When Lonnie and I got our starts as apprentices, the labor movement was battered, bleeding and in retreat.

This past month, I did something I never could have imagined doing in those stormy years. I signed my name to the charter of a brand new local union in San Juan, Puerto Rico: Local 787. I wish all of you could feel the joy Lonnie and I did as we shook hands with the men and women who work for the island's only utility and who drove the creation of this local.

I remembered my hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, where factories were shutting, heading south or overseas. I thought back to that moment when the lights were shut off for the last time in a union hall where people, strangers, had joined together in the bonds of brotherhood. And it happened again and again and again for decades.

It isn't just the local that suffers when unions are lost. Entire towns disappeared with those darkened halls.

That's what I was thinking about as Lonnie and I signed that charter. We were in a room where the lights were coming on. The pride and hope in our new brothers and sisters was like the sun breaking through rain clouds.

And here is the true miracle of it: This wasn't the first time Lonnie has chartered a new local in the seven years he's led the IBEW. This was the sixth new local since 2015: Upper Peninsula, Mich., Local 906 in 2015; Baltimore Local 410 in 2017; Atlanta Local 1997 in 2018; Chattanooga, Tenn., Local 911 in 2020; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Local 1974 a few months before Local 787. I've been fortunate to be with him for the last four, and those are some of my proudest moments.

As I write this, we wait to see what the midterm elections will bring, and I hope it is good news and the wind stays at our backs.

Because of the good work in the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act, the IBEW is looking at decades of ever-increasing demand for our skills.

For that, we will need to grow. We need to do it now and we need to do it quickly.

And that is on every one of us. Lonnie and I have the great privilege to sign new charters, but that is no more essential than personally organizing a single person, something anyone reading this can do. I hold the pen, but each member of the IBEW holds in their hands the future of the IBEW.

Also: Stephenson: Standing Up for Democracy