SPECIAL REPORT · LABOR RELATIONS

IBEW “Job Blitz” Targets Columbus

Job Sites: What Merit-
Shop Contractors Need to Know
 

Bottom line for employers: The IBEW is bringing organizers from across its six-state Fourth District to Columbus this month to canvass active job sites, hand your electricians a flyer, and offer them same-day placement with a union contractor. The plumbers and pipefitters (UA) and the Ohio State Building Trades are watching to see whether it works before doing the same. This is a recruiting raid on your workforce first and an organizing campaign second. Organizers standing on the public right-of-way at your gate cannot be stopped. Organizers on the site itself can be removed only by whoever controls the property, and your own employees keep the right to talk union on their breaks. The leaflet is not the real risk. A foreman’s reaction to it is.

What we know about the Columbus blitz

The plan surfaced on September 3, when Dorsey Hager, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the  Columbus/Central Ohio Building & Construction Trades Council, described it on the America’s Work Force Union Podcast. In his words, the IBEW is “coming to Columbus and doing a huge, what they’re calling job blitz, where they’re going to have organizers from all over the Fourth District hitting job sites, blanketing, leafletting, flyering a lot of those folks that are working on those job sites and letting them know that there’s immediate opportunities if they want to come and join the unions.” The leafleting will be followed by “an all-day session with contractors and union reps” where workers “can come, have any of their questions answered … and they’ll be able to place them directly with a contractor.”

Hager added that “if this goes good, I know the UA is thinking about copying the concept,” and that he has “already been in initial conversations with President Bobby Cole and Executive Secretary Mark Douglas and the State Building Trades to do this on a council-wide level.”

What has not been published: dates, participating locals, headcount, or target sites. As of September 7, IBEW Local 683’s website and September calendar show nothing about a blitz, and no Columbus news outlet has covered it. Hager said he would give an update on his next monthly segment, which puts the next public word in early October. Assume the blitz is happening in the meantime and that you will not get advance notice.

One data point worth watching. On Thursday, September 3, a union-side recruiter promoted a “hiring event” in Reynoldsburg: 14 IBEW signatory contractors in one room from 3 to 8 p.m., advertised starting pay of $41–$46 an hour plus benefits, free food and a free pair of Klein pliers for anyone with proof of three years’ experience, and “no commitment — show up, compare your options, and find out exactly what your experience is worth.” The Ohio AFL-CIO shared it. Nobody has officially tied that event to the blitz, but it is exactly the format Hager described, and it tells you the pitch your people will hear.

How a job blitz works: the IBEW playbook

A job blitz is not new. What is new is the scale and the money behind it. The IBEW reports it added more than 34,000 members in 2026, its largest one-year gain in over 50 years, to reach roughly 908,000, with a stated goal of one million members before 2030. Locals 683 (Columbus inside) and 1105 (Newark, which covers New Albany) are described by the Building Trades as two of the fastest-growing IBEW locals in North America. Central Ohio building-trades hours have gone from about 4 million a year a decade ago to more than 18 million in 2025, with roughly 40 percent of those hours on data centers. The union halls cannot fill the calls. Your journeymen are the supply.

The blitz model the Fourth District is bringing to Columbus has a track record:

• Ohio, October 2025. The Fourth District ran an “IBEW Job Blitz in Ohio” with seven teams drawn from locals including 129 (Lorain) and 306 (Akron). By the union’s own count the teams visited 78 job sites across three jurisdictions in one week and held four “top-down” conversations with contractor owners.
• Dallas–Fort Worth, March 29–April 2, 2026. Eighty-three organizers and volunteers from five IBEW districts leafleted non-union job sites and knocked on the doors of licensed journeymen. Applications were taken on smartphones on the spot. The week ended with a job fair at the Local 20 hall: about 500 applicants, color-coded badges by classification, contractors hiring by scanning a QR code, and nearly 100 wiremen hired that night. Local 20 added 440 members in April, the most in its history for a single month.
• Baltimore, June 2026. The Fourth District staged a blitz during its Progress Meeting with roughly 115 participants from all of its locals, including three International Vice Presidents and IBEW President Kenneth Cooper. The stated goal: “get on as many of these job sites as we can, make as many contacts as we can, leave good impressions on the non-union electricians.” The IBEW’s takeaway for its locals was blunt: “build a plan, bring members together, and conduct a blitz in your own jurisdiction.”
• The older template. IBEW organizers described the Florida model in 2008 the same way: “make unannounced visits to jobsites, find the electricians, hand out fliers, and then quickly leave,” then invite everyone to a hotel-ballroom “industry night” with signatory contractors. The Fifth District’s 2015 “Industry Night Blitz” across Louisiana and Alabama used GPSrouted site lists and visited 156 non-union shops.

Two tracks, run at the same time. “Bottom-up” means recruiting your electricians directly into the hall with a wage sheet and a job. “Top-down” means visiting you, the owner, and pitching a signatory agreement so you can keep your crew and get access to the hall. Blitz teams do both. If an organizer asks for a meeting with ownership, that is the top-down call. Organizers use a mobile app (Action Builder) to map every active job in the jurisdiction and log every contact, so assume they already know where your crews are.

The UA version. The United Association runs a formal national blitz program with the Mechanical Contractors Association. MCAA’s own description: “you will visit jobsites, supply houses, gas stations, offices of non-union contractors, and other areas that are frequented by non-union mechanical and plumbing employees.” Week-long blitzes bring in organizers from around the country to saturate a market, with the local following up on leads for months. The 2026 calendar ends in Des Moines (October 4–9); 2027 stops are Houston, San Diego, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. No Ohio blitz is on the national UA schedule. A Columbus effort would be a Local 189 initiative, and Hager says it is being considered.

Scheduled locations and trades: confirmed vs. not

Here is the current picture. Nothing in the “Not yet published” column has been announced by any union; we will update this report when it is.



The law: can they leaflet your job site?

Short answer: from the street, yes. On the site, only if whoever controls the property lets them. Here is how the rules break down.

1. The public right-of-way belongs to them

A public sidewalk, the shoulder of a public road, or the public approach to your gate is not yours to police. Organizers may stand there, hand out flyers, and talk to anyone who stops. The only limits are ordinary traffic, obstruction, and safety ordinances. Most blitz leafleting happens at shift start and lunch at exactly these spots, because the union knows it.

2. Private property: no right of access, but the exclusion must come from the right party 

Non-employee union organizers have no statutory right to enter private property to reach your workers. The Supreme Court settled that: access is required only where employees are so isolated (the classic example is a remote logging camp) that the union has no reasonable way to reach them. A Columbus job site with a gate, a parking area, and workers who go home every night does not qualify.

The catch is who does the excluding. Under the Board’s property-interest rule, an employer may eject organizers only if it holds a property right under state law that allows it to exclude people. The owner has that right. A general contractor with control of the site usually has it by contract. A subcontractor with nothing more than a license to perform its scope of work generally does not, and a sub that throws organizers off a site it does not control commits an unfair labor practice. Before the blitz arrives, know for each active project who controls the property and what that party’s policy on solicitors is.
 

3. Enforce it consistently

If organizers are excluded, the rule has to be applied evenly. Letting charities, food trucks, and vendors on site does not open the door to the union, but letting other advocacy or organizational groups solicit while barring the IBEW does. A property holder that excludes the union also cannot single it out for different treatment than it gives any other outside group doing the same kind of activity.
 

4. Ohio trespass law is available, with limits

Ohio criminal trespass is a fourth-degree misdemeanor. It reaches someone who enters or stays on land without privilege, enters a fenced or posted site, or fails to leave after being told to. The federal courts have held that a property owner’s state-law trespass remedies survive when a union enters private property. Two practical limits: the demand to leave must come from the party with the property right, and Columbus-area police routinely treat a peaceful organizer on a construction site as a civil matter and decline to remove anyone. Post and fence the site, give actual notice, and document it. Do not expect a squad car to solve the problem.
 

5. Leafleting is not picketing, and the picketing rules will not help you

Handing out flyers is treated as speech, not coercion. The Supreme Court held that peaceful handbilling directed at a neutral does not violate the secondary boycott provisions of the Act, and the Board has since held that stationary banners and inflatable rats are not picketing either. The rules you may have heard about for shared construction sites, the Moore Dry Dock standards, reserved gates, and the 30-day cap on recognitional picketing in Section 8(b)(7)(C), all regulate picketing. A job blitz is a leafleting operation. Those rules matter only if the campaign escalates to a picket line, and if it does, a properly posted and policed reserved-gate system is your first move. Call us before the signs go up, not after.


The law: can they talk to your workers?
 

1. Off the site, without limit

Nothing in federal or Ohio law prevents a union from offering your employee a job. Organizers may call, text, visit homes, message on social media, and work the supply house, the gas station, and the lunch truck. A non-compete or non-solicit agreement you have with an employee does not bind the union. And a handshake “no-poach” understanding among competing contractors is an antitrust problem for you, not protection from the hall.
 

2. On the site: the fence line is theirs, the inside is the property holder’s

Organizers may talk to your crews from the public side of the fence all day. Inside the fence, the same property-interest rules described above apply. Even where the owner or GC excludes organizers, the exclusion does not stop your own workers from walking out to the gate on a break.
 

3. Your own employees keep their rights on your site

Your employees may talk about the union with each other on non-working time (breaks, lunch, before and after shift) anywhere on the site, including work areas. They may hand out literature on non-working time in non-working areas. You may ban distribution in active work areas at all times, and you may require that all solicitation take place on non-working time. Two drafting rules: say “working time,” never “working hours” or “company time,” and apply the rule to every subject, not just unions. Work rules are still judged under Stericycle (2023), which asks whether an employee could read the rule as chilling union activity. The General Counsel has asked the Board to scrap that test, but until it does, draft to it.
 

4. Salts: they can apply, and you can only say no for neutral reasons

A blitz can also plant organizers on your payroll. A paid union organizer who applies for a job is an “employee” under the Act, and refusing to hire someone because of union affiliation is unlawful. The good news is that the employer-side protections remain in place: the Board must prove a salt was a genuine applicant and to prove how long he would actually have stayed before it can award backpay, and General Counsel Memo 25-08 (July 2025) tells the Regions to enforce those requirements. Hire on your written criteria, document them, apply them to everyone, and run every new hire through E-Verify as Ohio’s construction E-Verify law (H.B. 246, effective March 20, 2026) now requires.
 

What you can and cannot do when the flyers show up

Every serious unfair labor practice charge that comes out of a blitz starts with a supervisor who was surprised. The rules are simple. Brief every foreman and superintendent on them this week.
 

You can

• Tell your employees what you think. Section 8(c) protects your opinion, your facts, and your arguments, as long as they contain no threat and no promise.
• Give them the comparison. Wage rate, health plan, retirement, overtime, steady work, and what actually happens to a ten-year non-union journeyman who signs up: hall dues, initiation fees, the referral list, and whether his experience is credited or he starts over. The IBEW is advertising $41–$46 an hour. Know your number against theirs before they ask.
• Hold voluntary meetings, announced in advance, with a clear statement that attendance is optional and no one will be penalized for leaving. Mandatory “captive audience” meetings on unionization remain unlawful under the Board’s Amazon decision (November 2024). The General Counsel has asked the new Board to overrule it and the Eleventh Circuit is reviewing it, but nothing has changed yet. Keep meetings voluntary.
• Enforce a lawful, consistently applied no-distribution rule in active work areas.
•  Call the owner or GC and ask them to enforce their own solicitation policy.
• Document actual misconduct (blocking a gate, entering a fenced area after notice, safety violations) after it happens, with a written record of the specific reason.

You cannot

• Surveil. Do not photograph or video organizers or employees at the gate (F.W. Woolworth, 1993). Do not park a supervisor at the fence to watch who takes a flyer. Supervisors may observe open activity in places they would normally be, and nothing more.
• Promise. A raise, a bonus, or a new truck offered to keep someone from going to the hall is an unlawful promise of benefit. Wage adjustments you had already planned should go forward on their planned schedule, with documentation showing they were planned.
• Interrogate. “What did they say to you?” and “Are you thinking about it?” are the two questions that turn a flyer into a charge. Do not ask who took one. Do not survey employees about union support. A lawful poll requires secret-ballot safeguards that almost never fit a job site.
• Threaten. No talk of layoffs, lost jobs, closing, or “we’ll never sign” as a consequence of union support.

The real defense is economic. The blitz works on people who feel underpaid or underappreciated and have three or more years of experience. If your journeymen are well below the union scale, a foreman’s speech will not hold them. Know your turnover risk.
 

If the blitz turns into a card campaign

A recruiting blitz can become an organizing campaign at your company if the top-down pitch fails and enough of your crew signs cards. Under the Board’s Cemex decision (2023), an employer that receives a demand for recognition based on signed cards has roughly two weeks to file its own election petition, and unfair labor practices during the campaign can result in a bargaining order without an election. Two things have changed in Ohio’s favor. First, the Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, held in Brown-Forman Corp. v. NLRB (March 6, 2026) that Cemex cannot support a bargaining order. Second, the Board now has a 3–1 Republican majority as of August 7, 2026, and General Counsel Crystal Carey’s August 26 memo asks it to overrule Cemex, Stericycle, Amazon, and the rest of the Biden-era decisions. None have been overruled yet. Until they are, a card demand still requires a fast, correct response, and a traditional bargaining order for serious misconduct remains available. If anyone hands you a demand letter, call us the same day.

What to do this week

• Map your sites. For every active project: who holds the property (owner or GC), what its solicitation policy says, where the gates are, and where the public right-of-way ends. Ask the GC in writing what it will do when organizers arrive.
• Brief the field. Fifteen minutes with every foreman and superintendent on the can/cannot list above. The script for the gate is one sentence: “Take the flyer if you want, be polite, don’t argue, and let the office know they were here.”
• Check your handbook. Confirm your solicitation and distribution rule uses “working time,” covers all subjects, and is actually enforced. Fix it now, not after the flyers arrive.
• Build the comparison sheet. Total compensation, employee by employee, against the IBEW inside scale and package. Decide now whether any planned adjustments go forward, and document that they were planned.
• Tighten hiring. Written criteria, applied to everyone, with E-Verify on every hire. That is your defense to a salting charge.
• Do not overreact. No police calls unless you control the property and have given notice. No cameras. No questions. A blitz is designed to provoke a mistake; the leaflet itself does nothing.
• Call us at the first flyer. We will want to see it, know which site, and know what was said.

If you want to pressure-test your site access plan, your solicitation rule, or your supervisor talking points before the organizers arrive, we are ready to help. Reach out anytime.

Matt Austin · Matt Austin Labor Law
614.843.3041
[email protected]
 

This report is for general information only and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorneyclient relationship. For advice on a specific situation, contact Matt Austin Labor Law.