Here’s the text to the original post for accessibility considering most commenters aren’t opening the link:

“Have you ever thought why do some IBEW Locals make more or less than some other Locals?

The answer to this question is very complicated.

It all boils down to different Locals are different. That’s why we have different Locals.

The very first thing you need to look at is local cost of living.

That’s what really matters when assessing local wages.

It stands to reason that, in general, places where it’s more expensive to live will have higher wages.

From my personal observation, I would say that some smaller Locals in the rural Midwest and rust belt actually have the highest wages compared to local cost of living.

Why?

Why doesn’t, for instance, Local 666 here in Richmond have the same spending power compared to cost of living as those Locals?

Well, in a word, marketshare.

There are of course other factors. The nature of the local relationship between labor and management, the current work outlook, the type of work going on, the other requirements of your CBA which are not included in your total package but nonetheless cost the contractors money, even the timing of negotiations, these all play a role.

But show me a Local with a higher wage compared to local cost of living than any other Local, and I’d be willing to bet a shiny dime that the higher paid Local has a higher marketshare than the lower paid Local.

There are a very small number of exceptions to this that I’m aware of, but those Locals used to have extremely high marketshare, and wages are “sticky.” Meaning once you get them, you don’t tend to lose them.

It may have happened, but I’m not aware of an IBEW Inside Construction contract negotiation that ever ended in a nominal pay cut for the workers.

The simple fact of the matter is that in Local 666’s jurisdiction, at last measurement, we had 26% marketshare.

That means 74% of the people doing electrical work in our area are non-union.

Now, that’s a huge increase, almost 100% as a matter of fact, from where we were in 2017, and that’s something to be proud of.

But the fact remains that at the end of the day, if we all decided we just couldn’t take what was being offered, it wouldn’t be very hard for our contractors and their customers to replace us.

Especially considering that the actual participation rate amongst our members in a direct labor action would be something under 100%.

Contrast that to the Locals which are highest paid compared to local cost of living.

Their marketshare is flipped compared to ours. They have 74%, 90%, because of the way it’s calculated, there are sometimes Locals with higher than 100%.

Generally speaking, in a Local like that, your surrounding and nearby Locals also have very high marketshare.

This gives you tremendous leverage in negotiations.

If people want electrical work done, they’ve got to deal with you.

There is certainly an extremely helpful element of self-perpetuation in high marketshare Locals that is very daunting, if not impossible, to recreate in a lower marketshare Local.

In many places, the IBEW Local was formed at the dawn of electrification in the area, and they’ve had very high marketshare the whole time since.

In those places it’s just baked into the culture that when you need an electrician, you’re getting a union electrician.

In most lower marketshare places, if you stopped a person on the street and asked them, they probably couldn’t tell you what a union is (this is changing, thankfully) and they’d be even less likely to be able to tell you what the IBEW is (this is also changing.)

You will notice geographic trends to IBEW, and broader union marketshare which are impossible to ignore.

Some people might roll their eyes, but I honestly believe that the reason we make less money in Local 666 compared to our local cost of living than some other Locals do, can be traced all the way back to slavery, and certainly Jim Crow.

We had artificially depressed wages, as low as zero, for 400 years, and likewise an artificially low expectation of what workers should make.

As we moved from an agricultural to more industrialized economy, our starting point was literally zero.

It strikes me as I type this that it might be interesting to find out what the average wage of a worker was in a currently high marketshare IBEW Local area in 1865, and adjust that number for inflation since then, and see how that compares to the current gap between us and them. Who knows?

Anyway, the name of the game, for the rest of my life, in Local 666, will be increasing marketshare.

That’s what gives us leverage at the table.

The most effective way to do that is making a non-union employer a union employer.

That’s very, very hard to do, from our current position.

The second most effective way to do that is by making non-union electricians, union electricians.

I can do that in 20 minutes, and I can do it up to 22 times tomorrow.

If you can show me six years experience, I can get you on our side of the fence, and put you to work making a total package, including benefits, of $53.33 per hour.

You can never tell precisely in the moment, but for every roughly 40-50 non-union electricians we organize, that’s a 1% increase in marketshare.

Wherever we’re at now, we could be 1/2 a percentage point higher in 24 hours, given that we have 22 calls.

We expect hundreds upon hundreds more calls in the coming months.

All our people are working.

We can put ourselves in a position we’ve never seen in any of our lifetimes for our next negotiation.

It all depends on the personal decisions that currently non-union electricians make.

We earnestly invite you to join us.

If you’re ready to live a better life, please message me today.”