Lincoln, Neb., Local 2366 members have been working at Schneider Electric for the past 50 years, but the coronavirus pandemic created an opportunity for the manufacturing plant's workers to show just how essential they really are. And it helped spur a $70 million investment by the company.

"This is a testament to the quality of work done by our IBEW members and their commitment to excellence in their work," said Eleventh District Vice President Mark Hager. "The quality of the product line produced at the Lincoln facility shows what can be accomplished when there is a true partnership between the employees and employer."

Local 2366's 360 members produce circuit breakers for residential use as well as their component parts. They also supply other Schneider Electric facilities with molded and stamped parts.

"This work isn't something you can do just coming off the street. It takes a certain level of experience, and Schneider recognizes that," said Manufacturing Department Director Brian Lamm. "They could have gone anywhere, but they chose this plant because they know it's important to make their products here. And it's been a long time coming."

When another plant had to shut down because of COVID-19, the Lincoln plant was there to pick up the load. It was work manually producing two pole breakers, which they could certainly do, but they needed more workers than they had. So Local 2366 leadership sat down with management to hammer out the details of how they could do so without violating any contracts.

"It's because of the strong working relationship that we've built here over the years that we were able to work everything out," said Local 2366 Business Manager Dianna O'Brien.

Schneider ended up hiring more workers, some permanent and some temporary, but with the potential of hiring those temporary workers permanently if they worked out. And most did. They got the work done, despite coronavirus-related supply chain issues, and O'Brien says that work likely put them in consideration for another product line, this one involving a new type of circuit breaker, which they also secured.

"The union and the company worked together, and it allowed our local to more than double our membership," O'Brien said. "And we're still hiring."

The $70 million investment will be spent over the next five years on various machine upgrades, the replacement of some molding presses and other capital improvements. Some of the upgrades will streamline production, which will allow the plant to have more continuous operations and ultimately increase production.

"We are excited about the growth in our facility," O'Brien said. "The investments make us feel encouraged that our membership will continue to grow, and that our members can have long careers here."

Local 2366 members were honored for their hard work and expertise at a Manufacturing Day event in October that was attended by several legislators and IBEW leaders, as well as area college students. The annual event is put on by the Manufacturing Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers and included a tour of the plant.

"We were honored to have so many in attendance and to show off our facility," O'Brien said. "And it was great to hear so much discussion about the bright future for manufacturing."

Schneider's $70 million infusion comes on the heels of a federal push to promote U.S. manufacturing, including the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden administration's increased Buy American provisions.

"After decades of offshoring work, manufacturing quality has been negatively affected, and the pandemic exposed those vulnerabilities," Lamm said. "Now there's steps being taken to address it."

As of October, manufacturers have added 467,000 jobs, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

"President Biden's policies have been instrumental in moving manufacturing back to the United States, and we look forward to continuing our partnership and further growth with Schneider Electric," Hager said.

The tallest mass-timber building in the world opened in June, with the electrical work done by members of Milwaukee Local 494.

The 284-foot high-rise, known as The Ascent, isn't that different from the kind of upscale rental buildings going up in downtowns across North America — pool, dog grooming room, blond wood everything in gleaming white apartments.

The blond wood exposed in the ceilings, columns and beams isn't decorative, however. It's the structure of the building.

Steel-and-concrete is used only in the six-floor retail space/parking garage at the base and in the elevator shafts. The 19 floors above are framed with prefabricated composite wood components that slashed the weight of the building by more than 70 percent, cut traffic to the site by 90% and cut construction time by 25%.

General contractor Korb said using mass timber cut three to four months off construction time, nearly all of it saved by reducing the need for heavy steel components and the long wait from building forms, pouring concrete and waiting for it to set.

"One of the biggest challenges in construction is the fits and starts. You start. You stop. You wait," said Phil Rose, owner and CEO of signatory contractor Roman Electric, which did the electrical work on The Ascent and has been a signatory contractor with Local 494 for almost a century. "Once they started going here, they went to town. One floor after another: boom, boom, boom, and there were much fewer interruptions to our installation."

How much faster? The 25-story building broke ground in June 2020. Finishing the first six floors of steel and concrete took 18 months. From the beginning of the 19-floor timber erection in December 2021 to the first renter moving in took only seven months.

Rose said it was nothing like prefab rooms being stacked like boxes. It was more akin to working on a building using precast concrete components, if precast could be used in high-rises.

All the holes in the support structure in The Ascent were designed in the planning stages and cut during processing of the part.

"No field drilling anything. It would be like using a torch to cut holes in a steel support beam," Rose said.

No changes were possible at all once construction began, he said, which the designer might not like but is great news for construction crews who could set and then keep a good workflow.

The size of the crews wasn't all that different from a traditional high-rise build, said Local 494 Business Manager Dean Warsh.

"We had between 25 and 30 wiremen on site for just over a year," he said.

Of course, there is nothing surprising about using wood in construction, even in multistory buildings.

Wood is an excellent building material: stronger in tension and compression than steel for its weight, and it literally grows on trees. Unlike cement, which emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide in production, trees just need dirt, water, sun and time.

But traditional wood construction has important limitations. The light framing used in residential and low- and mid-rise commercial construction is wasteful, susceptible to fire and ultimately lacks the strength to support high-rises. Heavy timber works well if you are building a log cabin or a medieval cathedral, but building with beams hewn from 300-year-old oak trees is expensive and awkward.

Mass timber is an attempt to answer each of those limitations. It is the name for several new manufacturing processes that use wood, modern adhesives and CNC machines to engineer structural elements with the advantages of heavy timber and light framing without the weaknesses of either.

Just 30 years after the first mass timber building went up in Austria, the U.S.-based Wood Products Council, or WPC, found more than 403 mass timber projects under construction in North America. Nearly 100 of them are more than 8 stories tall. Another 500 are in design or permitting.

And this may be the beginning of a sharply rising curve. The WPC released a study this year predicting mass-timber construction to double every year for the next decade.

As with all prefab, there are questions for the building trades. How this will affect our brothers and sisters in other trades is a genuine concern, Business Development Director Ray Kasmark said. There remain significant questions about safety and longevity whenever new materials come along.

But there are reasons to believe that mass timber will be a more common sight across the country.

First, the federal government — the largest single purchaser of building supplies — set a 2045 goal of net-zero carbon emissions in federal facilities this year.

Construction materials alone, mostly cement, account for nearly 75% of the carbon emitted during a building's life. Wood, on the other hand, is made by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and when a tree is turned into a building, that carbon is locked away for decades.

Second, building codes across the country and the world now include mass-timber high-rise standards. In 2021, New York City approved the construction of mass-timber structures up to 25.9 meters as part of the first major code update since 2014. The International Building Code was amended earlier this year to allow mass-timber buildings of up to 270 feet.

Third, fourth and on to infinity is money. Developers like cheaper, contractors like faster, and tenants like green, even if it is marketing.

For the moment, electrical assemblies are not built into any of the mass-timber components at the factory. The concern about complete floors being assembled in Chinese factories and shipped by boat to a construction site near you is not yet close to being realized.

But these are disruptive times, Kasmark said.

"Our industries are growing rapidly and changing almost as fast. Our trade has adapted many times in the last 131 years, and the IBEW has been leading the way," he said. "This is simply worth paying attention to."