AVSR1 workers went with Oso Town Council members Gerard Conroy and Richard Skaggs on Tuesday, June 19 to speak with the L.A. County Board of Supervisors about their jobs. They didn’t get a chance to do that, but on June 21 an agreement was eminent. On June 22 many got a call to get ready to come back to work.
By Patric Hedlund
“They are bringing everybody back, plus hiring additional [workers],” a union electrician working at the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One (AVSR1) construction site, said Monday. “We’ve been working 6-10s,” he said, meaning six days in a row, ten hours a day, for electrical contractor Conti Electric. The union electricians are installing First Solar’s cadmiumtelluride (CdTe) photovoltaic solar panels.
“I’m exhausted…” the electrician said (he is not authorized to speak to the press on the details, so asks not to be named), “but we’ve got hundreds of panels up since Thursday. There are going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of them.”
Ultimately, there will be over three million panels in the 230 megawatt facility being built by First Solar, Inc. near Neenach at 170th Street.
The panels have been sitting, staged in boxes on pallets, waiting for the green light from the county to move ahead. It was these panels that caused work to grind to a halt in April when a Los Angeles County Department of Public Works inspector saw that the panels do not comply with Los Angeles County’s requirement to have such hardware and socket fixtures UL certified.
Hundreds of workers were put on furlough while the company and the county with “rooms full of engineers and lawyers” went toe-to-toe for weeks until a breakthrough on June 21 which was partially a politicallybrokered accord nudged by 5th District Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich.
That same day agents with CLP Services (a labor contractor for post and tilt beam installers at the site) called their furloughed workers to tell them to go get drug tests, in preparation for returning to their jobs.
Some workers thought they were being “strung along.” But at 5:30 a.m. on Friday, June 22 First Solar and L.A. County issued a statement of agreement, with a quote from Antonovich saying he was glad to be of help and a note from First Solar’s Jim Lamon, Vice President of Construction, saying the process “paved the way for future projects in the region, which has great potential for solar energy production.”
“Everybody is called back,” a source from CLP’s labor pool said, “I think we had 100 people, and now they are talking about bringing extra people, maybe hundreds, to ramp up the job.”
Workers are happy to be heading back, but concerned about the next challenge— the looming triple-digit heat coming just ahead in the desert summer. They hope to start working 5 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. shifts, several told The Mountain Enterprise.
This is part of the June 29, 2012 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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