When Power - is Power !

There is a very good chance that homes and businesses in northern Sydney, The Hunter, Newcastle and the Central Coast will experience power blackouts when hot weather strikes in February.  The three thousand workers of Ausgrid are threatening industrial action if their pay claim is not settled before that time.

That is not an idle threat.  The generation and distribution of electricity has been balanced on a knife edge when we recently had a forty-seven degree day and historically February usually delivers an end of summer burst of heat.   These three thousand workers are the people who control and maintain the electricity distribution network that flows through poles and wires to our homes.   Any sort of industrial action, including  stoppages and call outs would be critical at times of high demand.

The unions are taking advantage of the crisis situation that delivers power to their hands and they have suffered a pay freeze for three long years.  Their original work agreement expired in December, 2014, when Ausgrid was owned by the NSW State government.  It has since been acquired by a consortium of Superannuation funds, IFM investors and AustralianSuper.

Negotiations have been grinding on endlessly, with the workers claiming to have delivered a productivity increase of  6.4 percent and have asked for a three percent pay rise.  Ausgrid is offering 2.5 percent over the next two years and 2 percent in the third year, supported by a $ 1000 bonus payment for each employee.

The union is holding out for that full three percent over the whole period and a vote by union members resulted in 93% opting for industrial action unless this pay claim reached finality.

Of course, Ausgrid is just one of the several individual companies that control electricity distribution in New South Wales and it is virtually certain that whatever is decided in the Ausgrid case will quickly flow on across the industry.

Fortunately, the pay discrepancy is very small and this gap may be negotiated without the unions resorting to industrial action because the outcome of rolling power blackouts is just too horrible to contemplate.  We are a society that has developed around a continuous electricity supply and blackouts would create the spectre of third world conditions.  In some forms of continuous supply manufacturing the damage to plant and machinery could run into millions of dollars.

The inconvenience of householders sitting in the dark is nothing compared to the damage even a small power interruption would cause to small business.  In the heat, most food would spoil very quickly, and the loss of refrigeration would compound that loss enormously.  That income loss would spread across all sections of society.

The danger exists more widely that this pay dispute. There is a doubt that our generating capacity is up to the job in very hot weather and commercial decisions are influencing outcomes in new plant to replace old coal fired generators.  It is quite possible that generation may fall short  if we experience a run of unusually hot weather.

A continuous electricity supply is probably the measure of our capacity as a twenty-first century society.  Its about time we got serious about making the right decisions to ensure uninterrupted supply !