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| Shermann Dilla Thomas, right and ComEd president and CEO Gil Quiniones in happier days. |
Commonwealth Edison has 6,600 employees, none as well known as Shermann Dilla Thomas, power grid manager by night, Chicago TikTok historian and roving South Side tour guide by day.
Leading new Bears and Bulls players through Bronzeville on his custom luxury bus, appearing on television, pinballing around the internet, always giving props to his bosses at the electric company.
That was the case, least, until ComEd fired Thomas in late September.
"I cried for a week," he said. "I loved being there."
Even more surprising is how it happened.
Thomas joined ComEd in 2011, as a meter reader, rising to meter technician, substation operator, then area operator. A safe union berth with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and an important job, a troubleshooter, literally keeping the lights on.
"We manage the power grid for the city," he said, as if he still worked there. "If somebody downtown loses power, we'd get power restored. I was mostly underground, inside manholes."
But it's hard to work at night and build your business during the day, while raising a family. Thomas worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., arriving home in time to help get his younger kids — he has seven children, aged 4 to 26 — to school.
"You're a zombie," he said. "My wife would ask me every day what day it is, and I would say, 'I have no idea.'"
Meanwhile ComEd began to notice there was something special about this particular employee — the Sun-Times might have had a hand in that, splashing him across the front page in April 2023.
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First rule of capitalism: your boss is not your friend.
ReplyDeleteSecond rule of capitalism: get everything in writing.
It's sad how true this is.
DeleteThose in power always seem to exploit those who work for them. To me it's one of the strongest arguments in taxing the highest earners and companies. Everything they make their money on is dependent on the people they abuse. The rich pay nothing for the government-subsidized "things" that get people to their businesses.
And like ComEd, where do you get your power if you don't want to deal with them? At least I can avoid Comcast like the plague, and while their competitors aren't that much better, I'm proud to do so.
Tax the rich. tax corporations. protect the people. get it in writing.
Bingo. Rule #1 and Rule #2 of the Wonderful World of Working.
DeleteRule #1: You might be good buddies with your boss, and drink with them, and golf and fish with your boss...but when push comes to shove, as it so often does, your boss is just your boss. If you piss him off in any way, or if you piss off somebody higher on the totem pole, you're history. The deck is always stacked in his favor. It is wise to remember this.
Rule #2: Get it on paper. His biggest mistake, by far, was believing a promise and a handshake, and not getting it in writing. Maybe if he had, he could lawyer up now. Probably wouldn't get reinstated, but a judge might get him a nice chunk of change, so he wouldn't have to cry for another week. Or maybe ever cry again.
Perhaps an even bigger mistake was giving up union protection. Without the IBEW having his back, he was toast when the layoffs came, management or not. Nobody to go to bat for you, no piece of paper, believing the platitudes and promises, and you're broomed out the door. Happens countless times a day in corporate America.
Of course, being in a union is no guarantee, either. Their clout is but a shadow of what it once was. How is the Newspaper Guild (now the NewsGuild-CWA) doing these days, Mr. S? Its very first local (Local 1, Cleveland Plain Dealer, organized in 1934) no longer exists.
Truly reprehensible behavior by ComEd acted upon this DOPE individual who has done nothing but good for the community. May his tours continue to grow and take care of his family and continue to educate those lucky enough to take part in them.
ReplyDeleteThe paternal company, where you work hard for thirty years and retire with a gold watch and a pension have long passed. Sadly, these things occur and then corporations wonder why so many employees no longer give a damn. It works both ways. So glad I was able to retire twenty years ago when you could really enjoy what you were doing every God Damned Day. The work ethic put into his tour company shows he will not only survive, but prosper.
ReplyDeleteI used to work for ComEd. This doesn't surprise me at all. The company has had a habit of designating former union jobs as management to avoid paying benefits, etc. I hope Mr. Thomas was able to take advantage of the stock.purchase plan. That Constellation stock has gone through the roof.
ReplyDeleteI am a big fan of Mr. Thomas work. He is truly a bright light. Pardon the pun .in our community
ReplyDeleteBut to become a mouthpiece for a slimy organization who's hoping to have their reputation burnished through his brand seems like a poor decision on his part
Like my grandma always said you lay down with dogs you get fleas
I wish the Dilla all the best, but being self-employed can be a b**** when your side hustle turns into your main line of work. You discover all the benefits you had from your day job and how important they were
Is there an organization that doesn't have its slimy corners? I've worked for the Sun-Times for 37 years, and at times needed a squeegee to scrape myself clean. It's called dwelling in an imperfect world. What increased the shock for me is that I LIKE ComEd, generally — something I'm going into on tomorrow's EGD post. They keep the lights on, more or less, often using outdated equipment. They respond — it might have been inadequate corporate BS. But the city of Chicago would never have come up with that if I badgered them for a month.
DeleteNeil, I think, in general terms, ComEd is a good company. When the power goes out, they turn it back on. Your power bills don't go up so much so often that you realize how badly you get taken advantage of (that's by design).
DeleteBut it falls onto a larger societal issue, one that we faced in 2008 with the idea of too big to fail. These companies don't work for us -- the consumer -- anymore. They work for the investor and the bottom line. Look at Boeing; the people who understood the situation and what was going on have been pointing it out since it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, and there was a shift from Building the best to making the most. It takes decades of small cut corners to round off an edge. I believe we are starting to see the results of these corner cutters -- which began in the 80s under the Reagan administration -- finally starting to show. Big companies got bigger, small companies got eaten up. Slowly people got replaced by computers and smarts with yes men. We are so busy trying to make it and eke by that we haven't noticed how dark its gotten.
Is it too late? will things ever change?
who knows. But I do think your view of ComEd is a wonderful example of how we perceive companies compared to what they are, what they were, and what they are becoming. As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, Americans have a strange obsession with Pluto, the (dwarf) planet. He believes it is because both the Disney Dog and the Planet came into our lives the same year and thus have had a connection far beyond the rest of the planets. In other parts of the world, people don't seem to have that connection, so the pluto thing wasn't and isn't such a big deal. ComEd (and other big well-known companies) may have a similarity here. The company that it used to be is tied to something we hold dear to our heart. they are a core memory. Like a blue-dog Democrat or a Lincoln Republican, we may often miss the changes that have occurred because we relate them to something deeper and stronger than reality. We are, after all, jsut human.
I worked there for 40 years. The workers do a great job keeping the lights on. Long hours including nights, weekends, holiday; rough conditions, bad weather, heights, manholes; hazardous equipment, shocks, falls, crashes, asbestos, lead. The corporate leadership is not so consistent. It's gotten worse after ComEd merged with other utilities in the mid 1990s. Doesn't surprise me the way they treated Shermann.
ReplyDeleteShermann did great work for the company from Meter Reader to Area Operator to spokesman. And he was a great Union Steward for his fellow workers. But that doesn't protect you from corporate politics.
There are organizations that are not slimy some less slimy than others. ComEd with their downstate dealings with madigan and such pretty darn slimy.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure as an influencer you're constantly dealing with people primarily out to make a buck. Nothing wrong with that or make themselves look better The dealer has built a great brand and this is not going to make him look bad for sure
I'm interested in the article about ComEd. I have been impressed that over the last 10 years with demands for electricity. Skyrocketing that they haven't had the problems that I anticipated
On a particularly hot summer evening some 10 years ago we sat on the porch outside our darkened buck town apartment because of a rolling blackout and watched the wires on the poles catch Fire break and fall to the tops of the garages
At the time when purchases of electric vehicles were just starting to take off and I thought to myself uh-oh but so far so good
Pretty funny to casually flip the page and see the full-page Com Ed ad on page 15 of today's S-T, hard on the heels of this exposé on pages 12 and 13. Gee, I wonder which will resonate more with the readers?
ReplyDeleteRegardless of anything else about this cruel, bone-headed move, at the point at which the very capable and popular Mr. Thomas turned down $30,000 and health insurance because he didn't want to sign a non-disclosure agreement, it would have behooved the company to offer him $120,000 to work however many hours he felt like, doing whatever the fuck he wanted to.
Of course, that would have required that a company in this benighted nation care about something other than the stock price and the bottom line.
In business, you have to get terms and conditions in writing.
ReplyDeleteI liked the way you presented Mr Thomas in your column. He comes across as very likeable and genuine. I wish him well in whatever comes next for him.
ReplyDeleteHi Neil - there's a big(ger) issue here, about how our community writ large protects the less-advantaged, less-informed, or less-educated among us. ComEd acted perfectly within its legal rights to layoff an at-will employee. It was deeply stupid, but legal.
ReplyDeleteDilla is a smart person, and presumably well-advised. Or at least he should have been when given the opportunity to change jobs from a legally-protected union job to an at-will one. He should have known to get it in writing, as other commenters noted. But, get *what* in writing? a severance package, presumably. You can be sure the CEO of ComEd who did this to him has one of those, in writing.
The big problem is, millions of others, much less informed than Dilla was or should have been, fall victim to this very problem. Smarter or better-resourced employers take advantage of those millions, legally. In the case of ComEd, someone with Dilla's (and your) platform make them look venal and stupid. Those millions of others don't have that advantage, if we can even call it that. Economists like me call that "information asymmetry", where one party knows much more about their rights and opportunities than the other. Progress as a society depends to a large degree on reducing that asymmetry.
But how? Sure, we can attempt to educate those millions better, about employment, personal finance, legal rights, and many other subjects. That would take decades. While we do that, we need to think carefully about how we want to use laws to protect them.
It's been a week or so. I see Dilla launched a new show, which few others would have the opportunity to do. We haven't heard anything further, say from ComEd, everyone would welcome an update at some point.