Tracking Worker Gaps in Southeast

Utility exec Ed Clayton marshals owners to share data, practices

As the utility that must keep up with power demands in one of the fastest growing U.S. regions, Atlanta-based Southern Co. is painfully aware of how much new capacity must be added. Edward L. Clayton, outage planning manager for the utility's Southern Co. Generation unit, saw the workforce crunch coming when he was detailed to help the parent firm strategize planned new projects and staffing demands.

But instead of keeping that intelligence to himself and his own company, Clayton, a 26-year Southern Co. veteran, is sharing it with his regional owner peers, not to mention area contractors and labor groups, to forestall an even greater craft labor gap in coming years that could jeopardize a region already hard hit by hurricane-generated construction demands.

Multimedia  View Award of Excellence Luncheon and Acceptance Speech of Ed Clayton April 3, 2008

Clayton led the loose coalition to form the Southeast Manpower Tripartite Alliance (SEMTA), an offshoot of the Construction Users Round Table, a Cincinnati-based national owners' group, which generated the region's first labor demand projections. More than 60 utilities and industrial owners cooperated in the survey for the first time in an effort to schedule regional projects more efficiently. "I felt it was better to cooperate with peers, contractors and labor to determine the magnitude of the problem," says Clayton. "This has heightened the awareness that we have a problem." The report, by the Construction Labor Research Council, found that demand for some crafts will rise more than 40% in the next four years.

Clayton says SEMTA meetings have attracted up to 250 attendees, that a new labor-demand survey is being planned and that CURT may replicate the approach in other regions.