Westinghouse locks out union members at N.H. plant

Westinghouse Electric Co. has locked out more than 170 members of the boilermakers union in its Newington factory in New Hampshire, setting the stage for tough negotiations in the coming months with unions in Cranberry, Warrendale, Churchill and Blairsville.

The Cranberry-based nuclear firm, which filed for bankruptcy in late March, said it offered “a fair contract given the business conditions,” according to spokesperson Sarah Cassella, “and we are disappointed the Boilermakers were not willing to accept the offer.”

Duane Egan, chief steward for local 651 at Newington, sees it differently. He said the company leaned on the bankruptcy during negotiations, saying that a bankruptcy judge wouldn’t allow Westinghouse to meet the union’s demands.

“We feel that they’re being opportunistic with this bankruptcy,” he said.

Even though the union is willing to forgo wage increases, Mr. Egan said, the contract put forward “strips us of most of our benefits, and we’re not agreeable to that.”

Other union members reported that Westinghouse is trying to bring union employees in line with its non-unionized workers, who have seen their pensions frozen, their severance pay slashed, and their health care costs increase in recent months.

Similar issues are likely to surface this summer when Westinghouse goes to the negotiating table with 155 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers at its Blairsville plant, which makes components for nuclear fuel.

Around the same time, the company also will be putting forward a new contract for 386 members of the Association of Salaried Westinghouse Employees, many of whom are administrative employees in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Westinghouse has 713 union employees across its operations, according to the company’s bankruptcy documents, a sliver of the total workforce that numbers around 11,500 worldwide.

“I’m sure we’re kind of a litmus test for all of this,” Mr. Egan said.

The union and the company can’t even agree on how many union members were locked out, with Westinghouse putting the

number at 172 and Mr. Egan saying he represents 174.

While comparatively small, the union workforce at Newington in New Hampshire is doing big things — it manufactures the reactor vessel barrel and the parts that go into it for new AP1000 nuclear powerplants.

Currently, it is finishing up the last two orders for reactor vessel parts and coolant pumps that will go into the AP1000 projects in Georgia and South Carolina. The first two were delivered in 2015, according to Westinghouse’s website, and weighed some 200 tons. It is those AP1000 construction projects that swung Westinghouse into bankruptcy, with billions in cost overruns and years of delays.

Mr. Egan said Newington is scheduled to ship the last two orders to those projects in the next few months, a schedule that will “almost certainly” be delayed if the lockoutcontinues, he said.

But Westinghouse maintains it will keep deliveries on time by putting some of the 118 non-union workers at Newington — managers, supervisors, engineers and administrative workers — on the shop floor to keep productionhumming.

The company also said in a statement announcing the lockout on Sunday that it will “utilize alternate Westinghouse locations to meet customercommitments.”

Ms. Cassella declined to name what other plants are capableof picking up the slack for the large component manufacturing that goes on at Newington, but said, “We have a series of nuclear components manufacturing locations and are leveraging applicablelocations as needed.”

She said the company isn’t hiring outside contractors to dothe work “at this time.”

“To my knowledge, there are no other facilities within Westinghouse… that can build what we build,” Mr. Egan said. The lockout began just before midnight on Sunday.