37 Years on the Tools. Here's the Tool I Always Wished We Had.

Thirty-seven years. Three unions. Thirteen states. Boilermaker, carpenter, pile driver. Bush jobs to high-rise ironwork. My father was a Boilermaker before me — worked the toughest jobs in Alaska when there was nothing out there but the work and the weather. In all those years, here's what stuck with me: the work was good, the brotherhood was real, but the information always came up short. Not from the hall — the hall does its job. The gap was everything outside the dispatch. Every shutdown, the same questions. What's the per diem really paying once you get there? Is that out-of-town job worth the drive? Is the hotel going to eat my whole travel check? Nobody had a straight place to put that information, so the next brother could use it. You found out when you got there — and by then you'd already spent the gas money. The job sites out there never filled that gap. They were never built for us — non-union clutter, ghost jobs that filled months ago, "per diem TBD," numbers that shrink between the dispatch and the check. You scroll through "position closed, position closed, position closed," and you're supposed to call that a tool. So I built the one I always wished we had. UnionBoomer is union only, and it works with the halls, not around them. The work is the biggest real union projects in America — LNG terminals, nuclear, data centers, petrochem. Real projects, with the real per diem reported by brothers who were just there, and the catch nobody else tells you. Verified by the hall and verified by the boots on the ground. That's the whole idea — boots on the ground, always. And it's not just the work. There's a free print shop — grievance forms, Davis-Bacon cards, per-diem trackers, dryshack flyers, steward tools. Print them on any printer. Free for every brother and sister, forever. No paywall. There's a blog with real field intel. There's lodging intel near every job so you keep more of your per diem. All of it free. No payment. No catch. No data selling. No anti-union operatives — hall verification keeps them out. I'm a retired union tradesman building this where I live now, and it stays free because brothers help brothers. That's it. Bring it to your hall. If you're reading this on a job right now, you're the one who can do it. Text the link to your crew. Pin the dryshack flyer from the print shop. Tell your shop steward to take a look. That's how every good thing in the trades has ever spread — one brother telling the next. Boots on the ground. Always.