New Caucus Powers Up In the Electrical Workers

On paper, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has power like few other unions in the country. The “sparkies” have over 700,000 members. Most of them have held onto pensions, family health plans, and some of the best pay in construction.

IBEW ranks have grown steadily for nearly a decade on building sites and power lines. A longtime union staffer took the presidency of the AFL-CIO four years ago. While millions of other workers face threats of layoff by automation, Electrical Workers are booking overtime building data centers.

Yet a growing movement of members feel the union leaves too much power on paper when it comes to challenging their bosses. During the last four years, during a building boom, most contracts have not matched the spiraling cost of living, and only one local dared a strike.

Like many in the building trades, IBEW members have a patchy culture of jobsite direct action over break times, safety, and disrespect from foremen. But instead of building campaigns with militant direct action, leaders, local union officers, and shop stewards—all appointed—are generally quick to tamp down those flames.

To build an IBEW that lives up to its potential, a new member caucus was publicly launched in September. With two years of patient organizing under its belt, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Electrical Workers (CREW) already has 300 members across 40 IBEW locals, in every corner of the country.

“This union literally changed my life,” said Dave Pinkham, an electrical worker and caucus leader from Local 520 in Austin, Texas. “We love our union, and we know it takes organized members and union democracy for the IBEW to win all we can.”

“Now our job is to get out and get organizing with all the people in the pit with us,” said Emily Lumpkin, a CREW leader, full-time electrical worker, and recording secretary in her West Virginia local.

BUILDING BOOM STALLS

In just the last four years, the non-residential, more unionized end of construction grew nearly 50 percent. The IBEW brought on a new generation of apprentices, especially in Southern locals building a flurry of factories and hospitals.

The building boom hit a plateau this summer. Factory, residential, office, clean energy, and education construction spending all dropped. Trump administration decrees were often to blame, like the “stop-work order” that suddenly laid off 1,000 union members, including electricians, at a wind power project in Rhode Island.

Data centers alone are plugging the gap, accounting for 70 percent of private construction growth this year, according to an industry group. Union contractors are building a hefty share of new data centers, but these projects often require IBEW members to work 58-hour weeks, curtailing new hires who would grow the locals.

A brutal federal immigration crackdown is also throwing the brakes on construction sites. Nearly a third of construction workers nationally are first-generation immigrants. Raids have sown fear among workers and worsened labor shortages that were already a major cause of project delays.

Even when demand for labor is high, it only translates into big growth in union membership with serious organizing. While union density in the electrical industry, at 30 percent, is higher than most other construction trades, it still leaves two out of three electricians without a union. Keen on reviving the IBEW's lapsed tradition of bottom-up union drives at non-union contractors, one of CREW's founding goals is “to transform our union into one capable of organizing every electrical worker.”

SEEDS OF A NEW CAUCUS

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No national member caucus has risen in the IBEW since the 1970s, when the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus emerged from local fights against racism in the industry and union. That caucus eventually became an officially sponsored group in the union, although it maintains a more independent organizing edge in some locals.

The Latin American Electrical Workers Alliance, a new caucus formed this year, aims to revitalize Latino member organizing in the union. Some LAEWA members are active in CREW, and the caucuses have collaborated in some locals for immigrant solidarity resolutions and trainings.

At IBEW conventions in both 2011 and 2022, a handful of locals pushed to adopt one member, one vote elections for international union officers. (Top officers are currently elected by convention delegates.) With weak support from delegates, top officers easily snuffed out the resolutions.

A group of aspiring IBEW reformers across locals met at the 2022 Labor Notes Conference, and helped with the convention reform push later that year. They took clear lessons from how it fizzled. “We all want our union to have one member, one vote,” said Scott Durbin, a CREW leader from Local 666 in Richmond, Virginia. Reformers also want to ensure members have the right, currently rare in the IBEW, to turn down contracts and vote to strike. “But we learned we had to start [by] getting members organized in our locals.”

That core group began to recruit like-minded members through local campaigns, union conferences, traveling workers, and social media. National calls share organizing tips and take member votes on caucus decisions, but the focus is building campaigns back in the locals.

“The point of this caucus isn't a national chat or another Zoom,” said Leo Herbert, a caucus leader from the Richmond local. “The point is to turn to the co-worker beside you in the ditch and build something real.”

CREW has expanded quickest in growing Southern locals, and often in ones where incumbent officers welcome more member involvement after years of low participation. As in the IBEW as a whole, a big majority of caucus members work in construction, both in the top-tier inside wire unit and in the lower-paid sound and communications unit.

On an August weekend this year, CREW threw its first national convention, in an Austin Rotary lodge. Ample break times and a nearby swimming hole offered bonding opportunities for 80 members from 20 locals. At the heart of the convention were organizing workshops for members to hone skills and share tales of collective action.

Creative sparks flew. Electrical workers from one Western local told about a factory jobsite where managers ignored requests for charging cables for the power lifts, which ran out of juice regularly during the workday and left workers unable to run wires on the ceilings. A CREW member helped organize a petition, and a quiet action that left a lift without charge in front of an important elevator door. The company delivered cables the next week.

DEAD BATTERIES

When management at a massive Virginia data center tried to shave 10 minutes off a break, a CREW member organized 200 workers to sit down wherever they were at their normal break time. Members stuck with that break after that. Other members from the local shared how they’d won Spanish translation of their contract, and were working on steward training in Spanish, to build strength with over 500 immigrant members who had joined the local in the recent boom.

CREW members from another Southern local worked with co-workers to run a bargaining survey, then persuaded local officers to share it officially. In the local's recent officer elections, they cut video interviews with all candidates. A slate of reform-minded challengers won in a sweep.

With its public launch, CREW hopes to draw hundreds more electrical workers ready to organize for collective action on jobsites and democracy in the union. “This is about strengthening our union from the bottom up,” said Durbin.