By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace.  Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

MANCHESTER—As a resident of rural New Hampshire, I am accustomed to having my electricity go out during windstorms and blizzards.  I always cheer the Eversource line crew when the power comes back on.  And in recent years I’ve been impressed with how easy it is to report an outage and view the map which shows me how widespread the outage is.   

What I hadn’t thought much about was the people behind the scenes who make the systems work.  Those are the System Operators, who manage the transmission and distribution electric grids across Eversource’s New Hampshire service territory.  They’re on the job 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, keeping my lights on, running my refrigerator, and charging my mobile phone. 

And since they voted 17 to 1 to unionize in 2023, they’ve been part of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1837.  But although it’s been almost two years since the NLRB-supervised election, they have yet to negotiate a first contract.  That’s why they were picketing again outside the company’s Manchester headquarters early Wednesday morning.    

The big issue is scheduling, says Tony Sapienza, the union’s business manager.  “These people need a set schedule so they can have a life. They need a set schedule so they know when they’re going to work and when they can be off. They need reasonable work hours.”

“The huge thing that matters for us is stability and overtime,” said Brendan Von Koss, “because right now, because we’ve had such attrition, we’ve had to go from a six-week rotation to a five-week so instead of having six teams, now we have five teams. So we’re coming in a lot more often for nights.”

Von Koss, who was picketing with his two-year-old daughter on his shoulder, commutes to Manchester from Enfield.  When they get called in for storms, he said, “we don’t get paid, really, we get comp time,” or a promise of time off.  But the company management controls when and whether workers can use their comp time, he said, and the management discourages workers from using it.  

Eversource, formerly known as Northeast Utilities, has run most of New Hampshire’s electrical transmission systems since it took over the bankrupt Public Service Company of New Hampshire in 1998.  According to Von Koss, conditions for workers declined from that point on.  System operators in the other states have union contracts, he said, but the company has thus far not been willing to give comparable benefits to people who do the same work in New Hampshire. 

Despite securing the right to bargain collectively, progress toward a first union contract has been slow, contributing to a critical shortage of trained operators as employees leave due to burnout and challenging working conditions.

“Operators have been leaving both control centers, creating a critical shortage of trained operators,” Sapienza said prior to the union’s first picket three weeks ago.  “The shortage of trained operators is causing the remaining operators to have to work additional shifts. These employees are responsible for operating both the transmission and distribution electric grids for all of Eversource’s New Hampshire territory. These systems are incredibly important to our economy, safety, and way of life in the Granite State.”

Sapienza said the union’s first informational picket August 13 may have produced a change in management’s attitudes.  Negotiations will resume Friday, with two additional sessions scheduled later in the month.  “We’ve been negotiating since February of 2024, so it’s been a year-and-a-half, and progress has been virtually nonexistent.  And quite frankly, their proposals have been punitive and vindictive,” Sapienza said.  

Today’s picket began at 6:30 a.m., drawing about 50 union members and supporters, including local elected officials and several Congressional candidates.

The union will also hold a “digital picket” on September 4.  If that’s an unfamiliar tactic, it’s about posting pro-union messages on the employer’s social media accounts.  The New Hampshire News Guild, which represents workers at the NH Union Leader, has held several digital pickets this year.

Sarah Paduano, an Eversource spokesperson, said, “Eversource’s dedicated employees, including the thousands of union members across our three-state service territory, are the backbone of our essential work to provide safe, reliable service to our customers that has resulted in our reliability metrics being ranked in the top quartile nationally in each of the last five years. We always negotiate with union labor in good faith and will continue to do so with the system operators in New Hampshire.”