The IBEW has been booming for years nearly everywhere. The electrical industry is growing, new members are being organized at the highest rate in decades, and the IBEW has more “A” members than any time in its history.
But there is a dark reality that is often hidden in boom times. Over the last few decades, when times are at their best, the IBEW tends to lose overall market share despite the increased work.
When so much effort goes into taking on a huge job like a microchip plant, the day-to-day work in a local can lose staffing. And when market share declines, so does the union’s power to negotiate the best possible wages and benefits.
The IBEW is determined to learn from past mistakes and not let that keep happening during the current boom.
Market share is complicated to accurately calculate, but the idea is simple: how much of all the money spent on electrical construction goes to IBEW signatory contractors. “Market share matters for two reasons. First, because our founders set a goal to organize the entire electrical industry, full stop. But also because it is a measure of our ability to protect wages and benefits for our members,” said International President Kenneth W. Cooper. The higher the market share in a given area, the stronger the position IBEW members bargain from.
The losses in boom times past weren’t because the competition was better.
“They were fumbles,” Cooper said. “We were ahead by a few touchdowns in the third quarter and got complacent.”
In some places, it was white-ticketing nonunion workers, using them on IBEW projects without ever making them members. In others, it was turning away contractors that weren’t large enough. In still others, it was walking away from lower-margin business for the big jobs, even while that smaller end of the business grew in size and importance.
There are tools available for every business manager to help them avoid repeating past failures. They are built out of painfully won experience and designed to help them claw back market share.
And too few locals are taking advantage of them, Cooper said.
“It’s an old saw, but acorns grow into oak trees. These are your acorns. If you want to leave your local and the IBEW better off, these are the tools that will get you there,” Cooper said.
 New Contractor Training |
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| Classes and seminars that teach existing members how to start and run successful union contractors |
| From bidding work to what bonding, licensing and insurance you’ll need |
| We have the knowledge and resources to help members start a business and stay in the family |
| Keep ambitious members in the fold |
 Small Works Agreements |
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| District or regional contracts that make the IBEW relevant in markets we lost or never had |
| Written so contractors benefit even if wages and benefits are at the standard rates |
| A contractor with a job is the best organizer in the world |
| Crowd out small nonunion shops where they grow |
 Transition Agreements |
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| Targeted agreements for new signatories offering flexibility for a specific period or time |
| Allow contractors to finish work they’ve already bid and keep the people who made them a success |
| Particularly helpful to remove rules that punish existing members just starting out |
Thriving contractors need a partner to succeed, not rules written in stone |
1 New Contractor Training
Baltimore Local 24 held a new contractor training seminar last spring. Today, there are four new signatories putting new and existing members to work.
Last March, Fourth District International Representative Virgil Hamilton stood in front of a room of about two dozen journeymen in the Baltimore Local 24 union hall.
His goal was “to entice our members who are thinking about opening a business to go and do it.”
The Baltimore session was one of four he led across the district between 2023 and 2025, speaking to more than 100 IBEW members about taking the leap.
“The reason I am involved in this is that 53% of electrical contractors have less than five employees, 67% have less than 10, and they are doing the majority of the electrical work in the United States,” he said. “Any effort to grow market share must have small contractors at its heart.
“Those small contractors are doing a ton of the industry, and nearly all of them are nonunion,” Hamilton added.
The class includes sessions on licensing, bonding, insurance, accessing capital, estimating and other topics. No one will leave the six-hour course with everything they need to be a success, but it does give attendees the clear message that the local sponsoring the training is ready to be a partner when they start.
“Any effort to grow market share must have small contractors at its heart.”
– Fourth District International Representative Virgil Hamilton
“They need to build a business plan so they can get a line of credit. We show them how. We lay out the whole shebang,” Hamilton said. “If we give them the tools to start a business, then we don’t have to do the top-down organizing. We start with organized contractors.”
The result from March was extremely successful, said Local 24 Business Manager Michael McHale — four members who attended the seminar have already become signatory contractors.
One is running a job in Cumberland, Md., Local 307’s jurisdiction and is using members from both 307 and 24. A second is now running three members, including one that had been working nonunion, and is bringing on a second apprentice. A third was bidding work at press time, and the fourth has a specialized electrical testing company that is already expanding.
For the new business owners, Local 24 has a lot to offer.
“Simplicity and benefits,” McHale said. “You write one check. It goes to the local’s trust fund office and we will help you with the accounting and the bookkeeping. And if you sign on to our inside agreement, you have access to health and pension plans that would otherwise be far out of your reach.”
The syllabus Hamilton used for his training sessions is available for any local. He said it is critical that every local consider using it, especially the ones with full employment and plenty of market share to make up.
“When (Seattle) Local 46 took over jurisdiction on the Olympic Peninsula years ago, there were more than 80 nonunion contractors working there. More than half had been started by people who had gone through our apprenticeship. That’s a disaster,” he said. “Every local has a better pitch they can make and make it relentlessly.”
2 Small Works Agreements
Small works agreements were launched out of the Florida Project in 2007. Matt Paules (back row, fifth from the left), now the Construction and Maintenance director, was there.
Having new contractors is important, but the IBEW is also thinking creatively about helping them survive.
“Large projects and light commercial are really two separate industries. The work our members do is not that different, but the business model in light commercial has changed dramatically in the last 40 years,” said Fourth District International Vice President Austin Keyser. “When we controlled that work, our inside agreement was enough. But that was 50 years ago, and nonunion has been eating our lunch for years.”
IBEW locals can have “small works agreements” in place to give signatories a fighting chance in the most competitive corner of the industry.
Many locals and some districts have permanently available small works agreements, but starting this year, Cooper is requiring them everywhere.
“We have had variations of small works agreements in place for decades, and the debate is over. The results are clear. When we give our contractors tools to win market share, they do it, and they put our journeymen and apprentices to work when they do,” Cooper said.
The Fourth District — covering Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky — has three regional small works agreements that carve out special exceptions based on market share and the size of the project. The agreements can specify low-market-share segments: Funeral homes, gas stations, small medical clinics, restaurants, bars and taverns are commonly covered projects.
They often also allow blanket coverage for projects below a set square footage, which varies based on local economics. In some of the Fourth’s agreements, for example, anything under 15,000 square feet is covered, but exemptions can be made at the business manager’s discretion for larger projects.
“We have had variations of small works agreements in place for decades…. When we give our contractors tools to win market share, they do it, and they put our journeymen and apprentices to work when they do.”
– International President Kenneth W. Cooper
Without strong local market share, Keyser said, the union lacks the leverage to put upward pressure on wages.
“We want to push it up to parity, but we can’t pretend we have the presence that takes. When was the last time most of our members worked on a car wash or a McDonald’s? How do you regain that market?” he said. “We had to think about that split and make a contract that is relevant but different from the industrial work.”
The Fourth has separate agreements because the economics vary. Some of the largest construction projects in U.S. history are underway in the Fourth — Intel’s chip plant outside of Columbus alone is a $20 billion investment.
But there are plenty of places where there isn’t the land for huge developments and there isn’t demand for urban tenant improvements. For the locals that use them, Keyser said, the small works agreements are bringing growth no matter what the local market is doing.
“Akron Local 306 has grown their local without the market growing. They aren’t just fluctuating with the market. They are hyper-targeting developers, harvesting contractors and encouraging them to chase work,” Keyser said. “Same with Charleston, West Virginia, Local 446. They did almost none of the noncommercial in Charleston 10 years ago. Today they are doing nearly all of it.”
Painesville, Ohio, Local 673 can now include multiple McDonald’s on the “Patronize These Businesses” section of its web page.
While the jobs are small, the cumulative impact isn’t.
“Since 2010, we’ve had 23 million work hours under the three agreements,” Keyser said.
Last year in the northern Ohio agreement, journeymen and apprentices alone worked more than 800,000 hours, putting to work 340 new journeymen and apprentices.
The impact in corners of the Fourth with lower market share has been even more significant. The agreement covering southwest Virginia and West Virginia covered 2 million work hours and led to the hiring of 842 journeymen and apprentices and hundreds of CE/CWs over the last decade.
“We have created enough work for 1,377 full time journeymen and apprentices who would not have worked a single minute without these agreements,” Keyser said.
3 Transition Agreements
A transition agreement with Tacoma, Wash., Local 76 helped a nonunion contractor sign on to the CBA and still compete successfully in the low-market-share residential sector.
Hamilton said a secondary benefit of thinking through how to launch IBEW members as signatory contractors and then crafting small works agreements that make them competitive is that it will make it easier to sign up existing nonunion contractors.
“The things that we need to do to support our new members starting a new business is exactly what we need to do to entice nonunion contractors,” he said.
One of the most effective tools, he said, is a transition agreement, like the ones the Ninth District made mandatory this year. Ninth District Organizing Coordinator Greg Boyd started working on transition agreements nearly 30 years ago when he was on staff at Seattle Local 46.
“We did an audit of the contractors who were behind in payments to the trust — all had been signed in the last three years. A bunch of them had gone out of business. Why are all these recently signed contractors behind?” he said. “The answer we came up with was that the switch was either on or off: when we signed a shop, they had to go nonunion to union overnight.”
The local decided they needed to give contractors time to come up to speed.
The goal every business manager needs to have, alongside filling calls, is finding nonsignatory contractors to backfill the work that signatories walked away from. Allowing the employer time to adjust to the new way of doing business is more attractive than flipping a switch.
“The purpose is not to bring in a contractor that will compete in existing markets against our existing signatory contractors. That does not expand our market share, and besides, there is a lot of market there to go after. Most of it, actually,” he said.
In the beginning, Boyd said, they simply signed side letters for specific contractors on specific jobs or for a set period. Those early agreements often focused on making up the wages and benefits difference between the contracts they bid before signing on and the local’s scale.
But, Boyd said, this was expensive and often did not help the transition to union signatory status.
“They understand the wages and benefits when they sign up and they can crunch the numbers. The next question, and the more important one for their success is ‘What happens to my existing employees?’” Boyd said.
“Every hour a member works on transition and small works agreements is an hour that keeps small nonunion contractors small.”
– Fourth District International Vice President Austin Keyser
Layoffs, for example, were often a mess for new contractors. Existing nonunion workers had to be assigned a group status — either as journeymen or with skills they needed to learn. But assigning those groups takes time.
“That meant their longest-serving workers would be some of the first laid off. That made everyone unhappy — the new member, of course, but also the new contractor,” Boyd said.
A transition agreement can exempt contractors from these “reverse book layoffs.”
Like in small works agreements, full portability features in the standard transition agreement.
“People don’t understand, for nonunion, their challenge isn’t getting work; it is getting just enough work. Too much work is as bad as too little. Overtime is as bad as laying people off because the cost of hiring is very high,” he said. “Now, once they figure out we dispatch quality people, they don’t use that expanded portability. It’s cheaper than paying someone windshield time or paying for a hotel to man it from the local once they adjust their workflow.”
The agreement also lets signatories direct hire any journeyman working nonunion in the low-market-share business.
“Every contractor is a better organizer than I am. I have hopes and dreams; they have paychecks,” Boyd said. Although if unemployment hits 10% in a local, the transition exemption can’t be used.
Some of the most common concerns raised in Hamilton’s new contractor training are also addressed in the standard-language transition agreements. Members are allowed to register their business address as their home address and register the company in their own name. The agreements even allow owner/members to take small off-book calls.
“I’m starting out. I’ve got no cash flow. I put up my home. There is little I can bid without material and without bonding. So we let them get this work,” Boyd said.
When well used, transition agreements can kill two cancerous ideas. First, that unions are extremely rigid.
“When you sign a nonunion employer, I guarantee all the other ones in town are all watching to see what happens. When they ask the new signatory, we want them saying, ‘They worked with me,’ not ‘I had to let go my best guys,’” he said.
The second idea is one that is common inside the IBEW.
“I don’t know how, but too many people still think, ‘They can’t do it without us.’ They do. Thinking that way is suicidal, but more importantly, we have to stop acting that way,” Boyd said.
For any acorn to become a mighty oak tree, it needs room to grow and sunlight to feed it. Even in the densest, oldest and healthiest forests, saplings find room and light to grow when old trees die or are blown over in a storm.
But they must be ready to shoot up when a window of opportunity opens.
“Every hour a member works on transition and small works agreements is an hour that keeps small nonunion contractors small,” Keyser said. “It’s also about mitigating encroachment, keeping them off the big work. We are smothering the market.”
