Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 62F. Winds light and variable..

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 62F. Winds light and variable.

Members of Local 248 speak at Ashland Rotary. From left to right are Anthony Lewis, Gavin Tussey and Ben Collier.

Members of Local 248 speak at Ashland Rotary. From left to right are Anthony Lewis, Gavin Tussey and Ben Collier.

RUSSELL Members of the Local 248 Plumbers, Steamfitters, Welders and HVAC spoke before the Ashland Rotary on Monday.

Ben Collier, Business Manager for Local 248, shared information on the history and the importance of the union and others like it, not only for union workers but for the safety of the public at large.

“Our history in work force development is central to who we are,” Collier said. “The United Association was begun on Oct. 11 of 1889, and if you have been around that long it is very important to hold our history and to know where we came from. The Local 248 got our charter on Aug. 12 in 1916,” he said.

As an interesting aside to his speech, Collier told the Rotary that when they were redecorate in commemoration of their 100th year, they decided to reframe a copy of their charter. To everyone’s surprise, beneath the copy was the original copy of the charter itself, which now receives an honored place in the Union Hall.

“We are 24 eastern Kentucky counties,” Collier told the Rotary. There are 360,000 members nationally, he said, with the local currently having 529 members. Collier went on to provide historical insight such as in its earlier years, each town had its own local but there was no blanket organization to bring them together under the same umbrella. This, of course, changed, as demonstrated by the current coverage of the local over numerous Kentucky counties.

In 1889, Collier said, the organization made its own constitution and bylaws, and the representative logo designed then is still in use today. “They incorporated four core values in that logo,” Collier said, as a means to forge a cohesive identity.

Union Vice President Gavin Tussey spoke on the first core value, education.

“The Fitzgerald Act of 1937 established registered apprenticeship programs,” Tussey said. “And the UA was the first registered apprenticeship program in the United States.”

Education is key, Tussey said, to eliminating things such as generational poverty, and early planning helps achieve that education. He shared how in high school he only had a general goal of “$20 per hour,” but that a welding teacher (who was a member of the Local 248) helped him develop the more refined goal of becoming a welder.

“I really didn’t know what becoming a welder was going to be,” he said. But by following the core value of education, one of his earliest mentors helped him to learn and be successful.

Collier himself spoke on the core value of benevolence. Plumbers, he said, were not highly paid when the charter was established. To be benevolent when you don’t have a lot, Collier said, is the mark of a true desire to share with others.

“Benevolence is who we are as an organization,” Collier said. We want to live that at 248, and not just talk about it.” One recent way they demonstrated this core vale was to both donate money and time helping during the efforts in the communities of Southeastern Kentucky.

Anthony Lewis spoke on the core value of protection.

“Someone asked me what I thought that means,” he said. The answer was that the union fights for and protects the rights of the workers such as a 40-hour work week and benefits. Not only thew workers, he said, but the union protection extends to the community.

“There’s a young man right here by the name of Ross Simpson,” Lewis said. “He’s over 100 years old, and he wrote the first plumbing code in the state of Kentucky.” That code, he said, represents how the union protects the community by ensuring proper sewage disposal and preventing contamination of local drinking water to name a few instances.

Collier said that fidelity was the fourth core value of the Local 248.

“We want to always be faithful to our members and our communities,” he said. As part of the core values of 248, it reminds members old and new to always be considerate of the impact upon and needs of other members and each community where they reside.

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