The United Steelworkers labor union is again raising the threat of taking the Department of Energy to court to resolve a long-standing dispute over worker benefits at the Portsmouth D&D project. In a letter sent earlier this month to Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman, USW International President Leo Gerard called on DOE to resolve the Portsmouth dispute, as well as several other ongoing labor issues at other Department sites. Criticizing what he said is DOE’s “extremely slow pace” of addressing such issues, Gerard wrote, “We believe in several instances, DOE is acting outside of applicable law, and if the concerns cannot be addressed soon, we will have to strongly consider taking appropriate legal action to require your agency to address the concerns.”
The dispute at the Portsmouth site in Piketon, Ohio, centers on whether some project workers who transferred to D&D contractor Fluor-B&W Portsmouth from USEC, which previously performed ‘cold shutdown’ work at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, are being improperly kept out of the benefit plan previously established for Portsmouth’s cleanup contractors. Local union officials have said the previously established plan provides better benefits than the one FBP has created for new employees, and first raised the threat of possible legal action against DOE last year. DOE is the only federal agency to reimburse contractors for pensions and benefits costs, though the Department has said that it does not get directly involved in negotiations between contractors and workforce representatives. Fluor-B&W Portsmouth said late last year that it is continuing to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement with the local Steelworkers union to replace those held with USEC and previous site cleanup contractor LATA/Parallax Portsmouth, LLC.
In his March 9 letter, Gerard wrote, “USW asks that the workers at Piketon be made whole. We ask that DOE and its contractors at the site restore their benefits, including pensions and retiree health care, their seniority, any vacation time they have lost, any seniority credits to which they are due and any other wages and benefits that have been scrimped as a result of the flawed 2011 service contract transition.” Gerard also wrote, “If DOE fails to this, the consequences to the workers and their communities will be terrible. USW feel DOE’s actions in Piketon constitute the breaking of an explicit promise from the President of the United States.”
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