125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
skilled workers – but were able to successfully
meet those demands. What’s more, the
international was able to systematically recruit
and replace, mainly through attrition, a full
force of international representatives in the
field and new department heads at I.U.O.E.
headquarters that year, about which the general
president announced, “I am pleased to report
that these appointments have already begun to
improve our operations and alter jurisdictional
standings for the I.U.O.E.”
Keeping Good Times Rolling
As positive momentum carried over
into the second half of the 2010s,
locals across the I.U.O.E. reported
an increase in manhours throughout all of its
traditional hoisting and portable work. Having
Members of I.U.O.E. Marine Division Local No. 25, based in New
Jersey, change cutter teeth on a hydraulic cutter suction dredge
during a project in the union’s southern jurisdiction in 2015.
experienced a shortage of crane operators in
parts of the United States and Canada the year
before as work proliferated, General President
Callahan put out a call in the Winter 2015
International Operating Engineer to push locals
and the membership to organize and recruit
non-union engineers into the union while
work was plentiful, declaring:
“Our commitment to organizing,
in both hoisting & portable
and stationary, is steadfast and
we will continue to deploy the
resources needed to compete in this
expanding market.”
To also further protect the health and safety
of its members as they were out in the field
and on an increasing number of jobsites, the
union held the inaugural meeting of its new
I.U.O.E. Safety and Health
Committee on January 14,
2015, at its headquarters
in Washington, D.C. The
initial 11-member team
was composed of I.U.O.E.
members representing
various backgrounds such
as crane operators, heavyequipment
operators,
stationary engineers,
pipeline engineers and
training instructors, and
its mission was to represent
I.U.O.E. interests during
policy and rulemaking
proceedings by providing
real-world feedback and
advice to I.U.O.E. Safety
and Health Director
Donald Booth.
The union’s all-out
programs were seemingly
having their intended effect,
as into 2015 its members
were being employed in
These participants in Project: Accelerate!, a free, seven-week program that introduces women to career opportunities in construction across the
State of Michigan, spent the fourth week of their course in the summer of 2017 at the I.U.O.E. Local No. 324 Construction Career Center in Howell,
Michigan, learning about and operating heavy equipment. With I.U.O.E. participation, the program, which is sponsored by a coalition of businesses,
trade unions and colleges, allows women to gain hands-on experience with the tools of the trade, such as the cranes, excavators and other
equipment these women operated at the 555-acre, world-class Local 324 training facility.
areas that were historically not friendly toward
unions. Perhaps most notably, union engineers
were at work on construction of a number
of large, complicated stadiums in states with
so-called “right-to-work” laws, including the
$1.6-billion, 71,000-seat Mercedes-Benz
Stadium in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Even
without a project labor agreement, members
of I.U.O.E. Local No. 926 worked for seven
signatory contractors on the retractable-roof
facility between the start of construction in
May 2014 until it opened in August 2017.
Elsewhere, in Florida – a notorious “rightto-work”
state – operators from Local No.
487 in Miami were involved in the two-year,
$400-million renovation of that city’s Sun Life
Stadium from 2014 until it was completed in
January 2016, including installing a state-ofthe-art
canopy around the top of the facility.
I.U.O.E. members also built stadiums in
more-union-friendly states (based on their
lack of “right-to-work” laws) at that time,
including the $1.3-billion Levi’s Stadium
in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, for
which operating engineers from Local No.
3 were one of the first to break ground and
had to deal with the state’s more-stringent
seismic requirements during construction
from April 2012 to July 2014. In Minnesota,
after Local No. 49 had for years been an
outspoken supporter of a new stadium, the
local’s members helped build the $1.1-billion,
enclosed U.S. Bank Stadium from December
2013 to July 2016, during which it was the
largest construction project in the state.
New and emerging energy technologies also
continued to bolster I.U.O.E. employment, and
none more so than construction of the Block
Island Wind Farm beginning in 2015, which
would be the first commercial offshore wind
farm in the United States when brought online
in December 2016. Working under a project
labor agreement with Deepwater Wind, more
than 60 operating engineers with Local No. 57
of Rhode Island and Local No. 25 placed five
foundational installations for the 30-megawatt
farm’s five turbines three miles off the coast of
the state’s Block Island at depths of about 100
feet in the Atlantic Ocean. After the engineers
LABOR OMNIA VINCIT
WORK CONQUERS ALL