Talks between PECO and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 614 have slowed, with “no end in sight” to a strike that began July 4, union leaders said Monday afternoon.
About 1,600 PECO linemen, gas technicians, mechanics, call center staff and office workers walked off the job Saturday, in the middle of a major heatwave and before significant thunderstorms battered the region. The strike is the first work stoppage in the electric company’s history.
Stuart Davidson, Local 614’s legal counsel, said negotiations have been taking place around the clock since July 1. The union’s contract expired March 31.
“Negotiations have been extremely difficult and not altogether fruitful,” he told reporters outside the Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, where bargaining sessions have been held. "We think we're in range of a contract, but the last few issues seem to be very elusive.”
Davidson declined to detail specific points of contention but said working conditions, salary and benefits are always part of the conversation. Local 614 has said its members are paid 30% less than employees at similar utility companies.
“What is confusing to us is the apparent lack of urgency of the company to get this resolved,” Davidson added.
PECO representatives say they have put forward a competitive offer that includes pay raises of nearly 22% for employees working in the field and 16% increases for office staff.
Larry Anastasi, Local 614’s president and business manager, said the work stoppage has led to more and lengthier outages. Regarding recent storms, he added, “Something like that would have been cleared up right away.”
PECO has hired contingency staff from as far away as South Carolina to fill in for picketing employees. Company officials said more than 57,000 households lost power at the height of Saturday night’s storm, but that service was restored to around 90% of those customers within 24 hours.
“The PECO service area experienced multiple rounds of impactful storms throughout the weekend; however, our supervisors, foremen, and contractor crews have done a tremendous job of responding to outages and restoring service for our customers,” the company said in a statement.
Anastasi suggested that PECO is trying to hide outage data. Its website is not showing an outage tracker or map, though raw numbers by county or municipality remain available.
Candice Wormer, a PECO spokesperson, told Metro that the online features were temporarily disabled because Local 614 picketers were attempting to impede the work of supervisors and non-union contractors.
MORE: Electric bills to jump $5 a month beginning in August, PECO says
