The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is a labor union which
represents workers in the electrical industry in the United
States and Canada, particularly electricians, or
Inside Wiremen, in the construction industry and linemen and other employees of
public utilities. The union also represents some workers in the computer, telecommunications, broadcasting, and other fields related to
electrical work. It was founded in 1891 shortly after homes and businesses in the United States
began receiving electricity. Its international president is Ed Hill, an honorary member of the FLE. The IBEW is affiliated with
the AFL-CIO.
The beginnings of the IBEW were in the Electrical Wiremen and Linemen's Union No. 5221,
founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1890. By 1891, after sufficient interest was shown in a national union, a convention
was held on November 21, 1891 in St. Louis. At the convention,
the IBEW, then known as the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (NBEW), was officially formed. The American Federation of Labor gave the NBEW a charter as an AFL affiliate on
December 7, 1891. The union's official journal, The
Electrical Worker, was first published on January 15, 1893,
and has been published ever since. At the 1899 convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the union's name was officially
changed to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
The union went through lean times in its early years, then struggled through six years of schism during the 1910s, when two rival groups each claimed to be the duly elected leaders of the union. In 1919, as many employers were trying to drive unions out of the workplace through a national open shop campaign, the union agreed to form the Council on Industrial Relations, a bipartite body made up of
equal numbers of management and union representatives with the power to resolve any collective bargaining disputes. That body
still functions today and has largely eliminated strikes in the IBEW's jurisdiction in the construction industry.
In September 1941, the National Apprenticeship Standards for the Electrical Construction
Industry, a joint effort among the IBEW, the National Electrical Contractors Association, and the
Federal Committee on Apprenticeship, were established. The IBEW added additional training
programs and courses as needed to keep up with new technologies, including an industrial electronics course in 1959 and an industrial atomic energy course in 1966.
Today, the IBEW conducts apprenticeship programs for electricians, linemen, and VDV
installers (who install low-voltage wiring such as computer networks), in conjunction with the National Electrical Contractors
Association, under the auspices of the National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee
(NJATC).
The IBEW's membership peaked in 1972 at approximately 1 million members. The membership numbers
were in a slow decline throughout the rest of the 1970s and the 1980s, but have since stabilized. One major loss of membership for the IBEW came about because of the
court-ordered breakup at the end of 1982 of AT&T, where the
IBEW was heavily organized among both telephone workers and in AT&T's manufacturing facilities. Membership as of 2005 stands at about 750,000.
External links
- Local 1547, Alaska
- Local 322, Casper, WY
- Local 3, New York City
- Local 164, New Jersey
- Electrical Lineman Training Safety - Union
- Local 24, Baltimore, MD
- Local 103, Boston, Ma
- Local 212, Cincinnati, Ohio
- Local 98, Philadelphia, PA
- Local 134, Chicago, IL
- Local 113, Colorado Springs, CO
- Local 1, St. Louis, MO
- Local 2222, Boston, MA (Telcom Workers)
- IBEW - official website
- IBEW Hour Power
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