The San Luis Obispo (CA) New Times reports:
A year of failed labor negotiations prompted engineers from Diablo Canyon to protest outside PG&E’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Their complaints have stretched beyond the walls of Diablo Canyon and PG&E to the NRC. Typically, the NRC focuses on the stability and safety of nuclear plants rather than labor issues. But at Diablo Canyon, they’re taking a special interest. In other words, the relationship between the employees and company management has NRC staff looking at whether it could endanger the public.
On May 29, the Diablo Canyon engineers bused to San Francisco where they met up with others from the union to protest.... That protest was the boiling point after more than a year of failed labor negotiations with PG&E’s newest union.
According to union representative Joshua Sperry, PG&E’s management is punishing the engineers and technical workers who decided to join the union last April. When negotiations reached an impasse, he said, PG&E forcibly implemented a salary and benefits package that was handily rejected by the union members months earlier.
Again from the June 11 San Luis Obispo (CA) New Times:
"They’re pretty much sticking with their initial proposal and saying, ‘When you walked in that was the best [offer] you were ever gonna get,’" Sperry said. That offer included an unwanted pension plan and the elimination of a coveted consulting job classification. "We expected some type of dialogue and we’re getting a brick wall."
For now, union members can do nothing more than negotiate and protest—their contract prohibits members from striking until December 2011. A mediation is scheduled to take place next month.
and
PG&E employees at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant were asked to fill out a survey, ... a hint at a growing rift between employees and management.
When it came to management and the overall direction of the plant, the results took a serious dive. The two worst scoring questions were, "My work group has the resources ... necessary to do quality work," and, "Local management takes into account the impact of their decisions on employee welfare." Both scored just 40 percent favorable.
Mark Mitchell represents the newest group of unionized employees at Diablo Canyon: Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20. At a recent public meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Mitchell got up and spoke bluntly. "When we say things are bad, we mean they’re really bad."