Happy New Year to everyone.
There is a new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association Clearing House where all drug or alcohol violations will go into a central bank. It is nonnegotiable and all companies are required to participate. They will do an annual check to see if there are any issues with CDL’s. You and the company will have access to it. At some point there will be a sign up for authorization as part of the mandate. It will track positive drug or alcohol test results and refusals, when a driver completes the return-to-duty process and follow-up testing plan. There will be a Q&A coming out with information on how it works.
In the Governor’s State of the State he is pledging $5 Million to looking into a reuse initiative for some of the generation plants to possibly repower them. We will be watching this closely.
We are still in the process of negotiating with Liberty Utilities which bought out St. Lawrence Gas in Massena, New York. They want to go to their benefit platform, no pension, no retiree medical, and want to freeze existing employees’ pension and put them into a cash balance plan.
Exelon Power’s, (who owes Nine Mile 1 and 2) contract is expiring in June and wants to go into early negotiations before their outage in March. They are looking at the same kind of changes in pension and medical.
NGrid Electric will be sending out to the field and office employees an Employee Engagement Survey. Please take it and be upfront and honest. Let them know if something is not working and what is going on. They really do look at these surveys.
Attended a Leadership Safety meeting. Jeannette Mills, SVP of Safety, is leaving and John Bruckner will be taking over. They basically want to create our own safety culture. They are recognizing they have to look at Safety differently and that discipline does not always work except in severe cases. They are committed to Safety and realizing that communication is the key.
Just Drive initiative will be coming out. Now supervisors cannot use cell phones while driving as well. If they call you, pull over to take the call. I caution you that they will be watching everyone more closely.
We are looking to expand the Safety Advocate Program adding more positions, training and revising reports.
Loan Worker – will have two devices we will be piloting starting February 3rd. One is a Riskband and another is a Ripple to track any scenario for a loan worker. If you fall it will activate the device. It has the capability of picture, sound and video and can also notify the police automatically if something happens.
Article XXIII’s – met with the VP of Labor on January 16th to lay out which ones we will be going with. Cash Balance will be the first one we will be tackling.