Nat’l Grid health care loss hits family hard

Days before Brian Harvey would find out that National Grid had locked him out of his job and canceled his health insurance, he and his wife, Michelle, found a lump on their youngest son’s stomach.

Michelle Harvey tearfully recounted her toddler’s fight with cancer, which came at the same time her husband was locked out of his job at National Grid.

Within days, their son Winston, 20 months old at the time, would have surgery to remove a renal tumor, and then would be diagnosed with stage three cancer that required chemotherapy treatment. His parents had to figure out how they would afford to pay for it.

“What National Grid did was wrong. It was hurtful and it devastated us,” Michelle Harvey said, wiping away tears as she recounted “the worst month of our lives” and accused National Grid of using a “cruel negotiating tactic.”

The story was one of dozens shared by gas workers with lawmakers Tuesday as the Legislature weighs how deeply to get involved in a lengthy labor dispute between National Grid and United Steel Workers Locals 12012 and 12003.

National Grid locked out the gas workers in late June after several years of giving contract extensions that didn’t yield any concessions on health care or pensions for new employees. Legislators, however, have grown increasingly impatient with the impasse, have largely sided with the workers over the utility, and are now actively considering legislative relief for locked out workers.

“I believe National Grid should be ashamed of itself,” Sen. Marc Pacheco told the company’s Massachusetts president Marcy Reed.

As gas workers argued for legislation to restore their health benefits during contract talks, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo yesterday started to move a bill that calls for the state labor and workforce development secretary to establish “a benefit program for any individual who is involuntarily unemployed during the period of the negotiation of a collective bargaining contract because of an employer’s lockout.” Under the bill, all program costs will be assessed on the employer who has locked out their employees, and the bill precludes an employer from passing on the costs of the program to ratepayers.

Unemployment benefits for many locked-out workers are scheduled to expire Jan. 14, according to the union.

ANGELA ROWLINGS / HERALD STAFF FILE, ABOVE; JIM MICHAUD / BOSTON HERALD FILE, RIGHT SHOULD BE ‘ASHAMED’: Locked-out National Grid steel workers, protesting this fall above in Boston and right in Woburn, are appealing to the Legislature to restore health benefits for themselves and their families.