Its Supply and Demand-thats it.

[billfoster67]

The conditions and wages of the lineman is dependent on supply and demand. We are so short in supply, that anti-union bs can't work. I hold a BA in Economics and Mathematics and I am a lineman. If you give these idiots supply, you, they can't replace you without thousands and thousands of dollars.

I am a construction lineman. I tried the good old utility lick and it was just too weird for me. I loved my yard, my gf, my manger-they were 100% for the men, especially one foreman who I really appreciated, EB. But my retirement sucked, and all the other top management would talk in acronyms. The kids going in, the lineman- apprentice ratio was 4 to 1 didn't have that love for the work, a few did. My last day I was trying to teach the kids all the ties, al top tie, al side tie, copper top tie copper side, all the hot ties- the ones they should have read in their Shoemaker book. One said "Essay that aint right" like a gangsta. I said what- the metals and the position of the pole determine your tie. So now that kid will tie a copper top tie on a hard angle for the rest of his life. And the poor guy 10 years behind him will have to untangle that mess. Just ignorance.

That utility totally relies on contractors now, for that reason. The men don't have any bargaining power, because they won't do the hard jobs- the backyard piking, the cut and kicks, even changing an arm. It will all be bid out in units, because they don't want to do the work. These kids were trying to be all troubleman- which takes a lot of experience and knowledge- because of the paycheck. To be be a respected troubleman, it takes a good solid 10 years in the tools, and be aquainted with all the PE gear-switches-circuits. Those apes thought about the dollar signs, they don't think long term. Because if your a troubleman and do the wrong things, you endanger not only yourself- but crews. It only takes once!

Instead of changing out a pole, 3000 dollars, to give the wire some extra lift, the would put on a pole extension, 7000 dollar item. If you put off work, do things the easy way- you will be expendable. And they didn't have any union belief- all Mazdas, Hondas, Kias in the parking lots. They tried to file so many false grievances, that a substancial reasonable grievance was given little creedence. They are digging their own holes. A buddy and I became stewards, both from the midwest, to show how to be union. It was a lost cause. We took some extra time to go to the hall to get the contract, the books- History of the IBEW for the apes. We saw the meeting hall. There were a lot of good men at that utility, but for every good man - their were several idiots. A 3000 IBEW employee outfit, had 12 chairs out for their monthly meeting. They will never have any leverage. The utility right across the way, makes 6 dollars more an hour and a different local- no contractors on the property, unless they are overwhelmed.

If you love the trade and work hard you will always have a phone call waitiing for you. A good 7 12 job that would pay every bill for a couple months and heal you quick is always there. There is good management with some of these contractors or utilities. The bad management always falls out after time. If you are in those situations, where you have wormy crazy management- know your Weingarten rights- keep a binded diary with you and right down all the stupid things they say, put down the witnesses all the people around you. The local should have full time lawyers for any case. And you beat them in a court. Always!!!

I know a guy that was unreasonably fired. He was a jerk, but that doesn't matter. He did that, it took two years for his arbitration. He went to another utility and got a college degree. Kept all his receipts for everything. Received his job back and two years back pay, plus he padded the the expenses, and received punitive damages. Now he is a working millionaire as an inspector. They can't beat you if you do the right thing.

Don't worry men. If you have bad conditions anywhere, the turnover will cost the company a lot of money: the piss test, the videos you have to watch. If there are no stewards, know your contract-know the Weingarten rules-keep a binder. Keep working with integrity. If you have a good foreman, take care of him as he will take care of you.

Just focus on the Right of Way, not the crap in the office, not the stupid safety man that wants u to put on FR gear while you hammer the bottom stick of molding, the chock block under the tire while its buried to the axles. Keep that crap out of your head. Just pass the information to your friends where not to work, so they dont have the same headaches! The good, the cream will always come out on top. Just keep working, keep learning, keep doing, take care of those who have the integrity. And you will all be just fine.

The best story I have for you all. Was the screaming GF in LA. He went on this tantrum, (some psychological stupid ploy), he was throwing tools. The whole yard walked out, 25 men. The GF wasn't there the next day and his rep is cr!p. He can't work anywhere. Its all Karma. Stay United.

[tolex42]

The conditions and wages of the lineman is dependent on supply and demand. We are so short in supply, that anti-union bs can't work. I hold a BA in Economics and Mathematics and I am a lineman. If you give these idiots supply, you, they can't replace you without thousands and thousands of dollars.

I am a construction lineman. I tried the good old utility lick and it was just too weird for me. I loved my yard, my gf, my manger-they were 100% for the men, especially one foreman who I really appreciated, EB. But my retirement sucked, and all the other top management would talk in acronyms. The kids going in, the lineman- apprentice ratio was 4 to 1 didn't have that love for the work, a few did. My last day I was trying to teach the kids all the ties, al top tie, al side tie, copper top tie copper side, all the hot ties- the ones they should have read in their Shoemaker book. One said "Essay that aint right" like a gangsta. I said what- the metals and the position of the pole determine your tie. So now that kid will tie a copper top tie on a hard angle for the rest of his life. And the poor guy 10 years behind him will have to untangle that mess. Just ignorance.

That utility totally relies on contractors now, for that reason. The men don't have any bargaining power, because they won't do the hard jobs- the backyard piking, the cut and kicks, even changing an arm. It will all be bid out in units, because they don't want to do the work. These kids were trying to be all troubleman- which takes a lot of experience and knowledge- because of the paycheck. To be be a respected troubleman, it takes a good solid 10 years in the tools, and be aquainted with all the PE gear-switches-circuits. Those apes thought about the dollar signs, they don't think long term. Because if your a troubleman and do the wrong things, you endanger not only yourself- but crews. It only takes once!

Instead of changing out a pole, 3000 dollars, to give the wire some extra lift, the would put on a pole extension, 7000 dollar item. If you put off work, do things the easy way- you will be expendable. And they didn't have any union belief- all Mazdas, Hondas, Kias in the parking lots. They tried to file so many false grievances, that a substancial reasonable grievance was given little creedence. They are digging their own holes. A buddy and I became stewards, both from the midwest, to show how to be union. It was a lost cause. We took some extra time to go to the hall to get the contract, the books- History of the IBEW for the apes. We saw the meeting hall. There were a lot of good men at that utility, but for every good man - their were several idiots. A 3000 IBEW employee outfit, had 12 chairs out for their monthly meeting. They will never have any leverage. The utility right across the way, makes 6 dollars more an hour and a different local- no contractors on the property, unless they are overwhelmed.

If you love the trade and work hard you will always have a phone call waitiing for you. A good 7 12 job that would pay every bill for a couple months and heal you quick is always there. There is good management with some of these contractors or utilities. The bad management always falls out after time. If you are in those situations, where you have wormy crazy management- know your Weingarten rights- keep a binded diary with you and right down all the stupid things they say, put down the witnesses all the people around you. The local should have full time lawyers for any case. And you beat them in a court. Always!!!

I know a guy that was unreasonably fired. He was a jerk, but that doesn't matter. He did that, it took two years for his arbitration. He went to another utility and got a college degree. Kept all his receipts for everything. Received his job back and two years back pay, plus he padded the the expenses, and received punitive damages. Now he is a working millionaire as an inspector. They can't beat you if you do the right thing.

Don't worry men. If you have bad conditions anywhere, the turnover will cost the company a lot of money: the piss test, the videos you have to watch. If there are no stewards, know your contract-know the Weingarten rules-keep a binder. Keep working with integrity. If you have a good foreman, take care of him as he will take care of you.

Just focus on the Right of Way, not the crap in the office, not the stupid safety man that wants u to put on FR gear while you hammer the bottom stick of molding, the chock block under the tire while its buried to the axles. Keep that crap out of your head. Just pass the information to your friends where not to work, so they dont have the same headaches! The good, the cream will always come out on top. Just keep working, keep learning, keep doing, take care of those who have the integrity. And you will all be just fine.

The best story I have for you all. Was the screaming GF in LA. He went on this tantrum, (some psychological stupid ploy), he was throwing tools. The whole yard walked out, 25 men. The GF wasn't there the next day and his rep is cr!p. He can't work anywhere. Its all Karma. Stay United.

You have some interesting things to say here Bill but I must respond to one thing you said "a good 7-12 job will always be there". That may be the case at the present time, but it wasn't always that way and won't always be that way in the future. From comments you made here Bill I must assume you were around in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many construction linemen went a year or two between jobs, worked for a few months and sat on the bench again for a year or more, repeatedly. Some linemen were lucky enough to land jobs with Inside Locals who had nuke power plants in their area, but not many. I know of linemen who lost there homes and many who left the trade because of all the years of serious unemployment.

You may recall in those years the Arabs shut off the oil. The oil embargo seriosly affected the utility companies and the first thing they did was to cancell all new construction and get rid of the contractors. Linemen working for the utility companies at the time may not have noticed the depression in line work, but the construction linemen sure did.

My advice to linemen, young and old is to keep your debt low, put as much money away as possible for a rainy day because there certainly will be rainy days in the future with an economy as fragile as it is at the present time.

[billfoster67]

You are right. The faucet can run dry anytime. All the Edison systems I have been on though have many pole histories that are pre-1920. And the infrastructure is falling apart in a lot of areas. My wife and myself live in the Phillipines two to three months a year, and their system is better. Concrete poles with tree wire, but don't ask about the telephone though (they call it spaghetti). Japan has a real clean beautiful system. Taiwan the same. Our industries will never compete if we continue to have the infrastructure that we have, especially in the industrial cities. The third world is investing in their electrical systems. Here we are in the US, just patching a crapped up system, with black overloaded transformers in the air, lead switches in the vaults. In California they have rolling blackouts, and its a part of life. Get the trade magazines and all of the modern technology in our industry, the examples are Brazil and Japan, emerging third world countries. Your tax dollars at work. Even though Tesla and Westinghouse gave us AC, we have done nothing to improve upon it.

I grew up in Youngstown, OH. 28 miles of steel mills strewn across a valley. 50,ooo men employed making 12 to 17 ('77) dollars an hour working with turn of the century hearths, like the big Genny. While American dollars built Japanese steel mills post-war, that were electric furnaces. The Americans had more production per ton per man, the cost per ton was outrageous because they didn't have the modern equipment. It was called black Friday when Lykes some multiconglomerate who bought Youngstown Sheet aned Tube blew up the furnaces, and all the steel companies fell like dominoes within 2 years. USX fell also, Carl Icahn bought them. Lykes, Icahn, and Victor Posner who bought all the steel cos. stole all the cash out of them for more buyouts and more industries. No re-investment. Lykes took the reinvestment cash for ten years and put into their diesel and nuclear engine arm. Remember that movie "Wall Street"- Gordon Gecko. We had a bunch of Gordon Geckos destroy a town.

It was a depression in Youngstown. I knew the guy that passed out all the pink slips for US Steel, it was so devastating to him. He would go to the Boulevard Tavern and drink. He blew off his head after he was done. We had some once proud steel workers, forty year old men, walking around asking if they could cut lawns. We were a town of 250000, now its a town of 80000. With the worst murder rate per capita in the US. And thats the same story as Gary. I would go to school and my friends would just vanish. Families went to FL, AZ and TX. I lived in an economic depression. I know what you are talking about. We lived day to day, wondering if my mother was going to lose her job due to the ripple effect. You can ask our International President, Ed Hill what it was like, (Beaver PA 712) All of Eastern OH and Western PA was blight. Ask Pat Lavin, 47 and District 9 what it was like, he is from Gary, city totally blighted.

The only power company that is really on re-investment is AEP. You guys might hate AEP because if you go on their property their is no double time. They made a deal with the IO in that matter. But the majority ownership in that company, by rumor, is Arabs. But they do believe in reinvestment, after 30 years according to NESC a pole is condemned from service. And then I look at BC Hydro, a beautiful system- all their structures are clean and new. They don't patch, they build. When I worked on AEP property or a forward thinking municipality, they tore everything out and re-did everything. AEP in Columbus has larger neutrals, than the phases- because of the third harmonics. With all the computers and Digital TVs, with large neutrals you have a cleaner AC to DC transformation. You will notice your hard drive fans don't run as much because they are not as hot. Edison systems believe they need to get everything penny out of their poles and transformers- they load commercially 150% and residentially 200% on their cans. They want big bonuses and big dividends for their stockholders. They will always be short term thinkers. And First Energy, formerly OH Edison was the cause of the big blackout that took out all the power in the NE, from a substation in Ashtabula OH. Probably forty years of bird crap on the insulators and bus. The government made them update and Cleveland is going like gangbusters, PAR.

Con Ed, After the Commodities Exchange went down a few times Daley forced Con-Ed to bring contractors in 99. But that was shortlived. You'll see their propaganda on TV, we are spending millions and millions of dollars for better power. Sorry Southern Cal and Chicago, others are spending billions and billions of dollars.

My wife is in Manilla, they got hit by two typhoons a 100 miles an hour. Their power was up in one day. They get four typhoons a year. And they live in the sticks in Manilla.

My suggestion to all lineman, keep your record clean. No DUIs, no beating your wife, no felonies... nothing in your record. Because if it does hit a dud here, you can always go to another country and work. Quatar, Australia, Saudi Arabia, South America... there will always be a need for lineman. Hopefully you have understanding families and wives that can handle your absences, like mine. There is a lot of work to be done, but it depends on the management-the stockholders-the government to do it. If we keep up what we are doing, we are not going to be this super power... 4 billion dollars a day in Iraq, one or two days of that could rebuild So. Cal. or Chicago, or New York.

I have to get off my soap box, Bush's Patriot Act could be monitoring me. God Bless you all.

[west coast hand]

Where did that gf story take place what yard and what was his name never heard that story sounds like a good one. please respond???

[billfoster67]

We both know who we are talking about. And the thing is I kind of praise those guys who walked.

You got some crazy dufusses running some places, and great guys running others. I don't work LA unless I know where the good guys are. And you have that one j@ck@ss, whose safety speech and introduction is about how many blackbelts he has and he was SF and was a snake eater. Anyother foreman told me he was in prison for ten years, another day he told me was SF, which you have to be an e5 (5 yrs) and another five year commitment- and the dude was 32???? And how about the A######h judo team, he made his son safety man I heard. I heard Karate guy bid with arrestors and potheads hot while change out a pole, it can be done- but not all the time.

My stepfather spent 28 years in the military, three tours in Vietnam. And didn't talk about any of it- just his friends, and SSG Yale "Green beret.." song was one of his best friends. I know an SF guy... because they will never reveal that they were SF. To me to lie about your military service and pretend something you've never done is idiocy.

News travels fast around the country. It takes two days to find out about anyone if your connected.

I am proud of you if you were the walkers.:)