Answer extracted from the Forum Focus podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How labor and management built civic pride through joint electrical work in St. Louis
The partnership between NECA contractors and IBEW union electricians produced electrical and communication work on nearly all Habitat for Humanity homes in the St. Louis region, and together they relit the St. Louis Science Center planetarium after years of darkness—a tangible demonstration of what good businesses and labor leaders achieve when working toward shared civic goals.
The collaborative effort extended across the entire community. With only a handful of homes in the entire region where joint contribution did not occur, this represented a comprehensive commitment to affordable housing that transcended the traditional adversarial divide between management and labor. As Doug Martin explains in the Forum Focus episode, this wasn't just about completing electrical installations—it was about demonstrating that joint labor-management action could reshape how the construction industry serves its community.
The St. Louis Science Center planetarium project held particular symbolic weight. Relit after sitting in darkness for years, the planetarium became a visible landmark of collaboration, restoring a civic asset that had been dormant. This restoration created what Martin describes as a lasting sense of civic pride, proving that when management and labor priorities align, infrastructure and community benefit extend far beyond the initial project scope.
"I've worked my whole career with an organization that simply wanted to build an appropriate and productive relationship with our labor partners."
Doug Martin — Executive Director (recently stepped down), St. Louis Chapter National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). Martin grew up in western Montana in a copper mining family, with his grandfather serving as president in Local One of the Miners Union in Butte—which had over 40,000 members at its peak. After college, he briefly worked as an explosive apprentice in the mines before being encouraged to leave the industry. He joined NECA in fall 1977 as a trainee and became assistant manager in March 1978, spending over 40 years building labor-management collaboration in the St. Louis construction industry.
The scale of this effort—touching nearly every Habitat for Humanity home across the entire region—transformed how both contractors and union electricians viewed community service. The full conversation on Forum Focus explores how this partnership model became a blueprint for sustainable labor-management relationships, one where both sides recognized that investing in community benefit strengthened the entire industry's standing and moral authority.
See also
What role did PRIDE play in reducing work stoppages and relocating labor-management conflict from job sites to the negotiation room?
PRIDE emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to end work stoppages plaguing the electrical contracting industry. The initiative created a structured way to channel labor-management disputes from job sites into formal negotiation processes.
How did management and labor collaborate to preserve prevailing wage standards in Missouri?
Doug Martin was part of a significant coalition of both management and labor leadership that successfully preserved the core of the Missouri Preventive Wage Law, demonstrating unified industry commitment to worker compensation standards.
What new diversity and inclusion infrastructure did NECA create to address historical barriers in electrical contracting?
NECA created a Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion position for the first time in the last 18 months and hired a confident electrician to ensure sustained focus on breaking down historical barriers in the trade.