"We don't need to be intimidated by the size of
any nonunion contractor, not one."

On Memorial Day weekend, at 26 job sites across the U.S., the IBEW announced the existence of the largest construction-side organizing campaign in its history, targeting Bergelectric, one of the top-10 largest electrical contractors in North America.

What had looked like a regional organizing campaign that had stripped hundreds of workers, including many dozens of foremen, general foremen and superintendents, never was intended to be just that. Berg is national; so are the IBEW's intentions.

From San Diego to Seattle, Orlando to Austin, IBEW organizers from dozens of locals flew identical banners advertising a website — BergsGoingUnion.com — and something more: ambition, coordination, and professionalism.

"We've been showing our cards slowly over the last year, keeping management off balance, and turning up the pressure. Up until that Friday, I'm sure the company thought they had a southern California issue. We picked a long weekend to give them plenty of time to realize the truth," said Special Assistant to the International President for Membership Development Ricky Oakland. "We're not just recruiting their best workers in Orange County; we're welcoming them everywhere."

The goal, he said, is a national agreement between a national contractor and an international union.

A key component of the campaign has been highlighting the stories of Berg workers who have left for the IBEW.

Mike Lowitzer worked nonunion for 13 years, traveling from place to place to see the country. He'd sign a 6-month lease someplace interesting and then pick through electrical contractors in the yellow pages, negotiating a salary from open shops and building a resume.

In 2014 he joined Denver Local 68 and in 2019 came on staff as an organizer.

For a few months back in 2007, he worked a job for Berg in Las Vegas. The note he left in his resume about why he left the position said, "Wasn't treated like a professional; left for a prevailing wage job."

That feeling that you aren't getting what you're worth resonates with the workers he and the rest of the IBEW are organizing today.

And that includes the money they were due.

"When I was working nonunion, I always had to remind HR, 'Hey my raise is coming up.' Or remind my foreman, my general foreman, 'I'm due for a raise. It's been a year. Two years.' For a couple of cents," said Angel Navarette, a Los Angeles Local 11 member who worked nonunion for 15 years, including at Berg. "Here it's a contract. Now it's every six months. That's automatic."

For journeyman wireman Irving Ochoa, like Lowitzer, it was the benefits.

"When I was at Berg, they started changing our medical plan. Little by little they started taking away everything from when I started. Right before I left, they changed it to a high-deductible plan," Ochoa said.

Ochoa said the switch made a career he was proud of impossible.

"I have a family; three kids and a wife and I am the only breadwinner, so it was really difficult," he said.

State Organizing Coordinator Aaron Jones, who runs the day-to-day operations of the Berg campaign, said the cost of working nonunion is a key part of the campaign.

"Companies scare the hell out of their workers talking about union dues, so we tell them about the cost of working nonunion. We call them the Berg dues," Jones said. "They add up fast."

Lower wages are Berg dues. Health care that comes out of your paycheck and can hang you with a huge bill or self-funding a 401k instead of a having pension are Berg dues. Always hustling to find the next job and fighting every time for a fair wage? Berg dues.

"You pay your dues either way. The question is, why pay the bosses instead of your brothers? Why pay more to work for less?" Jones said.

Berg wasn't always nonunion. Founded in the 1940s, it was a union shop for 50 years.

"In many ways, Berg continued to operate like a union contractor, just without the wages and benefits," said Ninth District Organizing Coordinator Greg Boyd.

Internally, they kept a similar education model with apprentices working with journeymen over years and a structured supervisor program of foremen, general foremen and superintendents.

They still go after the prevailing wage, Veteran's Administration and military projects that are the IBEW's bread and butter.

And when they win them, their workers make prevailing wage. But on other jobs, Lowitzer said, you get only what you negotiate, the health care is worse, and the pension is absent.

"Making up numbers, we may make $40 an hour and pay $4 in dues, but you can't talk down to them if they are making $30. We are proud when we get $30 an hour, proud of the resume we built up on our own to get it," he said.

You even have to negotiate wages if you stay inside Berg, moving from a job in Texas to one in California.

"The cost of living is a bit higher in California, but until you speak up for yourself, they will take advantage of you," Lowitzer said.

Nothing about this makes Berg particularly special, Boyd said. Berg grew from a single storefront to a Southern California powerhouse with IBEW workers. But after a series of bad years in the '70s and '80s, culminating in deep recessions in the state and a strike in 1981, Berg went nonunion in San Diego in 1988 and in Los Angeles in 1991.

Ninth District International Vice President John O'Rourke says the campaign is about helping nonunion workers, of course, but it's also about building a bright future for Berg.

"Over the years, hundreds and possibly thousands of Berg workers dropped the company and joined the IBEW and I am sure they want them back," O'Rourke said. "Berg saw their greatest growth when they were signatory and that is absolutely possible again now."

As work picked up in the early 2000s, Southern California locals — Ventura Local 952, Local 11, Santa Ana Local 441, San Bernardino Local 477, Riverside Local 440, and San Diego Local 569 — were actively and successfully stripping workers from nonunion contractors, but the contractors themselves were slipping between and across jurisdictional boundaries in ways where locals struggled to adapt.

At the Membership Development conference in 2018, O'Rourke and Boyd brought all the Southern California business managers and their organizers together in a room to hammer out a plan that would smash down those walls and make life a bit harder for open shops.

"That's when we created Organizers Without Borders," Jones said.

The prime achievement, Boyd said, was a universal transition agreement that all the locals signed on to. The standard contract often has lots and lots of rules. They are there for a reason, for both sides, but they can often be too steep a climb if they come into force all at once. Transition agreements make allowances and exceptions from those standard rules, for a set period, but which rules and for how long makes a big difference.

Having a common language for all of Southern California meant they could get started putting our members to work quickly and they could bid jobs anywhere with confidence, Jones said.

The Organizers Without Borders locals also held regular meetings where they talked about nonunion contractors who were bidding work in their jurisdictions and strategized and coordinated campaigns to intervene, strip workers and, if the new members wanted it, get them on jobs closer to home. One company came up more than any other: Berg.

"We did not get a memo from our leadership saying, 'Go after Berg.' This came up from the organizers, not down from the International Office. Over and over, we were hearing that Berg was a problem we needed to solve, but what could we do? They were so big and, for years, we thought we would never have the tools, coordination, expertise or resources to go after them," Boyd said. "Turns out that was wrong."

That was the genesis of the "Berg's Going Union" campaign.

Like Berg, the effort started local, went regional and is now a national campaign to carrot-and-stick a Top-10 electrical contractor back into the fold.

The stick is underway. In the last 18 months, the IBEW has stripped hundreds of Berg workers, targeting superintendents, foremen and general foremen.

A coordinated effort has also been underway to expose unfair practices and chronic underbidding by the company, particularly on prevailing wage jobs.

The carrot has been handled by O'Rourke, consistently reaching out to Berg leadership to explain the benefits of returning to the fold.

"I am a firm believer in extending the hand of friendship," O'Rourke said.

So far, the letters and calls have gone unanswered, so the pressure continues to rise and what began in Southern California has not stayed there.

The standard leafletting, site and home visits and cold calls continued, of course, but there are powerful new tools available to make that first contact.

In April, the Berg's Going Union coordinated online campaign went public with a website, Instagram and Facebook accounts directed at Berg's employees and filled searches for the company with IBEW results.

Jones and State Organizing Coordinator Jillian Elliot also filled job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn with targeted ads aimed at Berg employees touting the benefits of membership and the stories of the men and women who made the jump. The culmination was the coordinated banner event nationwide: same time, same message. The message of the campaign is familiar but targeted to the specific concerns of Berg workers.

"Our message is simple: Prevailing wages on every job; health care that comes with membership, not out of your paycheck; and the opportunity to work better jobs closer to home," Boyd said.

The IBEW is not only using all the available online personalization and ad targeting tools, but organizers are doing it without using high-priced ad agencies. It's all in-house.

"That is maybe what I am proudest of, personally. These tools are ours, forever. Anyone who wants to use these tools to reach out to people only has to call us and they can have access as well," Jones said.

And every Friday, they up the pressure, expand the campaign and make the stick a little bigger and the carrot a little sweeter.

On the Friday before Memorial Day, they upped the ante again, making it clear just how high the IBEW's ambitions are and showing how coordinated and efficient the brotherhood can be.

Jones said much of the ambition, the tempo and even the feel of the campaign was inspired by the IBEW's recent experience in organizing on the professional and industrial side of the house, including at Baltimore Gas & Electric, Atlanta Gas Light and Electrolux.

There, the IBEW brought organizers from all parts of the country and all levels of the union, from local activists to international leaders, for the same task. Construction organizers worked side-by-side with utility and manufacturing organizers.

"I worked on BGE, and I remember thinking, 'We can do that in construction. We need to do that in construction,'" Jones said.

Most construction organizing campaigns don't end in an NLRB-sanctioned representation vote. The collaboration, the diversity of voices and the pace and structure of the P&I campaigns were crucial experiences for the organizing in the IBEW's spiritual home of construction.

"It struck me one day while I was on a honk-and-wave line for AGL that we didn't need to be intimidated by the size of any nonunion contractor, not one," Jones said. "Because the truth is, the IBEW is bigger than any of them. Workers outnumber owners and bosses. This is a basic truth that we somehow need to be reminded of: organizing is the solution to every problem the American worker has."

For the first time, Oakland said, the IBEW can take advantage of a national labor shortage to make permanent changes to the industry.

"It is something we always wanted to do, but we have never picked this big a target before. We are learning as we go. We have the courage to take this on and technology has really allowed us to meet our ambitions," Oakland said. "This is a blueprint for going after anyone. No one is too big."