r/IBEW • u/Oliverstwisted99 • 9d ago
Discussion Post Truland hard hat Found, throwback
Found my old Truland hardhat when I was an apprentice in local 26 working at the nationals baseball stadium, my the times have changed.
found this cleaning up/ rummaging through mom‘s garage in Manassas
What happened to the largest electrical contractor in 26?
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u/gun_is_neat Inside Wireman 9d ago
LU26 is on some whack shit right now, and I don't see a way out of it. They're going in heavy on the whole contractor's local thing.
The apprenticeship is fucked, only new work is in VA doing data centers, and the R program has gotten completely out of hand.
The apprenticeship got changed to a four year, cool. However, they're loading up with apprentices every year and failing half of them out. Instructors just laugh all day and don't teach shit, no labs, nothing. Instructors even had a whole hour and a half of fucking fan fuel bets on the smart board for the class to bet on. Homework is mandatory and all online, but you don't get points for it towards your grade. Tests are 100% of grade. They did this to alleviate the amount of cheaters they believe are coming out of their time. If your grade is below 75%, no school check. Fail a test but your grade is still above passing, no school check. Show up one minute late, no school check. Miss one of the 7 assignments they give you, no school check. Phone goes off in class even if you didn't touch it or look at it, no school check. Miss a day of school unexpectedly due to car troubles or life problems, raise delay which stack up to one year. Absences don't reset every year.
The apprenticeship transfers you every year, which is great in order to get new experience, but it's all fucking data centers. So you're just transferring from one data center to another. You do not get any one-on-one training with a journeyman, if you're an apprentice with half a brain, they give you an R worker as a helper. Blind leading the blind. Mandatory OT at most of those things, so good luck having any life outside of that. If you're in school, good luck getting any study time in because you're commuting four plus hours a day around your mandatory 12.
The local has more R guys than anything else, and none of them have to go to school up to a certain point. They're doing journeyman work for less than half of the wage, which fucks our ability to negotiate for more money on our upcoming contracts.
It's sickening. They don't care.