Ironworkers Local 512: Former business manager Charlie Witt dies at 76

Charlie Witt, a former business manager of Ironworkers Local 512, died December 24, 2024 after two bouts with cancer.

Witt retired as Local 512 business manager in 2011, after serving nine years in that role (Minneapolis Labor Review, September 11, 2011).

Witt grew up in Winthrop, Minnesota and came to St. Paul on a football scholarship at Hamline University.

He worked as a member of the Laborers union from 1969-78 and helped build the Prairie Island nuclear power plant.

“I knew a lot of Ironworkers,” he told the Labor Review in 2011, and so he joined Ironworkers Local 512 in 1978.

Much of Witt’s work as an Ironworker involved a sub-specialty, erecting television transmission towers. “People who build them are a small fraternity,” he said. That work took him across the world, going to Venezuela and three times to Iceland.

Witt was elected Local 512’s recording secretary, serving 1984-2002.

In 1995, he went to work full-time for Local 512 as an organizer and director of market recovery before winning election as business manager in 2002.

Witt spent 34 years as an active member of Local 512.