Ex-Surry nuclear plant employee sues Dominion, alleging nationwide wage-fixing – Smithfield Times

Two former nuclear plant employees, including one who worked at Dominion Energy’s Surry Power Station, are the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging that the utility “conspired” with its competitors to “fix and suppress” the wages of workers at every nuclear power plant in the United States since 2003.

Chesapeake resident Leo Dorrell, who worked as a nuclear instrumentation technician at the Surry plant from 2008 through 2012, and Herndon resident John Dunn, a former employee of New Orleans-based Entergy, filed a class-action complaint on July 11 in the District of Maryland’s U.S. District Court on behalf of themselves and “all others similarly situated” against 26 defendants, including Dominion and Entergy. The complaint alleges violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, an 1890 federal anti-monopoly law that outlaws “conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce” across state lines.

Dominion, in a statement to the Times, denied violating antitrust laws.

“Dominion Energy is fully committed to compliance with all federal antitrust and employment laws. We are reviewing the lawsuit and will vigorously defend it in court,” spokesman Ryan Frazier said.

The complaint alleges the 26 companies, since at least May 1, 2003, “directly exchanged highly sensitive compensation data – including the amount and dates of planned future wage increases – through a digital repository of union collective bargaining agreements” known as the CBA Repository, which collected CBAs from each company and “posted them to a password-protected website accessible only to participating nuclear defendants and coconspirators.”

It accuses Dominion specifically of having “directly participated” in the alleged scheme by exchanging “current and future compensation information with competing nuclear power companies through the CBA Repository and “compensation comparison reports” that allowed defendants to “easily compare and coordinate their current and future compensation rates at each unionized nuclear power plant and provided them with a significant bargaining advantage when negotiating wages and benefits with unions.”

The complaint claims Dominion “knew and understood, when it shared its current and future compensation data” with Chicago-based co-defendant Exelon “that its compensation data would be distributed in fully disaggregated and deanonymized form to, and examined by, other nuclear defendants.” 

A former labor manager at Exelon quoted in the complaint allegedly said nuclear power companies shared information “all the time” and for the “specific reason” of “trying to screw the union.” It’s unclear in the filing to whom the quoted source made the statement.

The complaint further claims Dominion employees “regularly attended annual NHRG (Nuclear Human Resources Group) conferences where executives from competing nuclear power companies gathered in-person to exchange information about, discuss, agree upon, and fix class members’ wages, salaries, benefits, and other compensation at artificially depressed levels.” NHRG is described as “a human resources association that consisted of all the nuclear power companies in the United States and Canada.”

The complaint asks the court to declare the lawsuit a class action under federal rules of civil procedure and seeks unspecified monetary damages. It further asks that the defendants be “permanently enjoined and restrained” from information sharing.