Prefab Work in Climate-Controlled ‘Construction Worker’s Dream’

Members of Nashville, Tenn., Local 429 were pleased when Modular Power Solutions told the local last year that it needed to add 400 IBEW electricians to help staff its new prefabrication facility in Mount Juliet.

They were ecstatic, though, when the company recently asked for 1,000 more.

“It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is,” said Local 429 Business Manager Jeremy Butler. “It’s one of the most exciting things that’s happened for us in this local in a while.”

At the 12½-acre MPS facility east of Nashville, scores of Local 429 members have already been hard at work building the plug-and-play components used in eastern U.S. data center and cell tower customers.

Locals in Tennessee and the other states in the IBEW’s Tenth District, which also covers Arkansas and the Carolinas, have been gearing up to meet the growing demand for such components over the last several years. This has been spurred by a forward-thinking prefab agreement negotiated between 17 of the district’s inside construction locals and the NECA chapters in the district.

“A project like this one was something we’d been chasing for a long time,” said Tenth District International Vice President Brent Hall. “We saw the writing on the wall, how prefab was going to take off. We had to get ahead of it or we would be in trouble.”

Hall said the current agreement, which runs through 2028, aims to grow the IBEW’s membership and market share by encouraging employers not only to establish prefab facilities in the Tenth District but also to use what those facilities make on projects throughout the district.

“What we’re getting with MPS was the reason we did the agreement. It’s really starting to pay off,” said Hall, who retired April 1. (See Brent E. Hall’s Transitions story.)

Rosendin Holdings, which owns MPS, is staffing the Mount Juliet facility through its Rosendin Electric subsidiary, an IBEW signatory.

“They’re probably the Number 1 electrical customer in central Tennessee,” said MPS project leader Jeff “Moose” Henley, a third-generation Local 429 member.

Indeed, Tenth District International Representative Quentin Tanner noted that Rosendin has partnered with the IBEW on several other major projects in the district. Working with Hall and former Local 429 Business Manager Joel Brauchi, Tanner helped persuade MPS to set up shop in Mount Juliet.

“Joel and I traveled to Texas to tour facilities where they had ongoing work,” Tanner said. “From there, we worked with the local and the contractor to decide how to make the prefab agreement work best for everyone.”

At Mount Juliet, IBEW members are making a variety of components for use in high-profile, billion-dollar data centers, including transformers, voltage switches and electrical enclosures called “skids.”

“We’re building skids for one project that’s going all across the country,” said Henley, who recently transferred to Mount Juliet after a five-year stint with a Rosendin-managed data center project in Gallatin, Tenn. “They’re for super-quick pop-up data centers under tents.”

Henley, a Local 429 member since 1988, marveled at how quickly demand for prefab components from Mount Juliet has grown in his short time there.

“When I first started, it was, ‘We’ve got three to five years of work,’” Henley said. “Now they’re saying it’s 10 years — and who knows what it’s going to be a year from now, after all these projects keep rolling out.”

Local 429’s leaders have a multi-faceted strategy for handling the staffing challenges to meet MPS’s needs.

“There already are a lot of apprentices there, and there’ll be more, plus a lot of CW/CEs,” said Local 429 Vice President Laura Looch. “And you have to have journeyman wiremen to oversee all of that.”

Strengthening efforts to organize the region’s nonunion electrical workers will continue to be crucial, said Butler, who was elected business manager last July.

“The IBEW has had a mission from the very beginning to organize everyone in,” he said. “The only way to get it done is one step at a time.”

Looch said that Local 429’s full-time inside construction organizers, Jeff Phillips and Bill Romero, are busily reaching out to qualified electricians throughout central Tennessee and that the International Office has pledged to assist the local with organizing as needed.

The steady, years-long work outlook at MPS also should help entice travelers to return home to Local 429, Looch said.

“In the past, we were kind of a suitcase local — a lot of our people traveled,” she said. “Some of them are only happy when they’re on the road, but some really want to spend time back at their own house.”

Perhaps just as enticing as the work, Hall said, is the workplace: a massive, climate-controlled building he described as “a construction worker’s dream.”

“You’re not out in the weather, it’s the same job every day, you have real bathrooms as well as a cafeteria,” he said. “It’s like working in a factory.”

Tanner added that as MPS ramps up production in this building, Rosendin is buying another nearby to help handle future expansion needs.

To handle the training for a massive influx of prefab workers, Looch said, Rosendin recently hired Nashville Electrical JATC director Bobby Emery, a former Local 429 business manager, along with NEJATC Assistant Director Stephen Hall.

Henley said that quality, IBEW-based training is helping new hands adjust to this kind of work. “We have hires who are brand new to the trade and now they’re able to terminate a PTX,” he said. “As they get more involved in the project, we’ll welcome them to learn other, different things in the building.”

The IBEW stands ready to meet MPS’s staffing challenges head-on, Tanner said. “It’s going to be a monumental task to meet the demand, but we’re going to do it.”

Butler predicts an ultimate win-win-win outcome for his fully employed, 2,400-member local, whose numerous other projects include work on a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans football team.

“With most construction projects, you work yourself out of a job,” he said. “MPS is going to be around for a while, and I think it’s going to be good for Rosendin, good for our workers and good for the union as a whole.”