By Pam McFarland

Despite a shift in federal government that has left it less friendly to labor unions than the previous administration, the mood at the annual conference of the Ironworkers union and its signatory contractors, held in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 24-26, was upbeat. Major topics included the rollout of a new mental health and suicide prevention website for IMPACT (Ironworkers Management Progressive Action Trust) members and their families as well as opportunities presented by megaprojects and mass timber. 

Several speakers on a panel of owner's representatives, which included leaders from U.S. Steel, Ford Motor Co., General Motors and the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, voiced their strong support for working with union craftworkers and their signatory contractors, but noted that the need for skilled workers will continue to grow as megaprojects funded by such legislation as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act continue to move forward. 

Eric Grubb, Ford’s director of construction, said one of his biggest fears in not having enough workers for projects in coming years. “I think in the next five to 10 years we're going to lose a lot of people, and ... we have lots of mega projects coming up. We're going to need more.”

He noted however, that IMPACT’s development of a team of workers who travel to locations needing workers a few years ago helped avert shortages at new multibillion dollar Ford EV battery plants currently under construction in Kentucky. The traveling workforce program “ensures that we all get the trained professional people that we need. And it was fantastic,” Grubb said. 

Brian Watkins, director of facilities management at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that his experience has been that union contractors “always deliver. It makes it so much easier when you can point to past projects and know that we've seen [that] over and over again with our union contractors. They always deliver, and that builds that credibility.”