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DWP - Spinning The Union
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2184 Reads
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There's a problem with the Department of Water and Power. More specifically, I think, with their union.
A few years ago, when rolling blackouts were hitting California and SCE was hemorrhaging money, the LA DWP spent a lot of its time laughing. For the most part, the city had enough power to sell, and then some. It appeared that the DWP had its act together.
These days? Not so much.
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The Times today reports that a paperwork problem caused the outage. Henry Martinez, a DWP assistant general manager, is quoted as saying that it was a case of miscommunication.
Hell of a miscommunication. Reminds me of that Mars probe that crashed a few years back because two groups at JPL didn't talk to each other. One's calculations were in English units, the other metric. Whoops.
The union that represents the DWP workers, Local 18, has been fighting to get more money for DWP engineers. Thing is, DWP is the highest paid city of all the city's service workers. It's the sort of thing that generates all sorts of ill will with other agencies. When things like this happen, there's the inevitable question of what exactly they're being paid for.
Enter the Daily News. There's an opinion piece this morning that wonders if maybe there's a conspiracy afoot. Interesting time to have a major power outage when the union is pushing for raises for an already highly paid group.
I don't like conspiracy theories. When it's two or three people, that's one thing. Beyond that it tends to fall apart. Conspiracies assume that people are smarter then they usually prove to be.
So when the head of the union, Brian D'Arcy, says that if the workers were paid more they could have done it at night, minimizing the disruption, it doesn't make me wonder if there's a conspiracy. It makes me wonder if they're stupid.
If I catch it correctly, he's saying that the problem would have happened, whether they were better paid or not. It just would have happened at night, where not so many people would have noticed it.
I'm sure he's just doing his job, trying to get the best deal for the men and women he represents. But making an argument that indicates that you're representing morons is not the way to go about it.
I know that the people over at the DWP work their butts off, and the engineers are skilled, competent people. They keep the lights running in a city larger than some countries. No small feat.
They might want to take a closer look at their spin doctors, though.
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| Posted by: S_Blackmoore on Friday, September 16, 2005 - 08:45 AM
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