MYTHS & REALITIES OF THE ‘34 MINNEAPOLIS TEAMSTERS STRIKE
Building a strike movement
by Pete Brown
(CV #36, Sept. 2005).
.
. Some activists in Detroit’s Million Worker March group are interested in rebuilding an activist labor movement. To this end some of them organized a study of the pamphlet How To Win Strikes: Lessons from the 1934 Minneapolis Truckers Strike written by Harry DeBoer in 1987. Their study session met in late January and lasted for a few hours. Six MWM members attended and discussed what orientation to take toward rebuilding the workers movement and how to carry out a successful strike. Much of the discussion focused on the history of the strike movement in Detroit, especially the newspaper strike of the mid-90s and the teachers strike of 1999. There were also some reflections on struggles of the 1930s such as the hunger march against Ford.
. Reading about struggles of the past can be helpful in inspiring activists and giving them some ideas for methods to use today. But differences between situations also need to be kept in mind. In the MWMers’ meeting a serious reservation was raised about the applicability of DeBoer’s 1934 strike tactics to the movement of today, when a strike movement hardly exists. The group thought that there was a need to make a more thorough study of recent strike struggles in Detroit, such as the newspaper strike, to try and come to some conclusions about the tactics recommended by DeBoer. One of the points noted was that conditions today are quite different than in the 30s. For example, in the 30s the mass upsurge was preceded by patient organizing work in the factories carried out by communists for 10 or 15 years previously. The communists had built up circles of militants who trusted their leadership. Thus a core of activists existed who were ready to take advantage of the economic crisis, when it began, to launch large-scale organizing campaigns.
. Many organizing drives of the 30s were hugely successful, and communist activists often played an important part in them. But then as now the union bureaucrats worked to keep mass actions of the workers within very limited bounds. While accommodating themselves to the mass upsurge and the demand for union organizing drives, the bureaucrats worked to limit and sabotage the influence of the “reds”, and when they had a chance later on they purged the reds out of the unions. To prevent this, the red activists should have taken preventive measures and worked to differentiate their own trend from that of the bureaucrats. But the leaders of the ‘34 Teamsters strike failed to do this, and the result was eventual loss of their influence and the return of the union to total bureaucrat control. This is the history of the Minneapolis Teamsters obscured by DeBoer’s pamphlet, which simply promotes the ‘34 strike as a great victory. It’s true the strike was important, but the loss of their union to the bureaucrats was a disaster for the workers. By just exalting the tactics of the ‘34 strike without considering the conditions in which they operated, DeBoer promotes simple-minded nostalgia and covers over the role of the trade union bureaucracy both then and now.
A nostalgic call for militant tactics
. DeBoer himself was active in the ‘34 Minneapolis truckers strike. But his pamphlet wasn’t written until more than 50 years later. Appalled by the decline in the workers movement, DeBoer was moved to write a pamphlet trying to sum up some experiences of the Minneapolis strike and make these lessons available to a new generation of worker activists.
. Some of the lessons DeBoer gives are basic to working class tactics. He tells activists they must take the initiative, carry out militant tactics and shut down production at the struck plant. The last-named lesson he mentions numerous times. This is crucial, he says. Production must be stopped. Supervisors and scabs must not be allowed to carry on production at the plant. DeBoer notes that nowadays striking workers often are replaced, and the union relies on public relations campaigns (”corporate campaigns”) to win the strike. DeBoer correctly notes that public relations can be helpful but are not the essential thing.
. This point about stopping production is so obvious that it’s a wonder it even needs mentioning. But the union bureaucrats are so enmeshed in the government bureaucracy and NLRB legalisms that they avoid it like the plague. This was an obvious problem with the Detroit newspaper strike. The newspapers never missed a day of printing their papers, though they were late in delivering them a few times because of militant pickets at the plant gates. Activists and a section of the rank and file newspaper workers tried to stop the scabs, at times beating back police attacks. But they were undermined by the bureaucrats. Replacement workers were never prevented from entering the plants and taking over production workers’ jobs. Union leaders told the workers to rely instead on their corporate campaign strategy, but this led to a dead end for the strike.
. DeBoer claims to be the inventor of “cruising pickets”, a tactic of cruising around in cars and blocking scab trucks. Of course the general idea of roving pickets predates DeBoer’s activity — they were used for example in coal strikes of the 1920s. But in any case DeBoer advocates this tactic, variants of which have sometimes been used effectively as a supplemental tactic to mass pickets in strikes.
. In the Minneapolis strike coal delivery trucks were sometimes deliberately allowed to leave the struck plant, to avoid a confrontation with the police right there. Instead the strikers let a truck get through the picket lines, but it was then followed by cars full of strikers. Once the truck got away from the station and the police forces there, the strikers would force the truck to stop, surround the driver with a mob of angry workers, and force him to dump his load of coal on the ground. DeBoer notes that some of the scab drivers, once they were talked to by the strikers, would gladly dump their coal and then join the union. They switched sides when they realized what the strikers were fighting for.
. The union also organized cruising pickets to roam the city looking for the odd delivery truck which had come in from outside the city. (1) And picket lines were also posted at the “city gates,” the points at which highways entered the city. The union also maintained a squad of motorcycle spies, workers who roamed around the city looking for any activity involving trucking — driving, loading, unloading, etc. These spies were under strict orders to not engage in any picketing or confrontations with the police; they simply reported back to strike headquarters (either in person or by telephone), from where picketers were dispatched to the trouble spot.
. So the truckers used a variety of imaginative tactics. But conditions for carrying out these tactics need to be kept in mind. Cruising pickets have been used in failed strikes as well as successful ones, and they have sometimes been promoted, for example in newspaper strikes, as a way to avoid having to have mass pickets and stop production. Adopting a tactic doesn’t necessarily guarantee victory, as DeBoer seems to think. And a tactic, once used, may lose its effectiveness next time around. An example of this is the ‘34 strike, which was actually two strikes, one in May and one in July. In the first strike the capitalists were surprised by the extensive preparations of the strike leaders and shocked by the amount of mass support they received from other sections of the working class. This led to the capitalists suffering a humiliating defeat in the famous Battle of Deputies Run.
. Leading up to this battle, the trucking capitalists and local police arrogantly announced their intention to load trucks and move them through the city on a certain day. Everyone knew the focus of this effort would be at the main produce market, so the union mobilized their supporters to show up there on the appointed day. Tens of thousands of workers came to the market armed with clubs and thirsting for revenge for the capitalists’ recent attacks on pickets. Radio stations had reporters placed atop local buildings, and they reported the confrontation live, like a college football game. When one of the produce merchants tried to load a truck, the workers went into action, demolishing the truck, the merchant’s store, and anyone who stood in the way. The battle went on for hours, as the police and capitalist vigilante squads tried to beat up or arrest picketers. But all these attacks were driven off, and the workers eventually occupied the entire produce market. The police ran off and left the vigilantes to be beaten to a pulp. After the battle flying squads of workers fanned out through the city and drove the police off the streets of Minneapolis. The workers took over directing traffic while the police hid inside their headquarters. In the aftermath, the capitalists capitulated on the major issue of the strike, recognition of the union.
. But in the July strike the capitalists were better prepared to deal with the union’s tactics like cruising pickets. Instead of relying on club-wielding thugs and local police, they had the Minnesota governor bring in the national guard, declare martial law, occupy the union’s strike headquarters and arrest the strike leaders. These counter-tactics of the capitalists had their effect, and the strike came close to collapsing before a compromise settlement was reached. DeBoer doesn’t mention any of this, though it’s covered in C. R. Walker’s history of the strike.
. Also it must be borne in mind that cruising pickets, like any tactic, can be misused and sabotaged by the bureaucrats. A typical ploy of the bureaucrats today is to slyly encourage a few activists to militant action, but then when the activists are busted by the police to publicly disavow their actions and leave the militants hanging. This sabotages the trend toward militant mass activity. Even when carrying out what appear to be union-approved tactics red activists must prepare themselves and other militants for this sabotage activity and encourage public, large-scale, militant actions.
. The ‘34 truckers strike is rich in positive lessons for strike organizers, many of which are not mentioned by DeBoer. Strike headquarters was an old garage/parking structure rented by the union, which used it as a commissary/cafeteria and hospital as well as barracks. Thousands of striking workers and supporters lived and ate there every day during the strike. The first aid station had a doctor and nurses constantly on duty. The reason for maintaining a hospital was to keep injured workers from going to public hospitals where they would be placed under arrest by the police. Previous strikes had suffered from having their most active militants arrested and taken out of commission when they went to get first aid. (2)
. These tactics show the imagination and initiative of the strike leaders as well as the rank-and-file workers during this strike. The same characteristics were present among the rank and file in the Detroit newspaper strike, where workers and local activists supporting them tried to maintain strike initiative by blocking trucks, fighting off police attacks, etc. But in that strike the local labor bureaucrats sabotaged the workers’ initiative by capitulating to injunctions against mass picketing. The bureaucrats brought in national AFL-CIO leaders like Richard Trumka to harangue the strikers and tell them to rely on Democratic Party politicians like Bill Clinton to save the day. They launched a “corporate campaign” and tried to win the strike by convincing newspaper stockholders that the strike was bad for profits. (The capitalists agreed, but their solution then was to step up efforts to break the strike. )
. As part of their alternative to mass picketing, the union bureaucrats launched a local weekly newspaper, the Detroit Sunday Journal. Supporting this paper was promoted as the way for workers of the community to support the strikers. This was popular for awhile, but the problem was promoting it as the alternative to more active forms of support such as joining the picket lines. And the paper’s content was simply terrible, concentrating on legal hearings, NLRB rulings, etc. News from the picket lines was banned. Sad to say, the scab newspapers, the News and Free Press, actually carried much more information about the strike and picket line activity than the unions’ newspaper did.
. This doesn’t mean a strike newspaper is a bad idea. In the ‘34 truckers strike the local union put out a daily four-page paper. Ten thousand copies were printed every day and sold on the street for a penny a copy. It was so popular that the union actually made a profit off it, with the money earned going to support the strike. The paper carried news of the strike, battles on the picket lines, etc. This paper announced mass actions ahead of time and called on workers of the community to attend. It was designed to promote mass struggle, rather than to substitute for it.
. DeBoer goes into various details of strike organizing, but the main thing he counsels is militance. Be active, and don’t hang back from confrontation. But wouldn’t that lead to injunctions against the union and to arrests of picketers? No problem, DeBoer says; bail out the picketers and bring them back to the picket lines. And paper the walls with injunctions.
. This preaching of militance sounds good. If the working class is ever going to reverse the declining living standards and fall in union membership of the last generation, there must be a revival of the militance of the 1930s labor movement. The capitalist employers have now moved beyond just cutting wages to the point of demolishing pension plans and health care benefits, and their political chief Bush has set his sights on dismantling social security. Workers can no longer take for granted the reforms and social legislation of the past, but must revive the militant tactics that won these advances in the first place. But DeBoer never bothers discussing the conditions needed for the success of these tactics or even the conditions under which they are desirable. He just preaches militancy, assuming that if workers wanted to, they could easily reproduce the movement of the 30s. And he just brushes over the role of the union bureaucrats of today as he covers over the reactionary role played by union bureaucrats in the 30s.
. But the bureaucrats who lead the unions are afraid of militant activity. They have been schooled to believe that the union officialdom has an honored place in imperialist American society. And their cozy positions depend on their keeping the workers quiet. So the strike movement continues to decline. Union leaders are stuck in their tracks regardless of the severity of the capitalist attacks.
A stagnant bureaucracy
. DeBoer says that unions became complacent in the 1950s-70s, and this allowed the capitalists to become more aggressive in driving down living standards. There’s some truth to this. After the anti-red purges of the 1940s the reactionary bureaucrats were able to harden their positions in the unions. But this should not lead to thinking that the AFL and CIO unions, from top to bottom, were centers of militance in the 1930s-40s and before. Then as now the labor movement was marked by a struggle between trends, and the militant actions of the 30s were driven forward by this struggle. The union hacks of the present day have not simply “forgotten” what built the industrial unions in the 30s; their forebears were shocked by the militant actions then and tried to tone them down. But the difference is that then (in the 30s) there were also large, consciously militant trends supported by the mass of industrial workers, and the hacks had to accommodate themselves to these trends to some extent. Today the militant trends are small or nonexistent, due in large part to the bureaucrats’ decades-long campaign against them.
. So how do you reverse that? It’s not as if the labor bureaucrats are not already aware of the way things are going. They are constantly moaning about the decline in union membership, etc. , and the AFL-CIO leaders are in a tussle over alternative responses to the crisis. And they’re not ignorant of labor history — they know very well their organizations were originally built in struggle. But they’ve also been schooled to believe that that stage of history is behind us, that unions can live peacefully within the structure of American capitalism, and the officers of unions can enjoy bourgeois lifestyles just like the capitalist employers. DeBoer says they’ve “become complacent.” But he doesn’t realize how deep this problem is.
. DeBoer addresses this problem in a cursory way. To workers whose union leaders won’t adopt militant tactics, he advises “vote them out.” Sure, that’s great when you can do it. But DeBoer’s offhand remark is like shrugging off the problem of anti-labor laws by saying “Don’t worry; if such laws are used, just vote the politicians out.” DeBoer doesn’t even mention that the top reformist bureaucrats often put militant locals under receivership, in which the workers have no right to elect their officers.
. So in fact DeBoer pays little attention to the problem of opposing reformist union leaders and their policies today, or the experience of the ‘34 truckers strike with the AFL leaders. He evades the problem of opposing the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats and their policies. The whole point of his advice is to not worry about the struggle of trends. His idea seems to be that the trade union bureaucrats will someday spontaneously take up the fight against the capitalists even if they are reluctant. But history shows, time and again, the bureaucrats prefer losing a strike, losing members, and even losing their union rather than taking up a serious struggle that may cross the bounds of bourgeois legality.
. DeBoer says “vote them out” if the union leaders act like bureaucrats. Sometimes militant workers do organize support for an independent slate in a union election, and such an election campaign can help lay the groundwork for militant actions. But for this to happen the election campaign must be subordinate to the basic task of building independent forms of class organization. Even if a militant activist manages to get elected to union office, he (she) can expect to be attacked by higher level bureaucrats who will rip up the union constitution to try and get him(her) barred from office. So even if elected an individual militant must be backed up by independent organization either to be effective in office or to maintain militant work after he(she) is thrown out of office by the upper level bureaucrats.
. It’s not just a question of replacing a few union officers. It will take work to build up an alternative workers’ trend for class struggle that can stand up to the reformist union bureaucracy. DeBoer says nothing about how this is to be done and pays no attention to the struggle against reformism.
Conciliating the bureaucrats leads to disaster
. “Vote them out” is DeBoer’s frivolous reply to the problem of today’s stagnant union bureaucracy. But when speaking of the 30s DeBoer doesn’t even mention the problem. He acts like the ‘34 strike was a glorious achievement of “the union”, from top to bottom. But in fact Teamsters international president Daniel Tobin tried to sabotage the Minneapolis strike by launching a red scare campaign against the strike leaders. And after the strike, when the red Teamsters in Minneapolis were working to consolidate their victory and extend its gains to other sections of workers, Tobin and his fellow AFL leaders launched a gangster campaign to drive the Minneapolis reds out of the labor movement. Far from extolling the strike’s victory, the bureaucrats worked to destroy the strike’s ongoing influence.
. There are important lessons in this history for militants of today, lessons every bit as important as DeBoer’s advice about using militant tactics in strikes. But DeBoer hides these lessons, which is in line with the way the Minneapolis Teamsters leaders dealt with them in the 30s. The Trotskyist leadership of Local 574, the truckers’ local in Minneapolis, capitulated to the bureaucrat leaders of the Teamsters international, relied on them and refused to tell the workers the truth about them. This helped lead eventually to militance being stamped out of the Teamsters union as Tobin purged the Trotskyists from the union in 1941. Having gone along with and supported the bureaucrats for years, the Trotskyists were in a weak position to oppose this purge. They had not made their differences with the bureaucrats into a mass issue, an issue of discussion among the mass of rank-and-file activists.
. Due to their basically reformist politics, the Trotskyist leaders of Local 574 didn’t publicize differences with Tobin over policy for the Teamsters. This was true even though Tobin tried to sabotage Local 574. In between the two big strikes of 1934, in May and July, Tobin issued statements regretting that the leadership of the local had fallen into the hands of “Communists and radicals” and calling on the truckers in Minneapolis to “beware of these wolves in sheep’s clothing.“(3)
. Tobin was not able to rid the Minneapolis local of the leftists, who managed to once again win an important strike in July. In the aftermath of this strike the capitalists’ open-shop stranglehold on Minneapolis was broken, and a wave of strikes took place throughout the region in the next couple years. This included strikes by iron workers, textile workers, and others. Thousands of workers followed the lead of Local 574 in fighting for union recognition. The strike leaders of Local 574 took an active part in many of these other strikes as organizers and tacticians. In this organizing activity they advocated that workers form locals affiliated to the AFL.
. But despite the reds’ organizing victories for AFL unions, the AFL bureaucrats were dead set on crushing their militance. Shortly after the July ‘34 strike victory Tobin issued an ultimatum to Local 574 demanding that it repudiate its semi-industrial-union type of organization and instead split itself into eight craft unions. He also demanded that the leaders of the victorious truckers strikes be expelled from the Teamsters local. When the local refused to submit, he expelled Local 574 from the Teamsters in early 1935. (4) Tobin then set up a scab union, Local 500, in Minneapolis and tried to raid Local 574. Tobin’s local minions visited the trucking capitalists who had signed contracts with Local 574 and tried to persuade them to break those contracts and instead sign new deals with Local 500. But very few of the capitalists agreed. Local 574 maintained the support of the rank-and-file truckers in Minneapolis, and the capitalists were reluctant to ignite another class war.
. At this point, in 1936, Tobin got help from the AFL as a whole. AFL president William Green announced a new anti-communist purge of the AFL and said the campaign would begin in Minneapolis. Green sent a personal representative to Minneapolis to try and demolish Local 574. When methods of persuasion did not work, hundreds of goon-squad thugs were brought in from Chicago to beat up Local 574 leaders and activists wherever they appeared. The reds stood up to the goon squads, and fighting raged all over Minneapolis for three weeks. But finally the local leaders agreed to a truce with Tobin and the AFL. The 574 leaders agreed to let Tobin appoint half of their local’s officers, which meant putting their local into a kind of semi-receivership. In return Tobin dissolved Local 500 and reaffiliated 574 to the Teamsters and AFL. (5)
. None of this history is mentioned by DeBoer, who takes a frivolous attitude to the problem of the union bureaucrats. Just “vote them out”, he says, as if workers in Local 574 could vote Tobin and Green out of office. It’s not as if the bureaucrats limited themselves to running for office in Local 574. No, they took up all kinds of undermining activity against 574, even to the point of semi-military actions.“Vote them out” is a silly reply to labor activists faced with these kinds of attacks. Workers need all kinds of preparations — ideological, political, etc. — to face these attacks. They need organization independent of the bureaucrats.
. This is where the Trotskyist leaders of Local 574 fell down. They were effective in carrying out militant tactics against the capitalists in the ‘34 strikes. They were helpful in extending the Minneapolis strike wave to the entire northern Midwest. They even stood up to the physical attacks against them organized by Green, and beat back Tobin’s attempt to set up a rival Teamsters local. But they did not carry on thoroughgoing work against the bureaucrats. After accepting a condition of halfway receivership of their local, they maintained a truce with Tobin, generally refraining from public criticism of the Teamster leadership. They didn’t carry out much agitation against the bureaucrats, and they were happy to seek posts among the bureaucrats. Their cozy relationship with Tobin lasted until at least 1939, when Tobin took the Trotskyists’ most prominent organizer, Farrell Dobbs, onto his paid staff and made him the lead organizer for truckers throughout the Midwest. Dobbs later resigned to devote himself full-time to working for the Trotskyist party, and at that point Tobin felt secure enough to launch another attack on the leftists. In 1941 Tobin successfully purged the Trotskyists out of the Minneapolis Teamsters leadership. (6)
. Note that just opposing Tobin wouldn’t necessarily have guaranteed victory for the reds. They might still have eventually lost their union positions and been subject to Smith Act trials. But having organized opposition to Tobin would have made it difficult for him to eliminate any independent organization that was built up. And the reds would have at least clarified to the mass of workers the main lines of struggle within the union movement. By building independent organization they could have provided an ongoing opposition to the bureaucrats and a rallying point for workers when the next tide of struggle arose.
Fight the bureaucrats!
. Thus DeBoer’s pamphlet neglects the problem of how to deal with the bureaucrats. His heroes, the Trotskyist leaders of Local 574, combined left-sounding declarations about general politics with capitulation to reformism in their immediate politics. They postured on national and international politics while largely remaining silent on the nature of Tobin and the Teamster union bureaucracy. Along with other militants, DeBoer was no doubt angered by the bureaucrats’ anti-leftist purges, but he doesn’t mention them in his pamphlet and couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth about what happened to 574. Labor activists of today are still forced to deal with this problem.
. To learn the lessons of the class battles of the 30s it’s not enough to just be nostalgic about the militant battles of that period. We need to be critical of those like DeBoer who try to paper over the differences between trends in the labor movement, the militant rank-and-file trend and the reformist trend that dominates the present union leadership. Workers who are interested in reviving a militant strike movement must build it against the reformist bureaucrat trend and its conciliators. <>
Notes:
(1) Facts in this paragraph come from American City, A Rank-and-File History by Charles Rumford Walker. This book, a history of Minneapolis published in 1937, is mostly an account of the 1934 strike. While scrupulously depicting both sides of the dispute, Walker is generally sympathetic to the striking workers’ demands, and his book is promoted by some Trotskyist groups as authoritative. (Return to text)
(2These features of the strike are covered in Walker’s book. (Text) )
(3) Tobin’s Red-baiting quote was used by the Minneapolis capitalists to do propaganda against the strike leaders. See p. 157 of Walker’s book. (Text)
(4) Walker, p. 246. (Text)
(5Walker, pp. 260-63. (Text) )
(6) See Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism, 1988, by Christopher Z. Hobson and Ronald D. Tabor. The authors were members of RSL (Revolutionary Socialist League), a Trotskyist group that dissolved in 1993 with a lot of its activists moving into the anarchist group “Love and Rage.” This book was written as RSL reoriented itself and became critical of Trotskyism. (Text) <>
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0% MARKET SHARE deunionizing apartment building construction in NYC
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deunionizing apartment building construction in New York City
Currently, New York City is experiencing a residential construction building boom.
All over Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, new low rise apartment houses are going up - in some areas, it’s not at all unusual to see two or even three twelve story buildings going up on the same block!
What is remarkable - and very sad - is the fact that every single one of these low rise apartment houses is being built non union.
And these aren’t just any scab contractors.
These companies typically pay sweatshop wages - their skilled carpenters and masons get $ 7/hr and their unskilled laborers and helpers recieve $ 4/hr.
Yes, reader, you read correctly - that is not a misprint!
I said FOUR DOLLARS AN HOUR!
For a 10 hour straight time day, and a 6 day workweek, with no overtime paid.
Of course, such illegally low wages (a full $ 3.25/hr below minimum) are paid in a less than legal manner; off the books, in cash, with no taxes, unemployment insurance, social security, workers comp or disability withheld.
Virtually all of the workers in this sector are minority - some are American Blacks or Puerto Ricans, others are immigrants from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Cuba, El Salvador, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua, Barbados, Senegal, Haiti, Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, China, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Hong Kong or the Republic of Georgia.
It wasn’t always like that in the residential sector here.
Well into the 1970’s, almost all apartment buildings in the city were built union.
Even as late as the 1990’s, there were still many lowrise buildings that were constructed with union labor.
Today, that’s not the case.
Not only has this led to the pauperization of New York City’s construction workforce, it’s also accelerated the already rapid decay of the New York construction unions.
And this isn’t only a decay in terms of size - although the building trades have shrunk from the 1968 high of 250,000 members (or virtually 100% of the New York building trades workforce) to barely 100,000 today (barely 50% of the trades - and most of that 50% are chronically underemployed since they only do 30% of the construction work in the city these days).
Deunionization has also shrunk the trades as a whole - in 1968, the industry had over 250,000 workers - today, barely 200,000 men and women work in the construction industry in NYC.
The trades have decayed economically - construction work was once a career that guaranteed automatic middle income status.
Today only around 120,000 tradespeople, barely 60% of the industry, even get basic workplace benefits like social security and workers compensation - the remainder are paid in cash, off the books.
They can’t collect unemployment when they get laid off, they won’t get a social security check when they get too old to work and if they get hurt they will not get a dime (if they are lucky, their boss will give them cab fare to get to the hospital!)
This 20% shrinkage of the construction workforce has happened while the city as a whole has gotten bigger - there were 7 million New Yorkers in 1968 and there are 8 million people living here now.
As the wages of the non union sector have decayed, the unions have given up wages, benefits and working conditions that were won generations ago, to keep up with the race to the bottom.
Like the 7 hour day - the New York building trades won that in June 1936 and now it’s rapidly being abandoned.
In some agreements, (specifically, the deal the NYC Building Trades signed with the NYC School Construction Authority) the unions actually allow a 10 hour straight time day (something the unions haven’t tolerated here since we won the 8 hour day on May 1, 1886!)
The New York District Council of Carpenters has led the way in the race to restore 19th century wages and working conditions in the 21st century New York construction industry.
For instance, a two tier wage scale was imposed on the handfull of union carpenters still working in residential construction - their pay was cut from $ 41.23 an hour to $ 28.00 an hour, with benefit fund contributions slashed from $ 32.47 an hour to $ 20 an hour (with contributions to the Carpenters Annuity Fund - the District Council’s 401k-like supplemental pension - reduced from $ 5.40 an hour to ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS an hour!)
Also, all union carpenters - commercial and residential - have seen major health insurance benefit cuts. Copayments have gone through the roof (from $ 10 to $ 25 for doctor visits, from zero to $ 50 for emergency room visits and from zero to $ 20 per prescriptions), the number of in network provider visits have been sharply cut, often by as much as two thirds, and out of network provider visits have been either deeply slashed or totally abolished.
These deep cuts to wages and benefits are supposed to help reunionize residential construction - in reality, they merely help accelerate the deunionization of the industry, and the reduction of the standard of living of all carpenters.
Since carpenters are the largest trade, making up 20% of the total construction workforce, and are at the center of the construction process (especially in residential work) the fall of the carpenters will drag down all of the other trades.
How did this happen to what were once the strongest local construction unions on the face of the earth?
And what can New York construction workers - union and non union - do about it?
Let’s take a look.
First, we’ve got to take a look back, to see how we got here.
Construction workers in New York City were among the first in the world to unionize - the earliest carpenters unions here date back to the 1790’s and the present District Council of Carpenters has continuously existed, in one form or another, since 1872.
Incidentally, despite the myth that the Carpenters Union tries to spread these days that “residential has always been non union” the first carpenters unions represented “house carpenters” - that is, workers who framed single family houses.
Those unions were far different from modern day construction unions.
They were typically led by committees of workers who combined full time work in the trade with part time labor activism - unlike today’s unions, which are run by full time Business Agents and officers, who often earn far more than the tradespeople in the field do.
These “tramping committees” (so called because they walked from jobsite to jobsite organizing workers) were often quite radical - most of the worker-activists had far left political beliefs - usually utopian socialist, communist or anarchist - a far cry from the Republicans and conservative Democrats who run today’s building trades unions.
And, unlike today’s unions, who almost always put the needs of the contractors ahead of the interests of the majority of tradespeople, these union leaders envisioned a time when there would be no bosses - what they called a “cooperative commonwealth”, a society where productive industry was run by the workers instead of businesspeople.
These unions were very militant on the jobsites too…
Typically, they organized non union jobs through a tactic known as a “trade movement” - they would lead workers marches around the city from scab jobsite to scab jobsite, often accompanied by a brass band.
Those parades would stop at each scab job, go onto the site and force the non union workers to either join the movement or at the very least take their tools and go home.
Once organized, they used unilaterally imposed Bylaws and Working Rules on the contractors to regulate wages, hours and working conditions - and they would strike any job that did not follow union rules.
Unfortunately, that militancy didn’t last.
Contractors, real estate developers and the government ferociously repressed these unions - and much of the union’s very limited financial resources were tied up with economically supporting union leaders who had been fired and blacklisted and who could no longer get contractors to hire them (in that pre-welfare and unemployment insurance era, blacklisted union militants had no other way of paying their bills than direct financial support from the union).
This led to the development of full time union officials - originally called “walking delegates” they are the direct ancestors of today’s Business Agents.
Although the rise of full time union officials who were paid by workers union dues protected the leadership of the unions from direct retaliation from the bosses, it also pushed the unions sharply to the right.
The walking delegates had a stake in preserving the union’s finances (since that’s what paid their salaries) so their natural orientation was towards maintaining labor peace with the contractors - no matter what the bosses were doing to the workers on the jobs.
This desire for labor peace at any price also pulled the unions away from fighting for the interests of the casually employed tradespeople, who were hired at the begining of the season and laid off in late fall, (and who were most likely to have conflicts with the contractors) and oriented the unions towards the workers who had the most friendly relationship with the bosses - the foremen and other full time employees who worked for the contractors year round (in the field from early spring to late fall, and in the shop through the winter, when the casual workers were laid off).
There were still radical elements of the union leadership who were oriented towards fighting the contractors and defending the interests of the casually employed workers.
But they were rapidly being driven out of the unions by the more conservative company man and contractor oriented forces.
In the New York District Council of Carpenters, matters came to a head on May Day 1916. The union called a citywide strike, and the workers quickly won their demands.
The contractors, very upset by this turn of events, reached out to the NYDCofC’s parent union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America.
The general president of the UBCJA, William “Big Bill” Hutcheson (a man who very much believed in labor peace at any price), came in, illegally ousted the leadership of the NYDCofC and replaced them with a Canadian immigrant drug store clerk with ties to Irish immigrant organized crime groups, one Robert Brindell.
Brindell had begun his career as a labor racketeer by helping marine construction contractors rid themselves of Ironworkers local 177 (the militant dockbuilders union) and replacing it with his pro contractor Dockbuilders Union, which quickly affiliated with the NYDCofC as local 1456 (a local that still exists to this day).
Brindell and his gangster associates reorganized the District Council, forced all the carpenters to join and gave up all of the victories won in the May Day strike.
He also took away New York carpenters rights to vote for District Council officers and on their right to ratify union contracts.
New York carpenters didn’t get back the right to vote for District Council officers until 1995 - and we never regained the right to vote for contracts, even down to this day.
Brindell took the union leadership’s alliance with the contractors and the company men to a new level, by openly brining in organized crime elements.
The larger and more influential contractors would use Brindell’s mob ties to their advantage.
By the early 20th century, New York’s construction industry was filled with many many many contractors (both native born and immigrant) and fierce dog eat dog competition drove contractor prices (and construction worker wages) to rock bottom levels.
This was great for the real estate developers and the banks - and it really sucked for the contractors, especially the more successful ones who didn’t want their businesses ruined by price cutting.
Some of these contractors figured out that it was in their interest to put a break on cutthroat competition, keep construction prices high and drive their more marginal competitors out of the business.
The most practical way to achieve those goals was to have some kind of cartel, that would regulate which bosses got to bid on what jobs and for what price.
Of course, that cartel would have to have the power to punish bosses who didn’t go along with the program.
Brindell was perfectly positioned to help the contractors cartelize residential construction.
He controlled the Carpenters Union, so he could call strikes at companies who didn’t go along with the cartel - as well as preventing labor disputes with companies that were under his protection.
Brindell also had ties with the corrupt leaders of Teamsters locals 282, 522 and 1205 (the lumber delivery wagon driver unions), as well as the owners of the lumber yards, so he could cut off building material deliveries to contractors who tried to compete with the companies he was protecting.
Brindell and his associates divided up the construction projects in New York, decided which contractors would bid on which jobs and predetermined the price they would charge the clients. And if anybody tried to underbid the preselected companies, they would get hit by a Carpenters strike and would be unable to get Teamsters to deliver material to their jobsites.
Brindell’s cartel only lasted for 3 years. The bankers and developers could no longer profitably pay monopoly prices, thanks to the post World War I recession, so they leaned on the government to arrest Brindell and break up his racket.
Brindell got locked up in 1921 - and made history as the first person in America to go to jail for racketeering (which wasn’t even a crime at the time - the prosecutors had to stretch the conspiracy laws to put him behind bars - the state legislature caught up with them in 1930 when they amended the State Penal Law to make racketeering a crime).
But Brindell’s racket continued without him. The Irish gangsters who had helped him run the construction rackets took them over in his’s absence, and the cartel continued.
Within a decade, the Irish gangsters were displaced by Jewish racketeers, and by the 1940’s those gangsters had been elbowed out of the picture by a far better organized and more sophisticated Sicilian immigrant criminal organization called “cosa nostra”.
That’s Italian for “this thing of ours” and they are more commonly known as “the mafia”.
By the 1960’s the cosa nostra’s five New York based “families” (Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, Bonanno and Lucchese) along with New Jersey’s De Cavalcante family, ran the construction industry in New York.
They had a committee, called “the commission”, chaired by the underboss of the Genovese family, which ajudicated any disputes between the families over their protection rackets (which expanded far beyond construction - they also included air freight, sea freight, trucking, garment manufacturing, trade show services, produce, garbage hauling, commercial moving, fresh fish, cigarettes ect).
In all those industries the pattern was the same - the dominant companies in those businesses would pay “tribute” (protection money) to a particular gangster or mafia family.
In return for the tribute, cosa nostra would have the unions keep their competitors out of that business (either through strikes or by having union members violently attack the other company’s business).
The gangsters would also help the dominant companies engage in price fixing, to make sure that everybody that was in the cartel made a healthy profit.
The gangsters also used their control over the unions to keep workers from resisting labor abuses committed by the companies that were under mob protection.
Nowhere in New York City in this era was this market control more extensive than in construction, and within construction nowhere was the cartelization more total than in the carpentry business - particularly in hirise concrete construction and interior drywall partition work, where the Genovese crime family decided which contractors would bid on which jobs, and how much they would charge the clients..
The Genovese family dominated the “concrete club” which ran the hirise concrete industry. They decided in advance which contractors would do the concrete work on every job in the city worth more than $ 2 million dollars.
If the job was worth more than $ 15 million, only one contractor was allowed to win the bid to do the work - S & A Concrete, which just happened to be owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the Genovese family’s underboss and head of the Commission.
A contractor who was foolish enough to try and underbid a company in the “club” would find themselves having labor problems with the Concrete Laborers Union (which was controlled by the Colombo family) or Teamsters local 282 (which was dominated by associates of the Gambino family) or the District Council of Carpenters (which was under the flag of the Genoveses).
The Genoveses also controlled drywall work, through “the wheel”, which was run by drywall contractor and Genovese family captain Vincent DiNapoli. The wheel operated under the cover of DiNapoli’s Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, which was nominally a legit employers association that bargained with the Carpenters, Lathers and Drywall Tapers unions on behalf of the drywall contractors
DiNapoli’s wheel had a rotation system, where every drywall contractor under mob protection would take turns getting major jobs. When a company’s turn came up, all the other contractors would put in higher bids, so that company would win the job. Each one of those companies would get a turn to be the low bidder (with the “low bids” set high enough so the winning contractor would make a very healthy profit, of course).
Contractors who tried to go around the wheel would find they suddenly had serious problems with the Genovese family-dominated Carpenters Union. Those problems would be particularly severe if a drywall contractor was foolish enough to use non union labor - they’d get a visit from a union controlled “wrecking crew” (a bunch of union carpenters who would invade and wreck a scab jobsite) …or their jobsite might suffer a mysterious middle of the night bombing or arson.
The wheel and the club worked out very well for connected contractors - they had a stable and profitable business, and had no fear of competitors or labor disputes. It wasn’t so great for the clients - since prices stayed up, thanks to the anti competitive actions of the wiseguys. And it also locked out smaller contractors trying to break into doing major jobs.
For a time, it kinda worked out for the unions too… but in the end, the mobsters would turn on the workers, in an attempt to protect their rackets. But even at the height of the club and the wheel, the unions were at best junior partners in the racket - and the workers of connected companies had no hope of assistance from their unions if their boss abused them (since mobbed up contractors had virtually total immunity from labor disputes - no matter how badly they treated their workers).
The early 1970’s were the peak of the power of the club and the wheel - and that decade also marked the beginning of the end.
There was a building boom in progress - the City of New York went several billion dollars in debt to finance the construction of luxury apartment buildings. The city actually turned a whole island (Welfare Island, the home of the city’s TB hospital and several other municipal facilities) over to the developers, who renamed it Roosevelt Island and built a mini city of luxury hirise buildings on the site (all with public funds).
With all that money floating around the real estate industry, there was plenty of cash for the wiseguys - besides their customary tribute, some families began demanding that contractors put gangsters on the payroll as no show, no work ghost employees (so they would be able to show the IRS - and their parole officers - a legitimate source for their income).
On one publicly financed job - the construction of the World Trade Center - drywall contractor P & M Sobara was expected to place over 200 no show gangsters on their payroll. And they cheerfully did so - it was a big and profitable job, that they wouldn’t have gotten without the assistance of the Genovese family, so it was only fair to share the wealth (and, after all, they would pass along the cost to the owners - in that case, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)!
But, around this time, the goose began to stop laying the golden eggs.
The problem began when landlords began literally burning the city down. Since the city was practically giving money away to developers who were building luxury housing, a lot of landlords rushed to get on the gravy train - even if it meant evicting their present tenants. Liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay made matters worse when, in 1971, he introduced a bill that repealed the Rent Control Law, which had kept a cap on rents since 1948.
The way the new Rent Stabilization Law was written, pre 1971 tenants still had low Rent Control rents - and they would keep those rents unless they moved out of their apartments. Post 1971 tenants would have much higher Rent Stabilization rents - and a new City commission, the Rent Guidelines Board, would be willing to review requests for rent increases from the landlords every two years (from that day to this, every time the landlords asked the landlord-dominated RGB for a rent increase, they got it).
So, landlords rushed to drive out their pre 1971 tenants.
In some communities, in particular areas of Lower Manhattan that were largely White and were close to Midtown and the Financial District, working class tenants were forced to leave their homes through landlord neglect (firing supers, refusing to give heat and hot water ect) and through outright terrorism (thugs breaking into apartments and robbing and beating tenants ect). Once they were driven out, the apartment houses were either renovated into high rent apartments or torn down and replaced by hirise luxury apartment buildings.
In areas of Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Southeastern Queens that were either too heavily Black and Latino to attract wealthy White tenants and/or were too far from Midtown and the Financial District for easy commuting, the landlords simply struck a match… they hired “torches” (professional arsonists) to burn down their buildings for the insurance. If those units couldn’t be turned into luxury housing, it was more profitable for them to be destroyed.
Between 1972 and 1976, vast areas of Harlem, the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvessant, East New York, Brownsville, South Jamaica and Far Rockaway were put to the torch.
Mysteriously, despite the deaths of dozens of firemen and several hundred tenants, the injury of several thousand and over one hundred thousand people being driven from their homes, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance fraud, nobody ever went to jail for this (other than a few low level torches).
The newspapers invented a racist slander about “crazy Puerto Ricans burning down their own houses” to cover up the landlord terrorism and that was that.
There was another problem besides the human tragedy - the City was going broke subsidizing the landlords. The luxury developers had been given loans on amazingly easy terms - long term and low interest. But, the City had borrowed the money to make those loans short term, at high interest.
Obviously, that couldn’t last - and it didn’t.
In June 1975, the loans came due, the City didn’t have the money to pay (since the landlords loan repayments wouldn’t be due for several more years) and the City of New York basically went bankrupt.
The bankers who held the City’s debt made damned sure they would get their money - they appointed a committee, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, headed by Lazard Freres’ chief Felix Rohatyn, who’s function was to force the City to repay them.
And MAC set about agressively collecting the debts.
Rohatyn had the city lay off over 50,000 workers, shut down Fire Department units (including the “Red Caps” - the elite squad of fire marshals investigating the arson epidemic), tear down subway lines, cut pay for teachers and sanitation workers, close down schools and public hospitals, shut down restrooms in city parks and playgrounds, abandon public works construction jobs, and force every city worker to work for two weeks without pay (with the wages to be used as an unpaid no interest “loan” to be repaid when that worker retired, quit, got fired, died or got laid off) - all to make sure the bankers got their money.
There was suprisingly little resistance to this from the city’s powerful municipal unions - backroom deals were cut with the leaders of the biggest municipal workers unions - AFSCME District Council 37, Teamsters local 237 and Transport Workers Union local 100 - who’s members were on the recieving end of the harshest cuts.
Those labor leaders worked very hard to keep their members from fighting back on the job.
AFSCME DC 37 chieftan Victor Gotbaum, a former CIA asset and self proclaimed “close personal freind” of Rohatyn and Citibank boss Walter Wriston, actually had his union use it’s pension fund to subsidize the city - and he had monthly secret meetings with Rohatyn and Wriston to help them deal with breaking working class resistance to the massive cutbacks.
As for the other city workers, after a brief flurry of strikes and jobsite resistance, the chiefs of the United Federation of Teachers, Uniformed Firefighters Association, Patrolmens Benevolent Association and Uniformed Sanitationmens Association local 831 of the Teamsters were persuaded to make their members accept similar, but slightly less severe, layoffs and service cutbacks.
In about two years, the City paid off the bankers, but Rohatyn and his Municipal Assistance Corporation stuck around to make sure that the city paid off it’s creditors in a timely fashion - and spent as few tax dollars as possible on public services.
This created something of a problem for conservative Democratic Mayor Ed Koch when he took office in 1978.
He had been elected to restore order to a city in chaos - not only did the city have a bankrupt government and large areas burnt to the ground, but there was a massive crime wave too, thanks to a flood of cheap heroin and 330,000 jobless factory workers (10% of the city’s labor force) who had been rendered unemployed when their bosses moved the plants out of town.
The 50,000 city worker layoffs and all the service cutbacks only added to the misery in the city’s working class neighborhoods (with the Black and Latino communties getting far far far more than their fair share of the suffering).
One of Koch’s most urgent tasks was rebuilding the vast urban wastelands created by the orgy of landlord arson.
And he had to rebuild those neighborhoods as cheaply as possible, because Koch still had to answer to MAC (and the bankers MAC represented had first dibs on all of the city’s tax revenue).
The newly created NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development was given the task of rebuilding the city on the cheap.
They came up with a very simple idea of how to do that - they decided to use workers who were paid less than union scale to rebuild those burnt out apartment buildings.
That violated the Federal, City and State Davis Bacon Laws, which required that prevailing wages be paid on all municipal construction jobs, but the clever folks at HPD came up with an ingenious idea.
The City itself wouldn’t rebuild the tenements, instead they would hand over the funds for the renovation work to Community Based Organizations who would do the work for the city.
The CBO’s were Democratic Party-patronage financed anti poverty agencies. They had been set up after the riots in the ghettoes during the 1960’s, to carry out a simple task - prevent future ghetto rebellions by using public funds to hand out public service jobs and social services to a portion of the inner city population.
The idea was to prevent poor Blacks and Latinos from fighting collectively for social change by having them compete with each other for individual assistance from the CBO’s.
Even though almost all their funding came from the taxpayer, these CBO’s were private corporations - and they were under no legal requirement to use union labor, or to pay non union workers prevailing wages, on construction projects that they ran.
Now, you would think that the construction unions would be up in arms at this scheme, and would fight it tooth and nail.
That didn’t happen.
The reason was simple.
The biggest unions - Carpenters, Building Laborers and Concrete Laborers - were so weakened by decades of organized crime infiltration that they were totally incapable of waging the kind of struggle that needed to be carried out.
Those unions, in particular the Carpenters, had some capacity to send wrecking crews or firebombers to scab jobs in Lower Manhattan (in particular scab jobs which were being built by non mob connected contractors) but they would not realistically be able to do that to inner city jobsites.
That was because of “the Coalitions”.
About a decade earlier, a group of Black maoist construction workers had organized “Harlem Fightback” an organization that led protests to demand the integration of the construction trades.
Fightback’s protests really struck a chord in the Black and Latino communities - who had tired of seeling all White crews on jobsites in the ghettoes.
In particular, they galvanized Black and Latino construction workers, who were locked out of most of the unions, no matter how skilled they were.
After the Plumbers Union led a strike in 1968 to oppose the City of New York’s limited tokenistic construction trades integration plan, minority construction worker protests really took off - some led by Fightback, others led by other organizations led by people who had split off from Fightback.
These groups (eventually there would be over 60 of these organizations - some all Black, some all Latino, some mixed Black and Latino and one that was all Chinese) came to be collectively known as the Coalition.
The Coalition regularly sent school busses loaded with jobless minority construction workers roaming around the inner city, and occasionally making forays onto jobsites in Midtown and Downtown Manhattan as well, raiding segregated jobsites and forcing the contractors to integrate.
Since the Carpenters and Laborers had the least restrictive rules on letting new members join (basically, if you could get a boss to hire you in that trade, you could join the union that day) and they were the only construction unions with any minority members (the Carpenters even had an all Black local - local 1788 in Harlem), those trades bore the brunt of coalition activism, and had to take in the most Black and Latin members.
Also, by the late 1970’s, many of the Coalitions had decayed far from their 1960’s radical roots.
Many of their “site coordinators” (the Coalitions version of Business Agents) had become conservative and pro contractor - due to their need for stable relationships with the contractors to guarantee a steady supply of jobs for coalition members and a steady source of coalition funds. (Basically, the same thing that happend to the unions back in the early 20th century)
Site coordinators were paid by the contractors, rather than the coalitions - they got labor foreman’s wages from the GC on every site they covered - so if a Coalition supplied labor to contractors on 10 jobsites, that Coalition’s site coordinator got paid ten seperate weekly paychecks.
Many of the Coalitions also began supplying guards to jobsites where their members worked - to keep out the other Coalitions.
Therefore it would be impossible for the Carpenters (the main union that used violent resistance against scab contractors) to use their wrecking crews on all minority scab jobs in the ghettoes - since they’d have to fight off the coalitions and they might not come out on the winning side of those fights.
Also many Black and Latino union carpenters would be reluctant to attack the coalitions - since many of then wouldn’t even be in the union if it wasn’t for the coalition and many of them were still active coalition members too.
Not only would the unions have had to take on the Coalitions, they would also have to fight cosa nostra, which was trying to accomidate itself to HPD by paying substandard wages on jobsites in the inner city.
Vincent DiNapoli himself led the way - one of his drywall companies, the appropriately named Inner City Drywall, began employing what came to be known as “lumpers” on their jobsites in the ghettoes. Lumpers were carpenters who were in the union, but they didn’t get paid union scale. They were illegally paid off the books - ususally in the form of a lump sum for how many boards they were supposed to put up, rather than by the hour. No taxes were withheld and no union benefit fund contributions were made from the payments made to the lumpers.
One Carpenters Union Business Agent tried to fight against DiNapoli and Inner City Drywall, William Nordstrom of local 488 in the Eastern Bronx.
Bad idea.
Person or persons unknown shot and killed Nordstrom in his front yard.
He wasn’t the first Carpenters BA to be killed by the wiseguys that decade - two years earlier, local 385’s Daniel Evangelista was assassinated at his desk in the union hall because he’d opposed the Genovese family’s candidate for District Council President, Theodore “Teddy” Maritas.
The Evangelista and Nordstrom assassinations were a sign of weakness on the part of the wiseguys - they were losing control of the drywall industry, and had to resort to violence to stay in power.
Despite DiNapoli’s efforts, openly scab contractors could and did underbid nominally union contractors, who still had higher labor costs no matter how many lumpers they used.
DiNapoli tried to bring the union scale down, by negotiating a “renovation” agreement - covering both the HPD jobs and the abandoned city public works projects that were now being restarted by the Koch administration.
The Carpenters Union agreed.
Drywall Tapers local 1974 did not.
The tapers were a much smaller craft - the people who follow behind the carpenters on drywall jobs, covering over the screwholes in the sheetrock and the joints between the boards with paper tape and a plaster-type substance called joint compound.
Tapers local 1974 was affiliated to Painters District Council # 9 (which, unlike the Genovese dominated Carpenters, was under the protection of a different cosa nostra family, the Luccheses).
The drywall tapers actually called a strike against the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association to protest the pay and benefit cuts.
DiNapoli responded by setting up a company union.
He directed Genovese family member Louis Moscatiello, Sr (an insurance agent and member of the Democratic Party’s Bronx County Committee) to get a charter from the Plasterers Union for a rival Drywall Tapers union.
The Plasterers agreed, and they set up Drywall Plasterers local 530, to be run by Moscatiello - who had never worked one day in his entire life as a drywall taper.
Moscatiello’s tapers union supplied Metropolitan New York Drywall Association contractors with tapers to use as scabs to break the legitimate tapers union strike.
After the strike ended, DiNapoli signed a sweetheart contract with Moscatiello, with all of the givebacks he wanted - lower pay, no union benefits, an all company man workforce with no mandatory hiring from the union out of work list and the use of stilts (a dangerous work practice outlawed by the legitimate tapers union, who’s members had to be supplied with stepladders, bakers and/or scaffolds for high work).
Tapers local 1974 still represented tapers employed by companies in the Association of Wall-Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, but, since DiNapoli’s association ran most of the major drywall jobs in the city at the time (thanks to his control over the wheel), the legitimate tapers union was locked out of most of those jobs.
Sweetheart contract or not, the HPD and it’s CBO frontmen still prefered to use scab contractors since their labor costs were still lower.
Also, DiNapoli and the Genoveses had another problem. Commercial real estate developers - and the bankers who paid for their projects - could no longer profitably afford to absorb the costs of cosa nostra tribute and ghost employees.
The end of the city’s massive giveaway to the developers had put a halt to the luxury apartment house building boom and the opening of the World Trade Center (and the 15 million square feet of vacant office space it dropped into an already glutted real estate market) had brought commercial development to a halt.
It didn’t help matters that the country as a whole had plunged into the deepest recession in 30 years - a recession that would turn out to be the begining of a permanent economic crisis for American capitalism.
Those factors combined to make it impossible for the owners and the bankers to continue tolerating the price fixing of cosa nostra and the contractors.
The financiers leaned on the government to break the cartels, and the feds launched an investigation called LILREX (that’s short for Long Island Labor Racketeering and EXtortion - they called it that because the probe was originally launched by Long Island-based FBI agents).
The LILREX investigators soon discovered the extent of the drywall protection racket run by the Genovese family, DiNapoli and the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association - and the role that the New York District Council of Carpenters played in that racket.
This led to an indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970. As would come to be customary in these RICO indictments, the main focus was on the union, rather than on the contractors who were the main beneficiaries of the conspiracy.
DiNapoli was a defendant in the case, along with the Genovese family-installed Carpenters District Council President, Teddy Maritas.
The defendant’s attorneys were able to force a retrial in that case - and, the day before the second trial began, Teddy Maritas (who may have been suspected of planning to cop a plea and become a witness for the feds) was lured to a meeting under the Throgs Neck Bridge …and was never seen again. The feds would later find his shoe and his wallet under the bridge, but they never found anything else, and he was presumed to have been murdered.
Maritas disappearance didn’t help DiNapoli or the Genoveses - they lost the second court case and the wheel was smashed.
The Metropolitan New York Drywall Association no longer regulated who got to bid on what jobs.
They weren’t even the main sheetrock trade association anymore - they were eclipsed in that arena by the Association of Wall-Ceiling and Carpentry Industries.
The Genoveses still ran Drywall Plasterers local 530 but that was about it.
Cosa nostra control of the concrete industry was under attack too - the Genovese-controlled hirise concrete club hadn’t yet been directly targeted, but the Gambino family rackets in the readi mix concerete trucking business were, with the indictment of Gambino-installed Teamsters Construction Drivers local 282 chief John Cody.
The District Council of Carpenters was in a shambles too.
After the Maritas assassination, the NYC Carpenters parent union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, stepped in and appointed a trusteeship to reorganize the council.
Thanks to the rapid deunionization of residential construction in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, the NY District Council of Carpenters had shrunk, from 40,000 members to barely 25,000 (and many of them were lumpers who carried union cards but worked off the books for cash).
The sharpest decay had been in the locals in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, largely residential areas where the union’s membership mostly worked building apartment houses and schools.
School construction was still union - but the only apartment buildings that were being put up with union labor were luxury hirises, almost all of which were in Manhattan south of 96th St.
Many locals in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Upper Manhattan had to be disbanded, since they no longer had enough members to be viable.
Their remains were combined into 5 locals - two in Brooklyn, two in Queens (one of which absorbed the remains of the union in the South Shore of Nassau County, Long Island) and one that covered Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and the city’s municipal penal colony on Rikers Island.
Even then, so much of the local construction sector in those boroughs was non union that a high proportion of the membership of those locals actually worked in Lower Manhattan - either on luxury hirises on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side, or on commercial jobs in Midtown and the Financial District.
Many of the members of the new Harlem/Bronx local, local union # 17, worked at the rapidly expanding city jail complex on Rikers (which, thanks to the crime wave, was being rapidly expanded from housing 4,000 men to having enough cells for 21,000 men, women and children and a dock for HMS Bibby Venture, a prison ship purchased from the British Royal Navy).
Across the East River in the South Bronx, there was a lot of work too - the rebuilding of the borough had finally begun.
But almost all of that work was being built by HPD’s scab contractors - so there was no work for union carpenters there (except for the many who had no choice but to accept scab pay and no benefits).
The Staten Island local had seen an even more extreme collapse - almost none of the work out there was being done union.
Local 20 only survived due to it’s geographic isolation - it was too far from any of the other locals for it to be merged with them - and most of the membership (along with a big chunk of local 17’s carpenters) ended up working on the trade shows at the New York Coliseum.
The fall of cosa nostra in interior partition work had made it possible for companies that had previously been locked out of the business to move in. These contractors had to legitimately underbid their competitors to get the work (since there was no longer any organized cartel keeping prices up and organizing the bids so nobody pushed the prices down too low).
Once they won the jobs through “lowballing” (putting in bids far lower than their competitors - often too low to profitably complete the job) he only way for these companies to make a profit was to get it out of the hides of their workers.
This is the time when production quotas begin reappearing (over a century after they had been outlawed by the District Council of Carpenters back in 1872) - first it was 40 boards a day, then 50, then 60…
This was only a taste of the labor abuses to come.
The union made no effort to fight against these violations - if a carpenter got laid off because the foreman thought he/she was “too slow” the union invariably agreed with the contractor that the carpenter was “a fuckup” and merely sent another guy to replace that worker.
As the Carpenters Union allowed the restoration of sweatshop labor practices on the jobsites to go unresisted, cosa nostra’s power in construction continued to crumble.
The contractors who had been under the protection of the wiseguys hated the end of the cartels - but their competitors were grateful for the opportunity to break into the business.
As for the clients, and the bankers who financed their projects, they were overjoyed at the end of what they called the “mob tax” in drywall - and they were looking forward to the government going even further.
The real estate interests were on the cusp of another building boom - both in luxury apartment buildings (this time, constructed without city subsidies) and in commercial construction (with many buildings built on speculation, without any tenants lined up)
This would be one of the biggest building booms in New York City history, and the developers and the bankers wanted to maximize their profits (and minimize those of the contractors). They’d already won a major victory in the drywall business - they wanted to have the government extend and consolidate that victory for them.
And the financiers got their wish.
The two prosecutors representing Manhattan - District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and the very ambitious US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani - continued their offensive against cosa nostra’s contractor cartels.
With the success of the attacks on the drywall wheel, the focus shifted to concrete.
The Colombo family-installed chief of the Concrete Laborers District Council, Ralph Scopo, got indicted - and just 4 years later, the head of the club, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and his company S & A Concrete were charged with racketeering.
The Salerno indictment was unique in that usually only union officials get arrested for labor racketeering - the bosses who benefit the most usually go scot free.
But Fat Tony was different.
He was the head of the Commission that regulated all of the price fixing cartels run by cosa nostra in New York City.
Fat Tony was also the underboss of the Genovese crime family (at the time, FBI agents erroneously believed that Salerno was the head of the Genovese family - the family’s actual boss, Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, had been successfully feigning mental illness for many years).
Worse yet, Salerno also overcharged the State of New York about $ 25 million dollars on the concrete work for the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (he charged the state $ 40 million for a $ 15 million dollar job - and he delivered that job 4 years late)
Scopo was ousted from his union, and Salerno ended up going to prison for the rest of his life.
S & A stayed in business - but with a name change and without Salerno as it’s owner.
The feds also struck a blow at what was left of the Genovese family drywall rackets, by jailing Drywall Plasters local 530 chief Louis Moscatiello, Sr. When Moscatiello went away, he put a puppet president in charge of the contractor-dominated union, and having his son, taping contractor Louis Moscatiello, Jr, as the actual boss of the union.
Moscatiello’s incarceration happend around the same time the building boom of the 1980’s came to an end. Cosa nostra’s power in the industry had largely been broken - there would be remnants of mafia control in the construction industry, but the once invincible empire was shattered.
The unions were in pretty bad shape too.
Despite the building boom of the 80’s the unions (in particular the Carpenters) had not regained their strength. The New York District Council of Carpenters had shrunk to less than 20,000 members (about half what they’d been 20 years before).
The trades as a whole were a lot weaker too - in a city where the construction industry had been almost 100% union for decades, there was now a vast army of non union workers, and over a third of the work in the city was done by scab contractors.
The unions had no clue as to how to stop this.
The leaders of the trades had toyed with mass action - they had succeeded in getting 20,000 workers to a rally at the Brooklyn Bridge in the dead of winter in January 1990 (to a rally that didn’t take on the scab issue head on, but instead called for a federally funded municipal construction program), but they shied away from following through on that mass action - let alone taking on the non union contractors head on.
This timidity on the part of the union leaders was possibly because they feared mobilizing the mass of local men into activity within the unions.
The union leaders likely had an even deeper fear of unleashing a massive strike wave among the mass of non union tradespeople.
This fear would have been especially intense regarding the growing Black and Latino workforce, many of whom had long experience with mass struggles in the Coalitions -it’s doubtful the union leaders would welcome any kind of struggle that would involve bringing those militant workers into the unions.
Many of the BAs were preoccupied with a far more personal problem - their years of cosa nostra ties were making many building trades union officers exchange their suits and ties for Department of Corrections jumpsuits!
Even those who didn’t get locked up often faced ouster from office - like the Lucchese dominated officers of Painters District Council # 9.
They were ousted when their parent union placed the council into trusteeship, in the wake of the indictment of Lucchese underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso (who also faced charges for his control over Ironworkers local 580 and his leadership of a price fixing cartel in the replacement window installation industry).
With their freedom (and the perks of union office) at stake, stopping the deunionization of the industry was a very low priority for the BAs.
The recession of the early 1990’s continued to chip away at the unions - not only did members experience long periods of joblessness, but the segment of the construction market under union control continued to shrink.
And the federal prosecutors continued their onslaught. The leaders of the Carpenters Union, still reeling from the breaking of the drywall wheel and the concrete club, now had to worry about an attack on the non construction side of the union, the trade show industry.
The feds were investigating the Genovese family’s control over the decorating contractors who set up and took down trade shows at the state owned but contractor operated Jacob K. Javits Convention Center - and the Carpenters Union was a major target of that probe.
This was due to the obvious influence the Genovese family had on selecting carpenter shop stewards at the convention center.
Of the two general stewards, one, Anthony Fiorino, was a professional handball player, the other, Leonard Simon, was a cab driver - neither steward was a carpenter, but both allegedly had ties to the Genovese family (Fiorino’s alleged ties were the closest - his brother-in-law, Liborio “Barney” Bellomo, was a Genovese family captain).
Many of the “company men” (workers who had steady jobs with the contractors) at the Javits also allegedly had ties to the Genovese family as well.
The Javits Center case gave the feds an excuse to open another front against the Carpenters - they filed a civil RICO suit, seeking government control over the New York District Council of Carpenters.
The feds did the same thing to the Mason Tenders District Council, the Laborers Union district council that represented building laborers in the city. They went after the Building Laborers on pension fraud charges (specifically, gangsters allegedly getting Laborers Union pension coverage despite the fact that they were not laborers).
The Building Laborers also had become the target of another law enforcement probe - the effort by the City of New York and the feds to break the waste hauling cartel jointly run by the Genovese, Gambino and Lucchese families.
Back in 1956, Mayor Robert Wagner had ordered the Department of Sanitation to privatize the collection of garbage from commercial businesses.
Facing cutthroat competition over this great windfall, the four trade associations which represented the 300 construction waste hauling companies (and which had long been controlled by the wiseguys) organized a cartel.
Under their system, every company had routes assigned to it, and no company was allowed to take another company’s routes unless the wiseguys gave them permission and they compensated the company who owned that route.
Comapnies that cheated and tried to steal business from other firms (and upstarts who tried to break into the business) found themselves targeted by the two unions that represented waste hauling workers - Teamsters local 813, the drivers union, and the Mason Tenders District Coucil, which represented the waste handlers in the transfer stations who unloaded the garbage trucks.
By the 1990’s, in most of America, commercial waste had been monopolized by three big companies, BFI, Waste Management and USA Waste Haulers. They charged low prices for their biggest clients, high prices for the small business owners - and they relentlessly drove small waste haulers who tried to compete with them out of business.
Cosa nostra was the only thing that kept them out of New York City. The commercial landlords wanted the big boys to come into town - so they could get discounts on their waste hauling needs - and they wanted the feds, and New York City’s new “law and order” liberal Republican mayor, former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, to open the way for those companies to come in, by breaking the mob cartel.
The feds and Giuliani set out to do just that.
Their method would be to break the mob control over both Teamsters local 813 and the three Mason Tenders locals in the waste hauling industry.
This brought the Building Laborers union into the federal crosshairs, and that’s why the feds filed their civil RICO suit. The details of the charges were different, but the objective was the same as in the Carpenters - the feds wanted to take over the union.
Unfortunately, a lot of carpenters and laborers, seeing that their unions were in decay and, correctly, blaming the gangsters and the gangster dominated union leaders for the collapse of union standards, had illusions that the feds were going after the bosses of the unions because they wanted to help the workers.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The feds aim was simple.
They knew that, by the early 1990’s, the carpenters and laborers unions were letting cosa nostra connected contractors violate collective bargaining agreements pretty much at will. Not only were union work rules going out the window, but in many cases mobbed up contractors were allowed to pay less than union scale and evade paying union benefit fund contributions for their workers.
This not only gave these contractors an unfair competitive advantage over other, non mob connected, firms, it also cheated the bankers and the developers. The financiers were paying union scale prices, but the wiseguy contractors were paying scab wages - and pocketing the difference.
The financiers wanted to make the unions reduce their pay and benefits for all of their contractors. With the pay and benefit cuts legal and open, the developers and bankers could make their contractors charge them less, so they could enjoy the extra profits from reduced construction worker wages.
That’s why the feds came after the carpenters and laborers unions - instead of secret pay cuts for some contractors, they wanted open pay cuts for all of the contractors.
The feds goal was to install leaders in those unions who would go along with the goals of the owners and the mortgage bankers.
The union leaders, anxious to defend their perks, quite naturally tried to accomodate themselves to the feds.
The Laborers International Union of North America (who’s international leaders - many of whom allegedly had ties to Rhode Island’s Patriarca crime family - were facing another federal effort to take over the union nationally) stepped in and put the Mason Tenders District Council under trusteeship.
The international Laborers Union helped the feds hand pick a leadership that would be amenable to the demands of the developers and the bankers.
This actually wasn’t that hard - the company men in the Laborers Union (the core of privilged workers who were the social base of the political machine that ran the union) were mainly employed by General Contractors.
GC’s manage construction sites on behalf of the owners and developers.
Unlike other contractors, who are always in conflict with the owners because they want to maximize the prices they charge and the owners want to minimize how much they will be paid, the GC’s are on the same side of the table as the developers.
They also have a stake in reducing how much the subcontractors will charge, and maximizing the share of the profits that go to the developers and the bankers.
The company men, quite naturally, tended to have the same world outlook as the GCs (since their priviliged position in the industry and their high incomes were directly tied to their connections to the general contractors) and like the GC’s they supported the goals of the developers.
This made it easy to find company men who would support the goals of the developers, and who the FBI could trust to carry out those goals once they were installed in office.
But before they installed new officers, the trustees and the FBI also reorganized the Building Laborers union, by disbanding most of the local unions.
All of the building laborer, bricklayer tender, plasterer tender and demolition worker locals in New York City were merged into one big citywide local, Building Laborers local 79.
And all three waste handler locals were merged into a big citywide local, Waste Handlers local 108.
The hazardous material and asbestos laborers got their own local, local 78.
The FBI and the trusteeship hand-picked new leaders for these locals.
In local 79, most of the new officers were company man building laborers with ties to the old regime, but without significant organized crime ties. Very few of them had ever worked in demolition or bricklayer tending, despite the fact that a majority of local 79 laborers worked in those crafts and almost none of them were Black or Latino, despite the fact that minorities were a majority of the local’s membership.
In locals 78 and 108, which were overwhelmingly minority - just about the only White people in local 78’s jurisdiction were Polish or Croatian immigrants and almost all of the local 108 waste handlers were Mexican, Guatemalan or Ecuadorian.
So, local 78 had to have a mostly Latino leadership, balanced off with some Eastern European immigrants.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the asbestos removal craft has a higher proportion of women workers than any other construction trade, local 78 didn’t have any female officers or BAs.
Local 108 ended up with a White president, a building laborer, but they balanced that off with Business Agent Vicente “Panama” Alba, a Puerto Rican man who had never actually worked as a waste handler (or a building laborer, for that matter) but who had been in the 1960’s Latino radical group the Young Lords Party. Alba’s role was to give a radical flavor to the government takeover of the union - and to create the impression that the union was actually willing to fight for immigrant workers rights.
The FBI-installed leadership had to present themselves as a militant alternative to the old Genovese, Gambino and Lucchese-dominated regime, otherwise they would not be able to impose the pay cuts and benefit reductions the clients demanded.
So, the Mason Tenders DC set up an elaborate organizing program - many organizers were hired, almost all of them had worked as laborers, many of them were Latino (with a few Polish and Croatian immigrants in the mix as well) and they even hired a Latina woman organizer.
This is the union that introduced the large inflatable rat to labor demonstrations in New York City. They had very loud boisterous picketlines, with whistles and Army marching cadence-style picket line chants.
These militant appearing rallies were radical-looking window dressing for the wheeling and dealing that went on with the contractors behind closed doors.
The Mason Tenders organizing department did succeed in organizing most of the non union asbestos abatement and demolition contractors.
But there was a catch.
The 2,800 newly unionized asbestos handlers got a lower pay scale and an inferior benefit package than other laborers. Also, the contractors only had to hire a limited proportion of their workers from the union’s out of work list.
That’s very important in construction - construction workers do not have steady jobs, so it’s important for them to have a way of getting work from the union when they get laid off. If they have to rely on getting work from the contractors, there is a tendency for workers to make deals - most commonly involving them agreeing to work off the books for less than union scale and no benefits - to get a job.
This is especially true if the workers are undocumented immigrants (which most asbestos handlers are).
So, that loophole allowing mostly company man crews pretty much guaranteed that the asbestos abatement contractors would actually be paying much of their workforce even less than the already low union pay and benefits scale.
Also, the union took over the asbestos contractors training, licensing and medical monitoring function - which not only saved the abatement contractors a whole lot of money, it also relieved them of the legal liability of knowingly hiring undocumented workers.
The demolition contractors got a similar deal from local 79. They could use mostly company men, and they could pay most of their workers less than full union scale. The only laborers who had to get full union scale were the company foreman and the union shop steward - everbody else could be a “B Man” getting paid as little as $ 10/hr.
Also, since the demolition contractors could use almost all company man crews in many cases, they were able to force B Men to work for even less than union scale in return for a steady job.
The non union residential contractors were offered a similar deal, but they didn’t go for it - after all, they paid their laborers less than minimum wage, and there was no way local 79 could match that!!!
In local 108’s case, the big three had displaced a large portion of their membership, since over 200 of the 300 private waste haulers had either gone out of business, been driven out of waste hauling by the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs and the FBI or had sharply reduced their operations due to the loss of routes to BFI, Waste Management and USA Waste Services.
Over a third of the trade, around 1,000 workers, had lost their jobs.
Since the same amount of garbage that had once been processed by 3,000 workers was now being handled by 2,000, the waste transfer stations became deathtraps.
Serious accidents became commonplace, with severe injuries a regular occurance and even a few on the job deaths.
Despite the carnage in the transfer stations, local 108 did absolutely nothing to protect their members lives and limbs.
Local 108 did launch some demonstrations on behalf of BFI, Waste Management and USA Waste, when the NYC Department of Sanitation tried to deprivatize part of it’s recycling program, and end the huge public subsidies to the big three.
Local 108 and Teamsters local 813 also ended pattern bargaining. Where there had once been industrywide contracts with the 4 associations that represented all 300 of the city’s private carting companies, now there were seperate union contracts at each of the big three and at all of the 100 remaining independent carters.
This was the model for other construction union trusteeships - a militant-sounding union leadership who could impose deep wage and benefit concessions on the workers in the name of “organizing”.
The next target was the Carpenters Union - where the trusteeship would not be as successful.
The District Council of Carpenters had been agressively maneuvering to avoid a federal takeover.
They had signed a Consent Decree with the Department of Justice, ending the civil RICO case.
The Consent Decree made a number of changes to the union, including reorganizing the hiring hall system (supposedly to make it more fair for the local men but actually to make it easier for contractors to use more company men on their jobs) and restoring free elections for District Council officers, a right union carpenters had lost in 1916.
The Carpenters elections were scheduled for July 1995. There was a small reform slate, Carpenters for a Stronger Union, that would have been willing to go along with the feds plan to take over the union - but they were unlikely to win.
The two main factions - one led by Fred Devine, the head of Dockbuilders local 1456 and the incumbent DC president and the other led by Pat Harvey, chief of Westside Carpenters local 608 - had essentially the same program: collaboration with the contractors.
They also both had the same social base, the “company men” - that narrow priviliged minority of union carpenters who had steady jobs.
Those company men had close ties with the contractors, in many cases they were related to the bosses by blood or marriage, or at the very least they came from the same neighborhood or had the same ethnic background.
These company men were loyal to the needs of the contractors - and they would oppose anything that would hurt the contractors - like, for instance, the ending of the secret, cosa nostra-brokered deals that the larger, more well connected contractors had with the union, enabling them to get away with contract violations and making the union protect these firms from other, smaller, upstart companies that might want to underbid them for work.
Since both the incumbent Fred Devine administration and challenger Pat Harvey from local 608, as well as the leaders of all 15 other locals, had their social base in this priviliged layer of company man carpenters, they would also not undermine the deals the union had with the cosa nostra-connected contractors.
In fact, the District Council would do it’s best to reinforce and shore up those deals, since the whole system of cartels that had protected these contractors for decades was in a state of collapse and had already been partially destroyed by the feds!
So neither Devine nor Harvey would do anything to help the feds in their fight against contractor price fixing.
Carpenters for a Stronger Union would - but they were not going to win.
CSU’s social base was among local men - the underpriviliged majority of union carpenters who were sporadically employed and had far lower incomes than their company man brothers and sisters.
The problem was, local men, while having full voting rights in the union, were largely excluded from active participation in the political life of the union (other than as blind uncritical supporters of the officers and BAs who ran their locals).
Local men were dependent on the union for their jobs - and could easily be blacklisted if they expressed any opposition to the union machine. The company man dominated union machines had long made this very clear - and were quick to retaliate against any local man who spoke up against them.
80 years of this kind of economic terror had scared local men into silence.
Also, many local men had a fatalistic attitude about the union - it had been dominated by company men and the wiseguys for as long as anybody could remember, and it always would be that way.
Carpenters who thought like that, quite understandibly, tended to be passive about union politics - due in part to their fear of sticking their necks out, and in part to a raw cynicism that no matter what they did, nothing would change, so why bother?
Other local men, who also felt the system was unchangable, were oriented towards currying favor with the union leadership - in hopes that they might be able to get steady work as shop stewards.
Many of the stewards, of course, were among the few local men who had incomes and employment stability comparable to company men - and, alone among union carpenters they could not get fired at will by the contractors (the boss had better have a reason to let a shoppie go - and he’d better clear it with the union before giving that carpenter his two checks).
Some of these local men also thought that that a good relationship with the BA’s might lead to a company man spot somewhere (a very rational belief, since many BA’s were ex foremen or supers - and they still had ties with the contractors they’d run jobs for).
Those local men would tend to be very involved with union elections - as supporters of the union machine. Those are the folks who would go around putting up campaign posters on jobsites, handing out campaign literature at union meetings and leafleting and handing out campaign buttons and stickers at the elections (hoping their loyalty would be economically rewarded).
Another, much smaller, segment of local men did think that changes could be made in the union, and did feel the union didn’t always have to be dominated by the contractors and the wiseguys.
This handfull of dissident local men were the social base of CSU.
Unfortunately, many of these union dissident local men shared CSU’s deadly and dangerous illusions that government intervention would be the only way to make the union more responsive to the needs of the local men.
Those illusions were fueled by the governments takevoers of the Teamsters and Laborers unions - and by the fact that government intervention in the unions was presented as the only road to freeing unions from gangster domination by almost all of the major union reform groups, like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Labor Notes magazine, the Association for Union Democracy…and, of course by the reform caucus in the NYDCofC - Carpenters for a Stronger Union.
Unfortunately, this tended to promote another kind of local man passivity - the attitude that, since the only way the union will be cleaned up is by the feds, workers should just passively wait for the US Attorney, the New York County DA and the courts to come in and “clean up the union”.
In short, the great bulk of politically active union carpenters were either company men (who could afford to express a free opinion about union internal affairs since, unlike most construction workers, they had a steady job) or local men who aspired to be company men or to get regular work as shop stewards (and who would uncritically support the incumbent union leadership to further those ambitions).
They made up around one fifth of the NYDCofC’s membership, but they dominated the union’s internal political life, and they were the social base of the leadership.
The remaining four fifths of the union, the local men, were largely politically inert, and has almost no influence on the District Council as an institution.
Needless to say, due to the social and economic ties the company men had with the contractors - and the roots the union leadership had among those company men, it was impossible for the District Council to go against the interests of the contractors (as they would be expected to do by the feds if a Mason Tenders style reform regime was to come to power in the District Council).
The feds would find that out the hard way in the subsequent decade.
Meanwhile, as the Carpenters had their first free election in 79 years, their trade became more and more openly non union.
One of the biggest scaffold contractors in the city, Colgate, ripped up it’s contract with the Carpenters, Laborers and Teamsters unions, and went openly non union. It also began replacing it’s formerly unionized carpenters, laborers and truck drivers with Mexican immigrant carpenters, who’d never been in the union (and who would have to do scaffold laborer and truck driver work, as well as scaffold building and dismantling).
Rockledge scaffold quickly followed Colgate’s lead. Many non union firms that had never been in the scaffold business before poured into the industry, with the union’s once total control over the market now broken.
Regional scaffolding stayed union…kindasorta.
They cut their carpenters pay, and stopped paying into the union benefit and pension funds - instead, their company men got “profit sharing” payments instead.
Incredibly, Regional’s owner Mike Mazzucca was actually an employer trustee of the very funds he was cheating!!!
Even more incredibly the union did nothing to punish Regional!!!
This was the begining of a trend by union contractors to pay their company men less than union wages and no benefits in return for steady employment. Often, these wages were paid off the books (a practice soon dubbed “working for cash”) The way these cash company men looked on it, it was a good deal - they got a steady job, they didn’t have to pay taxes, and they could use their wife’s health insurance to cover themselves and their kids. It beat sitting in the union hall waiting for a job!!!
This trend of working for cash spread like wildfire in the office furniture installation sector - where contractors came on the site at the end of the job, or into occupied office buildings where there were no other contractors. This meant that their might not be any carpenter shop stewards on site, so the union didn’t even know a lot of these jobs were happening. Also, furniture installation jobs are very quick - so by the time the union found out, they’d be gone.
But nowhere would cash become more common than in that dwindling corner of residential construction that was still union - the luxury hirise sector.
Hirise concrete contractors, who built the shells of the buildings, began making deals with their company man carpenters and laborers - work for cash and you’ll be on the job from foundation hole to topping off, demand union scale and you’ll get cut on the second floor and they’ll get another guy who’ll take the deal.
Drywall contractors, who framed out and rocked up the interiors, made similar deals with their carpenters and tapers - work for cash and you’ll work steady. With the tapers, even the guys who got paid union scale on the books didn’t get benefits, since the Genovese-dominated Drywall Plasterers local 530 didn’t have a benefit fund!
The developers had a problem with this setup.
One, not all of the contractors did this - some still paid union scale and benefits, since on paper these carpenters got the same pay and benefits as commercial construction workers.
Two, the ones that did pay cash usualy had arraingments with cosa nostra that allowed them to do that.
Some of those contractors passed on their labor cost savings to the owners in the form of lower bids - but others didn’t.
They charged the same prices as if they were paying union scale, and pocketed the difference. They also tended to pass along the cost of the “tribute” (protection money) they paid to whatever mob family they were under the protection of (by this time, the Gambinos, Colombos and even New Jersey’s De Cavalcante family had begun poaching on the Genovese’s traditional turf in the concrete and drywall businesses).
And that just wouldn’t do…
The developers (and the bankers who financed their projects) had become accustomed to the state of affairs in the non union segment of residential construction - where all the labor cost savings were passed along to the owners in the form of lower prices.
Naturally, they wanted to bring this to the last remaining pockets of union construction in the residential sector - luxury hirises. They wanted to have ALL of their contractors openly and legally paying lower wages and benefits, and to have those savings passed on to them - and the government was ready, willing and able to assist them in doing just that.
The leadership of the District Council of Carpenters, while more than willing to make economic concessions at the expense of their members (like eliminating doubletime for weekday and Saturday OT and replacing it with time and a half), were very reluctant to attack the cash activities of connected contractors.
The District Council also had other problems.
New York State’s newly elected Governor, George Pataki, was under pressure from the major corporations who had shows at the Javits Center to drive out the Genovese family. Freeman Decorating Company, the general contractor that ran many of the biggest shows, had joined in with it’s clients in demanding the breaking of cosa nostra power at the convention center. Along with driving out the wiseguys, FDC and it’s clients also wanted the governor to impose deep wage and work rule concessions on the unions at the Javits.
And Pataki was more than willing to comply.
Pataki reached out to the New York media, and they launched a fierce publicity campaign against the Carpenters, and the two other major unions at the Javits Center, Teamsters local 807 and Expos local 829 of the Stagehands Union.
Not only were the Carpenters, Teamsters and Expos attacked for the Genovese family ties of some of their company man members who worked at the Javits, and the thefts that some of those connected company men had committed while they worked at the center, the unions were also attaked for supposedly “excessive” union wages, benefits and work rules at the Javits.
One newspaper even claimed, ridiculously, that union rules required 9 men be used to drive a forklift at the Javits Center! Despite the obvious absurdity of that claim (after all, forklifts only have 1 drivers seat!) it was repeated as gospel truth in every media outlet in the city!
FBI-installed Teamster General President Ron Carey joined in the attacks, by ousting Genovese family associate and convicted murderer Robert Rabbit, Sr and his son Michael from their leadership posts in Teamsters local 807, and making a televised pledge - live from in front of the Javits Center - to unconditionally support Pataki’s attacks on the Javits Center unions.
The District Council of Carpenters responded by setting up a training program for trade show carpenters, including a rather insulting “comportment” class that assumed that all carpenters were loud, foul mouthed, sexist pigs who didn’t know how to act around white collar professional women.
That didn’t placate Pataki or the decorating contractors or the exhibitors in the least.
The same weekend that the District Council of Carpenters held it’s first free elections in 79 years (balloting Devine won handily, with Harvey coming in second and the CSU slate coming in a far distant third - and 80% of New York carpenters not bothering to vote for any of them!) the state launched it’s attack.
A force of 200 state troopers raided the Javits Center, with 9mm pistols drawn and attack dogs straining at their leashes.
The state troopers ousted the previous workforce at gunpoint, banned 260 carpenters, teamsters and expos from ever setting foot in the Javits Center for the rest of their lives, drove the Expos union completely out of the house and ripped up the contracts with the Carpenters and Teamsters.
This was followed up with an open labor call, where any worker in the city would be allowed to apply for non union carpenter and teamster jobs at the Javits Center.
Expos local 829 picketed that open labor call - the NYDCofC and Teamsters local 807 told their members to cross that picketline to apply for those non union jobs.
That was only the first government attack on the Carpenters.
Meanwhile, the carpentry trade became more and more non union, and the NYDCofC continued to decline and lose membership.
Devine had given woodwork contractors the right to install non union made material on union jobs (and ordered union carpenters to install this scab material, in violation of a 120 year old union rule that union carpenters are not supposed to install scab-made woodwork).
This concession devastated the unions cabinet shop membership.
Due to layoffs in the union cabinet shops, and the closing of several large union shops (including Schultz Industries, the biggest union cabinet shop in Manhattan and the largest factory in Harlem, with over 400 workers) two of the three cabinetmaker locals had to merge. Locals 1146 and 2155 were disbanded, and the few members who still had jobs joined the newly chartered local 1994.
In outside construction, and particularly in office furniture installation, hirise concrete and residential drywall, the cash epidemic was spreading. The “request system” that had been created by the Consent Decree that ended the civil RICO case against the union. Basically, it allowed contractors to evade the union’s 50/50 rule that required half the crew on any jobsite be local men.
Under the request system, contractors could select which local men would be sent to the job by the union. The contractors could pick any local man that had worked for them in the last 6 months. The only local man who could not be requested was the shop steward. This enabled contractors to have all company man crews.
Since contractors now had the right to have all company man crews, it became harder for local men to get jobs. And it created a strong incentive for local men to become company men at any price - even if it meant making less than union scale.
In theory, the union was supposed to check to make sure that all carpenters were getting their full pay and benefits.
In practice only some contractors got their payrolls checked - the ones that did not have ties with cosa nostra.
Companies that did have