About Us

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is a labor union representing nearly 875,000 workers and retirees in the electrical industry in the United States, Canada, Panama, Guam, and Wake Island as well as several Caribbean island nations. In particular, the IBEW  represents Inside Wiremen in the construction industry, 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. Established in 1891 shortly after homes and businesses in the United States began receiving electricity, its first Grand President was founder Henry Miller. The International president is now Kenneth W. Cooper. The IBEW is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. 

The IBEW was born 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 in publication since then. The Nashville local, then Local 5, sent a representative, N. Duff. At the 1899 convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the union's name was officially changed to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. By this time, Pittsburgh, PA had claimed the Local 5 designation.  

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. 

The Nashville Local 429 was organized in 1916, after an attempt in 1902 to organize as the LU 129. More than a century later, the IBEW 429 still stands in Nashville, Tennessee.  

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 nuclear power course in 1966. 

Today, the IBEW conducts apprenticeship programs for electricians, linemen, and VDV (voice, data, and video) 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." In Canadian jurisdictions, the IBEW does not deliver apprenticeship training but does conduct supplemental training for government-trained apprentices and journeypersons, often at no or little cost to its members. The IBEW local 353 Toronto requires all apprentices to be registered with the JAC (Joint Apprenticeship Council) for a number of safety courses, pre-apprenticeship training, pre-trade school courses, supplementary training, as well as pre-exam courses. 

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 2025 stands at about 873,000.