The leadership factor
Hiring craft journeymen, either to add expertise to a plant’s workforce or to fill staff vacancies, will not be productive unless the workers are well-supervised. Accordingly, the survey asked each of the 45 respondents to state their plant’s “supervisory ratio”—the number of craft workers (in-house craftsmen, I&C and IC&E techs, and apprentices) divided by the number of managers, general foremen, and craft supervisors. Eight plants reported their ratio as 10 or greater; one plant reported a ratio of 19; the median was 7.3.
The survey asked the same question about the ratio of craft workers to planners/schedulers. The median reported was 13.3, although the data ranged from 30 to as low as three, with a ratio of 48 disregarded in the calculation.
Cost of doing business
Getting a handle on hourly wage rates is always difficult because raw reported figures fail to take into account the local cost of living, fringe benefits, and the range of union pay scales. However, the survey did request raw hourly wage information by craft specialty. The results (Figure 10) underscore the wide range of rates that plants are paying for essentially the same skill set.
10. Reported hourly wage rates for craft maintenance workers. The numbers atop the bars indicate the number of responses received for the specific specialty and wage rate range. Source: EUCG
Straight-time wage rates are only a ballpark measure of craft costs because overtime assignments can bust a budget for direct labor. In this survey, 36% of respondents reported that overtime was typically 11% to 15% of the straight-time 40 hours/week, 29% reported that it was 6% to 10%, and 9% reported that it was 21% to 25%.
Maintenance coverage (the number of hours in a day when a maintenance staff is on duty) varied pretty much linearly by plant size. Small plants (<499 MW) generally had 40 hours/week of coverage, but two plants reported coverage of 96 hours/week. Plants larger than 1,000 MW tended to have two-shift coverage, although roughly one-third reported still using single shifts of maintenance workers. Plants larger than 2,000 MW tended to have two- or three-shift coverage, but the mix of specific shift schedules and craft specialties varied significantly among plants.
Filling the craft pool
The final survey questions asked about minimum requirements for entry-level positions in power plant maintenance. Of responding plants, 21 said new hires only had to be high school graduates, 13 required the candidate to have a trade school diploma, and seven insisted on an associate’s degree. More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) reported having a formal maintenance apprenticeship program in place, although some required new hires to work as a helper for one year before entering the program, to avoid breaking company seniority rules. Over half of the respondents (54%) said their maintenance apprenticeship program lasts 37 to 48 months.
—Robert Oldani (oldanir@dteenergy.com) is a plant performance manager at DTE Energy and a member of the EUCG’s Fossil Productivity Committee.
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