“I was born and raised in Kenya. In 2011, I came to the U.S. through the green card lottery. I arrived in November, and I joined the military by April. For me, it was a good place to start because I liked the stability of the Army.
I was on reserve at first, stationed in Trenton, N.J., 445th Quartermaster. The first place they sent me for active duty was Fairbanks, Alaska. When I saw my orders, I said, ‘You do realize that I’m African?’ Everyone said it was a warm winter. It’s negative-10, and everyone is walking around in shorts! They said, ‘It’s warming up,’ and I told them, ‘Your definition of warming up and mine are very different.’
When I out-processed from the Army and was looking for job placement, I learned about VEEP — the Veteran’s Electrical Entry Program — and I was one of the first to start with the program in Alaska. I went to Anchorage for training, and every Monday through Friday for four months, we were learning, training, doing inside and outside wiring and outside pole work. This wasn’t regular training, where they give you the basics and tell you to go figure it out. Our training was comprehensive, and I met some of the best-trained people in the union.
I found that VEEP was very much like the military: the structure, not worrying about having to keep looking for work and ask again and again how much I’m going to get paid.
Once we finished training, VEEP helped us get into any local in the U.S. Having started in New Jersey, I wanted to be somewhere on the East Coast where I knew people, including my military buddies. Someone suggested Local 98 in Philadelphia, and I drove there from Anchorage.
When I came to Philly in 2019, my first construction building was the Arthaus downtown. In 2020, COVID hit, and we were out for three months. And we came back and continued building, picking up where we had left it, like it never stopped. We just continued, and we did the gear from the bottom all the way up.
Our union tells us to take pride in our work; do it in a professional and timely manner; and make sure if somebody comes back to look at your work, it’s easy to recognize it as yours. You want them to say, ‘This was John, he did a good job.’
When some people complain that union workers are lazy, I tell them I have never seen a lazy union worker in the last six years. If you mess something up, you’ll hear about it. And if they say, ‘It’s not that serious,’ I will say: ‘Yes, it is! They pay me, and I need to show them what they’ve paid for.’
I want you to look at the work and tell me it looks professional, that it stands out from the rest. Don’t go down on the standard — push the standard up, make it even better than it was.”
