APPOINTED — Fourth District International Representative Austin Keyser has been appointed the district’s international vice president, effective April 1.
Keyser will finish the term of the retiring Gina Cooper. He was assistant to the international president for government affairs from July 2021 until August 2024, when he returned to the Fourth District. The district includes West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Keyser’s native Ohio.
“No one has ever done the job better,” Keyser said of Cooper. “She commands respect for the IBEW because her plans were comprehensive and persuasive, and she built coalitions between labor, employers and political actors to benefit our members.”
While serving as assistant to the international president, Keyser was a frequent visitor to the White House. He also was a liaison between International Presidents Lonnie R. Stephenson and Kenneth W. Cooper and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. That work helped the IBEW play a key role in the passage of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and CHIPS and Science Act.
A third-generation IBEW member, Keyser began his apprenticeship at Portsmouth, Ohio, Local 575 in 2001 and was made a steward before even topping out. He later served as assistant business manager, treasurer and membership development coordinator before being elected business manager in 2008 at the age of 29.
He left his position in 2011 to become the AFL-CIO’s Ohio director, then took over its entire Midwest operation in 2014. He returned to the IBEW in 2017 when Stephenson appointed him director of what was then called the Political and Legislative Affairs Department. He was appointed to the newly created position of assistant to the international president for government affairs four years later.
Keyser said his assignment was to deliver on the strategy created by Stephenson and Cooper to put the IBEW at the center of increasingly important industries — like solar, advanced nuclear, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing — to ensure that members are doing the work.
“Whatever happens politically, if we are in their business plans from the beginning, our members will always have work.”
– Fourth District International Vice President Austin Keyser
“What they wanted, and I fought for politically, was a world where the IBEW was an indispensable part of any business plan in those industries,” he said. “Whatever happens politically, if we are in their business plans from the beginning, our members will always have work and we will always have room for more.
“Vice President Cooper adopted that full-on at the district level,” he added. “She did it through specialized agreements, leveraging local politics, bringing all the pieces together into a comprehensive and comprehensible plan. She says it often, and I believe it: ‘We follow the plan, and we win.’”
A good example of that is grid-scale solar in Ohio, where electrical work was performed almost entirely by nonunion contractors a few years ago.
Now, more than three-quarters of it is performed by IBEW members, he said.
“In Ohio, the Republicans have supermajorities in the state House and Senate and all five [statewide] offices are red,” he said. “There was one blue senator [Sherrod Brown], and he just lost.
“But, if we’re honest, that’s been true in the Midwest since the Tea Party swept through 15 years ago,” Keyser added. “And yet, some of the biggest projects in the nation are in Ohio — the $28 billion Intel plant in Columbus, the Honda-LG battery plant — and we have project labor agreements on all of them because they cannot do it without us. You just have to play the game as it exists and do the best you can.”
It’s a model he intends to continue across the Fourth District, including in the massive data center industry in Virginia and Maryland. Making sure IBEW members are doing the electrical work there is a priority, he said.
The most significant challenge the IBEW faces, he said, is maintaining the connection within and across the union as it grows.
“Like the vast majority of people in America today, most people who join the IBEW didn’t grow up in a union home,” he said. “It’s also a fact that we need to grow, and that can strengthen us or destroy us. We need to educate our newest members. We need them to understand prevailing wages and project labor agreements, but they won’t come in knowing.”
That responsibility will fall heavily on the people most trusted by the membership: the business managers.
“It’s a heavy load on top of just running the machinery of the local — I know that. I was in their shoes, but there is no one our members trust more than the peer they elected to lead them,” Keyser said. “I believe in strong local unions that are part of our larger mission. My number one goal is to add as much value to our local unions as I can: help them organize, win better contracts, and educate and connect with our members.”
It’s the only way, he said, to chart the union’s course in a political climate that changed after the November elections.
“We will build on what we’ve won in the market regardless of political whims. When the political winds work against us, we resist. When they blow in our direction, we take as much ground as we can,” he said.
The officers and staff congratulate Brother Keyser on his appointment and wish him much success in his new position.
