By Leo Herbert
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is full of democratic machinery. Per its Constitution and pattern bylaws, members may elect local officers, introduce motions, send delegates to conventions, and amend the laws of the union. On paper, an IBEW member possesses substantial rights. But a member who enters a union meeting alone, without prior preparation, relationships, or an organization capable of actually carrying an idea beyond one room, will quickly discover the gap between possessing a democratic right and possessing the power to use it.
That gap doesn’t depend on corruption or bad actors. Full time officers and staff deal with union business every day, so naturally they develop a great deal of experience and institutional memory. Rank-and-file members encounter that same machinery only intermittently, usually after long hours of work and alongside the demands of ordinary life. Even in a healthy local, this creates an imbalance. The members may possess authority in theory, but they remain far less capable of using it in practice.
The Caucus of Rank-and-file Electrical Workers, or CREW, grew out of an attempt to change that balance. Five rank-and-file electrical workers founded the caucus in February 2023, and within its first year it had grown to 70 members across more than 20 union locals, with 5 formally established chapters. Today it approaches 500 members across the US and Canada, with 21 formal chapters.
The caucus began as a way for scattered rank-and-file electricians to find one another. These connections soon raised a key question: how do you turn communication between dissatisfied or ambitious members into an organization capable of meaningful action?
Large group chats and Facebook groups can put electrical workers from different parts of the country in conversation with one another, but conversation alone does not create organization. If rank-and-file members wanted lasting influence in their unions, they needed structures through which experiences could accumulate, and new generations could learn how to carry the work forward.
We later discovered that one IBEW reformer had reached almost exactly the same conclusion forty years earlier.
Getting Back to Organization
Charles Delgado was the business manager of IBEW Local 527 in Galveston, Texas. He ran for international president, challenged convention practices, and pursued changes through the courts.
Looking back on those experiences at a 1985 Association for Union Democracy conference on democracy in the building trades, Delgado arrived at a blunt conclusion:
“I think the only way that we can implement democratic principles in building trades unions is to organize a network for communication and education of the
rank-and-file members.”[1]
What stands out in Delgado’s remarks is where he located the missing piece. He had already worked through elections, convention procedure, constitutional reform, and litigation. Victories achieved through one channel often remained isolated unless members themselves had a way to stay connected and build on them.
The network he imagined was not merely a vehicle for reform-minded officers to coordinate with one another. Delgado wanted information, knowledge, and power to reach the rank-and-file. Members could then question their local leadership in an organized way, while local leaders would face pressure to demand answers from the international union. In his words, change had to come through “pressure from the bottom up.”
Delgado’s comments could have easily been written for our own time and prefigure strikingly CREW’s early organizing roadblocks:
“If we ever hope to bring about democracy in our union, we’re going to have to do the network thing. It’s the only thing that I think will work. I’ve tried everything else, and I’m not one of the guys that intends to give up. I’m just trying to be effective. Through a process of elimination we have to weed out the things that don’t work and get back to basics, get back to organization.”[2]
Technology now makes simple connection easier. An electrical worker in the smallest, most isolated local can meet with members thousands of miles away without ever leaving the couch. Documents that once had to be mailed or hunted down can be passed around in seconds. But easier communication has not eliminated the organizational problem Delgado identified. A busy group chat can give the appearance of tremendous activity while accomplishing very little.
The challenge is not simply getting members into contact. It is turning that contact into coordinated action, deep relationships, and lasting organization.
The Particular Problem of the IBEW
The structure of the IBEW makes clear the need for an organization of this nature. The Brotherhood is organized primarily through semi-autonomous local unions. In construction locals, bargaining is usually conducted with local chapters of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), rather than through large national agreements. These negotiations almost uniformly happen behind closed doors, with little-to-no member input or accountibility, and often do not require a ratification vote. Electricians on jobsites in different jurisdictions (and even in the same local union) often spend years confronting nearly identical problems without ever comparing what they have learned, or coordinating on a meaningful scale.
In construction, the temporary nature of the work adds another layer. Jobsites form and disappear, and members move among contractors or travel between jurisdictions. A crew that works together for a year may scatter when the project ends. The relationships workers develop on one job do not automatically become part of the lasting life of the union.
For many electricians, the most regular point of contact with the union may be the hiring hall, the apprenticeship program, or the collective bargaining agreement. None of that, by itself, creates an organized rank-and-file.
The average union meeting illustrates the distinction. Suppose twenty members believe their local needs better steward training. They can attend the meeting, speak, vote, and introduce a motion. But did they first talk with existing stewards, identify where the system was failing, and work out a practical proposal with coworkers across several jobs? The official structure gives members a place to decide, but a rank-and-file caucus can help them arrive at that decision together and carry it through.
Why a Separate Caucus?
This raises the obvious question: if the IBEW already has meetings, elections, committees, and officers, why does CREW need to exist separately?
The official structure and an independent rank-and-file organization do different jobs. The official union has to administer the union’s business. Agreements must be negotiated and enforced. Members need representation. The hiring hall has to function Monday morning. These tasks are necessary, and they create their own pressures on the union.
The caucus has a different responsibility: maintaining an organized center of initiative among the membership itself. It can keep questions alive that the administration may not have time to pursue: why participation has weakened, what another local learned from a similar fight, or what reforms could give members a stronger voice.
That independence does not require de facto hostility toward union officers. CREW members regularly cooperate with union officials when worthwhile work can be done together. Some officers share our goals and possess experience and knowledge younger organizers need. The important thing is that rank-and-file independence means retaining the ability to make that judgment ourselves.
A caucus that automatically opposes leadership becomes sterile, and one that disappears into leadership whenever sympathetic people win office stops being a rank-and-file caucus at all. Permanent opposition can become its own kind of dependence, with the caucus defining its politics in reaction to leadership rather than developing its own judgment about what the union and its members actually need. It also risks teaching members how to criticize the union without learning how to take responsibility for it. The harder task is to retain enough independence to support good decisions, oppose bad ones, and keep organizing under either friendly or hostile administrations. That is what it means to preserve an independent center of gravity among the members.
The IBEW itself actually sets an important precedent here. The Electrical Workers Minority Caucus grew out of Black members organizing against discrimination within the Brotherhood. Its early history included sharp conflict with the International and threatened direct action at the 1974 convention. Over time, the EWMC developed leaders and influenced IBEW programs and constitutional policy. Today, the Brotherhood openly celebrates that history. International President (IP) Kenneth Cooper has described the EWMC as “a group of members living the principles of this union.”[3]
CREW and the EWMC are not the same organization. But the EWMC established the principle that independent organization by members is not organization “against the union”. It’s a way for members to develop the capacity to participate in it more effectively.
A rank-and-file caucus exists because formal representation is not always enough, and because some union structures place real limits on how directly members can exercise power. Caucuses can help members better utilize the institutions available to them while building the organization necessary to challenge and improve those institutions when they prove inadequate. IP Cooper himself described himself as “first and foremost an organizer” and said that “organizing is everything to the IBEW.”[4]
He has argued that organizing is the responsibility of every member concerned about the union’s future.
We agree.
But if organizing is every member’s responsibility, members need places where they can learn how to do it.
Beyond Winning Elections
Independence and continuity also distinguish our caucus from simply another election slate. Electing better officers can have an enormous impact, but winning office changes the position reformers occupy. A new business manager may have run because they wanted to change how the local operates, yet they now inherit responsibility for administering the structure they hoped
to reform. Contractors, staff, legal obligations, and emergencies all compete for attention, while many existing procedures have to keep functioning simply because the union has to function. This tension does not automatically mean betrayal or co-optation. Much of it is simply the reality of administration.
The danger comes when the movement that won the election treats victory as the end of organizing. If members go home and leave the hall to run the union, the administration once again becomes the only continuously organized body. An independent caucus interrupts that cycle by remaining organized before, during, and after elections, capable of supporting (and holding to account) good leaders, correcting bad ones, and continuing to develop new ones.
Learning to Take Responsibility
Building an independent caucus does not automatically solve all the problems our union faces. CREW has had its own growing pains as work has naturally concentrated around the most experienced or dependable members. The answer is not simply to let the experienced people handle everything. New members have to be brought into real responsibility. That can be slower and messier than leaving the work with the people who already know how to do it but, as with the rest of our trade, the mistakes are part of the education.
This is one of the most valuable things a caucus can provide. It’s a training ground where rank-and-file workers learn leadership by practicing it. A member who begins by talking with a few coworkers can learn to chair a meeting, organize a campaign, and eventually develop others. That experience changes a member’s relationship to the union. Someone who has helped build something is more invested in what happens to it. Developing new leaders from the shop floor is therefore not separate from union democracy. It is one of the ways democracy becomes real.
Making Members the Union
The IBEW has set an ambitious goal of returning to one million members before the end of the decade, just as demand for electrical workers is rising at a pace not seen in generations. This extraordinary opportunity makes the distinction between recruiting and organizing impossible to ignore.
Reaching a million cannot mean just adding names to the rolls. If we bring in hundreds of thousands of workers without doing the harder work of bringing them meaningfully into the life of the union, teaching them how it works, and giving them a sense of responsibility for its future, we will have recruited on a historic scale without organizing to the same degree.
We want every new member to understand that difference. The IBEW cannot remain, in their eyes, simply a temp service with good wages and benefits. It cannot just be something that finds work, negotiates raises, and otherwise exists somewhere down at the hall. We need members who ask what they can do to grow the union, who stand with and organize the people working beside them, and who believe that what happens to their locals is their responsibility.
This is where we hope that an organized rank-and-file can make an enormous contribution to our union. The coming growth of the electrical industry can produce more than a larger IBEW. It can produce a generation of new shop-floor leaders and organizers. If we can combine the IBEW’s resources and institutional strength with hundreds of thousands of members who genuinely see organizing together as their own personal duty, we have an opportunity to leave this period not just larger, but more powerful than we have ever been.
To CREW, Delgado’s call to “get back to basics, get back to organization” is not nostalgia. It is a challenge suited to this moment. One that we seek to meet.
If Delgado was right, the measure of this period will not be whether we reach a million members, but what those million members learn and achieve together.
[1] Charles Delgado, “Running a Local,” in Union Democracy in the Construction Trades (Association for Union Democracy, 1985)
[2] Delgado, Ibid
[3]“A More Perfect Union: Reflections on 50 Years of the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus,” International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, March 2024.
[4] Kenneth W. Cooper, “Record-Breaking Year,” The Electrical Worker, September 2025.
Quotations from Charles Delgado are drawn from Charles Delgado, “Running a Local,” in Union Democracy in the Construction Trades (Association for Union Democracy, 1985), pp. 20–22.
Quotations from International President Kenneth W. Cooper and discussion of current IBEW organizing goals and the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus are drawn from official IBEW publications:
Kenneth W. Cooper, “Record-Breaking Year,” The Electrical Worker, September 2025. “Honoring Outstanding Organizers After a Historic Year of Growth,” The Electrical Worker, October
2025.
“A More Perfect Union: Reflections on 50 Years of the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus,” International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, March 2024.
Kenneth W. Cooper, “Protecting Our Work,” The Electrical Worker, July 2025.
By Leo Herbert is a International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Journeyman Inside Wireman.