APPOINTED — Joe DiMichele, a key figure in numerous IBEW organizing campaigns during the last decade, has been appointed professional and industrial director in the Membership Development Department.
Brother DiMichele [pronounced De-MICHAEL] has been an IBEW member since 2014, when he was hired as a Sixth District field organizer and joined Rockford, Ill., Local 364.
But he learned the value of union membership in perhaps the best way possible: by working a series of nonunion jobs for the previous 16 years, including as an electrician.
“I know what it’s like to walk on eggshells every day,” DiMichele said. “I know what it’s like to be subjected to unsafe working conditions and if I don’t do the work, I’ll be terminated and they’ll find someone else.”
Born in Chicago, DiMichele grew up in suburban Hanover Park, Ill. He took a job as a tire buster for Goodyear while still attending high school and continued to work there after graduating in 1996.
Two years later, on the advice of a friend already working for the company, he took a job working for a nonunion contractor building new homes.
He had to learn quickly. The foreman and journeyman electrician quit on DiMichele’s first day on the job.
“The company owner came out and said, ‘You guys either need to figure out what you’re doing and learn it, or I’m bringing in contractors,’” he said. “So we did. We read the code book. I learned how to bend conduit, and I can proudly say we passed our inspection first round.”
DiMichele looks back on that accomplishment proudly. But in the moment, he had a young daughter to support and felt like he didn’t have a choice.
“I had just left a job at Goodyear that I had all through high school to do this,” he said. “Now I could be jobless with a kid.”
DiMichele continued to work construction, both residential and commercial, until the Great Recession in 2008. He worked a variety of jobs after that, including as a truck driver and a construction and maintenance technician on cell towers.
In 2012, he took a job with Nippon Sharyo — a major rolling stock manufacturer based in Japan — at its new facility in Rochelle, Ill.
It turned into a life-changing experience, although not quite the way DiMichele expected.
“I was watching the way they were talking to people and treating them and thought, ‘This is worse than [the notoriously anti-union] cell tower companies,’” DiMichele said. “You were not a human being to them. You were a number.”
DiMichele was particularly upset when a U.S. Air Force veteran working for Nippon Sharyo was targeted by a supervisor with no experience in the industry and subsequently fired. The fired employee was later admitted to a Veterans Administration hospital after suffering a mental breakdown. [He is now doing much better.]
So DiMichele reached out to Chicago Local 134, which put him in touch with Sixth District Regional Organizing Coordinator Lynn Arwood. He agreed to lead the volunteer organizing committee at the facility.
Arwood said she was impressed by DiMichele from the moment they met.
“He stepped forward to make changes at the workplace because of his concern for the other workers,” she said. “He never really brought up issues that affected him. It was the other workers that were being treated poorly. That really hit home for him.”
The Nippon Sharyo organizing drive fell short due to a massive disinformation campaign by the company, which also found fraudulent reasons to fire some employees who were active in the drive. The workers never gained union recognition, and the company closed the facility in 2018 due to a lack of orders.
DiMichele left Nippon Sharyo in 2014. IBEW leaders were impressed enough to offer a spot as a Sixth District field organizer not long after.
DiMichele said it wasn’t an easy decision. He mulled it over for three days.
He accepted in the end, and he’s glad he did. He traveled across the country, assisting on successful campaigns at DirecTV, Electrolux and BGE. He was named a Sixth District lead organizer in July 2016 and moved to the International Office in Washington, D.C., in August 2022, when he was appointed as a P&I international representative.
“He’s always all in,” Arwood said. “The most important thing in a lead organizer is representing the IBEW well. They’re honest. They show integrity and are committed to those workers. We’re holding their lives in our hands because we’re trying to organize them. Joe understood that.”
DiMichele said he’s assuming his position at a good time following the passage of several pieces of federal legislation — most notably the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — that will allow American manufacturing to grow after decades of jobs being sent overseas.
“The work is ours to lose,” he said. “We’ll be out there making contacts, knocking on doors and going out looking for contracts.”
DiMichele has three daughters — Kayleigh, Madelyn and Sarah — and one grandson, Cade. He and his wife, Melissa, live in Arlington, Va.
“I’m honored to be in this position,” said DiMichele, who calls Arwood his mentor. “Every time I was appointed to something, I never thought in a million years something like this could happen to me. I’m grateful.”
The officers and staff congratulate Brother DiMichele on his appointment and wish him much success in his new position.
