---- BURLINGTON, IOWA - SOUTHEAST IOWA

INTERNATIONAL

BROTHERHOOD OF

ELECTRICAL

WORKERS

Representing skilled inside construction electricians across a 13 county jurisdiction in southeast Iowa.  Built on solidarity.  Powered by craft.
 

The Founding Era (1891–1901)

The IBEW was formally chartered by the AFL on November 21, 1891, born from a gathering of wiremen and linemen who had met at the 1890 St. Louis Exposition. The hazards of early electrical work were severe — early death rates for electrical construction ran upwards of 50% per year, and the average working life of a lineman was three years. Pay was desperately low. The union organized specifically to establish safety standards, formalize apprenticeship training, and win wages commensurate with the genuine skill and mortal risk of the work.

The IBEW has been in Southeast Iowa since 1897 — just six years after the Brotherhood's founding. The original Burlington local covered inside construction, outside construction, utility, telephone, and electrical manufacturing, making it a broad-jurisdiction local typical of the era. Burlington at the time was a thriving Mississippi River industrial and railroad city, and the local's early establishment reflects how central the region already was to the Midwest's electrical industry.

Ottumwa's inside wiremen organized just four years later. IBEW Local 173 was chartered on April 10, 1901 — Ottumwa then a booming rail hub, meatpacking center, and industrial city. Local 173 would operate as an independent local for 83 years before its eventual amalgamation into Local 13 in 1984.

The Keokuk Hydroelectric Dam (1910–1913)

This is the single most historically significant construction project in Local 13's entire history — and one of the most remarkable electrical projects in American history, full stop.

Construction of the Keokuk Dam formally began on January 10, 1910. Engineer Hugh L. Cooper managed what became the largest construction site in the world at the time. The 2,500-person workforce removed 1.7 million tons of rock and earth, used 3 million bags of cement, and stretched the dam nearly a mile (4,649 feet) across the Mississippi between Keokuk, Iowa and Hamilton, Illinois.

The last concrete was poured on May 31, 1913. On July 1, 1913, the first electricity was generated and sent to St. Louis via a revolutionary 110-kV transmission line — the first long-distance high-voltage power transmission line in American history. The plant's 15 generators made it the largest-capacity single powerhouse in the world at completion. Burlington's industrial electrical system was tied to this project from its earliest days.

Local 13's official history identifies the Keokuk plant as "one of the first large projects that the members of the IBEW worked on." The inside wiremen from Burlington and the broader southeast Iowa jurisdiction were the primary labor force for the electrical installation — wiring the massive powerhouse, connecting the generators, and running the high-voltage switchgear. The plant remains the only commercial hydroelectric facility on the Mississippi River and is operated today by Ameren Missouri.

The Open Shop Era & The CIR (1919–1930s)

Coming out of World War I, the IBEW faced a coordinated national employer campaign to eliminate union contracts. The IBEW's response was institutionally decisive. In 1919, the union and the National Electrical Contractors Association jointly established the Council on Industrial Relations (CIR) — a bipartite body with equal labor and management representation holding binding authority to resolve collective bargaining disputes. This mechanism largely protected the IBEW's construction jurisdiction from the devastating strike activity that crippled other building trades throughout the 1920s. The CIR remains in operation today.

World War II & the Cold War: Iowa Ordnance Plant (1941–1975)

One of the most historically significant — and least publicly discussed — chapters for the Burlington locals was the massive wartime industrial buildup on the western edge of the city. The Iowa Ordnance Plant began production in 1941 to manufacture tank and artillery ammunition near Middletown, just outside Burlington. The facility was enormous: 767 buildings, 282 ammunition igloos, and over 240 miles of internal roads and rail. At peak operation, over 40,000 civilians worked there. The electrical construction demands of a facility this size would have generated years of sustained IBEW work.

After World War II, the plant was recommissioned in 1947 under classified circumstances. From 1949 to 1951, the Burlington plant was the sole nuclear weapons assembly facility in the United States — the only place in the country where atomic bombs were being assembled, disassembled, modified, and tested. Nuclear weapons operations continued at the facility until 1975, when responsibilities were transferred to the Pantex plant in Texas. The scale and specialized electrical requirements of nuclear weapons assembly make IBEW participation during this era highly probable.

The Big Amalgamation: Local 173 into Local 13 (1984)

On September 1, 1984, IBEW Local 173 in Ottumwa — the inside wiremen's local that had operated independently since April 10, 1901 — formally amalgamated into IBEW Local 13 in Burlington. This single event created the modern Local 13 as it exists today: a combined Burlington-Ottumwa jurisdiction covering thirteen counties in southeast Iowa.

The timing was not coincidental. It came during the deepest trough of the construction industry's open-shop era. The severe 1982–83 recession had devastated construction employment nationally, and IBEW membership had declined sharply from a peak of approximately 1 million in 1972. Amalgamating smaller locals into larger combined jurisdictions was the IBEW International's deliberate strategy: consolidating organizational resources, maintaining bargaining strength, and ensuring locals could sustain a functioning business manager and apprenticeship program through lean years.

For Ottumwa — which had lost industrial employment as meatpacking and manufacturing contracted — combining with Burlington created a more viable organizational unit. The amalgamation of Local 173 into Local 13 is not a story of decline. It is a story of adaptation.

Local 13 Today

Today, Local 13 represents over 350 construction and maintenance electricians across thirteen counties in southeast Iowa. The local's commitment to broader labor solidarity is a defining part of its character — not a policy, but a practice. When fellow workers in the region walk picket lines, Local 13 members show up. An injury to one corner of the labor movement is an injury to all of it.

That instinct reflects an understanding built over 125 years — that the wages and conditions organized workers enjoy exist because someone, at some point, walked a line and held it. Local 13 members carry that history with them when they stand alongside fellow union workers, and they bring the same expectation when it's their turn: that solidarity is not a sentiment but a commitment you show up to honor in person.