Labor & Employment Law

In Covanta Struggle, Utility Workers Go Global

By Mike Hall

In 2008, after some 140 workers at Covanta Energy Corp.’s Rochester, Mass., plant voted to join the Utility Workers (UWUA), the “green” energy company started a two-year-long campaign of delay, “intolerable” contract demands and other bargaining table stalls. As UWUA President Michael Langford says:

They thought we’d just go away. 

Well, they didn’t go away. They went global. Now, UWUA Local 369 members in Rochester have a contract signed just last week and the union may be on the verge of winning an agreement that would allow Covanta workers at its 30 U.S. facilities, as well as its overseas operations, to choose to join a union without management interference (more below).

Covanta, a multinational firm, is seeking to expand its waste-to-energy operations in several nations and that, says Langford, was the key that eventually opened the lock on nearly two years of fruitless negations.

Covanta put on the table outrageous contact provisions like worker gag orders on and off the property and new termination provisions. Then early last year, says UWUA Organizing Director Stewart Acuff, Covanta announced it would stop paying all union members annual wage increases and semi-annual bonuses.

The union filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It was then time, says Langford, to turn a local organizing campaign into a more strategic global effort.

UWUA is an affiliate of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Union (ICEM). Langford and Acuff say the relationships and strategies union leaders developed at AFL-CIO and international organizing and labor conferences began to pay off.

UWUA reached out to unions, environmental groups, civic and other organizations in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries where Covanta was seeking municipal contracts. All those nations take their labor laws seriously.

Where Covanta went, so did local unions and other groups, spotlighting the company’s environmental, health and safety records, as well as what the ICEM described as

its appalling labor relations conduct, which included serious and malicious breaches of U.S. labor law.  

Last year, when Covanta was seeking to win a contract in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil, union and political leaders spoke up. Huw Lewis, a member of the National Assembly, said:    

Frankly, I find it a little surprising that the Assembly Government has been courting a company that has a string of environmental breaches and seems to also engage in union-bashing. We desperately need quality jobs in Wales?and in Merthyr Tydfil, in particular?but not jobs at any cost.

Martin Mansfield, secretary general of the Welsh arm of the United Kingdom’s Trade Union Confederation (TUC), said:

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the Merthyr incinerator proposal, we would expect any company seeking to do business in Wales to adopt our high standards of partnership at work between employer and unions.

What we hear from our American colleagues does not bode well for how Covanta would approach Welsh unions.

After more than a year of international actions and a March 26 ruling by an NLRB law judge that Covanta had indeed engaged in unfair labor practices, and with the NLRB set to seek a federal injunction ordering the company to return to the table, Covanta returned to the table. The company reached an agreement with the workers that includes back pay, restoration of bonuses, wage increases, new health and safety standards and more improvements.

Next, the UWUA will seek what is known in international labor circles as a Global Framework Agreement, basically on a worldwide neutrality agreement. Working in partnership with the ICEM, the union hopes to convince Covanta that it would be in everybody’s best interest to work together. Langford says:

I think they’ve seen what we can do as an adversary, now we’d like to show them we can use that same kind of energy and effort and be a good global partner.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on May 03, 2010 (boomark / email).