Have you received your July 2013 “Construction Update” from Enbridge? Ours arrived just after our return from Washington D.C. Fortunately, it doesn’t contain any vital information that we could have shared with our legislators. Plus, we figure they’re all on the Enbridge mailing list anyway.

Still, it’s a pretty interesting edition of the monthly newsletter. For this one, it appears that Enbridge’s vast public relations brain trust huddled together in a conference room and generated a brand new strategy. You see, having learned (apparently) that nobody much trusts the things uttered by the people who run the company (or formerly ran it), or the disingenuous spinmeisters who represent the company (there are lots and lots of them), or the land agents (including the fictional ones) who are landowners’ primary interface with the company, they’ve decided to lean on the only group of people associated with this project left with any sort of credibility at all: the construction workers. It’s right there in the newsletter’s main headline:

The accompanying letter from Project Director (is this a promotion? he used to be Project Manager) Thomas Hodge is all about the construction crews, focusing heavily on how they’ll be “spending their paychecks locally for goods and services.” Enbridge has even provided some real-life testimonials, from honest-looking employees at various local businesses, about what swell people the construction workers are: “a phenomenal group,” according to somebody at the Cracker Barrel in Brighton; “nothing but respectful,” according to someone from the Outlet Marathon store in Howell;  “good guys,” according to a person at a clothing store in Howell.

Of course, we don’t doubt any of this. As regular readers of this blog know, we’ve spent a great deal of time ourselves talking with these construction workers. Obviously, they’re “good guys” (and women, we would add!). Who said otherwise? Who ever would have assumed otherwise? Shouldn’t this go without saying? Did the people at the Outlet Marathon Store in Howell think they’d be difficult to work with? Disrespectful? A bunch of desperadoes and outlaws, like those roving bands of violent thugs and ruffians terrorizing people along secluded highways that always show up in post-apocalyptic movies? Or does Enbridge think that the bad reputation they’ve got derives not from the people actually running the company, but from the people at the very bottom of the pay scale, the workers in the trenches? If that’s the case, they are sorely mistaken. Frankly, we’ve seen lots of ill-conceived PR tactics from Enbridge over the past year. But mainly that’s because they tend to be so very misleading. This one, by contrast, is just bizarre.

Which is not to say that it isn’t also misleading. The other striking thing about the newsletter is that it is packed full of vague, unverifiable claims: construction crews “are comprised of about 60 percent specialized pipeline workers and 40 percent hired from local union halls”; local merchants “will see an economic boon estimated at $330,000 a week along the route”; “the contractor is anticipated to spend up to $665,000 a week on consumables related to the project.”

We hardly have the energy to interrogate this. Can we see the hiring rolls documenting that 60/40 split (it certainly does not jibe with our experience talking with workers)? Who has made that $330k estimate? And what if the reality falls short of that estimate? Will Enbridge make up the difference? Similarly, who anticipates the contractor spending all that money? Spending it where? On what “consumables”? (We heard one story earlier this summer of how a local farmer in our neighborhood had to throw a fit to get Enbridge to buy straw from him, rather than bringing it in from much farther away.) And what about that picture and caption of the Courtyard Marriott? How many pipeline workers are really staying there, we wonder?

We’ll wrap this up with just one more observation, something we have never said before on this blog. And the reason we’ve never said it is because, unlike Enbridge, we generally don’t like making unverifiable claims. It’s why, as we’ve said many times, we don’t tell even a fraction of the many terrible stories of terrible Enbridge behavior that we hear about– not because we don’t trust the people telling us these stories; generally we do. It’s just that we like to be careful– which is what respect for the truth demands. Nevertheless, we will share this, since it’s based not on hearsay, but on our own experience:

In our conversations with dozens of the “phenomenal,” “decent,” “respectful,” “good guys” (and women) working construction on this pipeline in our neighborhood, there have been two common refrains from these people, two things that always seem to come up in our conversations with them. The first thing is that they are ready to go home (to Oklahoma and Texas and Arkansas and Mississippi, rarely to somewhere here in Michigan). Most of them have been here for a very long time. They’re tired and they miss their families and friends. The second thing– and this is why Enbridge’s latest PR strategy is not only bizarre, but deeply, cruelly ironic– is that they have no love and very little respect whatsoever for Enbridge. Repeatedly, we have heard from them– completely unprompted by us– that while they may like their jobs and take pride in their work, they would not say the same about Enbridge.