Edison employees allege retaliation, regulator says

Southern California Edison employees have told state regulators that the utility retaliated against them after they raised serious concerns inside Edison, according to a letter to the company from the state Public Utilities Commission.

The March 3 letter to the utility’s chief executive, Al Fohrer, didn’t say what Edison allegedly did or how many employees had complained, and it made clear that the state hadn’t determined whether the allegations were true.

But the letter, sent by two PUC executives, warned Fohrer that if “our staff investigates and finds that retaliation has occurred, we will inform the commission, and we will seek appropriate sanctions.”

Retaliation against workers who complain about corporate wrongdoing is forbidden by commission rules and state law.

PUC spokeswoman Susan Carothers didn’t answer questions about the letter Thursday and didn’t make available the commission executives who signed it -- Richard Clark, director of the Consumer Protection and Safety Division, and Dana Appling, director of the Division of Ratepayer Advocates, an independent arm of the PUC. A call to Clark was referred to the commission’s public relations office. No one answered the telephone at Appling’s office.

Ken Stewart, Edison’s ethics officer, said the company had received the letter but hadn’t responded yet. Edison doesn’t retaliate against employees who raise ethical or legal concerns, he said.

“Apart from the fact that it’s just wrong to retaliate, and we don’t want to have a retaliatory environment, we also assume that we’re legally obligated under various statutes not to retaliate against whistle-blowers,” Stewart said.

The unusual warning touches on a nagging issue for the Rosemead-based utility and parent company Edison International: whether the company protects employee whistle-blowers and properly investigates allegations of fraud and misconduct.

“I was sort of surprised at the tone of it,” Stewart said of the letter. “But on the other hand, I think the PUC wants to send a very clear signal.”

Because of the letter’s timing, Edison believes that it refers to a case involving a problematic software system being installed by the utility, Stewart said. This week, PUC officials were scheduled to question two employees under oath who had complained about the program.

The employees “have raised those concerns, and we’ve investigated them very thoroughly,” Stewart said. The company also probed complaints of retaliation or fear of retaliation by the employees, but “we can’t see any evidence of retaliation.”

Stewart and Fohrer have acknowledged that Edison is struggling to counter distrust among its employees

A 2007 companywide survey found that “only 33% of responding employees said they are confident in the integrity of the help line investigation process,” according to a December report written by Stewart. As for retaliation, the survey showed that between 54% and 62% of employees believed that they could report unethical behavior without fear of reprisal -- a result that remains below Edison’s benchmark but was an improvement from 37% two years earlier.

“The survey basically showed that we made very substantial progress,” Fohrer said in a Jan. 31 interview. “The one area where we weren’t happy was that there were still some employees who feared retaliation. . . . Whether or not it’s right, the perception is still out there.”

Some of those views could represent fallout from a seven-year fraud at Edison where workers rigged customer satisfaction surveys and submitted faulty employee safety reports that allowed the utility to collect millions of dollars in customer-funded performance incentives.

In both the survey and the safety cases, warnings were sent to top executives a year or more before Edison divulged the problems publicly. A PUC judge ruled that the scandal should cost Edison as much as $237 million, but the decision is under appeal at the commission. Edison admitted that employees manipulated data, but argued that the total penalty should be around $52 million.

Robert Barnett, the judge who heard the fraud case, suggested that the unidentified letter writers at the utility should be “substantially rewarded.” Barnett ruled that the wrongdoing at Edison was deliberate “and without the intervention of a whistle-blower, might be continuing today.”

elizabeth.douglass

@latimes.com