Seventh District International Representative Todd Newkirk retired June 15, capping a 30-year career that took him from organizing his nuclear power station in Kansas to testifying before Congress and helping launch the Utility Code of Excellence, among other achievements.

"They say you can judge the value of someone by the size of the hole they leave. Todd has left a big hole. It's going to be hard to fill," said Paul Lira, former Topeka, Kan., Local 304 business manager and a longtime colleague of Newkirk.

A master instrumentation and control technician by trade and member since 1994, Brother Newkirk came into the IBEW when he helped organize his fellow workers at the Wolf Creek Generating Station. It took a few tries. But once the drive was successful, it earned the designation of being the only nuclear plant to be organized through a National Labor Relations Board petition for the initial unit and not through accretion, or gaining new members by adding them to an existing unit, Newkirk said.

It was also where Newkirk met former Seventh District International Vice President Jon Gardner, who was then an organizer assigned to the campaign. Rumor had it that Newkirk was a potential union supporter, so Gardner went out to visit him.

"I take pride in knowing that I was the first IBEW representative to talk to Todd," Gardner said. "I'll admit I was a little nervous when I knocked on his door. House calls can be interesting. You never know when you'll get a gun in your face. But Todd invited me in and we talked for over two hours. That's when the campaign got started. He built my confidence up, and I realized we could really do something."

They lost the first vote by a relatively small margin, Gardner recalled, but with Newkirk's input, they tried again the next year and were successful, organizing the roughly 200-person unit into Local 304.

"I can't overemphasize how important Todd's efforts and support were in securing that victory," Gardner said.

After serving as a steward, negotiator and organizer at the plant, Newkirk was hired by Local 304 as an assistant business manager in 1997. In that role, he continued to negotiate, and he handled grievances and served on several employer-sponsored and state-certified apprenticeship training committees. He also earned a reputation as a disciplined, procedure-driven guy with a penchant for data.

"I was a 'fly by the seat of my pants' type. Todd was the opposite," said Lira, who worked with Newkirk when they were both assistant business managers. "We made a good team. We complemented each other."

By 2004, Newkirk had caught the eye of the international office and was hired on as an international representative in the Utility Department working on generation, renewables and environmental legislation. Working in Washington, D.C., was an eye-opening experience, Newkirk said.

"I had no clue how big our need to have good politics to back workers and families was until then. Before that, most of my corporate worker life was inside a fence," he said.

Newkirk's duties took him all the way to Congress, where he testified on the importance of Helmets to Hardhats, which helps servicemembers find jobs in the unionized trades after finishing their military service. He also worked with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he pushed for new nuclear projects and fought deregulation at the state level.

"Part of my job was to visit jobsites. Being run off nonunion ones was always a special kind of fun," he recalled.

Newkirk was also part of the team that introduced the Code of Excellence to the IBEW's utility members, something he did alongside then-International President Edwin D. Hill.

"President Hill shared some of his personal experiences as an IBEW leader at about every Pennsylvania town we rolled through while wheeling his car through hills and curves like he was on the NASCAR circuit," Newkirk said. "It was priceless."

In 2009, Newkirk moved back to Kansas, where he serviced all the branches throughout the Seventh District. He also has the distinction of serving on the Kansas State Workforce Board under both Republican and Democratic governors.

"Todd didn't see the political, just right and wrong," Lira said. "He could talk to anyone. He's very straightforward. It was always about getting the job done."

In any role he had, Newkirk could be counted on for having a handle on the relevant data, and he had a knack for interpreting dense material," Lira said.

"Todd could wear people out with details," Gardner said. "It helped with negotiations and arbitration, though. I'm pretty sure there were times when he got companies to settle just by drowning them in discovery."

Looking back at his tenure with the IBEW, Newkirk said the confidence he gained and things he learned during his first union campaign sparked his interest in organizing, and he thanked Gardner and others, including then-International Representative Steve Moulin, for inspiring him.

"I honestly still believe organizing our power plant saved it from being sold or shut down," he said, noting that the plant is slated to keep running until 2045. "Today, we would be considered a Code of Excellence success story, but back then it was just taking care of business the right way with good leadership."

Newkirk said the bargaining unit at Wolf Creek has grown to roughly 450 members, which is no small task in a right-to-work state.

"If you have not worked on organizing campaigns in a right-to-work state, you don't know what you're missing," he said. "Today, my family knows choosing the IBEW was the right choice. Thirty years ago, several family elders thought I was risking the best job within 500 miles and that I'd be fired for seeking representation. But we persevered. Now, seeing second-generation IBEW workers at the facility covered by the contract that was originally ratified by their working parents in 1994 is a special, warm feeling."

Now that Brother Newkirk is retired, he said he's got some projects around the house that need his attention, and he'd like to see Willie Nelson play again. But mostly he's looking forward to making up for the lost time he spent on the road and away from his family.

"I have a tribe of grandkids ready to make that happen," he said.

Newkirk and his wife, Tonya, also have plans to see Europe, where they intend to travel by train with only backpacks.

"If Henry Miller started the IBEW more than 130 years ago on a train, why can't we give it a shot?" he said.

International Representative Al Davis, who successfully handled numerous agreements — and disagreements — as business manager of Las Vegas Local 357, has been appointed director of the Council on Industrial Relations/Bylaws and Appeals Department.

Davis has served the IBEW at the International Office since 2019, when then-International President Lonnie R. Stephenson asked him to come to Washington and work in the Construction and Maintenance Department. A year later, Stephenson gave him an opportunity to work with the CIR/Bylaws team.

"As a business manager, I'd seen how the CIR worked from that side," Davis said. "When I got here, it was what I expected it to be."

Founded in 1920 and considered the U.S. labor movement's oldest dispute resolution system, the Council on Industrial Relations is unique in that it partners the IBEW with the National Electrical Contractors Association to help most of the union's construction locals get their disputes arbitrated by a group of their industry peers.

"That's better than going on strike," Davis said.

From his birth in Ventura, Calif., Davis was exposed to the IBEW via his traveling journeyman wireman father, also named Al. The younger Davis spent a lot of his free time with the older one as he went where work could be found.

The family eventually settled in Las Vegas, and in 1981, as a favor to his father, Davis gave college a try at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, aided by a scholarship through Local 357. After the end of his junior year, though, Davis left UNLV and headed into the desert heart of Nevada and worked as a laborer, then as an inspector, at the Tonopah Test Range, a nuclear weapons development facility operated by the U.S. departments of Defense and Energy.

While Davis was at Tonopah, Local 357 Business Manager Cecil Wynn, a longtime family friend, asked him to be the local's "inside person" there, relaying management information to Wynn as a "pepper."

When Davis' position was eliminated a short time later, Wynn offered him a Local 357 apprenticeship in exchange for his service as a salt on a mostly nonunion hotel construction project. Wynn was true to his word, and in May 1989, Davis was initiated into Local 357, where he quickly went on to serve on, and later lead, his local's Organizing, Picket and Welfare committees.

Davis also taught at Local 357's Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee. In 2003, the local hired him as a full-time organizer. The following year, he was promoted to director of organizing.

In 2009, Davis became assistant business manager. Two years later, he was appointed business manager, a position he went on to hold for three elected terms, until his 2019 appointment to the International Office.

In January 2022, after more than two years with CIR/Bylaws, Stephenson appointed Davis as director of the Inside Construction Organizing Department. Six months later, Stephenson asked Davis to return to CIR/Bylaws and work again with Mike Kwashnik, the department's director since 2017.

"We worked hand in hand every day, as a team," Kwashnik said. "We both saw every item that came into the office. Together we reviewed and recommended every item that was submitted to the department for approval of the international president. Al is well versed in every aspect of the department and a great asset to the IBEW."

Among his many CIR/Bylaws duties, Davis fully participated in each of the council's quarterly three-day meetings. "I served during the pandemic, too," he said, with sessions held via teleconference rather than in-person in Washington. "That was a lot of work."

As the department's name implies, though, there's more to the CIR/Bylaws job than resolving disputes. The department handles locals' charter requests and proposed bylaw changes, for example, along with amalgamations and defunctions and any resulting membership transfers and contract changes. CIR/Bylaws also reviews locals' purchases, renovations and other expenditures, and it processes election disputes and appeals to the international president and to conventions.

"There's just a lot of moving pieces," Davis said. "It keeps it interesting."

The department is responsible, as well, for implementing the changes and updates to the IBEW's pattern bylaws resulting from amendments to the IBEW Constitution that are adopted at the union's international conventions. Ensuring that the changes from the most recent convention in 2022 get accurately made in the bylaws of the union's nearly 800 locals "has been a daunting task," Davis said.

"As a business manager, you think you know the constitution," he said. "Here, you learn something new every day."

Davis' appointment as director was effective July 1. Kwashnik, a member and former business manager of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Local 163, now serves his home Third District's office as an international representative.

"Al is well prepared to take the department into the future," Kwashnik said. "I'm 100% confident he'll do a fantastic job as the new department director."

Davis and his wife, Vicki, have been married since 2000. They have one daughter, Lauren.

Please join the IBEW's officers and staff in wishing Brother Davis the best of luck in his new role.

Danielle Eckert has been appointed assistant to the international president for government affairs, effective July 1, capping a meteoric rise through the IBEW from new member to leading one of the most effective political operations in the country.

Only 10 years ago, Eckert was a forklift operator for Norfolk Southern in her hometown of Altoona, Pa., waiting for the results of a test to become a locomotive electrician. When she passed, she joined Altoona Local 2273, and the trajectory of her life changed.

Today, Eckert is as likely to be found at the White House or on Capitol Hill as at a local union hall or a factory floor. Since coming to the International Office in 2014, Sister Eckert has become one of the most effective advocates for unions in the country and helped build — along with Austin Keyser, the outgoing assistant to the international president — the IBEW's Government Affairs department into one of the most influential political organizations in the history of the American labor movement.

"There is no one in D.C. like Danielle, and everyone in D.C. who meets her knows it," Keyser said. "There are plenty of smart people and hard-working people here, people who are experts on policies because they've studied it. When Danielle talks about changing the American economy to serve working people, congresspeople know, their staff know, the president knows, she is not just representing our members, she is our membership. And that makes her unshakable."

Back in 2012, Eckert had just started as a union janitor for Norfolk Southern and was grateful for the chance.

It was a far cry from her dream of becoming a high school government teacher, the career she'd gotten her college degree for and joined the Army Reserves to pay for.

But it was a start, and it led to the forklift job and offered a promise of more and better.

She needed that start badly. A succession of substitute teaching jobs — and moonlighting at a convenience store — wasn't providing anything like the stability she wanted for her young family, even when she was offered a position at the chain's corporate office.

Joining Norfolk Southern looked like a lifeline when an Army "battle buddy" and IBEW member recommended it to her. She knew plenty of people who would have given their right arm for a shot at the steady income and good benefits a union railroad job offered.

"I was married, had Charlee and was working at Sheetz," Eckert said. "We couldn't make ends meet with daycare."

After joining Local 2273, Eckert said, she didn't exactly throw herself into local politics, but she volunteered to do the things the local needed that no one was doing: organizing events and outings for the members, organizing the Christmas party at the train shed.

But she began volunteering for more formal positions at the local, first as registrar and then, in 2019, running for and winning a seat on the executive board. Almost immediately, Eckert was furloughed from the operator position.

"I thought I would have to look for work and leave the IBEW," she said.

Local 2273 Chairman Dan Dorsch told her not to leave yet and launched a campaign to find a place for her, putting her resume in the hand of Mike Welsh, then the Third District international vice president. It worked. In 2020, International President Lonnie Stephenson appointed Eckert as an international representative in the Political and Legislative Affairs Department.

"She was one of the best students we ever had here," Dorsch said. "Dani is a very hard worker and a fast learner, and she has a work ethic that can't be beat."

A year later, Stephenson appointed her director of the department, making her one of the youngest directors in the history of the IBEW.

In the four years since her appointment, the IBEW forged a series of legislative accomplishments that did the most for organized labor in America since the New Deal nearly a century ago.

The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act transformed the economic consensus that had dominated American political thinking since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

"We rejected the idea that the purpose of the American economy is to make rich people richer, and we built a team of policy experts that could lay out what an alternative should look like," Eckert said. "In the Biden administration, we had partners who didn't just let us in to talk — something the Trump administration never let us do — they put us at the table. And when everyone else left the room, the president asked us to stay. On policy after policy, the president made it clear that unless we said yes, he was saying no."

How deeply the IBEW, Stephenson and the renamed Government Affairs Department were involved in crafting many of those bills is not widely known, but at key moments, representatives of the IBEW were the critical voices in the passage of these bills.

Eckert said the clearest example of this came very late in negotiations over President Joe Biden's most important and most personal legislative accomplishment, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Some of the more conservative senators were refusing to include language about prevailing wage standards in a part of the bill.

"Three days before it passed, we were not endorsing the bill. We had been working on this bill for 18 months, and it was about to die," she said. "The president called President Stephenson and said, 'I heard you're not happy.' We held up that bill until we got what we needed for our members — and the president was able to deliver."

Eckert said what surprises her the most about the last four years is how closely the union works with lawmakers and the people who implement the laws.

"It's way more collaborative than I imagined it would be. We have direct lines into the Department of Energy, the Treasury, that are priceless for creating and protecting our work. I never thought Capitol Hill offices would reach out to us, but they want our input," she said.

Eckert said her top priority in the short term will be working with locals to explain why reelecting Biden is so critical: "We are choosing between two futures," she said.

In one, the IBEW continues to change our economy by winning more power and resources for working families.

In the other, the economic changes the IBEW has made are reversed and working people settle for anger and having people to blame.

"I know people feel left behind. So much of my own family feels like they were abandoned, and they are angry about it, and rightly so," she said. "But having someone to blame doesn't pay for daycare. Anger doesn't get your kid braces. Power does. And right now, unions have power, but it could all slip away."

Please join the officers and staff in wishing Sister Eckert the best as she assumes her new role.