San Diego is a union town.

But it didn’t used to be.

For decades, San Diego consistently elected anti-union politicians. In 2012, it became the largest city in the country to ban project labor agreements.

That’s what San Diego was.

This month, as thousands of delegates from North America and guests from around the world come together to conduct the critical business of the IBEW in the union’s 135th year, they will find a new San Diego, a city transformed.

Ten years ago, San Diego Local 569 members worked 3.3 million hours. Last year, they banked more than 6 million.

In 1997, the local had about 250 apprentices. Now it has more than 750.

And two decades of organizing in the trenches — political, members and business development — the city and county are filled with pro-labor elected officials and that ban on PLAs was tossed out by popular vote in 2022. Within months, the city signed a citywide PLA with the Building Trades that applies to any project worth more than $1 million. The total value of the projects covered could exceed $63 billion.

Two years ago, the utility local, Local 465, mobilized and fought off a public takeover of the city utility.

“There are cities with longer histories as a union town, but no place in North America has worked harder or more successfully to become one than San Diego has in the last two decades,” said International President Kenneth W. Cooper. “We are a confident union in an ambitious moment in our history. This is the right place for our moment in the sun.”

San Diego Local 569 Business Manager Jeremy Abrams said he is excited for everyone to see what has been built.

“It’s pretty exciting to welcome people to our home,” he said. “We’ve always been a smaller local than L.A., Chicago and New York. The whole host committee can’t wait to show off how far we’ve come.”

Local 569, San Diego Local 465 and Diamond Bar Local 47 are the official host locals of the convention, with critical assistance from Los Angeles Local 11 and Vacaville Local 1245.

“We had low market share. The nonunion and anti-union owned us,” Abrams said. “I hope everyone takes away how much work and fight we’ve put in over the last two decades.”

Becoming a Union Town

The last time the IBEW held a convention in California was in 2001 in San Francisco, a convention that was marked forever by the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,977 people, including 17 members of New York Local 3 and four from New York Local 1212. (Read a Local 3 member’s 9/11 remembrance in a letter to the editor.)

A quarter-century ago, holding this convention in San Diego would have been unthinkable.

The city was ruled by what Abrams called a “good old boys” club of rabidly anti-union businessmen and the politicians they owned.

“We were a petri dish for every terrible anti-worker, anti-union law,” Abrams said. “When the Republicans owned the city, they took away pensions from county workers. It was a free-for-all.”

There was a single project labor agreement with the San Diego County Water Commission, and it only applied to projects with a budget above $100 million.

“It was a terrible PLA, and it was all we had,” said Ninth District International Representative Gretchen Newsom, who was hired as Local 569’s political director in 2014. “Worse, no one really knew what a PLA was.”

Al Shur first ran for Local 569 business manager in 1992, when the old San Diego was near its peak.

“There wasn’t a single period of time when things were ‘the worst,’” Shur said. The entire City Council and the congressional delegation were anti-union Republicans.

Like many construction locals, Shur said, Local 569 was doing fine enforcing the agreements it had, but as long as the existing membership was working, there was little organizing.

Before running for business manager, Shur had never worked in the local hall. His life revolved around two tools: the side-cut and the surfboard.

“I’ve always been a surfer, so I’ve always been an environmentalist,” Shur said. “I spent all of my free time on the beach and saw how the environment was changing. My thought when I was working was, ‘There are no unions on a dead planet.’”

For decades, San Diego politics was dominated by anti-union Republicans. Local 569 members became an army of volunteers on countless campaigns to eventually replace them.

Labor-Green Alliance

He proceeded on two tracks, he said.

First, he needed to organize the membership of Local 569. At the time he was elected, there were no coal-fired power plants in his jurisdiction, but there were oil-fired ones, providing work for hundreds of members. Internally, Shur said, a significant part of the membership saw the environmentalists as self-righteous, white-collar job killers.

“In my first election, that was my opposition,” he said. He came in third. By 1995, he said, the membership had stopped fighting it.

He began a member-focused crusade, answering their concerns about an environmental focus and painting a picture of “how we can make the environment work for us.”

He built the then-largest solar array at the JATC and invested early in training the membership to win this work.

“He was a visionary with solar. No one was doing solar in the IBEW until Al put the pieces in place and showed what was possible,” Abrams said. “We had organizers going after that work; he ran classes. He made the IBEW and renewable energy synonymous.”

Second, he set out to build a political coalition strong enough to change the laws that were hamstringing the union and durable enough to survive years of political knife fights.

On their side was a long-term demographic shift transforming San Diego. Cities have trended younger than suburbs and rural areas. Since younger people tend to be more progressive than older people, cities have followed.

“We are a confident union in an ambitious moment in our history. This is the right place for our moment in the sun.”

_{– International President Kenneth W. Cooper}

In 2000, there were 477,734 registered Democrats and 552,415 registered Republicans in San Diego County. In 2026, there are 821,836 registered Democrats and 553,951 registered Republicans. That’s a 72% increase in registered Democrats and a 0.3% increase in registered Republicans.

But none of the potential partners he was seeking knew this then. And, Shur said, there was no guarantee that this new, larger left would come together around pro-green and pro-worker reforms.

“The left in San Diego was completely [splintered],” Shur said. “We had to find a way to get rid of everything we didn’t have in common and start working together on what we did.”

Unions were fighting unions, Abrams said, and unions were fighting environmentalists.

“Everyone in the house of labor had individual goals, and everything was a fight,” Abrams said.

At about the same time Shur took over Local 569, Abrams said, Jerry Butkiewicz took over the Labor Council and set about bringing peace.

“When Jerry got into that Labor Council, he brought everyone together and really laid it down: ‘We need to fight the right people,’” Abrams said.

By the late ’90s, Shur had found partners in a local nonprofit called the Environmental Health Coalition.

“They had a campaign to get rid of lead paint in poor neighborhoods. They were so pro-union that we had a natural ally. We built everything off of that foundation,” Shur said.

The EHC brought Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to the table.

“I had a unique attribute: They knew I was a surfer, and it wasn’t a surprise that I would be involved in the environmental movement,” he said.

The Labor Council joined in, and Shur said he “browbeat” some of the other local unions to join a strategic planning process.

“What everyone had to do on all sides is understand the deal breakers and the deal makers. There are things that are deal breakers for us. They have theirs, too. We needed to rid ourselves of those roadblocks strategically, and to agree to stand 100% against their deal breakers, write out a document and sign it,” he said.

Once that coalition came together in the early 2000s, it began to build connections, show up on campaigns for one another, support one another’s candidates and show up on issues that mattered to the others, not just when it was “our” issue, he said.

They won seats on the City Council and on the important, but sometimes lower-profile, civic commissions that award contracts.

The coming-out party for the coalition was the 2004 mayoral campaign. Two Republicans were in the fall runoff. Shur, along with the Building Trades’ Tom Lemmon and Lorena Gonzalez of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, chose not to roll over and accept the inevitable. Instead, they backed a write-in campaign by then-City Council member Donna Frye. Labor spent nearly $1 million to convince people to write Frye’s name on the ballot. Tens of thousands of people did, and they came within a few hundred votes of an unprecedented upset.

“The Frye campaign was the result of five years of working together,” Shur said.

And they began to think more boldly. Before the write-in campaign, Shur said, Local 569’s political activity was all “very typical stuff.”

“We gave money to politicians and said, ‘You want our support, we’ll get 12 members together, and we’ll help you do something one weekend,’” he said. “With Frye it was different. She was different. I made her an agent for a day and let her walk around a job to meet our members. See what we were up against.”

And the support he could mobilize was on a completely different level.

“We got 40 to 50 members showing up on Saturdays, week after week,” he said.

In 2008, they won three City Council seats. A year later, Shur hired Micah Mitrosky from the Sierra Club as the first environmental organizer in the IBEW. She’s now a Ninth District international representative.

“When we got started with our environmental partners, we wanted to make a threat the business community couldn’t overcome. We wanted them to see the sense in the economics when they did it right. Or put another way, we wanted them to understand that doing it wrong will cost you more,” he said.

In 2012, they had the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Democrat Bob Filner became the city’s first Democratic mayor in 20 years. But he resigned after a few months, and an anti-union Republican won the special election to replace him.

And then they hit bottom when Measure A, banning project labor agreements on city projects, easily won despite a massive campaign by labor.

By this time, Shur had retired, and Johnny Simpson was elected business manager. Lorena Gonzalez had left the Labor Council and was elected to the State Assembly in 2013.

The Importance of PLAs

In 2014, Simpson hired Newsom to be his political director. Her job, as she understood it, was to transform the City Council, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors and many other city councils to pro-worker majorities.

“When I was hired, I was told, ‘Go get more work for members.’ How? With PLAs,” she said.

There were two problems. First, she said, how labor was communicating wasn’t resonating with elected officials or voters.

“They couldn’t see the community benefiting from a PLA,” she said.

Second, there were now five PLA bans that needed undoing: in the city of San Diego and San Diego County, and in Chula Vista, El Cajon and Oceanside.

“When we met with electeds, we heard their concerns,” Newsom said. “We asked, ‘What have you heard about PLAs?’ Really bad things. ‘What specifically?’ Then we had to knock them down, one by one.”

The San Diego Association of Governments, or SANDAG, controlled more than $150 billion for transportation infrastructure. Winning a PLA there could transform the work lives of the membership and give the IBEW the resources to tackle the PLA bans.

SANDAG had a structural problem that was killing the PLA drive. By the middle of the 2010s, labor had many supporters in office in the larger communities, but every tiny city in the area had an equal vote in SANDAG, by law. They only wanted more roads, and they really didn’t want a PLA.

“We still had a red blockade in small towns,” Newsom said.

But regional public transportation checked all the boxes for the coalition first built by Shur, Mitrosky said.

“It’s work for our members, the environmental community wanted people to have options to get out of cars, and it expands the work possibilities for low-income residents,” she said.

In 2015, they unveiled the Quality of Life Coalition, publicly issued a vision statement signed by all the members, and met monthly at Local 569.

“It came down to finding shared values,” Mitrosky said.

They needed to transform the board, but to do that, they needed to change the state law that created SANDAG. It took two years for legislation sponsored by former Assembly Member Gonzalez to pass in Sacramento. They also had to beat back a SANDAG-sponsored ballot measure prioritizing roads with no guarantee of new transit.

In 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Gonzalez’s bill, and in 2021 SANDAG signed a five-year PLA converting the entire $162.5 billion regional transportation plan.

“We showed up on issues that mattered to our coalition partners, and they showed up for us. Service workers need round-the-clock transportation; we want to build it. UNITE Here is concerned about unionizing the new hotels; we want to build them. Anti-poverty groups want to stop environmental racism; we showed up to fight alongside them,” Newsom said.

By the early 2020s, the coalition was turning into a political powerhouse.

“When we started, we had a core group of 10 volunteers showing up again and again. We grew that to hundreds,” Newsom said. “That’s a core that’s strong enough to shift big things.”

It was a coalition strong enough to take down the biggest target: the PLA bans.

Every tool they had developed, every relationship they had built, came together in the 2022 election.

Labor-friendly candidates swept all nine City Council seats. The city signed a citywide PLA in February 2024 with the Building Trades that applies to any project worth more than $5 million for the first two years, and than all projects worth $1 million for the remainder of the PLA. The total value of the projects covered could exceed $635 million.

The PLA ban in Chula Vista was overturned in 2022. Even better, in September 2023, La Mesa became the first city in the county to adopt a citywide PLA. This November, revoking the final PLA ban is on the ballot in Oceanside.

“I’m optimistic,” Newsom said.

Local 465 Protects Jobs

Two years later, Local 465, which represents utility workers, had its own political challenge.

A citizen-sponsored initiative would have municipalized San Diego Gas and Electric, whose workforce has been represented by Local 465 for more than a century. For Business Manager Nate Fairman, a takeover by the city was an intolerable threat to that contract.

On the surface, municipalization was also a direct threat to the blue-green alliance. The initiative was very popular in some corners of the green half of the coalition.

“Our members showed up to every meeting [about municipalization] with the mayor and City Council, and we fought hard to ensure that the frontline workers’ concerns were front and center,” Fairman said. (Read more about the municipalization fight in the September 2024 Electrical Worker.)

The fight came to a head in a June 2024 meeting of the San Diego City Council. The vote against the putting the plan on the ballot was unanimous.

“That vote was the biggest showdown, and our organizing won out,” Fairman said. “Coalition building and solidarity in the San Diego labor movement were crucial.”

In the end, Fairman said it comes back to Shur’s deal makers and deal breakers. For the IBEW, this was a deal breaker, and the while the coalition bent, it didn’t break.

It’s easy to see how far the San Diego labor movement has come in 20 years.

“San Diego’s story proves that strong unions aren’t built overnight. They’re built through decades of organizing, political engagement, coalition building and an unwavering commitment to our members,” said Ninth District International Vice President Dave Reaves. “The success of Local 569, Local 465 and the entire San Diego labor movement is a powerful reminder that when the IBEW invests in people, relationships and long-term vision, we create jobs and help transform communities.”

‘In the Driver’s Seat’

Just six years ago, in a meeting with a nonunion contractor, the company wouldn’t even touch the paperwork Abrams had brought with him.

“They just looked at it on the table and inched their chairs away,” he said. And he didn’t really blame them. “I remember thinking, ‘What did we have to offer?’”

Two years ago, he said, the same contractor walked in themselves.

“I’ll remember this quote forever. The CEO said to me, ‘We decided to join because the IBEW is in the driver’s seat and we want to go along for the ride.’ It was an acknowledgement of the work we’ve been doing,” he said. “And they have taken the ride. Since they signed, they’ve doubled in size. They keep winning work, hiring more people, and it’s really cool.”

That’s how this works, he said. Power wins work, and work wins power.

“Today, people want to or have to work with us,” Abrams said. “If they take away nothing else, that’s something every convention delegate can take home from San Diego.”