Session Type:
Convention, Education
Location
Washington State Convention Center
Room Number: 620
Available Dates & Times
Description
This session will feature a panel of contractors that will discuss how they are successfully use CW/CEs to gain new work that would have otherwise gone to non-signatory contractors. In some cases, this may be smaller work, but not exclusively. These contractors will share how they have used the CW/CE classifications to compete on work that was previously out of reach for the union contractor. On many of these projects, they find themselves being the only union electrical bidder on the job.
Speaker
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Geary Higgins
Geary M. Higgins, Vice President of Labor Relations for the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), has the primary responsibility for establishing, maintaining, and repairing the relationships with all levels of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and represents NECA with the IBEW in joint programs on a national level. Higgins has worked in the construction industry for 30-plus years.
His association with NECA began in 1983 as a field representative for the NECA’s Eastern Region. In 1984, Higgins moved to NECA’s national office as an assistant director of Labor Relations, and in 1986, he assumed the position of NECA’s executive director of Labor Relations. Today, as Vice President, Labor Relations, Higgins is a member of NECA’s executive committee; treasurer of the Council on Industrial Relations, a national arbitration body for the electrical construction industry; and an executive committee member and treasurer of the National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, the committee responsible for the training of all union journeymen and apprentices in the electrical construction industry. He also serves as a trustee for the National Labor-Management Cooperation Committee for the electrical construction industry and a trustee for the NECA-IBEW Family Medical Health Care Plan.
Higgins earned his degree in business administration from Clarion State University in Clarion, Penn. He and his wife Gail reside in Waterford, Virginia.