I am an electrical engineer in the United States who works in MEP design (mechanical, electrical, plumbing). Over the past few years I’ve had to jump jobs twice because of shit behavior from my employers. In that time I’ve also learned how common it is for these firms to hire those of us with engineering degrees at salary, with health care cost covered completely by the company, and either unlimited PTO or starting off with significant PTO. Then hire people without engineering degrees at hourly wage, limited PTO, and the typical monthly cost for health care to do the exact same job.
The current firm I’m at let all the engineer designers take 2 weeks off for the holidays last year while the hourly designers had to work those two weeks or burn their meager accumulated PTO.
The firm I was at before this one pulled the same shenanigans. Not to mention the significant wage disparity between the hourly and salaried employees.
I left my last firm due to my supervisor lying about raises. During my exit interview with some HR rep in some other state none of us had ever talked to, she asked why I hadn’t reached out earlier and I told her “we didn’t even know you existed, and is there anything you could even do?” and she told me that realistically, there wasn’t.
At that time I tried to “Google” MEP unions in the US and found virtually nothing. I was just curious if anyone had ever come across one.
Thank you.
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Ddg.gg got me this:
https://www.joinifpte.org/engineering
https://www.ueunion.org/uewho.html
Hope this helps.
https://ua.org/ Also
There’s definitely electrical unions out there like the brotherhood of electricians, but I don’t know enough about any of that to be much more help.
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have a website at https://ibew.org/
What a terrible way to treat people. I really respect your drive to work for someone who treats all their employees fairly–saying “no” to bad employers doing unsafe and unethical things in both the work and the compensation has cost me jobs before, too, and it super sucks.
I live in a really union-heavy area. There are unions for trade workers in MEP, but I’m not sure how many of them are local organizations vs. national or international and for the engineers. There’s a lack of non-trade unions and white collar unions that’s helped to reinforce the divide that you saw between degree and non-degree workers. Reaching out to a union closely associated with your work and asking for their input might point you where you want to go.
