This story was updated at 10:15 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020, with more information.
President Donald Trump, who has pledged to continue to put America first if elected to a second term, used his prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention to tout his success in getting the Tennessee Valley Authority to abandon its plans to outsource information technology jobs in Chattanooga.
and saving save hundreds of TVA jobs by firing the agency's chairman.
In one of his most high-profile speeches accepting his party's nomination at the close of the Republican National Convention, Trump said he helped save hundreds of TVA jobs by firing the agency's chairman. During his campaign speech Thursday night, Trump personally recognized some of the TVA workers whose jobs had been threatened earlier this year when TVA announced plans to use a trio of foreign-owned contractors to replace their IT jobs.
"You went through a lot," he told the TVA workers who joined an audience of Trump supporters on the South Lawn of the White House.
One of those workers, LaDonna Sellers is a field operations support analyst at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant who said it was "a tremendous honor" to be invited to the White House.
"It was great to see the president stand up for American workers and hopefully that will help not only those of us at TVA but other workers as well," she said.
Thomas Dillard, a systems performance engineer at TVA in Chattanooga, credited Trump for saving his job and those of more than 60 other IT workers who got layoff notices last month and told their jobs would be replaced with contract workers.
"In this instance, the president really made a difference for us," Dillard said.
Trump recognized the TVA employees Thursday night during his prime-time address to the nation and asked the TVA workers to stand.
"When I learned that the Tennessee Valley Authority laid off hundreds of American workers and forced them to train their lower-paid foreign replacements, I promptly removed the chairman of the board," Trump said. "And now those talented American workers have been rehired and are back providing power to Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia."
On Aug. 3, Trump met with a half dozen computer programmers and analysts from Chattanooga and Knoxville at the White House and vowed to save their jobs from being outsourced. Trump signed an executive order limiting any federal agency from using workers with H-1B visa to replace U.S. workers and fired both the current and former chairmen of the TVA for their support of the previous outsourcing policy.
As an independent federal agency that no longer receives any taxpayer support, TVA is not part of the executive branch and the president can't dictate its policies or practices. But the president does appoint the nine-member board that oversees TVA and he vowed to continue firing TVA board members until the IT outsourcing ended.
Three days later, TVA reversed its outsourcing decision and agreed not to lay off any IT workers at the federal utility.
TVA's new chairman, John Ryder, and CEO Jeff Lyash, said Thursday they have had multiple conversations about the outsourcing with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows this month and have agreed not to outsource TVA jobs to any company using foreign workers.
"Simply put, we made mistakes and we immediately set out to make things right," said Ryder, a former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee who was appointed to the TVA board by Trump last year and was elected TVA board chairman on Thursday.
Although the IT and most other TVA work must be done in the United States, some of the IT workers whose jobs were being phased out complained this spring that they were having to train their replacements who were in the United States working on H-1B visas because they were not U.S. citizens.
During Thursday's TVA board meeting, Ryder and Lyash both said the previous outsourcing decision was wrong and TVA shouldn't have been planning to lay off its own workers during an economic downturn triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
"The underlying intent was good to leverage technology to lower cost and improve efficiency," Lyash said. "But we weren't sensitive enough to the economic impact of COVID-19 and some of the policy directives that the White House was setting."
Nearly half of the 200 workers at TVA whose jobs have or could have been eliminated by the outsourcing moves in IT opted in the past year to retire or find other work and no workers were ultimately laid off. Lyash said any of those who left TVA due to previous notices of job cuts may get their old jobs back.
TVA had already contracted with Capgemini (based in France), CGI (based in Canada) and Accenture (based in Ireland) to perform about 20% of TVA's IT work. Lyash said Thursday those contracts are being terminated.
TVA began studying ways to improve the staffing and services of its IT operations last year and previously said that hiring outside contractors was more efficient, reliable and in line with what other utilities are doing in the industry. TVA already hires uses more than 12,000 contract workers a year to perform a variety of specialized or temporary tasks for the agency, exceeding the number of TVA's own employees which totals about 10,000, according to Lyash.
Despite previous objections from one of its biggest labor unions and criticisms from U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, TVA initially stuck with it decision to outsource the IT work as TVA has done with other areas of its business.
But that changed this month when President Trump got involved after he saw a television commercial about the outsourcing prepared by a group opposing the number of H-1B visas issued for foreign workers to do technology jobs in the U.S.
U.S. Tech Workers, a three-year-old nonprofit that wants to limit visas given to IT workers coming into the United States, spent more than $100,000 on television ads in Chattanooga, Knoxville and Huntsville where TVA jobs are being displaced and on a cable TV outlet in Washington D.C where the group hoped to catch the eye of the president.
"President Trump promised to put American workers first," the TV ad said. "Here's his chance."
After seeing the ad, Trump initially tweeted in July that it a "strange ad" and denounced the commercial as "Fake T.V. But within a couple of weeks, Trump called a half dozen of the workers affected by the outsourcing and their union representatives to the White House for a meeting where he signed his presidential proclamation against such outsourcing by federal agencies.
Trump's opposition to the use of private contractors to replace federal government workers is in sharp contrast to the Republican campaign message in 1964 when then GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater called for the privatization of TVA.
But Democrats have also changed their views on TVA and the role of public power. Although TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration were created by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 as part of his New Deal programs to lift the economy out of the Great Depression, Democrat Barack Obama proposed selling TVA in his administration's budget plan six years ago. Congress never approved the idea, however.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.
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