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Fred Ulmer’s fellow Navy veterans, though trained in aviation electronics, are bumping from job to job. Anthony Rosi’s high school classmates are up to their eyeballs in college debt. Michelle Warner’s friend has a master’s degree, but works as a bartender.
Today, Ulmer, Rosi and Warner are first-year apprenticeship classmates at the Pittsburgh training center of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5, where they hope to find the economic security and fulfillment that has evaded their friends.
The union’s close relationship with signatory contractors in the National Electrical Contractors Association, is symbolic of the city’s progress.
A recently released survey conducted for the AFL-CIO, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” illustrates the problem confronting these three apprentices and young people generally. Unemployment for workers under 35 has risen sharply since 1999—and so has their anxiety about the future. Only half of these young workers say they are more hopeful than worried about their economic future, compared to 75% who felt that way a decade ago.
As much as any other city, Pittsburgh has explored the dark corners of deindustrialization and unemployment in recent decades. But IBEW Local 5’s bright and inviting training center—built in 2000 on the former site of J&L Steel along the Monongahela River—is pointing the way toward a more promising future for a new generation of young workers.
Ulmer, 30, couldn’t afford college. He enlisted in the Navy and served during the Kosovo conflict. After the 9-11 attacks, he found work as a project manager installing x-ray systems in airports.
“You basically worked yourself out of a job,” Ulmer said of that experience. He’d heard “bad stories” about unions, but then he began to notice the paychecks and benefits enjoyed by his brother and sister, who had joined the Boilermakers union. Now, with financial support from the G.I. Bill, Ulmer is preparing for his own future by apprenticing in the IBEW.
Warner, 25, has worked as a convenience store manager and in a group home for mentally-challenged adults. “I’m not right out of high school,” she said. “I have my own bills to pay.” She could have followed the example of her sister, who got a BA in communications and then couldn’t find a job that utilized her skills. But instead, Warner began listening to a friend who worked as an IBEW foreman and found her way to the apprenticeship program.
Warner’s college-educated sister isn’t alone in the job market. Twenty-one percent of the young workers surveyed by the AFL-CIO say they were unable to find jobs appropriate to their skills. But the IBEW apprentices in Pittsburgh believe they will find work that is personally as well as financially rewarding.
“This program is more fun and exciting than anything I have ever done,” said Rosi, 21, the son of a mechanical engineer. After working in a hardware store for six years, Rosi knew he wanted something better. But he didn’t want to work behind a desk like most of his neighbors in South Hills. Searching the web for “electrician’s union,” Rosi found his way to Local 5.
It’s about the money, sure. But in the union, young workers are finding something else as well.
“It’s the brotherhood,” said Dan Rozanski, who attended community college for one year before entering the apprenticeship program. “If I have a question on the job, or if I’ve got a major concern, I have someone to go to, and they’re on my side.”
“Everyone has your back,” said third-year IBEW apprentice Tony Furgiuele, interviewed while working on a new $14 million training center for the Carpenters union, just outside of Pittsburgh. Furgiuele, 27, said that many of his high school friends are working in strip malls selling cell phones or fast food.
“Some of the older guys say that we don’t have the same sense of brotherhood that they did, but I think we mostly do,” said Furgiuele, an Iraq War veteran.
John Myers, his foreman and a 26-year IBEW member, said, “Everyone has the ability to learn, but I want apprentices like Tony who have positive attitudes.”
It’s easier to maintain a positive attitude when you know the union has your back.
“The union is always there for you,” said Bob Yeager, a first-year apprentice who graduated from an automotive repair program at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC), but found wages lacking in the field.
With 3,000 members, Local 5 has been enjoying a lot of work recently, due in large part to Pittsburgh’s technical and hospital sector. Local 5 Training Director Bob Gieder believes that training apprentices from the “head up, not down” in new technologies can help bring union values—and wages—to a new generation of workers in a “green” economy.
Gieder remembers a trustee at the CCAC who was skeptical when he first approached the college about partnering with the school to provide the opportunity for apprentices to earn AA degrees. After several years of success, the trustee apologized for her former opposition, telling him that apprentices who graduate from CCAC are as skilled and valuable to the community as any of the college’s graduates. Local 5 has even gained international exposure, initiating an apprenticeship exchange program with electrical trainees in Great Britain.
“Everyone who walks through the front door” of the training center, Gieder said, “will know that they are joining something that is even larger, a family. That’s what the Brotherhood is all about.”
