New leaders of the railroad union and its labor-management group said they plan to emphasize strong organizing to grow their ranks and see strong American growth opportunities for organized labor and contractors in markets such as nuclear power, artificial intelligence and massive lumber construction, according to comments at the union’s annual IMPACT conference in Las Vegas.
Kevin Bryenton, who took over as CEO on January 1, told ENR he was “in step” with predecessors Eric Dean, who stepped down in December after a decade, and Walter Wise, who held the title from 2011 to 2015 and died on February 12.
“There is no deviation from the plans they had and what they wanted to do,” Bryenton said. The main priorities championed by Dean and Kevin Hilton, who previously led the Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust (IMPACT), included increasing the labor market share of large megaprojects and creating greater awareness of mental health issues, substance use and the availability of support for workers and families.
Aaron Bast, now CEO of the ironworkers labor management group IMPACT and former business director/secretary-treasurer of Local 5 in Washington, DC, told ENR that he also hopes to build on existing initiatives.
Organization will be a primary focus, Bryenton said. Both locally and in Ontario, Bryenton drove increases in union membership and apprenticeships, and hopes to replicate that success. “If we want to grow, we have to stay relevant” and find more “opportunities for our people … with more contractors and more diversified work for them.”
While the Trump administration has seen opportunities for unions shrink on projects funded under the Biden-era Jobs and Infrastructure Investment Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPs Act, the labor shortage is real and expected to worsen in the coming decades, said speakers from several major corporate project owners, including US Steel, Eli Power Lilly, Microsoft Generation and Ontario.
Patrick O’Brien, director of government affairs and communications for nuclear power developer Holtec International, said he expects opportunities to be plentiful for the foreseeable future. “The energy landscape has completely changed [over the past] 11 years,” he said, noting that the impacts of climate change, a push for decarbonization, growing concerns about grid reliability and the proliferation of artificial intelligence have “realized huge demand.”
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Not only are significant percentages of the current fleet of nuclear power plants nearing the end of their useful life, but also “if the goal is to get rid of fossil fuels, [we’re] those baseload resources will also need to be created.” Holtec is currently working with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reopen the shuttered Palisades nuclear power plant at a site in Michigan that will also include three small SMR-300 reactors, he said.
Massive wood workers needed
Solid wood projects, especially cross-laminated timber hybrid buildings, are another growth area, according to Brandon Brooks, program director of Woodworks, the Wood Products Council’s solid wood construction management program. He stressed that ironworkers should not worry about losing jobs with the construction of more massive timber projects.
“Solid wood is not replacing our workers. What it’s doing is just changing the way you apply your skills to a different material and some structures.”
Mark Bridges, director of Continuum Capital, talked about using artificial intelligence to “augment, not replace” project workers, helping underperformers or inexperienced ones accelerate the learning curve to work more productively. “There is an opportunity to look at training and applications of these tools to help people as part of the learning process and as part of training in companies … to use these tools to increase production and overcome non-union competition,” he said.
Bast noted that IMPACT has used AI to translate its curricula into multiple languages and incorporated it into training materials to prepare learners for the future workforce.
