Sisters and brothers, we are in a defining moment in the history of the IBEW. The hunger for energy is driving the biggest surge of blue-collar job creation in our lifetimes.

Over the next two years, there will be more than $2 trillion in construction activity in North America. American utilities are expected to invest an additional $1 trillion over the next five years.

The IBEW is already the largest we’ve been in decades, with the largest construction membership ever, and we’re growing faster than anytime in the last half-century.

That growth in our ranks, and in the work we are winning, gives us tremendous power. With that comes the responsibility to use it to improve the lives of our members and their families, and the future of our two nations.

We’ve already translated that power to better conditions on the job. In the past couple of years, we negotiated the first increase in NEBF pension benefits in decades; the first entirely new pension plan since 1947; and agreements with the Laborers and Operating Engineers confirming that underground, transmission and solar work is and will be IBEW work.

These changes make real and substantial differences for our members, now and for decades.

But, brothers and sisters, the future is already here. I’m still up nights thinking about how we organize faster, not just new workers but contractors and the work itself, because every lost job is a loss we can’t afford. Why? Because politicians in Washington, D.C., are trying to suffocate us.

None of what we win in negotiations matters if the pillars of the labor movement — the right to be in a union, the right to organize and the right to come home safe — are rotting.

President Trump appointed a corrupt union-buster to run the Department of Labor. She was run out of town less than a year later, but he found another union-buster to replace her. He defanged the National Labor Relations Board and stripped collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers, including many IBEW members. Under the auspices of DOGE, his administration fired two-thirds of the staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

He killed hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for clean energy union jobs already funded by Congress. On top of that, the president is spending $2 billion to kill offshore wind projects we fought for and that our members were building.

Five years ago, the IBEW was at the center of the most consequential slate of pro-union legislation in almost 100 years: the Inflation Reduction, Infrastructure and Jobs, and CHIPS and Science acts.

Today, those laws’ guarantees of labor standards on the projects that would rebuild America are in the garbage, trashed by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress. Those trillions of dollars of construction don’t matter if every job is a low-wage job and all the rewards go to a smaller and smaller group of billionaires.

The IBEW has gone further than I ever could have imagined when I first became your international president, but we can’t stop now before we’ve seized this immense opportunity for us and for the future.

This boom isn’t slowing down, and neither can we.