Mark Ayers – a longtime leader in the AFL-CIO who recently served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future – died this week. He was 63.
In a statement, Nuclear Energy Institute CEO Marvin Fertel said, “Mark improved the lives of many working men and women, and he will be greatly missed by those he touched. He played a huge role in changing the relationship that organized labor has with the U.S. nuclear energy industry, most notably through the project labor agreement that the building trades entered into for the Plant Vogtle expansion underway in Georgia. He was a persuasive and enthusiastic advocate for nuclear energy and for the skilled workers whom he represented.”
Ayers was an AFL-CIO vice president and president of the union’s building and construction trades department, a position he’d held since 2007, according to the AFL-CIO. Other leadership roles included his 1999 appointment as director of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ construction and maintenance department.
On the Blue Ribbon Commission, he helped draft a presidentially commissioned report finalized in January on the disposal of waste from American nuclear power plants. According to his commission biography, Ayers served as an aviator in the Navy for nearly six years before beginning an electrician apprenticeship in Peoria, Ill.