With the clock ticking down to the U.S. presidential election in 2016, anxiety was high the last time that an IBEW general counsel addressed the international convention.
Speaker after speaker in St. Louis warned of the storm ahead if a fiercely anti-union candidate followed President Barack Obama into the White House.
“We know how that story ended,” said General Counsel Jon Newman, whose law firm, Sherman Dunn, has represented the IBEW for 75 years. “Every single prediction, warning, and siren came true, and then some.”
How things have changed, he told delegates Friday morning, lauding their tireless efforts to elect President Joe Biden and ignite a new era for American workers and unions.
“It’s a new day because politics matters when it comes to labor law,” Newman said.
Starting with soaring change at the National Labor Relations Board, he ran through some of the unprecedented advocacy for workers since Biden took office in January 2021 and began building an administration that shares his values.
He also reminded his audience how precarious the progress is.
“The pro-labor developments of the last 16 months could vanish in a heartbeat depending upon the upcoming mid-term elections in November,” he said. “I know you are tired of politics. We are all exhausted from it. “It’s hard to hear over and over that this is the most important election in your lifetime. I get it.
“But you know what? As Secretary-Treasurer Cooper said this week, Henry Miller sacrificed it all for the IBEW and died penniless. All we have to do is get out the vote and educate our members.”
Among the lessons he highlighted:
After one of the most fiercely anti-union periods in its 87-year history, the NLRB has returned to its roots, putting workers first and encouraging the grown of unions, as prescribed in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Newman cited the new board’s pro-worker decisions — including rulings on IBEW cases — and the trailblazing work of General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who is fighting law-breaking employers in court and issuing memos calling for sweeping change, such as an end to captive audience meetings.
Biden signed an executive order in February to require, not merely authorize, project labor agreements on large-scale federal construction projects. “That order will put billions worth of construction under union agreements for the first time,” Newman said. Meanwhile, the Labor Department is pushing to modernize the Davis-Bacon Act “to make sure that contractors compete for taxpayer dollars on the basis of merit, not on the basis of who can exploit the cheapest workforce,” he said.
Biden’s landmark American Rescue Plan, passed solely by House and Senate Democrats, devotes $86 billion to rescue multi-employer pension plans — a top priority of the IBEW, which waged a huge battle for Congress to pass the related Butch-Lewis Act. While the IBEW’s pension programs are strong, other unions were facing dire shortages that Republicans plotted to remedy by taking healthy plans down with them. “Every single Republican member of the House and Senate voted against saving your pensions,” Newman said. “Every. Single. One.”
Adding the $3 trillion infrastructure bill to the mix, Newman said, “That’s just 16 months of the Joe Biden administration.”
He contrasted it with four years of anti-worker attacks and a budget-busting tax cut for the rich that corporations hoarded rather than pass down to workers as promised.
“When you vote, you have to pick a team, he said, making an argument for delegates to take home. “Why wouldn’t you pick the team that saved your pension, that is mandating PLAs, that is modernizing the Davis-Bacon Act, and that passed infrastructure, over one that lied to you over and over?”
Earlier in his speech, Newman paid tribute to an IBEW colleague and friend who passed away suddenly at the 2019 Membership Development Conference, also held in Chicago.
“Dave Yockel was a member of Local 86 in Rochester, N.Y. Dave worked in the International Office on staff for 30 years and was responsible for a lot of the great work of the IBEW,” Newman said. “As a point of personal privilege, I ask that you recognize Dave not with a brief moment of silence but instead give him the round of applause that he so richly deserved but didn’t get a chance to receive.”
Yockel’s union family rose and gave him an IBEW standing ovation.