Understaffed?!?

[De-energized]

Does anyone else feel like you are being required to do more with less?? I'm sure all of you do, but seriously? Do you ever seem to think "****, this used to be a four man job for safety reasons but now we are doing it with two. JY and helper". Seems to be a trend where I'm at and mainly do to not enough help in the workforce so they spread us thin and expect you to work your life away while your family suffers. I understand there is a shortage in the workforce but the company isn't trying to hire enough to replace what we are losing or to keep up with the workload.

[T-Man]

They will give you enough work to get you overloaded, then back off a tad and hire contractors to pick up the slack. The contractors bid the job and are not collecting, sick time or vacation bennies. Cheaper for the company. If you complain they will point to the door and say no one is stopping you from finding another job out there. So my advice to you is work safe, be sure you can handle what they send you on and collect a paycheck. And be sure you put enough away for your retirement.

[Trouble1]

Our trouble men pretty much do everything by ourselves. The only thing we don't do is change heavy equipment(transformers, poles, etc..) and climb by ourselves. Anything we have to go hands on for on high voltage we call for another trouble men. Most of the time crews won't come in and that leave two troubleshooters for every 10 towns in our area and we work in a heavily loaded highly populated area. Outside of 9-5 mon-fri you could possibly be asked to do anything with one or two guys. Anything live we will kill if it's too dangerous for two guys. Even if you get the help from the other troubleshooter, we end up having no ground man because we are both in the air doing line work out of buckets with no jibs. It gets pretty frustrating some times, but luckily it doesn't happen too often.

When I started there were roughly 40 linemen and 15 troubleshooters in each division. Now it's almost half that and they rarely hire when guys leave. Every body jumped at the chance to work back then because you never knew when you would be asked again. Now it's hard to go a week without being forced to work overtime.

[in the bucket]

Ha ha. We are a three man crew that does all the metering, all the primary and secondary overheads, street lighting, all the water and all the sewer for an entire town. Most of the lighting maintenance for the boro owned properties as well. I forgot to add the pumping stations, all the pumps and instrumentation as well. You think you are spread thin?

[Trouble1]

Sounds like you have a lot on your plate. One of the newspapers around here actually ran the numbers because Muni's were getting a lot of priase for storm response. We ended up with something like 1.5 guys per each town that we cover.

[rob8210]

I am a contractor, and it seems that every utility I go work in is always short staffed. For example the utility I am at now has had us there for 3 years just doing dock work. In the past I have been rented into a utility , to work on their trucks with their guys everyday. Last rental gig was 2 years.