RETIRED — Tracy Prezeau, who grew up in a family hostile to unions and remained a skeptic during her early tenure as an apprentice wireman, retired Nov. 1 after an unlikely but tenacious career as an IBEW educator.
Her origin story became a hook over the years as a Ninth District international representative who developed and ran member-to-member training programs.
As she tells it, she was 5 years old when she began doing chores at her family’s salmon cannery and smokehouse in Washington state — “my first paid job,” she said. One day, her grandfather gathered employees on the shop floor and threatened to shut it down if anyone tried to unionize.
“I didn’t know what a union was,” said Prezeau, who was 9 at the time. “But I knew it was something I didn’t want anything to do with.”
She couldn’t have imagined that the IBEW was her destiny, let alone as one of its most popular and inspiring trainers.
“I never went to a conference without somebody saying how Tracy changed their life through her passion for the IBEW, her education, her training, or just by sharing her union values,” Education Director Amanda Pacheco said.
“Tracy made it really accessible for people to understand that they could be organizers within their union and their communities,” she said. “Her genuine desire to make the IBEW better had a ripple effect. She helped other people feel the same way.”
It took roughly 20 years for Prezeau’s outlook to shift after her grandfather’s edict.
She continued working in her family’s cannery while studying science and math at the University of Puget Sound. Later, she was hired as a nonunion supervisor at a Teamsters-represented Ocean Spray cranberry plant. What she found most intriguing there were the electricians.
“I’d been admiring the work they do, the spectrum of equipment they work on,” she said. “One day I went to the chief electrician and asked what he thought about the idea of me becoming one.”
“That’s the best damn idea I’ve heard all day,” he said. “I’m going to call the hall.”
Prezeau asked what he meant. “You’re going to a union electrician,” he told her. “And that’s when my kneecaps started bouncing, because I was going to have to tell my family I was going to be part of a union,” she said.
Inducted into Tacoma, Wash., Local 76 in 1999, Prezeau loved her work. But for the first two years, she kept her distance from the union itself.
“My family’s views colored the way I participated,” she said. “That changed during my third year when a general foreman on a job in downtown Tacoma gave me a ridiculously unsafe work assignment.”
It involved standing atop an electrified switchgear and keeping water out of its energized bus. “I was terrified because coming from a nonunion background, if you refuse a job assignment, you don’t work there anymore,” she said. But the dangerous task terrified her more, and she went to her shop steward.
“He knew I wasn’t a strong union supporter, but he solved the problem,” Prezeau said. “I didn’t get laid off. I wasn’t retaliated against. The process worked.”
“Tracy made it really accessible for people to understand that they could be organizers within their union and their communities.”
– Education Director Amanda Pacheco
Afterward, she approached a classmate, an active member of Local 76 who was retraining for construction after years as a marine electrician. “I said, ‘Teach me everything about the IBEW, because I want to be part of it.’”
Before long, she was circulating a petition and speaking out at a membership meeting about the local’s plan to switch its training program from night school to daytime, costing apprentices one day’s work and wages each week.
Her faith in unions grew as Business Manager Mike Grunwald took her concerns to heart.
“They let us vote, and we voted to stay in night school,” Prezeau said. “Mike could have reacted to my activism by being punitive or dismissive. He could have buried me as an apprentice. Instead, he saw me as raw talent.”
Grunwald, who retired as a Ninth District international representative in 2017, recalls it well. “That was really my first introduction to Tracy,” he said. “I went and met with the entire apprenticeship class, and I figured out pretty quickly that there was something different about her.”
Step by step, he encouraged her to get more involved. “And Tracy always said yes,” he said.
Starting small, he asked her to be a bus captain for a rally at the state Capitol. Soon, it was yes to joining the executive board. Yes to serving as recording secretary. Yes to a temporary job as the local’s political coordinator, yes to becoming a full-time organizer.
Yes, that is, right up until Grunwald recommended her to be the district’s international representative in the IBEW’s new Education Department.
At the time, she was in charge of lobbying and government affairs for a coalition of the IBEW’s inside locals in Washington state. “She just loved politics,” Grunwald said. “And she said no.”
After some gentle arm-twisting from district higher-ups, Prezeau came aboard the international staff in early 2009.
“For the last 16 years, my job has been to parachute into locations on the West Coast and help people understand the IBEW, whatever they’re curious about,” Prezeau said, describing steward and officer trainings, and programs she helped develop to encourage members to talk to each other and future members about their union.
“She pushed the envelope, in a good way,” Pacheco said. “She’d see a need and figure out how to make it happen.”
Prezeau had her own learning curve. “It’s so rewarding to have people be receptive to what you have to say,” she said. “But sharing our experiences, having a dialogue, is the most valuable aspect. I learned over time that the lesson plan is just a guide. The more I’m talking, the worse I’m doing.”
IBEW conferences put a national spotlight on programs she created, often in partnership with International Representative Greg Boyd in Membership Development. Requests for their materials and workshops poured in from around the country.
Grunwald said that even in retirement he runs into people singing Prezeau’s praises. “I still travel around to IBEW events from time to time, and when I tell somebody I’m from Local 76, they’ll say, ‘Oh, Tracy’s local!’”
Prezeau said her family more or less came around to accepting her union career, though her grandfather died before it started. “I wish I’d had the chance to talk with him about what was driving his opinions,” she said.
As she looks forward to retirement and spending less time on airplanes, she’s proud of where her journey took her.
“When people ask what I do for a living. I like to say, ‘I get to help build stronger communities by empowering workers through training and education.’”
The IBEW thanks Sister Prezeau for her spirited service and wishes her a long and happy retirement.
