In numerous places around the country, there’s never been a better time to be an electrician — but San Francisco isn’t one of them.
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 20 in Dallas grew by more than one-third last year in terms of both membership and hours worked, according to Price Warwick III, its business manager.
The union now has so many people in its apprenticeship program — 560, about double what it had 2½ years ago — that it’s had to hire additional instructors, open up new classrooms and start a second set of classes that run from Tuesdays through Fridays in addition to the ones that go from Mondays through Thursdays, he said.
“Our apprenticeship is growing literally as fast as it can,” Warwick said.
In San Jose and surrounding Santa Clara County, there’s such a shortage of electricians that 700 IBEW workers from around the country are working there, said Javier Casillas, business manager for Local 332 there. The union has 500 apprentices, bringing in 140 just this year to keep pace with the demand, Casillas said.
Fueling much of the demand for electricians around the country lately has been the artificial-intelligence boom and the growth in the number and computing power of the data centers used train and run AI models. Dallas and Santa Clara County are home to two of the nation’s biggest clusters of data centers and each area is seeing substantial growth.
Meta is building a massive new data center in Richland Parish, La. — IBEW Local 446’s territory. In northeastern Louisiana, where Local 446 has 540 members, the union expects one new project site alone is going to need 500 electricians by September and as many as 1,000 in coming years, said Ken Green, the union’s business manager.
With the project paying 50% over the scale pay for the area, the local already has 60 out-of-town IBEW members who have signed up with it to work on it, Green said. The demand for electricians is unprecedented, said Green, who said he’s been in the union since he graduated from high school in 1977.
“I have never seen this much work or even talked about this much work in our area,” he said.
Nationwide, the number of electricians grew from 688,620 in 2019 to 779,800 in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The government agency expects an additional 84,300 electricians in the country by 2033.
The trade is one of the higher-paid blue-collar jobs in the country, with a median hourly wage of about $30. Union electricians in San Francisco get paid much better, with an hourly rate of $91.03 — and more than $140 when benefits are included.
“We’re kind of calling this the new pipeline, the new oil-field-type work,” Green said. “You know, everybody wanted to be a welder and work on the pipe. Now everybody wants to be an electrician and work on data centers.”
But things are quite different in San Francisco.
Those companies and others — such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — are pouring money into building out and equipping data centers across the country. But relatively little of the billions of dollars San Francisco AI companies have raised is going into the pockets of local electricians.
Data centers — such as the Amazon Web Services facility in Boardman, Ore. — create more work for electricians in the nearby area.
Jenny Kane/Associated Press, File
The City is not a data-center hub, and with costly electricity and little spare land, it’s not likely to be, so there’s little demand here for electricians to do that kind of work.
Instead, much of the need for electricians in San Francisco is typically tied to construction work. But with office vacancies at near-record highs, that work has slowed markedly in recent years. While AI companies are starting to expand their office presences in San Francisco, they have yet to put more than a tiny dent in the vacancy rate — or considerably boost demand for electricians.
Local 6 here has had between 1,500 and 1,700 members for the last several years, and it’s presently below 1,600, according to business manager John Doherty. The union has cut back on apprentices, although it’s hoping to ramp up its program later this year, he said.
Meanwhile, unemployment among its members peaked a few months ago at nearly 20% and is still at around 15%, he said. That’s a big change from the situation immediately before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the local was setting records for the number of hours its members worked and it had more than 400 apprentices in its system, he said.
“It’s a tough sector,” Doherty said.
“It seems like more and more, when it rains it pours — there’s opportunities galore — and then when it dries up, it dries up,” he said.
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Duncan Davidson said he’s seen firsthand how things can dry up. A San Francisco resident for 35 years, Davidson worked a variety of low-paying jobs — including as a writer for the Bay Guardian weekly newspaper and a bar bouncer — before a friend suggested he become an electrician, he said. He hadn’t ever considered the idea, but the more he thought about it, the more attractive it sounded.
He joined Local 6’s apprenticeship program in 2014 at the age of 43 — he was an “apprentisaurus,” as he calls it. It seemed like a great time to be getting into the trade. As he recalled it, there were cranes building high-rises all over downtown San Francisco.
“It was like crazy time,” he said.
Looking at all the construction going on, he said he thought, “Oh, [there] will be work for 20 years!”
But everything changed with the onset of the pandemic. After the lockdowns started immediately in the wake of its onset, Duncan was out of work for about three months, he said. Things back picked up, and he went back to work.
He was with a company that specialized in tenant improvements, the work performed when a new office or other commercial space is built out or a previously occupied one is renovated before a corporate tenant moves in. Work started to slow, and the company — which he declined to name — laid him off after a couple of years.
Duncan, who’s an “inside” electrician — someone who specializes in installing outlets and lighting, along with other high-power commercial wiring jobs, said he was out of work for six months before he was hired by another firm that specialized in tenant improvements. He said he thought it was a good opportunity; every electrician he saw working was with that company. But work slowed down for that company too, and he was laid off again three weeks ago.
When union electricians get laid off, they’re supposed to “sign the book” — the local’s list of members who are looking for work. New jobs go to those at the top of the list.
Duncan said he loves his job, but “I’m sick of having to f—ing sign the book,” he said.
“I’m sick of being laid off, but it’s just because there’s no f—ing work,” he said.
Just 50 miles to the south, Milagros Gomez described a completely different experience as an electrician.
Gomez started her apprenticeship eight years ago. She got into the trade after going to college and realizing it wasn’t for her and then working for Walmart, she said.
Milagros Gomez, a foreman for Rosendin Electric and a member of IBEW Local 332, shows off a branch conduit and a hand bender at the Rosendin workshop in San Jose.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Becoming an electrician was kind of a natural place for her to end up; her father is an electrician. While she knew that growing up, she didn’t really realize what the job entailed until she talked to him after her college experience. After he told her how much money he made, she was convinced to try it.
Gomez has been with Rosendin Electric, a big local electrical contractor, for six years, since before she even finished her apprenticeship. She’s been working on data centers pretty much the whole time. Not only has she never been laid off, she’s now a foreman with the company, overseeing other electricians, she said.
The data-center operators in the area have been continuously adding new facilities or upgrading their older ones, she said. Normally, Santa Clara County would have about one or two data-center projects going at a time, according to Casillas, Local 332’s business manager. But things started picking up about two years ago, and right now, there are five such facilities being built in the county and another four in development, he said.
Much of that demand for computing power is coming from the need to run AI applications and models, Casillas said. Because area technology companies keep coming up with new innovations, he doesn’t think the demand for electricians in the area is going to dry up anytime soon.
“As long as we can keep delivering power and the demand for it, we’ll be in a good position for now and into the future,” Casillas said.
Gomez has benefited from that demand for computing power by area companies.
Since she started, Gomez said, she’s has helped out on three different data centers that were being built. Lately, she’s been working on a project to bring more power to an older data center so it can better handle customers’ computing demands, she said.
The demand for computing power “means more work for me, so that makes me happy,” she said.
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