This is Politics and Corporations at their best!!??? They say, "While the crew waited in Virginia, Seaside reportedly
received the assistance it needed elsewhere." WHAT???!!! ..."received the assistance it needed"..... That just CANNOT be true!!! THE NY and NJ PEOPLE NEED HELP NOW! All the help they can get! Anyone coming to lend any kind of help they can give should be able to get through; not suddenly have their state or company call them back over union issues. THIS IS A HUMAN ISSUE; NOT UNION, OR POLITICAL!!! This is disgusting! I must add here, that just the other day, (like him or not) our President assured us all that there would be NO red tape or politics when it came to helping the victims of Hurricane Sandy. This IS red tape, and it prevented the good hearts of these electric workers from helping...
(Below is the report from the "PolitickerNJ")
A six-man utility crew from Alabama returned South today because of
what the company said was a requirement that workers agree to join an
electrical workers union before being allowed to aid with power
restoration in New Jersey.
In a statement, Decatur Utilities of
Huntsville, Ala. said they sent a crew to work in Seaside Heights, but
held them in Virginia while it clarified paperwork the company
understood to be a requirement that its workers join IBEW before aiding
crew here. While the crew waited in Virginia, Seaside reportedly
received the assistance it needed elsewhere. However "uncertainty" over
the union requirement "that we could not agree to" caused the company
to recall its workers.
An intial report from an Alabama television
station said the workers were "turned away" when they got to New
Jersey, however Decatur said their workers never got that far north and
turned back because of the union requirement.
More than a million
people in the state remain without power. A spokesman for the governor
said today that no crews have been turned away and spokesmen for both
JCP&L and PSE&G have said they are taking all offers of aid.
Below is the text of the full release from Decatur:
Decatur
Utilities sent a 6-man crew to the Northeast Wednesday October 31st,
bound for Seaside Heights, NJ to assist with power restoration.
Communications with Seaside Heights was poor due to lack of cell phone
service in the area. Upon arriving at a staging area near Virginia,
crews were held in place pending clarification of documents received
from IBEW that implied a requirement of our employees to agree to union
affiliation while working in the New York and New Jersey areas. It was
and remains our understanding that agreeing to those requirements was a
condition of being allowed to work in those areas. As we waited for
clarification, we became aware that Seaside Heights had received the
assistance they needed from other sources. To be clear, at no time were
our crews "turned away" from the utility in Seaside Heights.
In
connection with state and regional public power associations, Decatur
Utilities attempted to contact other areas that needed assistance.
However, based on the uncertainty of union requirements that we could
not agree to and the uncertainty of whether a resolution could be
reached, we ultimately made the decision to return them to Decatur after
being stalled in Virginia are most of the day on Thursday.
