes, interest and other expenses, by investing $7 billion to $11 billion in his solid-fuel fleet -- an eye-popping return in that sector.

Many utility companies feel their transmission and distribution systems need improving but they have been reluctant to spend the money themselves. A few utilities have sold their transmission systems outright, but the prices fetched haven't been enough to create a groundswell.


California Utilities have been snowed under ever since they were forced by State Law to begin regular inspections of faciltites... It's so bad they are importing Lineman from Canada cause the number of hands available in the U.S. cain't even begin to make a dent in thier problem...... California was the first state to deregulate, so they are ahead of the curve... when they deregulated, they got rid of half their hands and ceased maint. operations... brought in the same cash as before they stopped doing maint.... Wigs got their bonuses... Bought a lot of stock... watched the price go up cause the company was cash rich... sittin on them maint. dollars... N when the pot got right... they sold the stock... left employees; who owned a lot of stock in 401Ks', holding the bag.... now with their life savings gone... they gotta work the forced thousand hours of overtime or get on down the road... wit nuttin but a swift kick in da arse...
... Any how point is... should your state enact a law similar to CAlifornias... Its gonna come wit a big price tag... California didn't make such a law til they had no choice... it was either that or sit in the dark or sweltering heat fer days on end.... Does anyone remember still the massive rolling blackouts? And the pricetag of the power they did manage to scrape up?...
.... It's not if, but when the same thing happens in your neighborhood

I agree with Org' on the reasons why we have contractors on the property, its because the Ceo's have all but stopped any maint., havn't rehired or just plain got rid of the work force. Here at Com Edy we can't keep up the maint. or even the new constuction. We have been told by the company that they can't get enough contractors to do the work. The barn here doesn't have enough people to string in a 3 Ph/10 pole job.

People can say what they want about the unions, but lets look at the trend that is happening and look at the future, from what we learned from the past. Before unions the pay and benefits were nil. , losing a life or two to get a job done was just part of doing business. Thats what it was like, get down off your soap box and think before you bashers talk. If we lose the unions, we all lose, rat, non-rat, country club and contractor. If not for the union asking for a good wage and benny package, the non-union wage would be nothing.

Now lets look at the trend. With all the union busting thats been happening, what would happen if all unions folded......Stop and think..... There would be no need to pay a skilled person to do a dangerous job, the CEO could get any Tom, **** or Harry to do the work for dirt, why, because he has an unlimited amount of warm bodies who will do anything for $5.50 an hr. If he got hurt or killed, it was his fault, we gave him a safety book.

There is more than enough work here in Ill. that I don't have to worry about losing my job, and I'll work with anyone, be it beside you, front or behind. As long as I can count on you to watch my back.

Be Safe.

[CenterPointEX]

I heard a vicious rumor today about CenterPoint closing down all the service centers save three which would be SuperCenters. Berry is up for sale... Also that CenterPoint is down under five hundred lineman again. Back in the heyday, the had 1200... The customer base has quadroupled, and the work force cut more than half... No Comprende?...The supercenter thing may be just a ploy to make em sweat at contract time and It may also good scoop to put em on course to follow the way of California... Skeleten crews supported by an infrastructure of contractors... Of course thats after the part of the company bankrupts like PG&E did, while its parent company made record profits... I would say Reliant is the odd man out in that scenario... and turn what I got left in stock to full course mush... I keep wondering why I'm still holding... They are also gettin rid of all their pole trucks save one or two... contractors will deliever from now on... Gang way foreman... if they follow the california track, your job is next... out there they got inspectors herding a bucket of contractors... They ride around and critique your job, but they dont really manage you... Point is... all contractors and no company hands... don't need foreman... for you California folks, a foreman at CenterPoint is the equivelant of a G.F. there... Already CenterPoint is beginning to feel the crunch... Out there in California, nobody will work for less than five tens... It is hard to fill a five eight job... CenterPoint was trying to get some contract crews to work five eights to coincide with some CP wigs working with them... The contract crews balked N CP had to give... If they wanted the hands to get out the work they wanted... God knows CenterPoint don't have hands to get her done... I'm just sittin here grinnin like a Cheshire Cat, cause I know what comes next... The Wages a lineman can draw someplaces in the country are what they are cause the folks need lineman and they need them now... not three or four years down the road after they get some new ones trained... If they want to get the work done that is... Either that or they could get some Rats who just grab folks off the corner and put em in a bucket truck... Tripple A Lineman... or maybe the Vato brigade... get you a bucket of mexicans... they are cheaper by the dozen...

[CenterPointEX]

I asked a question and got an interesting answer the other day of a wig in the know at CenterPoint. "What is the average age of a pole on CenterPoint property?" The answer was twenty years. That means in the next ten years half of the poles in their system will be past a poles thirty year life expectancy on the gulf goast. In 1983 HL&P had 1200 Lineman, they now sport under 500... Is it just me, or has Houston not gotten any smaller since 1983?

[Orgnizdlbr]

I asked a question and got an interesting answer the other day of a wig in the know at CenterPoint. "What is the average age of a pole on CenterPoint property?" The answer was twenty years. That means in the next ten years half of the poles in their system will be past a poles thirty year life expectancy on the gulf goast. In 1983 HL&P had 1200 Lineman, they now sport under 500... Is it just me, or has Houston not gotten any smaller since 1983?

Sadly CP, every utility seems to be the same, downsize, take big bonuses for the COE and screw the customer.

[CenterPointEX]

On some things my friend... we agree...

The CenterPoint hands have to fight on this ground...
Some of the Contracters are complaining about what they are getting from the hall these days...The contract hands have no need to strike... They just drag... and most of the good ones have...
Rodinger just came back from Diego... he was there seven years...

[CenterPointEX]

Ok CenterPoint hands... If'n ya don't know it... Ya got em by the balls. They once had 1200 Lineman... They now have under 500... A contractor called the hall the other day asking for fifteen lineman... they just laughed at em... Nobody will work in Houston cause... to be frank... it sucks... So the Light company has to keep what it got left... They are depending on contractors to fill the gap... only there ain't no hands left here to take up the slack...At this Point, you can pretty much write your own check... Another contractor called the hall offering two dollars above scale trying to attract some hands... a sign of things to come... Just a suggestion, but put in a clause that requires the LIght Company to hire back laid off hands as the need arises... and make seniority mean something...

[CenterPointEX]

Somebody needs to wake up or else

A hurricane hits the mid-Atlantic, pounding the coastlines of North Carolina and Virginia. Homes and property are destroyed but the biggest problem is the massive power outage that has isolated tens of thousands of residents. The local utilities, already short-staffed, put out an urgent call for manpower to neighboring electric companies. But nobody comes. The lights stay out. There’s no one left to spare.

This disaster scenario is not as unlikely as it sounds. Years of relentless cost cutting by the utility industry have wiped out worker training programs and gutted the ranks of experienced linemen. Since deregulation came to the electric industry more than 10 years ago, utilities have reduced their line staff by 25 or 30 percent. Today, the average lineman is 48 and overworked thanks to the widespread practice of forced overtime.

The good news is anecdotal evidence suggests that the industry is aware of the problem. The bad news is not much is being done to address it.

"Everything is keyed on dollars and cents profit," said IBEW Utility Director Jim Hunter. "Storm outages are longer, and utilities are asking for more and more help from other utilities. The problem is that other companies are in the same boat. And they are still not hiring."

Thanks to bare-bones management under deregulation, worker training programs are all but relics from the past, victims of a highly competitive deregulated environment. The aging work force is dominated by baby boomers nearing retirement. Industry observers are predicting a slow-motion catastrophe over the low number of linemen qualified to shepherd the nation’s power grid into the future.

"We have this impending demographic crisis on our hands here," said Madison, Wisconsin, Local 2304 Business Manager Dave Poklinkoski. "At the same time, the utility industry has not come to grips with the need to hire and train that gap. But some utility companies are increasingly recognizing the problem."

Demographic Time Bomb

By 2010, as many as 60 percent of today’s experienced utility workers will retire. A survey conducted last fall by the Carnegie Mellon University Electricity Industry Center found that utility human resources executives overwhelmingly listed the aging work force as their number one concern. Eighty percent of those surveyed placed the aging work force as their biggest worry, far above the other listed concerns, which included cost of benefits and a skilled work force. The managers represented more than 200,000 workers from utilities across the country.

Those executives have done the math and the numbers do not work out in their favor. Climbing poles and repairing wires in extreme outdoor conditions is hard physical work. By the age of 55 or 60, most journeymen linemen are ready for retirement after a career spent in the elements.

"We are facing a huge depletion of highly trained people," Hunter said. "Some workers who have been in the industry for 30 years are not being replaced, and more than that, are not being given an opportunity to transfer their knowledge to the new work force because there isn’t one."

The industry is running out of time.

"If the industry continues to ignore this problem, all of society will be paying the price," said IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill. "A modern, technologically dependent economy must have a professional work force to maintain its vital infrastructure or it will no longer be the reliable system we have come to take for granted."

A Life on the Lines

The job of utility linemen is varied and complex. It takes five years to train a lineman to a journeyman level, and most in the industry acknowledge that it takes 10 years to become a well-rounded lineman. There is much to learn, said Utility Department International Representative Don Hartley, who came out of the Virginia Power training program. It takes years to gain the skills to construct and maintain the full spectrum of the utility infrastructure.

"There is no short-term learning curve for working safely in an environment that has the ever-present potential for injury or death," Hartley said. Years of one-on-one, hands-on training is necessary to learn the mechanics of dealing with the vast assortment of wire sizes and tensions, understand complex equipment capabilities and develop effective trouble-shooting skills, not to mention getting comfortable with climbing 55-foot poles and 200-foot transmission towers and the art of maneuvering large utility trucks through alleys and congested city streets.

Richmond, Virginia, Local 50 member Dave Barham said when he joined Virginia Power 26 years ago, his service area shared nearly 50 helpers, or "groundmen," that assisted linemen on crews. Now the Virginia Beach service area he works in has been doubled, but there are only seven groundmen. Barham said the utility preaches safety on the job, but the worker shortage itself is a safety issue. "They want us to have a safety culture but don’t want to admit that it’s an older work force and that there’s not enough people on the jobsites," Barham said.

Despite the evidence of a shortage, the computer modeling increasingly in use as a management tool indicates just the opposite. "Man-hour reports keep telling our supervisors we have too many people on the job for the work that we do," Barham said.

The work is also getting more technical, with utility companies increasing employing computers to track workers in the field and monitor job assignments, Hunter said. "But no matter how advanced technology is, when a line is lying down in the road, it takes a body and a bucket truck to put that line back up," he said. "There is no technology that we have that can do that."

Virginia Power is relying more and more on calling in workers for repairs, but to keep the number of those calls down, they are using the first response crews to make temporary fixes instead of using call-outs for proper repairs by repair crews.

‘Band-Aid Fixes’

It is only in extreme cases that regulators have entered the fray on staffing levels in the electricity industry. Two years ago, the New Jersey Public Service Commission chided FirstEnergy, parent company of Jersey Central Power and Light (JCP&L), for what it considered unacceptably long response times for power outages. The utility was ordered to hire 300 workers. But the unusual mandate has not solved the staff shortage problem at JCP&L. Five New Jersey IBEW locals representing 1,350 JCP&L workers went on strike last December after rejecting a contract offer requiring workers to remain on call 24 hours a day—essentially forced overtime.

"These are just Band-Aid fixes," Hunter said. "Eventually that person is not going to continue to work 1,000 hours of overtime a year. They are just trying to prolong the inevitable. We are not going to have enough trained, qualified people to do the work."

Not only are the utilities failing to reconstitute dismantled training programs and neglecting to replace those who have retired, some—like Pepco in Washington, D.C., and Maryland and Connectiv in Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia—continue to offer their workers early retirements. As the utility work force dwindles, companies are using more and more nonunion contractors, further depleting the ranks of highly trained IBEW members.

The lack of knowledge transfer and loss of institutional understanding are a particular concern of IBEW members who have spent years honing their skills in a challenging and dangerous field. The specialized niche of utility construction has been severely cut due to the lack of new investment in transmission and distribution. Deregulation and its attendant uncertainties have eliminated any inclination on the part of utilities to spend money on capital improvements and even more importantly, even less on the maintenance necessary for sustaining reliable infrastructure.

"Every time that person with 30 years of experience walks out the door, the problem gets worse," Hunter said.

[CenterPointEX]

And remember this CenterPoint Hands... If you travel during the Strike... You can make more money than if you stayed at Home... There was a bunch of boys from Jersey out on the road during thier last strike...

[CenterPointEX]

Originally Posted by notgreedy
I am new to this forum as far as contributing, but I have read the posts for a while... I am not a lineman (or a man, for that matter ;) ), but I have worked for an electric utility for 19 years in many capacities... that being said...
my point for posting...

I work for National Grid in upstate New York. I have hated them from the moment they took over Niagara Mohawk. Their lack of concern over their employees safety and well being as well as their lack of concern over customer satisfaction and system reliability is enough to make you puke--even before you find out the billions of dollars in profits the company makes.

Our last contract seems to be one that put a silver bullet into the heart of our union by freely allowing contractors to take over most of our work. Similar to how I know no one who actually voted for Bush (yet he won anyway), I know of no one who actually voted for this last contract (but, I also have to say that there weren't that many who actually read and understood fully the changes that were being voted on, either).... Now I am watching a mass exodus of our aging workforce, and those of us who still have many years before we can even think of retiring are left holding this nasty bag of sh*t that the Greed is handing us-- we are being set up to fail miserably, and that's exactly what we are doing... :mad:

We do not have enough resources available to properly do our jobs... I am a trainee in my dept, and I do not get trained, I get work that a clerk should be doing-- the others in my department have to share vehicles (while the contractors doing our jobs each get their own rental vehicle)... We have to field the complaints about the jobs that the contractors have messed up on, and then fix their work (and not get credit for it)..... we watch as UNION retirees come back as "consultants" and do the jobs our union bros and sis did, and should be doing-- and these jerks are getting paid three times what any of us get paid--I guess I can't blame them, because if they didn't do it, someone else would, but still... they should be supporting the Union....

The lastest slap in the face from the company is that they got fined for poor customer service from the Public Service Commission... One might think that we, as employees, could breath a sigh of relief that finally someone is telling Greed to take care of the business of taking care of their customers... but, no... listen to this... the EMPLOYEES have been told that we are not to speak disparagingly of the company under any circumstances... meaning that when a customer happens to meet up with one of the few remaining faces that actually represent the company in public and attempts to bombard us with their complaints that they haven't been able to resolve satisfactorily over the telephone (which is ALL OF THEM), we will face discipline if we direct them to voice their complaint to the PSC... this company has said that we could face termination if we tell customers that the reason that their work isn't getting done in a timely manner is because we don't have the man power, because the company will not invest the money in maintenance, because the company is not interested in providing customer service... meaning that we are not allowed to TELL THE TRUTH or give the customer a viable alternative to go with their complaint (because I know I can't solve their problems).... I am sickened by this and it gets worse every day...

National Grid is a NON AMERICAN company who is buying up a significant portion of America's electric and natural gas infrastructure... WHY ISN"T THE GOVERNMENT CHALLENGING THIS, MUCH LIKE THE PORT DEALS??? Why is an foreign owned company being allowed to roll all over American workers and consumers like this, and barely a whisper when they continue to buy up more and more???? :eek:


Just needed to rant....
thanks for listening!!

[CenterPointEX]

Wellp... the CenterPoint Hands passed a four year contract?... Four Years!... with 3% raises... and no concessions on conditions... They had em over a barrel and let em loose?... Now they are locked in for four years...Let me see... Gas prices have gone up since last year 33%... The full scale effect of that has not yet manifested itself in the economy... What will be the effect of a maintained or increased 33% rise in fuel costs. Will a 3% raise cover 10% inflation? I just grabbed 10% inflation out of the air, but you get the picture... In lue of money which you got craped on, conditions should have been a Point of Contention... Se La Vee...

[CenterPointEX]

Rodinger didn't even make it a week... They got contract helpers riding on Light Company Trucks now... Also they have Contract underground apprentices riding on LIght Company Trucks... How long before Contract Lineman?... It has already happend... Me...Just for a few days... has happened...