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IBEW

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
Founded	1891
Members	750,000 (2005)
Country	United States, Canada
Affiliation	AFL-CIO, CLC
Key people	Edwin D. Hill, president
Office location	Washington, DC
Website	www.ibew.org

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is a labor union which represents workers in the electrical industry in the United States and Canada, particularly electricians, or Inside Wiremen, in the construction industry and linemen and other employees of public utilities. The union also represents some workers in the computer, telecommunications, broadcasting, and other fields related to electrical work. It was founded in 1891 shortly after homes and businesses in the United States began receiving electricity. Its international president is Ed Hill. The IBEW is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The beginnings of the IBEW were in the Electrical Wiremen and Linemen's Union No. 5221, founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1890. By 1891, after sufficient interest was shown in a national union, a convention was held on November 21, 1891 in St. Louis. At the convention, the IBEW, then known as the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (NBEW), was officially formed. The American Federation of Labor gave the NBEW a charter as an AFL affiliate on December 7, 1891. The union's official journal, The Electrical Worker, was first published on January 15, 1893, and has been published ever since. At the 1899 convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the union's name was officially changed to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The union went through lean times in its early years, then struggled through six years of schism during the 1910s, when two rival groups each claimed to be the duly elected leaders of the union. In 1919, as many employers were trying to drive unions out of the workplace through a national open shop campaign, the union agreed to form the Council on Industrial Relations, a bipartite body made up of equal numbers of management and union representatives with the power to resolve any collective bargaining disputes. That body still functions today and has largely eliminated strikes in the IBEW's jurisdiction in the construction industry.

In September 1941, the National Apprenticeship Standards for the Electrical Construction Industry, a joint effort among the IBEW, the National Electrical Contractors Association, and the Federal Committee on Apprenticeship, were established. The IBEW added additional training programs and courses as needed to keep up with new technologies, including an industrial electronics course in 1959 and an industrial atomic energy course in 1966.

This article or section deals primarily with the United States and does not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Today, the IBEW conducts apprenticeship programs for electricians, linemen, and VDV installers (who install low-voltage wiring such as computer networks), in conjunction with the National Electrical Contractors Association, under the auspices of the National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee (NJATC), which allows apprentices to "earn while you learn."

The IBEW's membership peaked in 1972 at approximately 1 million members. The membership numbers were in a slow decline throughout the rest of the 1970s and the 1980s, but have since stabilized. One major loss of membership for the IBEW came about because of the court-ordered breakup at the end of 1982 of AT&T, where the IBEW was heavily organized among both telephone workers and in AT&T's manufacturing facilities. Membership as of 2005^[update] stands at about 750,000.

External links

Organized Labour portal

• IBEW - official website
• Local 1, St. Louis, MO - Electrical Workers
• Local 3, New York City
• Local 4, St. Louis, MO - Broadcast Television & Radio
• Local 11, Los Angeles, CA
• Local 21, Downers Grove, IL
• Local 24, Baltimore, MD
• Local 46, Seattle, WA
• Local 48, Portland, OR
• Local 98, Philadelphia, PA
• Local 103, Boston, Ma
• Local 105, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
• Local 113, Colorado Springs, CO
• Local 134, Chicago, IL
• Local 164, New Jersey
• Local 212, Cincinnati, Ohio
• Local 292, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Local 313, Wilmington, DE
• Local 317, Huntington, WV
• Local 322, Casper, WY
• Local 353 Toronto,Ontario,Canada
• Local 402, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
• Local 424, Alberta, Canada
• Local 429, Nashville, Tennesee
• Local 625, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Local 804, Central Ontario, Canada
• Local 894, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
• Local 903, Gulfport, Mississippi
• Local 1220, Chicago
• Local 1547, Alaska
• Local 1739, Barrie, Ontario, Canada
• Local 2222, Boston, MA (Telcom Workers)
• Local 2330, Newfoundland, Canada
• IBEW Hour Power
• IBEW British Columbia | Join a Union

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 21 November 2008, at 22:40.

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