Green energy is the future of America, but a key part of the transition is ensuring that workers in the industry are as fairly compensated as their fossil fuel counterparts.
That’s what workers at EmPower Solar, a solar panel installation company based in Bethpage, aimed to do recently when they voted 29-16 to unionize with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 259, an AFL-CIO affiliated union.
“I’ve been working there for eight months,” Daniel Lozano, a solar installer, told the Press. “So for us it was the working conditions. During the summer, there were grueling conditions with the heat waves, and we were still working. We only got 10 hours of weather time, so not a lot of people want to use it all the time.”
Lozano detailed an incident where a worker fell from a roof – and claimed EmPower responded by cutting his pay and lowering his position on the staff. Lozano also detailed conditions on a job installing solar panels on an house in upstate New York, which took three days and involved two-hour drives there and back – and as soon as they finished, EmPower handed them another three-day-long job.
“They never even gave us a thank you,” Lozano said. “ We got it done. And that’s the treatment that we get, another huge job right away. We give 110% to these people again and again.”
Workers from EmPower got the ball rolling by getting in touch with UAW 259, and its vice president, Michael DiGiuseppe. Lozano and DiGiuseppe wrote an opinion article detailing some of the workers’ grievances with EmPower prior to the vote. According to Lozano, EmPower implored the workers to vote no, and promised a meeting to address their concerns. It was not to be, as the workers voted yes.
After that vote, Lozano and DiGiuseppe say, EmPower began furloughing employees, with the current count being up to 20 workers. Lozano is one of them: He was furloughed in late December.
According to DiGiuseppe, the company’s response is yet another headache that unions often face when taking on new groups of workers.
“My job now is trying to bring everyone together,” DiGiuseppe told the Press. “We want to reconcile. We want to move forward and we want to make this the greatest company in the world. It’s not in our best interest to hurt the company; we just want them to understand that the old economy has to follow into the new economy.”
EmPower claimed to the Press that there were numerous falsehoods in DiGiuseppe and Lozano’s article, and EmPower has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board pointing out the falsehoods.
“The claim was we have a $44,000 average pay,” David Schieren, CEO of EmPower, told the Press. “That was what they wrote. Our average pay was $66,000. And they said that the pay for a foreman was only a little bit more. The average pay for the foreman was $90,000 – before health and 401(k).”
Schieren added that the recent wave of furloughs supposedly had nothing to do with the unionizing effort.
“We build our systems in the fourth quarter,” Schieren said. “Due to rising interest rates, there is a slowdown in business. So that has had a big impact, especially on interest rate-sensitive sectors. So the cost of borrowing has increased significantly for solar projects. So demand has gone down. So we had to furlough people all around the company, but that had nothing to do with unionizing.”
