Dave Megenhardt, executive director of the United Labor Agency, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast to review the agency's 2025 results and to discuss its annual Unsung Heroes of the Labor Movement dinner.
Megenhardt described placements, wages and training outcomes for job seekers, the origins of a dinner that honors everyday union workers and the stories of two honorees, Tiron Jester and Kimberly Nemeth.
Dave Megenhardt, executive director of the United Labor Agency (ULA), said the agency had to twist and turn and be nimble in 2025, as nonprofits must always think about where their funding comes from. Overall, he said they had a really good year.
The ULA has offices in Summit, Lake, and Cuyahoga counties in Northeast Ohio, Megenhardt said, and tracks placements and outcomes for unemployed or underemployed people seeking family-sustaining careers, including where they work.
The ULA placed more than 2,000 people in Cuyahoga County in 2025, Megenhardt said, and the average wage for those placements was $25.88 per hour. The ULA placements mostly come from two groups, he said. Some come in with skills, abilities and aptitudes and want a new job after losing an old one, or they want to build on past success. The ULA can usually place them directly.
Others have worked somewhere for years or decades and need new skills, Megenhardt said, so the agency sends them to training at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), Cleveland State University and a host of proprietary and vocational schools across the region.
The average wage for those who completed training was $26.76 an hour, Megenhardt said, the highest it has been for the ULA. Being that much above minimum wage lets people get some traction and start getting ahead a little, he said. The ULA also looks for quality jobs with benefits and room to move up, he added, and works with employers that invest in their workers.
The ULA has held the Unsung Heroes of the Labor Movement Dinner for a couple of decades, Megenhardt said. It used to be a fundraising dinner honoring a labor leader. Megenhardt said the agency came to feel that the labor movement is not just leadership or people in high positions. The ULA shifted its focus to everyday union workers on the front lines and kept thinking about how to honor them. When it first began, Megenhardt said they wondered whether a dinner for people they didn't know would draw anyone, but they tried it, and it has been a great success.
Megenhardt called the dinner a “super fun night” because of the diversity of work, personalities and stories about how people got there and why they do what they do. He said it is special that honorees are nominated by the people they work with, and that they come from manufacturing unions such as the UAW, teachers’ unions and the CWA, among others. The dinner agenda takes a moment to tell each person's story and to ask why they do it, how they came to it and what impact they have, he said.
Megenhardt said the honorees’ speeches are so good they shame him, and their words strike an emotional chord with the audience. Most honorees are surprised to be nominated and say they do the work not for recognition, accolades or more pay but because that is who they are. He said he does not know whether the ULA will ever go back to honoring labor leaders, whom he said the agency loves and who are always in the audience, but the dinner is a moment for leaders to take a backseat and honor the people who support them.
Asked about honoree Tiron Jester, a teacher at Green High School in Summit County, Ohio, and a member of the North Eastern Ohio Education Association. Megenhardt said he liked how Jester began his speech by saying he was up there because he got caught doing something he was not supposed to do. He said Jester explained that he is supposed to be unseen, the helper and the eyes and ears of the building who makes it work without being recognized, and he called Jester the glue of the school.
Growing up in Cleveland, Jester talked about friends who did not come to great ends. Megenhardt said Jester knows he has beaten the odds. Jester recognized not only his fellow teachers but his parents and wife, who were in attendance, Megenhardt said, adding that Jester kept saying he is supposed to be in the shadows, and now there is a big spotlight on him.
When asked about Kimberly Nemeth, a Union Benefit Representative at General Motors Corp. of UAW Local 1005, Megenhardt said what came through was the personal connections she made across the local, including at nursing homes and retiree meetings, helping her get to know people in a big local. He said she personalizes the labor movement, and that people talked about her humor and her showing up wherever she was needed, from sick kids to people going into the hospital, off the clock and outside her job.
Megenhardt said what came through in her speech and nomination form was how much she loves her work. He said she and Jester are alike in that it is almost as if they were meant to have these jobs. He said it is no longer a job but an advocacy and a passion beyond work, and he called it the labor movement right there, seeing the bigger picture and taking it to heart.
More information on the United Labor Agency is available at ulagency.org.
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