Xcel Energy Meter Readers
Organize in Southwest
August 18, 2005
"We had lost respect through no fault of our own. When you're union, you can get some control and respect back."
-- Tasha Christian, meter reader, Dumas, Texas
Traveling 250 miles a day across the northern Texas panhandle, gives power company meter readers a lot of time for thinking.
Tasha Christian has been on the road since 1997 reading meters, thinking about how her job has changed and questioning what will happen if technology wipes it away.
On July 27, by a vote of 34 to 28, Xcel Energy's meter readers at 21 locations from Guyman, Oklahoma, to Carlsbad, New Mexico, chose the IBEW Local 602, based in Amarillo, Texas, to help come up with some answers.
Many of the meter readers had worked for Southwestern Public Service, an Amarillo-based firm. In 1997, Southwestern merged with Public Service Company, based in Denver, Colorado, to become New Century Energy. In 2000, when New Century merged with Northern States Power to become Xcel Energy, their jobs took a turn for the worse.
The new managers stopped supplying uniforms, rain gear and winter coats, pushing the cost onto the work force. Bosses even threatened to take away the binoculars, the long-distance eyes that shelter workers from attack by over-zealous watchdogs. Management demands for increased paperwork by team leaders ended up pushing more work onto meter readers who were already stretched thin.
Compounding the workers' concerns is the slow climb up the pay scale. One worker with 20 years of seniority still has not made it to top pay.
The southwestern employees were the only meter readers working for Xcel who were not organized. Two previous IBEW campaigns had failed.
Christian attributes the closeness of the vote to the fears of some meter readers that, if the union won, remote-access automation would be introduced to eliminate their jobs. If that happens, she says, it won't be because workers voted for a union. However, she reasons, only with a union will she and her co-workers have any chance to negotiate an agreement that will give them the opportunity to move to other Xcel locations and job classifications if their jobs are eliminated.
"We knew that we stood a better chance with the union. We had nothing else to lose and we were tired of being treated like stepchildren," says Christian, who credits Seventh District International Representative Fernando Huerta with traveling hundreds of miles to different locations to win the drive.
Since 2004, Local 602 has organized operators and mechanics at the Blackhawk Power Plant in Borger, Texas; aerospace workers at Lockheed-Martin in Marfa, Texas, and ash handlers in Muleshoe and Harrington, Texas.
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