Water Works
Phoenix Local 2384 members reinvent their jobs in a front-line battle against privatization.
PHOENIX
The big wheel turns.
Connie Gandarilla opens it from the control room of Squaw Peak Water Treatment Plant here, running 140 million gallons of pure drinking water out into homes and businesses of this booming desert metropolis.
She’s a steward of AFSCME Local 2384 at the water plant, one of eight operators and maintenance workers volunteering for one of the most daring labor and management experiments in late-century America.
They are going to reinvent their jobs or almost certainly see them threatened by corporate privateers hankering to snatch public service contracts in politically conservative Arizona, a right-to-work state.
When the pilot project at Squaw Peak is completed by early 1999 — if the AFSCME team survives the plunge into uncharted and threatening waters of change — lots of good things can happen.
If successful, they’ll save the city $970,000 a year at this one plant alone, while building a new way to run it. The goal is to re-engineer work to be as efficient, and even better than competing plans dangled before city officials by privateers.
Successful re-engineering of labor and management processes developed at Squaw Peak likely will serve as a model for the four other water treatment plants operated by the nation’s sixth-largest city.
The five-year master plan is to save $60 million in water and wastewater treatment costs, in a system with assets of $629.8 million for drinking water and another $396.7 million for sewage treatment.
Failure at Squaw Peak, then, likely means a political stampede by the privatizers to have a go at all water department jobs in Phoenix. Certainly privateers across the country also would use failure as a way to get a foot in the door at some of the other 60,000 public waterworks in America, where many AFSCME locals already are looking at some kind of water privatization push.
“This is no day at the beach,” admits Gandarilla, “we’re all a little intimidated by what could go wrong.”
“But I’m not afraid,” says the 19-year-city worker and mother of three, “we know how to do this work better than anybody.”
NEW DAY. In July, she and seven fellow AFSCME members began working the plant using a newly devised team strategy system, rather than the traditional managerial command process so common in American organizations.
“You know,” Gandarilla offers, “Do this. Do that.”
Instead of the 30-person staff, including a 15-member maintenance and operator crew, Squaw Peak staffing was reduced by more than half — workers from Squaw Peak were reassigned elsewhere within the system — with only eight maintenance and operator workers like Gandarilla responsible for the place 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In the effort to improve efficiency, operators are being trained to maintain the equipment, with maintenance workers in turn learning how to operate the systems.
At Squaw Peak the newly trained crews will rely on computer upgrades, remote sensors and fancy communications gadgetry rather than traditional “footwork and touching of hardware” to keep up with operational and maintenance needs at the plant.
And instead of waiting for “the white shirts,” as Gandarilla calls traditional managers, when action is required on site to fix, repair or replace equipment — or to adjust the process to changing needs — “we’re learning to make decisions and take action on our own” as a team, not individually, with union brothers and sisters.
That, too, is part of a strategy that has slowly evolved between Local 2384’s former Pres. Art Ratcliffe and the city’s Water Services Director Mike Gritzuk. They started informal discussion on these issues in 1996, when the city council announced its commitment to wring big-time utility cost savings while increasing efficiency, excellence and customer service.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Ratcliffe and local leaders were convinced the local had to be a part of re-engineering the utility or face unacceptable risks with the economic lives of members. By 1997, the local’s leadership and members were deeply involved in working cooperatively with Gritzuk’s team to find cost savings.
SAVING $3.2 MILLION. Almost immediately members’ suggestions resulted in actions saving $3.1 million annually. Grateful, the city welcomed further Local 2384 cooperation.
By November 1996, the local applied for a grant from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to formalize the cooperative effort, and FMCS gave $72,000, which was used to create a joint union and management system called PALM.
The Participative Association of Labor and Management has met monthly ever since, with various subcommittees meeting more often in an attempt to hammer out “best of class” re-engineering concepts acceptable both to union and management.
PALM includes Local 2384 members, who come mostly from the waterworks. Another component is a mix of members from AFSCME Local 2960, which represents city clericals, white collar and technical staff. Management has seats, as do members of the Administrative Supervisory, Professional and Technical Employees Association.
Arizona State University Prof. Marilyn Dantico, a political scientist with years of union and community development experience, and Ron Jensen, the city’s previous Public Works Director, were hired to facilitate discussions.
By early 1998, the group collectively had worked up savings in excess of $33.2 million over five years, generating enthusiastic support within the city council predisposed to side with the privatizers.
NOT ROSES. “But it’s not all a bed of roses,” observes Ratcliffe, a 25-year city worker in the electronic traffic signals department who co-chairs the PALM committee with Gritzuk of the Water Services Department.
One problem is resistance by local members and leaders to some of the proposed changes in the work day.
There have been fist fights between members and shouting matches behind closed doors more than once on PALM, and in various technical advisory subcommittees.
Women have left meetings in tears, complaining that their chances for higher pay in the re-engineering process are threatened because the “whole PALM and re-engineering thing is too man-dominated.”
Another sore spot was when a re-engineering team suggested mandatory 12-hour shifts at Squaw Peak — a dramatic violation of the collective bargaining agreement — causing some members to hit the ceiling and jawbone their union brothers on the re-engineering team.
“I mean,” asks a disbelieving Steven Diaz, a steward in 2384, “if you want to have a wife and a life, is that the kind of stuff you ask of union people?”
Local 2384 is “doing all this extra work” helping management come up with saving money, adds Gandarilla at Squaw Peak, “but what about my pay?”
That issue is far from resolved, says Dantico. “Most of our operators and maintenance people make about $35,000. A few with a lot of overtime may pull down another $10,000 because of the compulsory overtime the system currently demands.”
Management talks about “team-based incentive pay,” a concept used in Charlotte, N.C., and elsewhere to share cost savings with the employees. Because re-engineering probably will do away with overtime as efficiencies increase, the economic welfare of members who have come to depend on the income is threatened.
“It’s a classic labor dilemma,” Dantico observes. “On one hand, you want that extra money, but it means less time for you and your family. What we’re hoping ‘team-based incentive pay’ will do is reward workers’ contributions to cost savings while making up for the lost overtime — giving members more time for families.”
NEW TRAINING. Just as important, believes Dantico, “is the need for skill training that is untraditional for many of the members.”
For Dantico, that means learning team building, practical union democracy concepts and basic conflict-resolution skills. She also believes that as worker responsibilities increase with their pay, the need to communicate better becomes more important.
“What PALM is all about,” she insists, “is working people having the chance to learn new skills and become better, more valuable workers.”
“If this thing succeeds, they’re going to have fewer managers above them to open and close organizational doors. They’re going to have to be able to talk the way their bosses do, and be able to write a memo or report that will work in this organizational culture.”
These are skills many working people “have never had to do in their entire lives. For some, it’s a frightening possibility, while for others it’s a door held open wide for their continued growth as workers and as people,” says Dantico.
In September, PALM is scheduled to begin a “Labor-Management Team Preparation Skills Training” program for pilot volunteers like Gandarilla, as well as her managers in the water department. The 28-hour classroom series at the Rio Salado Community College in Phoenix is designed to teach team members how to deal with one another, starting with fundamentals of communications, team building, problem solving and conflict resolution.
It is the first step in what PALM hopes will become a system-wide program offering college-level courses at no expense to city water workers and managers who want to increase their skills in a rapidly changing work environment.
CAUTIOUS REGARD. “Back in 1984, when I started to work for the water service department,” offers George Schreiber, current president of Local 2384, “I ran into a lot of problems trying to get promoted.”
Even though he “had the job skills to do the work,” management culture at the time could be demeaning for line workers like Schreiber wanting to get ahead.
Today he heads the local and the entire city management culture has been changed. And Schreiber closely monitors the PALM committee, seeing changes in the re-engineering project as a positive way for members to improve their lives.
“With proper training and tools of the trade,” Schreiber explains, “many of the employees will succeed. ... The one thing that everyone will have to learn is that they will have to be multi-skilled in their position.”
That’s not to say that Schreiber is “100 percent sold on this PALM thing,” he says.
“Yeah, there are a few who may think that I am narrow-minded about the program, but I have eight other departments and about 200 divisions that need our [local’s] attention,” says Schreiber.
Like a lot of older workers, the 61-year-old is cautious about working cooperatively with management. Last year he ran against former president Ratcliffe and won election as local president by hammering against PALM re-engineering threats to wages, hours and work rules in the contract.
Then the first thing he did was ask Ratcliffe to continue co-chairing the local’s PALM committee, thus assuring continuity and dialogue with management.
“While I’m in this office,” Schreiber says unapologetically, “I will always try to protect every member under our contract. I will step forward when this project starts to interfere with our contract.”
BETTER DAYS. “All of us in the water and wastewater industry, and other public utilities like Phoenix’s — all of us are going through a revolution,” says Gritzuk.
“Technology is dramatically reducing the number of workers needed to do the job, while the entire industry is under attack primarily by foreign-funded companies seeking to privatize what in America has been predominantly a public service.”
Paradoxically, while the Phoenix water utility was created this century by the city buying and expanding more than 70 private water companies, the dominant political philosophy here today seems to favor the “private sector over the public.”
Yet Gritzuk believes that better trained and skilled employees like Connie Gandarilla are the future of the industry, workers who can “make decisions on their own, take responsibility for them — being part of the ‘owners’ team — and earn better wages.”
While Local 2384 leaders are justified in battling for their members, he says, “the one thing for sure in all this is that better skilled workers and a common goal of excellence and cost effectiveness mean the day is coming when we’re going to see a true partnership between labor and management in public utility operations.”
“We’ve got to work together on this,” Gritzuk adds, “privatizers are interested only in cutting costs — not improving efficiency, the environment or anything else.”
“You bet,” concurs Schreiber, “As long as management is willing to work with us, and understand what this union stands for, I’m all for finding a new way for us to do our old jobs better.”
By Ray Lane
Fighting Foreign Foe
Five years ago, Local 127 (Council 36) in San Diego faced one of the most hostile privatization environments in the country.
The city threw open its doors to nearly every public job in town, practically forcing privateers to try for public services, including water and wastewater contracts.
Instead of caving in, the local took action when a French multi-national company tried to buy the wastewater operation. The local raised political hell with the city to stop the transfer, hired an engineering consultant to prepare its case, and built bridges to the managers of the wastewater operation.
"We told them we're their best hope of keeping their jobs," explains Dena Webb, president of Local 127. "Lo, and behold, they figured it out, that union people could push for changes they couldn't get through their bureaucracy."
Working together, managers and union members signed off on a six-year contract that saves the city $71 million. It also preserves 320 Local 127 jobs, shares cost savings with employees through a bonus program, and expands educational and employment opportunities for all city workers.
"Passions ran high," Webb says. "We had fistfights, too, but in the six months since signing, everyone is on the same team, with the same goal — to keep our jobs public, not contracted out — and we haven't had a grievance yet."
