Electrical Safety a Life-and-Death Issue for CWA Technicians

It was a late-night emergency call for a Maryland Verizon crew. A member of CWA Local 2107 climbed a pole that shared a telecom and electrical line. While he was up there, it started to rain and uninsulated electrical wires left by a non-union subcontractor for the power company sent voltage down the pole.

The worker became one of the latest CWA-represented technicians to suffer an electrical shock on the job. The man wasn't burned but spent several days in the hospital and may have suffered some nerve damage, said Mark Balsamo, the executive vice president for Local 2100 who helped investigate the accident and others in Maryland.

"They're happening more," Balsamo said. "As result of that accident, our guys had to go out the next day and finish some additional work and they rode up and down the road and found two other safety hazards on two different poles."

In about the last year and a half, four Verizon technicians represented by CWA and the IBEW have been killed in electrocution accidents and more have been injured. Across the country, many others have had close calls.

CWA has been aggressively working with its telecom employers and state safety and health officials to put an end to what they say has become a crisis in electrical hazards. In some cases, the companies face Occupational Safety and Health Administration fines and other penalties for safety violations, though they routinely deny the allegations and appeal.

A large block of time at CWA's Occupational Safety and Health Conference in March in Washington, D.C., was spent on panels and training devoted to electrical safety.

Panelist Louie Rocha, president of CWA Local 9423 and an outside plant technician with AT&T for 28 years, described how the emphasis on safety has changed over the years.

"Early on in my career, it wasdrummed into my mind that this job could kill you, that we needed to watch out for each other and at the end of the day, we were to return to our families the same way we came to work," he said.

The hazards are at least as great today, he continued, but management is far less diligent and OSHA is understaffed. "The past few years have been the most dangerous in memory and the costs have been huge," he said. "We have seen the rise of computer-based training that is easy to just get through, and managers who just toss safety material on a table and say, 'read it.' Thank God we have a union to help us stand up and speak out."

Rocha and other speakers described in detail the problems they had, the steps they have taken with the companies and authorities involved, and the ways they're training technicians to protect themselves and each other.

Micki Siegel de Hernandez, District 1 safety and health director, offered a presentation dedicated to Jarrod Lyon, a young lineman and member of CWA Local 1126 who was fatally electrocuted in 2002.

"There are tons of near misses," Siegel de Hernandez said. "When we do training sessions, it's striking when people share stories. Almost every single person has one to tell."

From cuts in state budgets to the constant demand from the company boardroom to cut costs and increase productivity, CWA safety and health leaders say there's a combination of reasons for the spike in deaths, injuries and near-miss accidents.

Balsamo said all of that has made the union's emphasis on safety more critical than ever. His local's safety committee has been dubbed the "Green-Shirted Thugs" by the company, he said proudly, for the lime-green T-shirts they wear identifying themselves when they visit Verizon garages to talk about safety issues and find out if the company's been doing its job.

"We interview technicians to find out who had a safety meeting and who didn't, and then we notify management of the deficiencies," he said. "One of the alarming things we've found is that there are some local management people who haven't even performed minimal safety training."

A seven-page safety fact sheet on electrical hazards, produced by CWA, is posted online at ga.cwa-union.org/issues/osh. The document describes recent accidents and discusses necessary training and safety equipment.