According to media reports, over 1600 workers are on strike against PECO. Also according to these same reports, this is the first time in the company’s 145 year old history.
This is NOT an anti-union post. Quite the contrary. These are the men and women who actually keep our power on and help us when storms cause crisis in our communities. The fat corporate cats who charge us out the ying yang, even profiting from data centers at our expense, are at fault. As a matter of fact a comment from one of my readers gave me pause:
PECO’s CEO makes millions. Record profits….and peanuts to those who actually do the work?
We are in the middle of a record breaking heatwave and these workers had no other option except strike. The recent rate increase has nothing to do with workers, just corporate America.
We the consumers are caught in this mess because of a greedy corporate entity and their executives. The fault lies with the executive suite.
The workers only want the basics and also don’t want jobs outsourced that are customer service related, and I am all for that. I am so tired of calling a US company and getting scripted offshore call centers or AI bots.
I am a fan of the linemen and folks that keep the power on. That started back in the 90s- specifically the summer of 1999 when we had a horribly long stretch of weather. I was living in my single girl home. We kept having brown outs and outages.
We also had a problem with a pole that serviced a lot of our neighborhoods. It had “legs” underground that kept burning. You could literally see scorched earth and feel the heat.
PECO corporate wouldn’t listen. We had so many outages that the site workers and linemen looked after us, one even gave us a really powerful flashlight. Eventually it took our state senator’s office to help us, and they helped us in part because of the workers who gave us information we needed to get the right repairs.
Then there was the ice storm of 2014. We were what? Ten days without power in a particularly icy cold February. We cheered when the linemen came.
Last night’s storm was swift and dangerous. We have a pole near us that services multiple municipalities. Every time there is a bad storm we are out. Last night was a more lengthy than average outage. I think that is because of the strike.
So PECO? I am sure your executives love their cushy packages and benefits. But for what we pay as consumers I would like to know that your workers are getting their fair share. That’s all. Other than you need update the problem poles that really have not been fixed AND your outage map is still not working. And Aspludth still sucks.
And for those of you who don’t share my opinion on this, please note purported violence against strikers is terrible. There is enough violence in this world.
https://nbcphiladelphia.app.link/8m1xTm23w4b
https://6abc.com/amp/post/peco-workers-remain-strike-negotiations-resume-sunday/19450004/
FYI – outage map is unavailable as PECO does not want to broadcast where outage work is, as the union will set up a picket line.
How do you know that?