CONSTRUCTION, DEUNIONIZED the decline and fall of the Building Trades unions

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CONSTRUCTION, DEUNIONIZED

the decline and fall of the Building Trades unions

I. “…we are the union, the mighty mighty union….”

Ten years ago, on Tuesday, June 30, 1998, 40,000 unionized New York construction workers marched on Metropolitan Transportation Authority/New York City Transit’s Subway Command Center on W 54th St and 11th Avenue in Manhattan.

The issue was that MTA/NYCT had hired a scab General Contractor, Roy Kay, Inc, to oversee the construction of the Subway Command Center.

This was the largest and most high profile scab job in the city to date – and it was only the tip of the iceburg, since the city’s construction market had gone from 100% union in 1968 to barely 50% 30 years later.

There had been a similar decline in union membership – from 250,000 union workers, and hardly any non union, in 1968 to barely 100,000 union (and an equal number on the scab side of the business) just three decades later.

The union decay had largely been confined to residential construction in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs – work in Manhattan below 96th St had stayed largely union… up until now!

The Subway Command Center was on the western edge of Midtown – the heartland of union construction work in New York City.

And it was a Davis Bacon job – that is, a job by a public authority which was mandated by federal, state and city law to pay “prevailing wages”, the average wage for skilled trades work in the community (which, in New York City, is still pegged dollar for dollar with union scale).

This is exactly the type of high profile public sector construction that was supposed to always go union – especially a job of that size.

Of course, Roy Kay had been doing Davis Bacon work on public schools in suburban New Jersey for years with non union labor.

And they’d already renovated a subway station (Astoria Boulevard on the R and W lines in Queens) for the MTA – with no union resistance.

But the Subway Command Center was a totally different balgame – the largest scab commercial job in New York City in over 30 years.

This particular highly public slap in the face had forced the leaders of the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council (the labor umbrella group for the 16 unions representing the 100,000 organized construction workers in the city) to act.

In a manner of speaking.

The form the NYCBTCT’s actions took were to call a rally on June 30, 1998, in front of MTA headquarters on East 47th St and Madison Avenue (about a mile crosstown from the Subway Command Center jobsite).

On the one hand, this was to be a stop work rally – that is, workers would leave their jobsites at 9AM, and wouldn’t go back to work until almost 2:30 (quitting time on union jobsites in NYC – we’ve have the 7 hour workday here since 1936) – in effect, a one day general strike on all union jobsites in Manhattan below 96th St.

On the other hand, the rally was to be a typical Building Trades borefest – a carefully controlled crowd corralled into a sidestreet, listening to speeches from union officers and contractors

Yes, you read right, I said contractors were speaking at this rally.

Construction union rallies frequently have bosses on the speakers platform – ranging from subcontractors to General Contractors on up to major real estate developers like Donald Trump (some union rallies amount to nothing more than propaganda events for unpopular mega developments opposed by most of the rest of the city’s working class).

Usually the leaders of the construction unions are able to safely channel and control the militancy of their members at these rallies.

Not this time.

The rally began at 10AM, with a huge crowd of over 40,000 union tradespeople filling E 47th St from Madison to 5th and Madison Av from E 45th St to E 49th St.

There was a speakers platform, surrounded with union banners (along with a banner from an employer – Black-owned union drywall contractor R & J Construction, one of the biggest union drywall outfits in the city…and one of the most abusive union outfits to work for). And there were the usual parade of union officers making speeches.

But, something different began to happen.

First, union members began interfering with car and bus traffic on the two lanes of Madison Av that the NYCBCTC had left open – eventually, all traffic on the major avenue was completely stopped.

Then, a group of plumbers and steamfitters (wearing the distinctive blue denim workshirts and overalls of their trades) organized a breakaway from the rally.

To this day, it’s not at all clear who organized this secession from the rally – if it was spontaneous or pre-planned, if it was led by a specific group of workers or if it was just a group of pissed off plumbers and fitters who were ready to stop passively listening to speeches and start actively stopping scab work.

But it didn’t matter – within a matter of minutes, several thousand workers were following their lead!

40,000 workers turned their backs on the speakers platform, and followed the pipe trades workers back to the Subway Command Center site, with intent of stopping the job by any means necessary.

In short order, every street from E 40th to E 52nd street was jam packed with a silent but militant crowd of construction workers, marching from Madison Avenue westwards

The general atmosphere was one of quiet militance – with a few flashpoints of conflict – near the Diamond District on W 47th and 6th Av, a businessman came close to having his Mercedes Benz minivan turned over (with him in it) when he tried to drive his car through the crowd, on W 42nd St a small non union store renovation job was forced to shut down, on Madison a sheet metal worker punched a police horse in the face when it’s rider knocked down one of his coworkers.

But, by and large the handfull of cops stood by, with dumbstruck looks on their faces, as the workers surged by (the NYPD had only sent a handfull of officers, just enough to direct traffic – they had assumed the the NYC Building Trades leaders would police the rally on their own, without the need of the armed agents of the state).

The Business Agents were as shocked as the cops were – and the leaders of the unions, after briefly trying to continue the rally, hastily and unsuccessfully rushed to get to the head of the breakaway march.

This did not work – the first elements of the breakaway march had already reached the Subway Command Center, and the workers behind them had blocked most of the streets in Midtown Manhattan – from 40th St to 52nd St, from Madison Av to 11th Av – in the middle of a business day.

Those workers had intent of stopping work at the SCC – and they did (one worker even invaded the site and – as the New York 1 news cameras were rolling live – tore down the large American flag on the top floor of the structure).

Seeing that the union leaders had lost control of the rally, the NYPD called in reinforcements.

The department hastily called in officers from every Precinct in the borough, as well as specialized units like Emergency Services and the Mounted Unit. The department also pulled all of the cadets out of their classes at the Police Academy, hastily issued them large chemical mace dispensers and civil disturbance helmets and sent them over.

The cops formed a cordon between the workers and the scab jobs, and fired a volley of mace at the tradespeople.

That didn’t go so well – none of the cadets had been trained to use the sprayers, nor did they have gas masks, so quite a few of the young cops accidentally gassed themselves (they made up the bulk of the 39 cops injured that day) .

They learned quickly though, and in short order the cops had driven the crowd back, arrested 43 construction workers and protected the scab job from the workers.

Ironically enough, many tradespeople gently scolded the cops for the assault on the protest (”you’re union members too” was commonly heard) and in response, many of the cops apologized to workers afterwards for having to attack them (”the bosses told us we had to do it” as one African American woman officer told this writer).

As it happens, quite a few NYPD police officers are ex construction workers, and many still have friends or relatives in the trades, thus explaining the cops’ uncharacteristic sympathy for demonstrators.

Still and all, the breakaway rally (which unionized New York tradespeople came to call “The 40,000 Man March”) was a brilliant success.

The 40,000 Man March contributed directly to Roy Kay having to begin negotiations with the unions, which resulted in Roy Kay having to sign agreements with all of the construction unions within a year of the June 30 rally and all of Roy Kay’s workers getting to join the union of their craft shortly therafter.

The march also inspired many unionized tradespeople – the next day, on many jobsites workers who had stayed home that day openly regretted not going – “but I’m going to make sure to go to the next one”.

Problem was, there was no “next one”!

The leadership of the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council were horrified that the militant 40,000 Man March had emerged from their tame street speech rally – and they immediately and publicly apologized to Mayor Giuliani and the real estate developers

The NYCBCTC’s vice president, Paul Fernandes, actually went on live television that night – on all news local cable channel New York 1 – to beg the New York City ruling class for forgivness and to humbly promise that never again would they let the workers get out of control like that!

And the Building Trades Council kept it’s promise.

Although New York developers, building owners, not for profit community groups and governmental entities continued to increase their use of non union contractors over the next decade – and as wages and working conditions sharply deteriorated for those non union tradespeople, the unions made very sparing use of their members power on the jobsites.

There were a few mass rallies – but, unlike June 30, 1998, great care was taken by the building trades unions to make damned sure the workers were kept under tight control (with union officials – in particular, the staff of LEROF, the Laborers Eastern Regional Organizing Fund – often used as enforcers to help the cops keep the construction workers in line).

And some of the rallies the building trades called wern’t even organizing rallies, but were instead promotional events for taxpayer subsidized megadevelopments that were often deeply unpopular with the New York City working class as a whole.

And those rallies were mainly concentrated in the part of New York where most work is still done union – Manhattan below 110th St.

For instance, only 2 union rallies were held in all of Brooklyn (New York City’s most populous borough) during this decaded – and one of them – the larger of the two events – was to support developer Bruce Ratner’s deeply unpopular Atlantic Yards luxury housing/office building/New York Nets basketball arena project in Prospect Heights.

No union rallies were held in the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island or Manhattan above 110th st at all.

In other words, despite the fact that construction in Northern Manhattan and the outer boroughs is predominantly non union, with some of the lowest wages (in some cases subminmum wage – and on many jobs off the books) and most horrendous job safety conditions, only one major rally against scab contractors was held in all of the outer boroughs.

Beyond the rallies, only 3 of the 16 construction unions do any real organizing at all – the Mason Tenders District Council of the Laborers Union, the New York District Council of Carpenters and Structural Ironworkers locals 40 and 361.

In the case of the Mason Tenders and Carpenters, their organizing efforts came out of federal racketeering consent decrees – basically, the FBI and the US Department of Justice forced them to make an effort to unionize at least some of the majority of their trades that had gone scab.

Incidentally, the feds didn’t do this because they’re “pro labor” – the government had it’s own motives here – which I’ll get into later.

The Ironworkers Union’s structural ironworker locals began to organize when non union residential developers began to use steel instead of concrete as their structural construction method of choice (and, of course, they used scab steel outfits to erect their buildings).

The other 13 unions (Asbestos Workers, Boilermakers, Bricklayers, Electricians, Elevator Constructors, Operating Engineers, Painters and allied trades, Plasterers and Cement Masons, Plumbers and Steamfitters, Roofers, Sheet Metal Workers, Tile Marble and Terrazzo Workers, Teamsters – plus Lathers local 46 and Ornamental Ironworkers local 580 of the Ironworkers and the Concrete Workers and Pavers and Roadbuilders district councils of the Laborers) basically didn’t do any organizing at all.

Worse yet, some of these unions were even fighting over the declining number of union workers.

These fights ranged from petty squabbles – like the longrunning (from 1912 to date) beef between Ironworkers local 580 and the District Council of Carpenters over who should install metal windows – ironworkers or carpenters;

On up to actual “raiding” (one union trying to recruit members of another union) – for example the long running effort by the Elevator Division of Electricians local 3 to sign up workers at shops that were already represented by Elevator Constructors local 1;

And all the way up to outright union scabbing – like Plasterers local 530, a low wage drywall tapers union which was created to help union drywall contractors break a Painters District Council # 9 drywall tapers strike in 1978 – a local that went on to spend the next 28 years undercutting DC # 9 level pay and benefits for tapers.

In other words, a crisis was going on – but most of the unions were carrying on like business as usual (more or less – like the Carpenters and Laborers, they all had to deal with federal intervention to some degree or other, and had been under watch by the feds for the better part of the last 30 years).

And, to make it even sadder – it actually could be worse!

New York is still 50% union – and only a few other cities in America have building trades that heavily organized (Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Las Vegas).

In most of the nation, construction was, at best, 20% union – even in major cities like Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Atlanta, New Orleans ect.

Nationwide, there are over 10 million construction workers – but barely 2 million of them are union members today.

It wasn’t always like that – as late as the 1960’s, construction nationally was 80% union – closer to 100% in “union towns” like New York, Boston or Chicago.

What the hell happened?

And, more importantly, can anything be done to change this ugly reality?

I’ve written about the crisis in the building trades at much greater length in my book: “DISUNITED BROTHERHOODS… race, racketeering and the fall of the New York construction unions” by Gregory A. Butler (iUniverse Books, Lincoln, NE ISBN 978-0-595-39143-5 – available at http://www.amazon.com ) but I will tell the short version of the construction deunionization story here.

To know where we are now, we have to start off where the trades came from.

We’ll go way back, to see where the building trades unions came from, the origins of both their strengths and their weaknesses and we’ll be able to see how they got where they are today (and, hopefully, how they can come back from the brink).

II. “…eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!!”

Construction workers were among the first employees in America to unionize – with the earliest building trades unions organized by residential carpenters in the 1790’s.

By the 1860’s, the earliest national construction trade unions emerged – the Plasterers and Cement Masons were the first, in 1863, closely followed by the Bricklayers.

The Carpenters in New York City had a citywide federation of the various local carpenters unions by 1872, and the trade had a full scale national union by 1881.

Boilermakers soon followed, and the “Bridge Carpenter” locals seceded from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners to form the International Union of Bridge, Ornamental and Structural Ironworkers.

Last to form national unions, in 1900, were three of the most technically advanced trades – Electricians, Elevator Constructors, Operating Engineers – and the most unskilled, the Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers.

The various local horse drawn delivery wagon drivers unions (trucks hadn’t been invented yet) merged into a national Teamsters union in 1903.

These unions were a lot different than the construction unions of the present day – but they also had very strong similarities.

Like the current construction unions, the core of these unions, and the social base of their leaders, were the most well off, priviliged and stabily employed members – what would now be known as “company men” (that is, that minority of tradesmen who had a steady year round job with a contractor, as opposed to the majority who, at that time, were hired at the begining of the construction season in spring and laid off in late fall).

However, despite having major advantages over the bulk of the workforce, these tradesmen still had very real grievances against their employers – primarily a need for higher wages, better safety and health conditions on the sites, control over bosses demands for more production from less workers in less time, opposing boss demands to pay workers based on production (piecework) rather than on hours worked and, above all, replacing the Sunrise to Sunset workday (in effect in the industry for the previous 3,500 years – since Ancient Egyptian times) with the 8 hour day.

Because of theit status as the core of the contractor’s workforce, they were in a very strategic position to shut down their boss’ business if their needs were not met.

Of course, that was only possible if the company men also fought for the interests of the majority of the men, the guys who got hired in early April and who lost their jobs just before Thanksgiving.

Those tradesmen also needed higher pay, hourly wages instead of piecework, safety, an outright end to production quotas (and consequent layoffs of “slow” workers) and the 8 hour day – but they also needed a more equal, and preferably worker controlled, division of work hours, so they could make a decent living in the trades.

This latter group of workers were the backbone of the “Trade Movements” (city or area wide general strikes of a trade or group of trades) that were the dominant union organizing technique of the day.

The “Tramping Committees” (the leadership bodies of these early craft unions – so called because they walked – or “tramped” – from jobsite to jobsite as a group to monitor conditions and attend to union business) would, from time to time, organize a trade movement in their area to unionize the trade and get their grievances addressed by the contractors.

Basically, the tramping committees would assemble a group of unemployed tradesmen, often accompanied by a brass band (composed, of course, of unionized musicians) hired for the day. They would march around from site to site, and call a strike of their craft at every site where union wages and working conditions were not honored (the large group of workers would make sure – by any means necessary including a little violence here and there – that all of the workers on the sites would either join the strike or at the very least take their tools and go home).

In the far west, trade movements sometimes took a different form – when the tramping committee wanted to impose union conditions on the contractors, they would deter the largely migratory frontier construction workforce from coming to town, by going to the local train station, looking for tradesmen getting off the trains, telling them that a labor dispute was in progress and paying their trainfare to go somplace else.

Parallel to the local trade movements, there was also the centrally organized national campaign for the 8 hour day, spearheaded by the Carpenters. The 8 Hour Movement was responsible for a national all-trades general strike on May 1, 1886, and a national carpenters strike on May 1, 1890, which won the 8 hour day for almost all urban carpenters in the nation.

In all of these cases, these labor disputes were not settled by collective bargaining, but by contractors submitting to union-imposed bylaws and workrules.

By the early 1890’s, the construction unions had become strong enough to make the 8 hour day the standard construction workday (the international labor holiday May Day has it’s origins in that struggle) and to prevent contractors from paying piece rates instead of hourly wages.

Bottom line, the unions had made themselves a permanent part of the construction landscape which contractors could not avoid.

The building trades unions of that era were somewhat different than those of today.

Politically, most of these unions were led by left wingers who either outright opposed the capitalist system, or wanted to see American capitalism dramatically reformed.

Some (concentrated heavily among German and Austrian immgrants) were anarchists, who believed in an armed workers revolution that would lead to the total abolition of all government and all bosses, and the creation of a society of free producers.

Others (disproportionately concentrated among Jewish, Russian and Scandanavian immigrants) were communists, who also believed in a workers revolution – but in their version, the goal would be to build a workers state in the short run, that, after a long period of reorganization of society by the working class, would lead to a stateless and classless society in the future.

Others were socialists, who also believed in a worker run society, but felt it could be achieved through ballot box reformism. The socialists had a much higher tolerance for present day injustice than either the communists or anarchists – in some cases, they actively supported some kinds of discrimination.

But the largest group were utopian socialists – folks who believed that it was possible to peacefully replace corporate capitalism with a reformed capitalist society (often called a cooperative commonwealth) where skilled workers and the contractors who employed them would drive out the bankers and financiers from their positions of economic and political power, and would work together to rule society responsibly.

By far the largest and most influential of these utopian socialist groups was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor (KoL).

Many of the international construction unions of today have their roots in KoL “National Trade Assemblies” – federations of local craft unions organized under the auspices of the Knights.

The Knights practiced a curiously racialized form of socialism – they believed in equal rights for all White American, European immigrant and African American men.

The KoL’s “socialism” pointedly did NOT include Chinese American workers – in fact KoL affiliated construction unions in the west were actively involved in ku klux klanish lynch mob vigilantism against Asian workers, with intent of driving them out of the trades and the country.

In many areas of the west (San Francisco, Wyoming, Arizona ect) the Knights (and their racist allies, the “Know Nothings” – basically a West Coast version of the KKK except they targeted Asians rather than African Americans) succeeded in ethnically cleansing Chinese and other East Asian immigrants out of the trades.

It didn’t include women either – the KoL felt that they belonged in the home, not on the job, a sentiment shared by many other labor activists of the day.

A handfull of women had gotten themselves a small foothold in the carpentry trade – as machine operators in woodworking shops and box factories and as seamstresses helping to install wall to wall carpet (they would sew the seams between the different segments of carpet) – the unions helped drive those women out of the trades.

KoL-style unionism included Blacks, kindasorta.

Unions of Carpenters, Laborers, Bricklayers, Painters and Plasterers let some Black men in, but strictly on a seperate but equal basis, in Jim Crow segregated locals (and that was just in the South – elsewhere else the Black worker was not welcomed).

In almost all cases, Black workers were confined to the fringes of the trades, with the lion’s share of work opportunites going to White tradesmen – even in places where African American workers were a majority in the trades.

Other crafts – Electricians, Plumbers, Boilermakers, Machinists, Sheet Metal Workers and a breakaway branch of the carpentry trade that came to be known as Elevator Constructors – excluded Black tradesmen from their unions entirely.

The Plumbers and Machinists even had clauses in their union constitutions saying that only Caucasians who were US citizens or Canadian subjects could be members (those racist clauses stayed in those union’s constitutions until the late 1960’s!!!!).

This disturbing comfortableness with discrimination had it’s roots in a broader and deeper problem – the fact that the leaders of these unions disproportionately came from the ranks of the company men, and tended to look out for the interests of that privilged minority of tradesmen over and above the interests of the underpriviliged majority of casually employed construction workers.

The wage improvements, hourly wages (instead of piecework), union funded life and disability insurance programs and shorter work days that these unions had won from the contractors mainly benefited the guys who had steady jobs with the contractors.

And the gains were massive – in the 1860’s, construction was a low paying sweatshop field of itinerant workers who were at about the same economic and social status level as migrant farmworkers. By the turn of the 20’s century, building tradesmen were at about the same wage level as the highest paid skilled factory workers – and the top layer of construction workers were well on their way to middle class status.

For the casual workers, things wern’t quite so rosy.

They had gained from higher pay and the union’s benefit programs – and the shorter work day added up to more work opportunites for casual workers.

But, their need for a worker-controlled means of distributing job opportunites, and the elimination of “the grading of men” (that is, production quotas, and the on the spot firing of workers who, in the opinion of the foreman, didn’t measure up to those quotas) had been pushed to the wayside.

The union hiring hall system was in it’s infancy, and the majority of construction workers still had to “shape up” (that is, walk from jobsite to jobsite with their tools until they found a contractor willing to hire them).

As the unions grew in power and influence, the needs of the casual workers were pushed even further onto the back burner.

The leaderships of these unions had become less democratic and less accountable to the members.

The old tramping committes had largely ceased to exist.

This was in large part because contractors were known to fire men who were active on those committees. Some bosses would also, through employers associations and union busting security companies like the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, have other employers blacklist those men from working anywhere in the industry.

There was no welfare or unemployment insurance in those days, so the unions had to financially support those workers.

This led to the idea that unions should have a full time paid leadership, instead of relying on volunteers in the tramping comittees.

After all, if the unions were going to end up paying the living expenses of their leaders, why not simply put them on the union payroll in the first place?

The fall of the tramping committee system was accelerated by the death of the utopian socialist Knights of Labor, which was largely built around volunteer leaders, and it’s displacement by the right wing socialist led American Federation of Labor, who’s leadership were more likely to be full time staff.

The KoL had been on the decline ever since the 8 hour strikes of 1886 and 1890, which had been led by their socialist rivals in the AFofL.

The final nail was hammered into the KoL’s coffin in 1895 when the union suffered a catastrophic defeat in the New York City transit workers strike.

The Knight’s biggest trade assembly, the 5,000 workers of the Brooklyn Manhattan Traction Co, had been defeated on the picketline by police, BMT special officers and National Guard troops. The strikers were then forced to quit the KoL to get their jobs back. The KoL never recovered from that defeat, and by the end of the decade it was virtually nonexistant.

This left the field to the American Federation of Labor as the only remaining national labor federation.

This is the period when the full time salaried “walking delegate” dispaces the part time volunteers of the tramping committee. They would soon come to be known as “Business Agents” and they control the construction unions to this day.

The business agents, unlike the radical organizers they displaced, saw themselves as a part of the system as a broker who negotiated the price of labor with the bosses.

They would offer the contractors a steady supply of skilled labor, available on short notice (but, of course, the contractors were always free to reserve as much of the work as they wanted for their core workforce of company men) – as long as the contractors were willing to comply with union wages and workrules.

The unions, through their apprenticeship programs, would also guarantee that the industry had a future domestic supply of skilled workers.

Up til that time, contractors had relied on immigration – with the apprenticeship systems of Great Britian and Continental Europe (and, to a lesser extent and principly on the West Coast, those of Japan, China and Mexico too) supplying America’s future journeymen.

Of course, another part of the bargain on the business agent’s part was guaranteeing labor peace on the jobsites, by any means necessary.

In big cities like New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, there was still another side.

Places like New York City on the one had had the most sophisticated and technically advanced contractors – but these highly capitalized firms were constantly threatened by the most ferocious competition from the constant influx of small contractors trying to break into the market.

The unions could also offer some guarantee of protection for the big contractors – by helping them keep their small competitors at bay and keep construction prices up.

That latter aspect of “labor management partnership” was flat out illegal – since it threatened the profits of real estate developers and bankers.

III. “…hold what we have, and get all we can…”

Some of the bigger and more far sighted contractors had found that the now business agent-led building trades unions could actually be very useful for them.

This led to a shift in contractor policy towards unions.

For most of the last 20 years of the 19th century, contractors and their employers associations had fought to break the unions.

Now, the contractors had a new strategy. They still tried to weaken the unions, and limit their power by fighting to retain “the open shop” (the contractor’s right to hire non union labor alongside union workers).

But parallel to that, the contractors worked with corrupt business agents to cartelize the market.

Instead of allowing contractors to freely bid on jobs (which would have pushed down construction prices – possibly even below the profit margin – and would have worked to put most of the profits of construction into the hands of the developers who owned the buildings and the bankers who paid for them) contractors worked to fix the bidding process, so the dominant contractors would divide the work among themselves, and set the prices of the jobs at a profitable level.

The unions were very instumental in this process, since they could guarantee labor peace to the contractors in the cartel as well as restrict the strike weapon so it would only be used against contractors who tried to break into the market by undercutting the high prices charged by the connected contractors.

These types of cartels were only possible in the largest cities – like Boston, Chicago or San Francisco.

In the latter city, the mayor, who was also president of the Building Trades Council, Patrick H. “Pinhead” McCarthy, was instrumental in guaranteeing that the biggest jobs only went to contractors who were in on the scam.

But New York City, above all, was the place where bid rigging cartels were both most necessary and most possible to carry out.

And the Boards of Business Agents of the city’s 5 boroughs (they predated the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council – and still exist side by side with the council to this day), alongside Sam Parks, the head of the NYC Ironworkers District Council and the dominant leader of the city’s building trades, were willing and able to help the bosses out.

There was one big obstacle here – the workers.

The labor side of these cartels involved the unions keeping their members in line, and that wasn’t always possible.

From time to time, the business agents had to fight for their members – above all for higher wages and against the open shop – and it was not yet possible for the union leaders to keep their combative and militant membership in line.

This also created problems for the conservative international leaderships that had arisen over the construction unions as the socialist tramping committes had been displaced by the labor management partnership-oriented business agents.

The leaders of the international unions wanted to have labor management cooperation on a nationwide basis – with the dominant unions working together with contractors in the major cities to suffocate competition between bosses and class struggle by workers against the contractors.

In particular, the leaders of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen were behind this push.

Those were the two largest unions in the trades at that time. And there was a reason for their close alliance – back then, most bricklayers and carpenters worked directly for the General Contractors, rather than subcontractors.

Since most of their members – and in particular, the steadily employed company men who were the social base of both union’s leaderships – worked for the contractors at the core of the business, the UBC and BAC’s leaders were allied to the GC’s, and sought to further the needs of those dominant contractors.

However, those class collaborationist schemes was not possible as long as the New York workers were undefeated – in particular, the New York City Carpenters, the largest, strongest and longest organized trade in the city.

The national leadership of the Carpenters Union worked with the leaders of the New York Building Trades and with the contractors to break this strongest link.

Carpenters General President William “Big Bill” Hutcheson and General Secretary Frank Duffy approached an Irish Canadian gangster named Robert Brindell.

Brindell, a Nova Scotia drugstore clerk who had moved to New York City, became a dockbuilders helper and had worked his way up first to business agent and then to labor racketeer, had led Ironworkers local 177, a union of waterfront construction workers and piledrivers, out of their union and into the Carpenters, where it became Dockbuilders local 1456.

This was a common occurance back then – the building trades unions of the early 20th century would often wage jurisdictional battles against each other, which sometimes included inticing the business agents of targeted locals to secede their unions from their international union and attach it to a rival labor organization.

Brindell’s Dockbuilders local 1456, along with it’s role as battering ram against the Ironworkers, was to do double duty as a base to overthrow the leadership of the New York District Council of Carpenters.

In May 1916, the leadership of the New York Carpenters had been forced to call a strike.

The problem was, thanks to the war raging in Europe (and all the money American businesses were making selling arms to England, France and Czarist Russia) work was booming and the industry was prosperous.

But none of that money was trickling down to the men on the scaffolds – carpenters had gone for several years without a raise.

So, the NYDCofC called a strike and demanded a raise for New York carpenters.

The contractors settled very quickly, since they didn’t want the strike to cause them to lose too many man days in the middle of a building boom.

But then Hutcheson, Duffy and Brindell came in, and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The strike had come at an inopportune time for the GCs – and also put the other General Contractor unions (Laborers, Plasterers and Cement Masons, Operating Engineers, Teamsters and above all, Bricklayers) in a position where their men would be expecting a raise too – and the unions would have to fight for it.

That wouldn’t do, so the Carpenters strike victory had to be nullified – and the rank and file carpenters had to be beaten, cowed and tamed.

To carry this out, the two general officers overthrew the existing leadership of the council (who they branded as socialists and “wobblies” – supporters of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World labor federation) and suspended all 63 carpenter local unions in the city.

Brindell was then placed in charge of a new District Council, with 22 newly chartered local unions, and greatly reduced rights for the carpenters (they lost the right to vote on District Council officers and the right to ratify union contracts).

The carpenters had to quit the old District Council, join one of Brindell’s new locals – and work under the old pay scale – or they would not be allowed to work.

The leaders of the old District Council vainly tried to fight Brindell through the union’s own appeals process and through the courts, but they were defeated.

They could have fought Brindell in the streets (after all, they had the support of the city’s 17,000 union carpenters, while Brindell only had the 300 men in his local plus the handfull of plug uglies guarding his new District Council building) but that was way too radical for these conservative business agents, so they didn’t even think to go there.

The breaking of the New York carpenters taught a lesson – to tradespeople in New York and nationally.

They learned that if they tried to fight back too hard against their bosses, their own unions would come in and crush them – and even after their resistance would be defeated collectively, they would still be subject to invididual blacklisting.

In any case, Brindell upon coming to power set up an elaborate criminal enterprise – basically, he pioneered 20th century labor racketeering.

Working closely with the main General Contractors associations in the city, Brindell would select which bosses would be allowed to bid on particular jobs, what prices they would charge and who would get to be the winning bidder.

Brindell also preserved labor peace at these contractors – no matter how they actually treated their carpenters.

He also acted as an enforcer against contractors who tried to underbid companies that were under his protection.

Brindell would see to it that they had carpenters strikes – and his allies in the building materials drivers and lumber yard worker locals of Teamsters Joint Council 16 would see to it that those upstart GC’s would not get materials delivered to their jobsites.

In return, Brindell got paid – and paid very well (as much as 20% of the total price of certain jobs – his biggest take came from waterfront jobs that employed dockbuilders).

This state of affairs worked out very well for the connected GC’s – but not so well for the clients, who saw the cost of construction go up sharply.

The developers and the financers were forced to tolerate Brindell’s rackets during World War I – but, as soon as the war ended they cut back sharply on building in New York City, reached out to the New York County District Attorney to do something about Brindell’s racket and took steps to weaken the unions as a whole

The DA arrested, tried and convicted Brindell – which was a pretty amazing feat, considering that racketeering as such wasn’t even illegal in 1921 (they got him on a conspiracy charge).

Brindell’s racket didn’t end with his incarceration – as we’ll see below, each time one group of gangsters was dispaced from the industry, their replacements were far more efficient (not to mention brutal).

Irish gansters associated with Brindell took over his rackets, cut their take down to more reasonable levels, and laid low until the heat blew over.

Meanwhile the developers and bankers, along with the architects association and other professional groups, set out to force their GC’s and subcontractors to break the construction unions.

This wasn’t just a New York phenominon – in cities of all sizes across the country, property owners and their agents sought to break the power of the bid rigging cartels that their GC’s and subcontractors had set up.. and, along the way, to break the floor that the existance of unions set on wage levels.

IV.

For a few years, the developers and their open shop allies were relatively successful in their attacks on the unions – at peak, they deunionized about 40% of the industry.

It helped greatly that the unions were hopelessly divided and unable to collectively resist.

The unions that worked for the GC’s (Carpenters, Bricklayers, Laborers) along with the Electricians were busy fighthing the unions that worked for the various specialty subcontractors (Sheet Metal Workers, Ironworkers, Elevator Constructors, Plumbers, Painters, Asbestos Workers ect).

These jurisdictional battles involved disputes over who’s workers would install the various types of new material that had been introduced after World War I.

The main thing the Carpenters, Bricklayers and Laborers had to offer was that their members made less money than the subcontracted trades – and that it would be more profitable for GC’s to do the work in-house rather than sub it out.

Some of the harshest jurisdictional fighting was in industrial construction.

The Asbestos Workers fought the Boilermakers over who got to insulate the machines the Boilermakers installed.

And the Plumbers Union’s Pipefitters locals battled the Boilermakers over who got to install the pipes that came out of the pressure vessels the Boilermakers installed.

But the main jurisdictional fighters were the Millwright locals of the Carpenters.

The Carpenter Millwrights fought a fierce battle against the Machinists Union over machinery erecting (and actually drove that trade completely out of the construction industry) and fought similar battles with the Boilermakers, Ironworkers and Plumbers unions to take over their machinery erecting work and turn it over to the millwrights.

The Carpenters also had two other metal trades related battles – a beef with the Ironworkers over the installation of metal framed movable windows, hollow metal storefront tubes for plate glass windows and architectural metal trim (jurisdictional disputes that continue to this very day) and another with the Sheet Metal Workers over the installation of metal interior trim and metal ceilings.

And they had a beef with the Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers over who would erect and dismantle scaffolds – carpenters or laborers.

They also had a dispute with the Wood, Wire and Metallic Lathers (the workers who installed the wooden lath strips and/or wire lath and/or metal mesh that the plasterers attached their plaster to) over who would attach lath to carpenter-installed wall studs. Since the installation of lath was 100% of the Lathers Union’s work, this was a life-or-death dispute for them.

Besides fighting with other unions, the Carpenters also had an internal political war – a Communist Party led dissident caucus was challenging the Hutcheson/Duffy machine for power.

They posed quite a serious threat – in the 1924 elections, Hutcheson was only able to beat the communist-led slate in the elections through the large scale use of dubious interpretations of technical union vote tabulation rules to disqualify potentially pro communist votes.

Big Bill did win the campaign for the top of the ticket (since the opposition’s leaders had split and had two seperate presidential candidates) but for the rest of his ticket, who faced only one opponent, it was not so easy.

In the wake of that election, Hutcheson and General Secretary Frank Duffy stripped all carpenters of their right to directly elect union officers by one carpenter one vote elections (and we still don’t have that right to this very day) and launched a massive purge against communist carpenters and their allies in the union.

The purge began with an attack on Morris Rosen, the communist presidential candiate who Hutcheson had narrowly defeated.

Rosen, the business manager of local 376 in Brooklyn, was stripped of his union office and expelled for life from the union.

And then, every single one of the 400 carpenters in local 376 – almost all of whom, like Rosen, were Jewish – was expelled from the union – even if they were not communists!

They were forced to reapply for membership in other nearby local unions – pay a whole new initiation fee as if they’d never been union carpenters before – and they were also banned from running for any union office for 5 years.

And then, local 376 itself was disbanded, and it’s territory was divided up among other nearby carpenters locals in Brooklyn.

Following the great purge of local 376, similar smaller scale witchhunts were held in other New York local unions and in the Chicago District Council of Carpenters as well.

The New York and Illinois purges had starkly ethnic overtones – Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, Danes and Jews were disproportionately targeted, suspended and expelled by the largely Irish and Irish American Hutcheson/Duffy machine.

But there were other purges as well – particularly in Los Angeles and Detroit.

In the latter city, communists and their sympathizers were actually the majority of the delegates to the Detroit District Council of Carpenters.

Big Bill Hutcheson and Duffy got arount that easily enough – they simply expelled the majority of the Detroit delegates.

Those men were kicked out of the union, stripped of all benefits and forbidden from rejoining the UBC unless they apologized for being communists and agreed to be barrred from running for union office for 5 years.

The right wing delegate minority were thusly able to take over leadership of the Detroit District Council of Carpenters – even though they had not been able to get a majority of the workers to vote for them!

The Carpenters war against Machinists and communists had really gotten in the way of any kind of serious fight against the open shop (and, of course, none of the leaders of the trades were willing to launch any kind of mass worker resistance – lest they lose control over their union machines).

The building trades were in pretty serious danger at this point – certainly, if left to their own leaders’ devices, they might have gone down to defeat.

The building trades were actually defeated in San Francisco.

The bankers and building owners of San Francisco, tired of the high prices enforced by the cartel of Carpenter business agent/mayor of San Francisco/president of the building trades council “Pinhead” McCarthy, had launched an attack on the unions

This was made immeasurably easier because Pinhead McCarthy’s dictatorial and corrupt regime had alienated most of the city’s unions from his home local, San Francisco Carpenters local 22 (even a majority of other Carpenter locals opposed Pinhead’s regime).

So, when the developers forced their contractors to lock out the union and to begin using an employers association controlled scab hiring hall, the unions had a hard time fighting back.

Some of the communist and left wing socialist led Carpenters locals actually were able to rally resistance for a time – until Big Bill Hutcheson and Duffy stabbed them in the back.

These locals were suspended and had their officers ousted – in effect, breaking the strike and causing the defeat of the San Francisco Building Trades (a defeat that it took over 15 years for them to recover from).

But outside of San Francisco, the GC’s and specialty subcontractors in the larger cities had found the unions useful as both a source of skilled labor and as the backbone of the anticompetitive cartels that they had put together.

So, those bosses fought against their rivals, the developers and the bankers – and they, with the help of the unions as very much junior partners, were able to prevail.

By the end of the 20’s almost all of the urban and most of the suburban construction workforce outside of California was union – with the exception of Los Angeles and San Francisco, only in very isolated rural areas were their signficant numbers of non union tradesmen.

Those unions were solidly allied with the contractors, an active partner in the contractors struggles against the owners and financiers over control over the industry’s profits and had memberships that had been throughly subordinated politically to their leaders.

The unions even won one of their greatest legislative victories of the 20th century – the Davis Bacon Act, which required that contractors building for government agencies had to pay “prevaling wages” to their workers (that is, the average wage for that type of work in that area – in the big cities, the prevailing wage was almost always pegged dollar for dollar with union scale).

Then the economy collapsed.

V. “…now we stand outcast and starving ‘mid the wonders we have made…”

Construction activity had started tanking about a year before the October 1929 stock market crash that officially started the Great Depression.

Within short order, mass joblessness hit the construction trades, with 80% of tradesmen out of work.

The handfull who were working were sporadically employed for the most part and most had to work “bootleg” (for less than union scale).

Some unions had over a third of their members having to quit the union because they could no longer pay their dues (and that was in a climate where the unions usually would not drop a jobless member unless he hadn’t paid his dues in over a year).

This was only a very extreme form of the mass unemployment that had hit the American working class as a whole and left 1/3rd of the workforce idle.

Worse yet, there was no unemployment insurance or social security or welfare back then – if you didn’t work, you starved.

The construction union leaders were against unemployment insurance – they felt it was “beneath the manly dignity” of construction workers to get public aid!

Many of their members disagreed – and communist construction workers in particular fought to get their unions to call for social security, welfare and unemployment relief.

This struggle was centered around the New York AFofL Trade Union Committee on Unemployment and Relief, chaired by Louis Weinstock, a communist business agent in Painters District Council # 9.

Many building trades unions threatened to suspend or expell members who called for unemployment relief.

This was especially true of the Carpenters – New York locals that supported Weinstock’s Unemployment Committee were threatened with expulsion.

And those were not idle threats.

There were Carpenter locals that were attacked by the UBC international because they joined the communists in calling for aid for unemployed workers.

Canton, Ohio Carpenters local 143 was put in recievership, Philadelphia Carpenters local 1051 was disbanded and had it’s members dispersed among other nearby locals and the entire Seattle District Council of Carpenters was taken into trusteeship by Hutcheson.

Eventually, despite the anti-communist persecution of pro relief local unions, the leaders of the construction unions had no choice but to follow the communists lead and call for unemployment relief – otherwise their members would have risen in open revolt against them!

Meanwhile, federal, state and local governments tried to deal with the depression through public works construction – most of which was done with union labor, and almost all of which paid Davis Bacon scale wages (a testiment to the permanent niche the unions had carved out for themselves in the building industry).

In New York City, the municipal government launched the building of the massive 8th Avenue and 6th Avenue lines of the municipally owned Independent Subway System.

That subway building job – the biggest since the completion of the Interborough Rapid Transit’s 7th Avenue South subway line extension in 1917 – set off another round of jurisdictional warfare between the construction unions.

The Tunnel Workers Union (who’s members were called “sandhogs”) had jurisdiction over tunnel building – but that didn’t stop other trades from demanding a piece of their action. The fact that the Tunnel Workers were a small local craft without the backing of a strong international union made their jurisdiction an even jucier target of raiding.

The Laborers Union’s Concrete Workers District Council chartered Excavation Laborers local 731 to claim a share of the Tunnel Workers Union’s work.

Not to be outdone, the New York District Council of Carpenters, who’s Dockbuilders local 1456 already had a small foothold on the job, set up Timbermens local 1536 to grab a piece of the sandhog’s jurisdiction.

Besides fighting Tunnel Workers and Laborers for subway tunnel work, Timbermens local 1536 also continued the Carpenters beef with the Ironworkers, because it became the local for carpenters who install metal windows, hollow metal storefront work and architectural metal work – a jurisdiction that the Carpenters and Ironworkers had been fighting over for close to two decades at that point.

In the end, the Tunnel Workers Union had to merge with the Laborers Union, where it became local 147 – thus giving the Laborers union control over all work in deep tunnels except for welding (the Operating Engineers got that).

But, besides the Operating Engineers, no other trade was allowed to work in the deep tunnels except for sandhogs.

The Laborers total victory in deep tunnel work helped to make Excavation Laborers local 731 the main trade in shallower cut-and-cover tunnels and open culverts through.

Dockbuilders local 1456 and Timbermens local 1536 ended up with a far smaller piece of the pie in cut-and-cover tunnel and culvert work than they’d bargained for – and they still had to share the work with other trades – Electricians, Lathers, Ironworkers – even the Painters Union got a piece of the action!

Along with the massive subway building job, there was the construction of the George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tri Borough, Whitestone and Throggs Neck bridges (all of which – except for the Tri Borough – were built 100% union).

Nationally, there were projects like the the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washinton State (a horribly designed and badly built structure which collapsed shortly after the contractors completed it), the Golden Gate Bridge in San Franciso, the Hoover Dam on the Nevada/Arizona state line (an unusual job because the unions actually let Black men work on the site, although they were forbidden to live in the company town on site – they had to commute in from Las Vegas), the Bonneville Dam in Washington State, the Tennessee Valley Dams in Tennessee ect.

Along with those megaprojects were lots of post office, national guard armory, police station, firehouse, school building projects as well.

These projects never really picked up the slack from the total collapse of private sector construction – and they barely made a dent in building trades unemployment, let alone general joblessness in the economy as a whole.

The failure of government to end the depression led to a wholesale change of the political balance of power in the 1932 elections. Above all, New York State Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the Democrats to power in the federal government. He won the presidency, and his party won both houses of congress.

Roosevelt had a plan – the National Industrial Recovery Act/National Recovery Administration (commonly known as “the Blue Eagle” because of the decal that pro NRA business owners put on the front of their establishments).

NIRA/NRA was a crypto-fascist corporatist scheme where the government would repeal the anti-trust laws and give the dominant businesspeople in each branch of the economy and the employers associations they controlled the power to set up cartels, drive weaker competitors out of business, fix prices, set a floor for wages and set up a government sanctioned guild to divide up the market in each industry.

The cartels from the various industries all operated under the supervision of the NRA, a government agency run by a US Army general.

A minor part of NIRA/NRA – Section 7 (a) – was a clause requiring that employers bargain with the unions chosen by their workers.

American workers, angered at the mass misery and desperate for some type of industrial change, grasped onto that one short paragraph and began to rush into organizing labor unions.

Some joined the small radical labor organizations run by the Communist Party USA’s Trade Union Unity League (TUUL).

This was especially true in heavy manufacturing industries, like automobiles, electrical products ect – where the AFofL had never bothered to organize or in industries like coal mining, steel, the garment industry and New York City mass transit where AFofL unions had collapsed.

In other industries, where the AFofL had a foodhold, they suddenly found a massive influx of workers anxious to join up.

In the building trades, the core of the workforce were already unionized – but non union workers in the building maintenance industry (stationary engineers, stationary firemen , janitors, elevator operators ect) flooded into the Operating Engineers, International Union of Firemen and Oilers and the Building Service Employees International Union.

Also, the manufacturing workers who made building materials also began to clamor to join the AFofL building trades unions – who’s members installed the products they made.

Several thousand electrical supply house and lamp factory workers in New York City rushed into Electricans local 3.

They were joined by several hundred elevator mechanics, who had been rebuffed by International Union of Elevator Constructors local 1 (who looked down on them as “unskilled” and felt they didn’t deserve to be union elevator constructors).

The IUEC’s loss was the IBEW’s gain, since they joined the Electricans instead.

These newly unionized electrical workers were led by a hard core of ex members of the communist led Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, who had dissolved their union in the name of electrical worker unity, and convinced their coworkers they’d be better off in the IBEW.

IBEW local 3 was more than happy to collect dues from these workers – but, they became second class citizens within the union.

They were members of local 3’s B Division – with a lower pay scale, no right to vote or run for office in the union and discriminatory rules that denied the many women in the lamp plants even the limited status that male B division workers had.

To this day, local 3 still has a B division (and a J division, and an ADM division as well). Even though a 2/3rds majority of local 3 workers are members of the B, J and ADM divisions, they do not have the right to participate in the political life of the union outside of their divisions – the local as a whole is ruled by the construction electricians of the A division.

The Plumbers Union’s Steamfitters local 638 also set up a B Division for fitters who worked for maintenance shops and other miscellaneous metal workers who ended up in their union – like local 3’s B division, the 638 B workers had a lower pay scale and had limited political rights within the Steamfitters Union.

Electricians local 3 and Steamfitters local 638 were following the same general policy their parent unions – the IBEW and the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices in the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA) – were following nationally, they were putting all their new members into B Divisions with lower pay and fewer political rights.

The Operating Engineers also set up B divisions (and even C and D divisions) for the new members they anticipated organizing in oil refineries, quarries, gravel pits and in the boiler rooms of hotels, movie theaters, hospitals, office buildings, public buildings and department stores.

The Operating Engineers’ A divisions were reserved for skilled operating engineers (heavy equipment operators) and stationary engineers (skilled boiler operators) while the B, C and D divisions were for firemen, oilers, helpers, apprentice engineers and other miscellaneous boiler room workers.

As was typical with alphabet divisions, the B, C and D folks had no democratic rights.

But the international officers of the Operating Engineers took it one step beyond that -

With the active encouragement and support of the Associated General Contractors and the National Constructors Association, the IUOE leaders took many of their locals into trusteeship.

In the trusteed locals (which included almost 40% of the IUOE’s membership) ALL the members, even the A men, were stripped of the right to vote.

Many of the smaller locals were also merged into huge locals covering whole states or several states (like Operating Engineers local 3, which covered Northern California, Northern Nevada, Utah and the Territory of Hawaii) – the better to keep the guys on the job from coming to union meetings, and interfering with the “cooperative relations between the IUOE chiefs and the AGC and NCA bosses!

The Ironworkers also faced a rush of steel fabrication shop workers who wanted to join their union. In their case, wherever possible, the newly organized shop workers were put into completely seperate locals with lower pay scales and no political influence over the structural and ornamental ironworker locals, in New York, local 455 was set up for this purpose.

The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Blacksmiths, Iron Ship Builders, Forgers and Helpers of America (IBB) followed a similar pattern with the mechanical system fabrication workers who came their way – they got put into locals that were totally seperate from both the construction locals and the shipyard locals.

The Boilermakers Union also made sure to not organize Black,Latino or Asian workers – and to exclude workers of color in the newly organized shops from being members of the IBB (who’s constitution restricted membership to White men).

But by far, the union that found itself facing the largest group of newly unionized workers was the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

Some of these workers were skilled cabinetmakers who could easily be absorbed by the existing cabinetmakers locals (in New York’s case, locals 246, 1146 and 2155) – most of these workers were in places like Chicago, the Bay Area and, of course, New York, where the UBC already had a lot of shop workers in their union.

Others were production workers in factories that made furniture, windows, hollow metal doors and other carpenter-installed products, as well as other wooden products like fresh fruit boxes.

They were a little harder to handle (and, quite frankly, the Carpenters Union leadership openly looked down on them) so they were put into newly organized Industrial Councils.

Industrial Council workers had political rights within their IC’s – but, they had very limited rights beyond them. They were considered “auxiliary members” with few rights in the unios – even their delegates to the UBC convention did’t have the right to vote.

The women in some of these factories were even more rightless – as the Carpenters Union’s constitution restricted membership to men, they were not considered to be union members, denied a vote and were not even allowed to collect union benefits!

Of course, they still had to pay union dues (at a 33% discount).

The IC’s were basically set up to insulate the broader UBC from the influence of these poor, militant and agressive workers.

This proved to be an even bigger problem when the lumberjacks and sawmill workers of the Pacific Northwest came flooding into the Carpenters Union.

These workers were very radical – up until the end of World War I they had been led by the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World.

Only massive repression by the US Justice Department, the FBI, the state police departments of Oregon and Washington State, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sheriffs and local police in the timber towns and armed anti communist vigilantes from the American Legion and the “4 L’s” – [Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen] had driven the Wobblies out of the lumber camps.

But despite the years of repression the “timber beasts” of the north woods were still quite revolutionary.

There was also a racial problem with the Canadian timber workers.

About one fifth of the lumber workers of British Columbia were Japanese, Chinese or Indian.

Considering the West Coast Carpenters Union local’s roots in the 19th century “Know Nothing” racist campaign of terror, having Asian workers as brothers (and even worse sisters – because there were Asian women employed in some of the mills) was almost as hard for the UBC leadership to accept as the communism thing was!

Not to mention the deep discomfort the Catholic dominated Carpenters Union faced at the prospect of initiating large numbers of Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims!

After all, this was a union that had never fully accepted it’s large Jewish membership in the big East Coast cities (and at least those men were White!)

The lumberjacks and sawmill workers of the Northwest were led by communists, who had dismantled their own unions (the National Lumber Workers Union on the US side of the border, the Lumber Workers Industrial Union on the Canadian side) and, in the name of lumber worker unity, had led the woodworkers into the UBC.

The Carpenters followed the pattern I outlined above – the lumber workers were denied their political rights in the union, and had a conservative leadership imposed on them by the international union.

But the timber workers did not stand for that.

Their communist leaders (and their non communist allies) fought to get full rights within the UBC, and to carry out organizing drives and strikes in the sawmills and out in the logging camps.

In British Columbia, that involved the Industrial Council buying a fleet of small boats – the “logger’s navy” – cause that was the only way to reach many of the remote labor camps along the coast.

The Northwest lumber workers also led a series of strikes – all of which were utterly opposed by Big Bill Hutcheson and his local representative Abe Muir.

Meanwhile, the business agents also had problems back on the construction side of the building trades unions.

In New York City, the newly unionized janitors and elevator operators of Building Service Employees International Union locals 32, 32a, 32b, 32e and 32j had forced their conservative business agents to lead them on a very militant strike.

The core of that effort were the building workers in the hirise factory buildings in the garment district, who were heavily influenced by the militance of the garment workers who were employed in the buildings they served.

Among other victories, the garment workers had won the 7 hour workday and the 5 day week (at the time, almost all AFofL union members had an 8 hour day and a 6 day week – or, at best, a 5 and a 1/2 day week with a half day on Saturday).

The janitors liked that whole two day weekend thing – especially the fact that, with Saturday and Sunday both as non working days, both Catholic and Jewish workers got their respective sabbaths off – and they forced the BSEIU to fight for it.

And, despite themselves, the BSEIU business agents were forced to lead a strike around this issue and they actually won that demand.

Once the BSEIU won the 7 hour day, the business agents of the construction unions had no choice but to fight for the 7 hour day and the 5 day workweek (or otherwise face the wrath of their membership).

By 1936, every construction trade but the Laborers had won the 7 hour day and 5 day week (and even they worked a 7 hour day on concrete and masonry jobs – only the building laborers still had the 8 hour day – and even they had gained the 5 day week).

To this day, unionized construction workers in New York City have a 7 hour workday and a 35 hour 5 day week, with overtime for all hours after 7 in a workday, and for all hours worked on Saturday, Sunday or a holiday – the living legacy of that struggle.

That victory also proved to the business agents just how dangerous it was for the union and it’s relationship with the contractors to organize militant and politically conscious workers – cause they might just force you to lead them in struggles, and they might actually win!

This showed the pitfalls of successful worker organziation – from the perspective of the class collaborationist business agents!

Generally speaking, workers in motion who have won victores are more likely to press for even greater demands. This is all the more dangerous when the workers have been exposed to revolutionary ideas – given enough time, those workers would tend to end up demanding that power over all of society be taken away from the capitalist class and their government, and given to the working class and it’s leadership.

Consequently, the building trades unions shied away from organizing the almost 4 million construction workers employed by the Roosevelt Administration’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

Those workers were half starved desperate unemployed men, brutally underpaid (their “wages” were their family’s welfare check) and subject to harsh working conditions.

And many of them were members of the building trades unions!

They were also working on some of the biggest construction projects in the country – in particular, the Roosevelt Administration’s elaborate road building program.

Even in New York City, WPA workers were on massive highway construction jobs – the Tri Borough Bridge was built entirely by WPA workers, for example.

They were organizable – the Communist Party’s National Unemployed Councils had proved that.

They had led WPA worker strikes, which had forced the government to improve working conditions, reduce the number of days per month the WPA workers had to work and increased the WPA workers’ welfare checks.

The Carpenters Union made a half hearted effort to bargain on behalf of WPA workers who were union carpenters. They won a ruling where those carpenters would be paid at prevailing wages. The way the WPA handled that was like this – if a union carpenter on a WPA job got a $ 6 dollar a month welfare check, and the union pay scale for the area was $ 1.50 an hour, he’d only have to work 4 hours a month.

But neither the UBC or any other building trades union made any effort to organize the rest of the WPA or CCC workforce. They had had enough problems with the building materials workers – why even take the risk of unionizing an even more revolutionary and militant group of workers, folks who really had “nothing to lose but their chains”?

As it was, despite over a decade of repression, there were still pockets of pro communist carpenters – for example New York Carpenters local 2090, which was disbanded because the officers refused to make their members swear to an anti communist oath.

If they were still having problems dealing with the revolutionaries within the union, the UBC chiefs were sure as hell not going to bring any in from outside!

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Labor had split.

Some of the more thoughtful and far sighted business unionists had realized that the AFofL’s tactics were not up to the task of organizing all of these millions of workers who were rushing to the labor movement.

Most importantly, the idea of making these militant newly organized workers into second class citizens in unions from other industries, rather than giving them unions of their own, was really not workable.

The leaders of the AFofL’s industrial unions – in particular the United Mine Workers of America and it’s prominent and charasmatic president, John L. Lewis, but also the New York garment unions, knew something had to be done.

Lewis in particular had broader ambitions for the role of labor in America. He had the corporatist idea that industrial unions like the UMWA, in cooperation with the main bosses in their industry and the government, could work together to save the economy.

Lewis had long wanted to work with coal mine operators and the federal government to reorganize the coal industry (by helping the big mine operators fix prices, drive small coal mines out of business and automate the remaining mines so that far fewer miners could extract more coal).

But the coal operators didn’t want to go along – in large part because many coal mines were owned by non union steel companies, who did not want to have unions that deeply involved in their business.

The Mine Workers president felt that, if the steel industry was unionized, his union would have the leverage to get those companies on board with his scheme to rebuild the coal industry along corporatist lines.

Sidney Hillman had similar crypto-fascist ideas for his industry.

He was the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (the men’s clothing workers union, which was the second largest garment union after the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the womens and childrens clothing workers union).

Hillman wanted to work with garment factory owners and the government to drive out the marginal garment sweatshops, automate the remaining factories, drive the workers thus displaced out of the industry and have the manufacturers and retailers collaborate to keep clothing prices high.

But it would take a new type of union to make Lewis and Hillman’s plans happen.

These unions set up a caucus within the AFofL called the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO)- which eventually was kicked out of the AFofL and became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (also CIO).

The core of the CIO was the UMWA, the miners puppet Steel Workers Organizing Committee, the New York garment unions and old line AFofL industrial unions like the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.

There was also a big contingent of the AFofL’s West Coast waterfront worker unions – the International Longshoremen’s Association’s Pacific Coast District (which formally seceded from the ILA and rechristened itself the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union), the Sailors Union of the Pacific (which had the unfortunate distinction of being the only Jim Crow union in the CIO – Blacks, Latinos and Asians were not allowed to work on SUP organized ships), the Marine Firemen and Oilers and the Marine Cooks and Stewards.

They were joined by unions that had come out of the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League – the United Auto Workers, the Farm Equipment Workers, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, the United Rubber Workers, the United Furniture Workers, the Transport Workers Union, the National Maritime Union, the American Communications Association (a left wing craft union of Western Union and ITT telegraph operators), the State, County and Municipal Workers, the United Office and Professional Workers, the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse, Agricultural and Allied Workers.

Also, there was a breakaway from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters – the Pacific Northwest lumber workers Industrial Councils we met earlier in this essay.

The lumberjacks had gotten sick and tired of being second class citizens in the UBC, so they asked for and got a CIO charter as the International Woodworkers of America (IWA – which sounded a LOT like “IWW” …which was NOT an accident on the part of the organizers!)

The UBC immediately condemned the IWA as a communist union that was posing a mortal threat to “American labor standards” with it’s “cheap Oriental labor” (the UBC was still deeply uncomfortable with the British Columbia timber industry’s large Chinese, Japanese and Indian workforce, who made up about 1/5th of the workers).

The Carpenters launched open warfare against the IWA-represented sawmills – with the all but open support of the big lumber companies and local authorities.

UBC Secretary Frank Duffy sent a circular to every Carpenters Union local, ordering them to refuse to install any wood products with a CIO union label on them.

Carpenters locals that shied away from open warfare against their CIO bretheren were subject to sanction – like San Francisco Piledrivers local 34, which was suspended for not pulling out of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific (a waterfront workers labor council which was mainly composed of CIO unions)

In Oregon, Washington State and British Columbia, the Carpenters Union chartered dual locals in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and in the smaller timber towns and lumber camps.

These bogus “unions” were then used to picket the CIO-represented mills – often reinforced with basebat-wielding ex convict “organizers” supplyed by Dave Beck, the chief of Teamsters Joint Council # 28 and the Western Conference of Teamsters.

“Picketing” often meant “beating up CIO workers while state troopers, deputy sheriffs and/or mounties stand by and let it happen without interference – unless the workers successfully defened themselves against the AFofL’s violent hoods – now THAT was “rioting” or “criminal anarchy” or “sedition”.

Incidentally, the sawmill campaign made Beck’s Teamster thugs so notorious up and down the West Coast that a new word was invented to describe them – they were called the Goon Squad (a name adapted from “Alice The Goon” a big and weird character in the Popeye cartoon).

With the goon squad to back them up, the bogus Carpenter locals let the sawmills know that they would not sell any lumber to UBC-represented union contractors as long as they had the IWA in their mills.

The Teamsters Union also informed the mills that – in addition to continuing to harass and assault sawmill employees – they would order their truck driver members not to haul any of their lumber until the mills broke with the CIO.

The lumber companies lept at this chance – they hadn’t wanted any union at all, but if they had to, they preferred a racist, anti communist, business unionist labor group that gave few rights and little power to the timber workers – and was quick to enforce goon squad terror agaisnt unruly workers, as opposed to a militant, anti racist, communist led, class struggle oriented union which went out of it’s way to inform and educate it’s membership.

In other words, they jumped at the chance to rip up their IWA-CIO union contracts and to sign sweetheart agreements with the UBC’s Industrial Councils behind the timber workers backs.

However, the workers wern’t so quick to go back to the Carpenters Union – some, in particular those in the big mills in Northern Oregon and Western Washington, were forced to, and in British Columbia some of the logging camp workers were forced out of the IWA, but not organized by the UBC and thus became totally non union, but the vast majority stayed with the IWA come hell or high water.

Plus the UBC and the timber companies had the added problem of the National Labor Relations Act to deal with.

Under the just recently set up NLRA, it wasn’t possible to just baseball bat workers into changing unions if they’d voted for those labor organizations in representation elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and attested to by both bosses and the union, so it was a lot harder to force the timber workers involuntarily back into the UBC.

It WAS possible to set up decertification elections – and to find workers willing to be the frontmen for the UBC and the timber companies in filing those petitions – and to set up a climate of goon squad terror and layoffs to force workers to switch unions.

But even then, most Northwest timber workers still stuck with the IWA.

Their counterparts in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi were also choosing to join the IWA as well.

In the latter 3 states, the heavily Black timber workforce had a clear choice – a union that let them be full members with equal rights versus one that would Jim Crow them.

The UBC also faced competition in the furniture factories of New York City, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Evansville, Indiana, Chicago and Los Angeles from the United Furniture Workers.

The UFW-CIO had originally been organized by the communists as the United Furniture Workers Industrial Union during the TUUL years.

Later, it had become the CIO’s United Furniture Workers Organizing Committee, and finally it got chartered as an international union in it’s own right.

Again, the workers had a choice – belong to a factory workers union that gave them the same rights as any other union member, or be stepchildren of a construction union that openly looked down on them as “unskilled trash” unfit to have full membership status.

The women in these plants faced this even more starkly – the UFW let them be full union members, the UBC wouldn’t even let them join and denied them all union benefits (but would make them pay dues!)

The furniture companies would have preferred to stay non union – but if they had to have one they definitely preferred the UBC – and wherever possible they forced their workers out of the UFW and into the Carpenters Union (if the couldn’t force them to be completely non union).

The IBEW had similar problems in it’s factories.

The Electricians Union had never bothered to even try and organize General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA or General Motor’s Packard Electric division.

But the CIO’s United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers had.

And now they were looking to organize the IBEW’s lamp plants.

The lamp workers faced a similar choice to their counterparts in the woodworking industry – be full members of a CIO union, or barely tolerated auxiliaries in the IBEW – UE was the obvious choice.

The employers had a similar choice – a union that would energize their workers, or one that would control them. In the absence of no union, the IBEW was the clear choice for the bosses.

The United Auto Workers was also going after the IBEW’s electrical shops – in Long Island City, Queens local 365 of the UAW succeeded in getting the workers at Eagle Electric Manufacturing, a fuse and lamp plant that was the largest electrical factory in New York City, to switch from the IBEW to the CIO.

UE even got a piece of local 3’s construction membership – the elevator maintenance workers (who the IBEW had got because the Elevator Constructors didn’t want them) ended up switching over to a United Electrical Workers local.

The Plumbers, Steamfitters, Boilermakers and Ironworkers had even worse problems in their shops – their B division members had multiple CIO unions trying to recruit their workers – not only UE and the UAW but also the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and United Mine Workers of America District 50 (the UMWA’s national miscellaneous workers district run by Kathryn Lewis – John L’s daughter).

For the workers the choice was simple – stepchildren of the AFofL or full citizens of the CIO, which was also a clear stark choice for the bosses as well.

At the very end of the depression, as the mobilization for the oncoming World War II began to revive the economy, construction began to come back.

In New York City, the municipal government, with funding from the federal Public Works Administration, began to build large scale public housing projects – some in old slum neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Harlem, others near defense plants in the South Bronx, Long Island City, Queens and, above all, near the huge Brooklyn Navy Yard, the US Navy’s largest warship manufacturing plant.

The Navy Yard itself was in the midst of a major expansion to beef up the American fleet – and other defense plants like Brewster Aviation in Long Island City, Sperry Gyroscope in Little Neck, Queens and Todd Shipyard in Red Hook, Brooklyn were also expanding.

Across the nation, in cities near major military installations or that were home to munitions factories, there was a similar recovery of the building sector, after over a decade of slack work.

It was in this renewed construction industry business climate that the CIO made a play for the core of the building trades.

The CIO chartered the United Construction Workers Organizing Committee – run by another one of John L. Lewis’ relatives, in this case his brother A.D. “Denny” Lewis (who also kept his other union staff job, as “Special Representative of the United Mine Workers of America”).

Unfortunately, the UCWOC was far different than the CIO’s factory worker industrial unions that had attracted so many building trades shop workers a few years before.

UCWOC was basically set up as a sweetheart union, who’s main appeal to contractors was it’s low wages (about half of what building trades skilled workers made – and even less for laborers and apprentices) and it’s utter lack of work rules.

The chartering of the United Construction Workers was symptomatic of the political decay of the CIO – which was very rapidly decending from the heights of it’s mid 1930’s revolutionary militancy back to AFofL-style business unionism.

As it happened, the UCWOC wasn’t very successful as a raiding union – urban and suburban contractors overwhelmingly rejected it (they preferred to take their chances with the AFofL building trades, who they had a longstanding relationship with).

Also, unlike the building trades, the United Construction Workers had neither a hiring hall system nor apprenticeship programs, so it was incapable of supplying skilled labor to the contractors in a timely fashion.

The only place where the CIO construction union was successful at all was among non union highway contractors in rural areas. Those companies had been hired by the feds to replace the superexploited WPA and CCC workers – they paid far more than those programs, but they were still non union and low wage, and needed some kind of union basically to prevent their workers from being organized by the legitimate construction unions.

The UCWOC did organize a handfull of maintenance workers in factories where CIO unions had organized the production workers – and they also organized a handfull of contractors in coal mining towns.

The only other momentary success for the sweetheart union was it’s brief absorbtion of Teamsters local 544 in Minneapolis.

That local, which was run by trotskyite socialists, had been taken into trusteeship by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters because it’s officers opposed US entry into World War II (that wasn’t the reason Teamsters President Dan Tobin gave – but that was the REAL reason for the trusteeship).

The UCWOC briefly tried to use that merger to transform itself into a rival interstate truck drivers union.

But, local 544 only had 4,500 members in just one state, and the IBT as a whole had 200,000 over-the-road freight industry workers nationwide (workers who, ironically enough, had been signed up largely due to local 544’s herculean organizing efforts).

Also, local 544’s officers were in the process of being tried by the feds for conspiracy to advocate the violent overthrow of the US government (they got convicted, and spent the subsequent 4 years in federal prison – with one of the local 544 officers also being deported to Sweden).

Defending themselves from that criminal case made it impossible for the local 544 leaders to function as trucker and warehouse worker organizers for the UCWOC.

Which was deeply unfortunate for the UCWOC, since it’s leadership did not have any real organizers of it’s own.

The few “organizers” they had were Detroit gangster “organizers” that Denny Lewis borrowed from his niece’s District 50 goon squad.

Those men knew nothing of unionism or organizing, but knew a whole lot about beating workers into submission.

But, UCWOC’s goon squad was no match for the goons of Jimmy Hoffa, the young tough leader of Joint Council # 43, the Michigan Conference of Teamsters and the Central States Drivers Council.

Hoffa hired the best of Denny and Katheryn’s goons out from under them to be part of his goon squad – and baseball batted the rest of their crew off the highways!

Also, unlike the UCWOC’s UMWA patronage officers and their army of hired thugs, Hoffa actually had real credibility as a trucking industry unionist.

As a teenaged migrant worker from rural Indiana, Hoffa had organized an independent union in the Detroit warehouse of the Kroger’s grocery store chain, then he went on to merge that independent union with the Teamsters and, by his early 20’s, Hoffa and a handfull of other organizers drove up and down the highways of Michigan organizing carhaulers – the truck drivers who delivered new cars from the factory to dealership.

Along the way, Hoffa and his associates in Detroit had allied themselves with the trotskist teamsters from Minneapolis and together they had forced the freight carriers to unionize.

When Dobbs was kicked out of the union, Hoffa became his successor as head of the Central States Drivers Council.

Unlike the UCWOC, the Teamsters had more than muscle and baseball bats to recruit truck drivers to their union.

Thanks to Dobbs’ Central States organizing drive, the Teamsters Union was seen by drivers as the legitimate union for their industry.

Beyond that, Hoffa himself was widely admired by drivers across the Midwest for his heroism in taking on Krogers and the carhauling carriers.

No other union could compete with that – especially a low wage road construction union run by coal miners and staffed by street hoodlums.

Consequently, the UCWOC’s attempt to become a CIO truck drivers union fizzled and died on the vine.

Meanwhile, those trotskyite teamsters in Minnesota weren’t the only folks in the labor movement under attack because of their revolutionary politics.

The CIO had also attacked the International Woodworkers of America – the federation helped oust the communists from office.

They actually went so far as to ask the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration to deport the IWA’s Canadian communist president, Harold Pritchett, from the union’s Seattle headquarters, and to block all Canadian IWA officials from entering the US to deal with union business.

In the wake of that CIO/Bureau of Immigration coup de etat against the lawfully elected communist officers of the woodworkers union, a block of right wing Republican lumber camp foremen came to power in the IWA (and they would rule the IWA for the next 45 years until the union collapsed, disbanded and had it’s remnants absorbed into the Machinists Union in 1986).

Upon the defeat of the communist lumber workers the UBC finally ended it’s war with the IWA-CIO.

Shortly therafter, the CIO abandoned it’s construction and trucking raid – Denny Lewis merged what was left of the UCWOC was his niece Kathryn Lewis’ UMWA District 50, which, along with the rest of the miners union, was now back in the AFofL.

John L. Lewis had quit the CIO and pulled his union out when the federation endorsed Roosevelt for reelection in 1940. Lewis, a lifelong Republican, had supported the GOP candidate – and in any case he opposed FDR serving an unprecedented third term.

District 50 maintained it’s construction jurisdiction, and occasionally raided the legit construction unions, for the next 29 years.

In 1969, District 50 disaffiliated from the UMWA, disbanded and it’s former locals became part of the United Steel Workers of America.

Two decades after that, the USWA signed an agreement with the Building Trades Department that they would not unionize any more construction workers, but the USWA could keep the highway and mine construction workers that were already in their union.

Thus ended the last serious effort to enroll American construction workers in an industrial union.

VI. “V For Victory!”

America’s entry into World War II changed everything for the building trades – and it set into motion very strong social forces that would radically change the industry.

One thing the war did was to almost immediately solve the unemployment problem.

The imposition of the peacetime draft in 1940 immediately pulled 2 million men out of the labor force – and that was to be the first of many levies by the War Department.

As some unemployed men were putting on khaki, others were actually pulling on their blue denim overalls and going back to work.

The federal govenment launched a massive wave of public construction projects (this time using union labor – unlike the WPA and CCC). Highways were upgraded, public housing projects were built, shipyards, aircraft factories and steel mills were put up, and, above all, military bases were built over the country.

Also, the vast program to expand the US Navy’s warship force and the civilian cargo ship fleet needed several hundred thousand shipyard workers.

The labor demands were vast – at just one shipyard, the US Navy’s Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City, over 70,000 workers were required!

That was far more skilled workers than the shipyard owners on their own could supply.

The construction unions, on the other had, had a large pool of labor that could be sent to the shipyards.

In particular, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers (a union with roots on the jobsites and the piers – as much a waterfront union as it was a construction union) sent as many of it’s members as possible into the shipyards – to the point where the IBB actually ran out of unemployed current members available for shipbuilding work.

Other building trades unions with a shipyard jurisdiction (Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers and Pipefitters, Sheet Metal Workers ect) as well as the AFofL Metal Trades unions (Machinists, Molders, Patternmakers ect) sent thousands of jobless workers into the yards too.

AFofL workers even ended up in shipyards represented by the CIO’s Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers. Since that union lacked a hiring hall system and an apprenticeship program, it didn’t have it’s own pool of unemployed members that could be dispatched to these jobs.

But that still wasn’t enough, so the AFofL Metal Trades, the Building Trades and the CIO Marine and Shipbuilding Workers had to accept large numbers of jobless workers from outside the industry to man all the jobs at the shipyards.

This also meant that, much to their horror, segregated unions like the Boilermakers and the Plumbers had to let Black, Latino and Asian men work in the yards – and, to the great distress of all the unions, AFofL and CIO alike, women of all colors had to be given the opportunity to work on the ships.

This also meant that those men of color, and the women, had to be absorbed into the unions – in the Boilermakers case, they got around their own racist constitution by issuing “permits” to minority men and to women, rather than taking them in as full members.

Permit system or not there were a few persistent men of color who forced the Boilermakers Union to let them join.

By 1943, the Boilermakers Union leadership found themelves actually having to compromize their “manliness” by initiating women into the “brotherhood”!

Of course, with all this wartime production was lots of wartime corruption.

This was dramatically symbolized when the French ocean liner Normandie (seized by the US Coast Guard when France surrendered to Nazi Germany and scheduled to be refitted as a US Navy troopship) burned to the waterline, rolled over and sank at it’s dock in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen.

That arson fire was a message – sent to the US government by a Sicilian American criminal syndicate called “cosa nostra” (Italian for “this thing of ours”) which had muscled it’s way into labor racketeering during the depression.

It had displaced the Brindell-era Irish gangsters, as well as the Jewish bootleggers who’d briefly rose to prominence running illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition (a business that brought them into prominence in the Teamsters, Distillery Workers, Brewery Workers and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees unions).

The mafiosi wanted a boss named Charles “Lucky” Luciano sprung from prison, and they wanted a free hand to run bid rigging cartels in the construction industry and on the docks for the duration of the war.

Cosa nostra indirectly controlled the main union on the East Coast docks (the Atlantic Coast District of the International Longshoremen’s Association,which was run by Irish gangsters who were under cosa nostra protection).

Keeping those docks running smoothly (irregardless of cost) was vital to the war effort, since every bullet and bomb bound for the European Theater of Operations were handled by ILA longshoremen.

So Luciano got out of jail (and got a free trip home to Italy once the US Army invaded that Axis power), and the wiseguys were left to run their labor rackets in peace for the duration of the war.

This also enabled the wiseguys to take on Brindell’s old role – helping big contractors monopolize construction work, keeping the small contractors from undercutting them and using the unions to keep the workers in line.

Unlike Brindell (who often took a 20% cut of jobs) the wiseguys only asked for 2% “tribute” for their labor racketeering services, a far more modest fee.

Especially in light of the fact that during the war the government was willing to spend quite generously on it’s projects, no matter how much it hurt bottom line profitability.

So it would be no problem absorbing and passing along the cost of the “mob tax” (in later years it would very much be a problem – we’ll talk about that much more below).

Thus begins the modern era of New York labor racketeering – and thus it would remain for the next 50 years.

For the moment, the rivalry between the AFofL building trades and the CIO ended – there was lots of work to go around, lots of companies with big fat War Department or Navy Department contracts who frankly did not care about labor costs (cause they were guaranteed a “cost plus” profit by the feds) and who would pay dearly for labor just to get war production out on time.

Also, the CIO leadership were ideologically committed to World War II in a way that the AFofL was not.

The AFofL leaders were patriotic American nationalists, but they were first and foremost business unionists.

They saw the war as an opportunity to get raises and benefit improvements for their members without much struggle while simultaneously collaborating with the bosses and, in many cases, personally enriching themselves through racketeering and “black marketeering” (the theft and unauthorized sale of scarce consumer goods rationed by the government – gasoline, cigarettes, women’s stockings ect) – if it was up to them, they would have hoped the war went on forever (as long as they were deferred from the draft and didn’t have to actually fight in it, of course!!!).

By contrast, the CIO’s leaders, both the right wing socialist corporatists and the communists alike, saw the war as a crusade against Nazism and fascism. They shared a utopian vision of all-class American unity against fascism, uniting bankers and short order cooks, senators and janitors in a common struggle for democracy and freedom.

The CIO’s leaders went so far as to renounce their members right to strike for the duration of the war (even the most mafia-ridden right wing AFofL unions wouldn’t go there!)

In particular, the communist led CIO unions were the most agressive about the no strike pledge – because they thought that supporting the Soviet Union’s war effort against Nazi Germany was so overridingly important that every other working class demand was secondary.

On the flip side, AFofL unions led by Republican isolationists (and in particular the more corrupt of those unions) were the least likely to suspend strike activity for the duration of the war. After all, they had been against the war up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and they were at best reluctant warriors after December 7, 1941. So why would they call for workers to sacrifice to support the war now?

All the “everything for victory” national unity stuff got even harder to take as the war went on.

The wave of American, British and Soviet victories, the continuing collapse of German, Italian and Japanese military forces and the outright surrender of Fascist Italy in the summer of 1943 made it clearer and clearer that Allied victory was inevitable – which made working class sacrifices less and less popular.

Especially in light of the galloping inflation, skyrocketing rents, extortionately high prices for rationed goods on the black market and the obscenely high profits that the bosses were raking in on cost plus contracts.

By 1944, every major AFofL union had led at least one wartime strike – and all of the CIO unions had seen massive wildcat strikes which had basically made the no strike pledge of 1941 a dead letter.

After Germany and Japan were defeated in 1945, the hopelessly discredited no strike pledge was totally abandoned (although at least some communist CIO officials had wanted to preserve it indefinitely into the post war era).

The war was over, America had won, Corporate America now exploited the economies of 9/10ths of the world – torrential superprofits cascaded into the USA, and the bosses let it be known that they’d be willing to share some of the loot of imperialist war with at least some of the workers.

This was the begining of a 28 year period of labor management partnership – when the AFofL and CIO unions were able to win an unprecedentedly high standard of living for the aristocratic part of the workforce, and living wages for all but the most miserably paid workers.

The only catch was the unions had to sell out the poorest and most downtrodden workers, and had to forget any ideas of even the mildest working class political independence.

Few people saw at the time what a devil’s pact the US unions were getting themselves into (but they would live to regret it just a few decades later).

VII. “…any damn fool can build homes…”

Meanwhile, the war had created massive changes in the construction industry.

When hostilities broke out, the Army and Navy had faced the task of rapidly building hundreds of barracks, defense plants and other military installations.

In the case of jobs that were done directly by military personnel, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Navy Construction Batallions (Seabees) had to use poorly trained raw recruits to build complex facilities very quickly.

The Army Engineers and the Seabees solved this problem very simply – they broke down every construction task into it’s basic components, and then trained their enlisted men to perform just those simplified operations – supervised by a relatively small force of Army Sergeants or Navy Petty Officers who were actual all around journeymen.

Also, wherever possible, products that required complicated installation by highly trained workers were replaced by simpler to install substitutes that could be erected by lightly or untrained personnel.

The most dramatic and far reaching example of this was the replacement of lath and plaster interior walls with a product then called “plasterboard”.

Plasterboard was invented by United States Gypsum (USG) in Chicago in 1928, but it’s use had been blocked by the political influence of the Lathers and Plasterers unions.

The leaders of the Lathers and the Plasterers had lobbied the Chicago Department of Buildings to ban it’s use as an alleged fire hazard.

The fire issue was a red herring (albeit a very potent one in a city that had burned to the ground in a fire back in 1871) the real issue was that the product was far less labor intensive than plastering a wall.

Plastering involved carpenters framing out a wall, lathers coming behind them and attaching wood, metal or gypsum lath to the studs and then plasterers coming in (with laborers to mix their plaster for them).

The Plasterers then had to apply three seperate coats of plaster, each of which had to dry overnight before the next coat could be applied.

Plastering was messy, it required lots of water (and posed the risk of water damage to the structure) and it could only be done in buildings with sealed windows and a water tight roof in tempretures that were above freezing but below 80 degrees.

Plasterboard, by contrast, could be directly attached to the studs with nails or screws, and then could be immediately hit with a light coat of plaster.

After just two more light coats of plaster and some sanding, the wall was ready for painting, wall paper hanging, installation of wood paneling or whatever other type of finishing was desired.

Plasterboard could be installed in any type of weather as long as the boards themselves were not left outside in direct contact with rain or snow.

Plasterboard installation involved a whole lot less labor than conventional troweled plaster work.

And a lot less different types of labor too – was their really a need for three seperate crafts (lathers, plasterers and laborers) to build a wall when the product came solid and pre made, with no need to be mixed on site?

This is why the Plasterers and Lathers opposed plasterboard so agressively.

They got Chicago to ban the product – and all the other big city buildings departments followed the Windy City’s lead.

USG’s great invention thus languished for another 15 years – until the Navy decided to make use of it.

The War Department soon followed suit and began to use plasterboard in their facilities (or at least the ones being built by Army troops, where civilian union jurisdictional disputes were irrelevant).

Since the product eliminated the messy water intensive in place mixing of plaster, it was considered to be a dry wall building process.

Thus the product came to be officially known as “dry wall wallboard” – or “drywall” for short.

USG, the market leader in the drywall industry, decided to give it’s version of the product a trade name – since it was a sheet of gypsum, they called it “sheetrock”.

Thus was introduced the greatest construction innovation since the Romans invented concrete in 300BC.

The technological innovations were coupled with equally far reaching transformations in construction business structure.

Prior to World War II, most buildings were built by a General Contractor who did all of the concrete, masonry and carpentry work on the site directly.

The GC’s subbed out electrical, mechanical, structural steel and painting and decorating work to specialty subcontractors who they supervised.

This business model had derived from the classic construction method of a General Contractor doing the entire job itself (the main building construction business form in America from the 1620’s to the late 19th century).

As buildings had gotten more complex in the early 20th century, it became necessary for the General Contractors to let other firms, with specialized workers, perform larger and larger areas of work.

This trend accelerated with the war.

With all the new materials like sheetrock, it was impossible for a GC’s in house tradesmen to be able to efficiently install the many different building products that went into a modern structure.

This was especially true with carpentry work – a craft that, thanks both to technological change and the relentless jurisdictional expansionism of the UBC, had come to include widly disinctive areas of work requiring very different skills.

In place of the old “dirt to doorknobs” carpenter (who could do everything from build the concrete forms at the start of the job to installing the fine woodwork at the end) there were now specialized carpenters who were highly skilled in one or two divisions of the trade, but far less competent on others.

This new development also led to the emergence of contractors who only did one or two specialized areas of work. These specialty subcontractors eventually became the dominant type of construction industry capitalist.

The old General Contractors also tended to evolve into one of two forms.

Some of the GC’s became general carpentry contractors, doing all phases of carpentry work but stripping themselves of their old general contractor functions.

Others subbed out all of their work to subcontractors, and only maintained the GC functions – hiring and supervising the subs, maintaining a force of laborers to clean the jobsite and – on hirise jobs – having operating engineers and elevator operators to run the passenger nnd freight elevators.

This new type of GC ended up having a very different relationship with the clients who owned the buildings.

Unlike the rest of the contractors, who still had an adversarial relationship with the clients (based on the fact that they fought over who got to have the biggest share of the surplus value created by the labor of the construction workers) the new GC’s essentially acted as agents of the client on the site.

They got paid a fixed percentage of the price of the job, and their main goal was, like the client’s, to minimize how much the subcontractors got paid.

The clients would learn that having this new type of General Contractor running their jobs worked strongly to their advantage – finally, they had somebody on the site who held a common economic interest, and would be in a position to fight for that interest!

This trend towards subcontracting accelerated at two diametrically opposed sectors of the business – hirise office buildings on one extreme and single family homes on the other end.

Homebuilders like the famed Levitt Brothers dispensed with the old practice of having the GC use the same crew of carpenters, masons and laborers to build the house from foundation hole to finished woodwork, with only the electrical, gas fitting, plumbing and heating done by subcontractors.

Instead the GC would have a series of subcontractors do the work – a concrete sub to do the foundation, a framing sub to build the rough frame of the house, one of the new specialty drywall subs to come in and sheetrock the interior, a woodwork contractor to install the interior finish work ect.

Levittown-style development usually involved building a large group of houses in a concentrated geographic area, so each sub could go from house site to house site to house site.

These tract house developments were typically built in suburban areas that had been farmland. The construction unions had always been weak in rural areas, even those that were near major cities. Consequently, most of these big suburban developments were built non union.

This led to the first mass influx of non union workers into the trades since the rise of the unions in the late 19th century. The Building Trades did absolutely nothing about this – no organizing drives, no “trade movement” style areawide strikes to enforce union conditions, not even one-contractor at a time NLRB election campaigns.

This fatal inaction was true across the country, even in New York City’s suburbs – Long Island, Westchester, Northern New Jersey and Fairfield County Connecticut – which were unusually heavily unionized for suburban areas.

That failure to deal with non union suburban residential contractors early on would later come back to haunt the construction unions. The unions hung on to their urban residential contractors, but as the center of gravity of homebuilding shifted away from cities and out to the suburbs, this began to matter less and less.

Meanwhile, in the hirise commercial sector, GC’s were subbing out all of the work – bout the traditional electrical, elevator, mechanical, heating ventilation and air conditioning and decorating work they’d always subbed out along with the concrete, brick and interior framing and drywall work they had always done in house.

In the major cities where most of the hirise jobs were concentrated, the commercial sector was already overwhelmingly union, so these new contractors ended up being union.

On both ends of the spectrum, single family houses and heavy commercial, the trend towards subcontracting was at it’s most dramatic in the New York City metropolitan area – which had always been ahead of the curve in terms of construction innovation.

The Plasterers briefly tried to be a barrier to this process (or at least the aspect that affected their jurisdiction – drywall) but that was a failed campaign. They could not stop progress.

The Lathers on the other hand tried to embrace the new product by claiming it for their members – the argument being that drywall was a substutite for lath and plaster (which it was) and therefore it should be installed by workers who had traditionally built part of the plaster walls.

The Carpenters contested that claim – and ripped up a 50 year old jurisdictional pact with the Lathers Union to do so.

By the mid 1950’s, the Carpenters had decisively won that battle – a defeat that sent the Wood, Wire and Metallic Lathers Union on a death sprial as a seperate union.

Meanwhile, Carpenters chief William “Big Bill” Hutcheson finally retired – after 48 years as UBC chief.

That had been 5 decades of dictatorship – during which time over 200 local unions representing in excess of 150,000 workers had been expelled from the brotherhood, a constitutional clause had been imposed banning carpenters from being communists or even voting for communist officers, every newly initiated carpenter was required to swear an oath that he would never join a communist group (on pain of expulsion from the brotherhood and loss of all pension benefits) and many workers – carpenters and from other trades alike – had been subject to goon squad terrorism at the hands of the UBC and it’s allies.

Like many dictators, Big Bill hand picked a relative as his successor – his son Maurice Hutcheson, a male secretary at Carpenters Union international headquarters who had a union book, but had never ever actually been a journeyman carpenter in the field.

Maurice may not have been a construction worker – but then again he didn’t get paid like a tradesman either.

At a time when the highest paid carpenters in America only made $ 120 for a 40 hour week, Maurice was paid $ 24,000 a year plus an unlimited expense account!

On his way out, Big Bill Hutcheson expelled two more locals – Glendale, California Carpenters local 563 and Los Angeles Carpenters local 634 – for the “crime” of duly electing communist business agents.

Also, two delegates from California locals to the UBC international convention were threatened with expulsion, forced to sign affidavits saying they would never become communists and banned from holding union office for 5 years just because they didn’t support the Korean War as enthusiastically as Big Bill did!

This Southern California purge was in the wake of an unsuccessful war against the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE – which represented the stagehands as well as other backstage blue collar workers in theaters, movie studios and convention centers) – to take that union’s Hollywood film set workers jurisdiction away from it.

That raid had involved the Painters Union several other Building Trades unions – the Painters took IATSE’s set decorating work, but the Carpenters didn’t get any of it (a raid fail that Hutcheson apparently blamed the communists for).

But the Carpenters did manage to raid IATSE’s trade show jurisdiction, forcing the union to let carpenters do the installation and dismantiling of temporary convention center exhibits – the Teamsters, the Electricians, the Painters in San Francisco and the Longshoremen in New York City also were able to pry away areas of IATSE’s trade show jurisdiction as well, leaving IATSE with the loading and unloading of trucks that delivered trade show exhibits (and in some venues, the Teamsters took that work too, so IATSE was left with no jurisdiction at all).

Hutcheson the younger abandoned that Hollywood campaign, but he did press on the war on the Lathers – and he tried to follow in his dad’s footsteps, by disbanding a local (Newark, New Jersey Carpenters local 1782) for the “crime”of supporting left wing political causes.

In stark contrast, when the officers of all White Jim Crow segregated Columbia, South Carolina Carpenters local 1778 allowed the local Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan to use their union hall for it’s racist terrorist meetings (and even let the klansmen hang their KKK klavern charter on the union hall wall) it was a different story!

Maurice merely let the local’s racist officers off with a mildly worded warning about their open ties to the Klan (and a polite request that the Klan charter be taken down)!

The UBC was still a segregated union, with Black carpenters segregated into so called “colored” locals not only in the South, but as far north as Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York (where Black carpenters were confined to Harlem Carpenters local 1788)

The Laborers, Bricklayers and Painters all had similar union segregation setups – the Electricians and Sheet Metal Workers used “father/son” sponsorship systems to keep Blacks out and the Boilermakers, Machinists and Plumbers outright banned Blacks from joining their unions.

The Ironworkers, with their large Native American Indian membership, were the only construction union that didn’t blatantly racially discriminate against workers of color.

Even there, locals like New York Ornamental Ironworkers local 580 had a de facto segregation – Black and American Indian ironworkers were assigned to welding work, while White ironworkers did cutting and fitting work that did not involve the use of torches or welding machines.

And, of course, there was corruption.

Some of it was petty – like Maurice and his associates using insider information to buy Indiana farmland along the future route of the interstate highways cheaply from the farmers and then selling it at a huge markup to the Indiana DoT (and sharing a part of that windfall with the Indiana Highway Commissioner!)

And some was classic Brindell-style corruption (centered in – where else? – New York)

New York District Council of Carpenters President Charles Johnson (who collected multiple salaries totalling $ 60,000 a year – at a time when his members made $ 140 for a 35 hour week) had a scheme where GC’s and concrete subcontractors were told to buy oil from a fuel dealership he controlled (with the obvious understanding that if they played ball with him, he’d take car of them.) Johnson also allegedly took an outright payment of $ 30,000 from Yonkers Raceway to resolve labor problems at that site.

But what Johnson was doing was small potatoes compared to what the wiseguys who’s protection he was operating under were up to.

The rise of the new specialty subcontractors was a destabilizing situation. All of a sudden, a lot of new businessmen entered the industry, which endangered the long established carpentry contractors because the new guys could, and would, underbid their older larger competitors just to get a foot in the door.

The dominant carpentry contractors approached the leaders of the Genovese crime family to see if there was something the wiseguys could do.

There was – they could set up a bid rigging cartel. The big contractors, under mafia leadership, would cooperate to keep prices high. When big jobs came up, the bosses would decide beforehand who would get to do the work, at what price. Then, the firm they picked would put in a bid at that price – and everybody else who was part of the conspiracy would put in a higher bid. Thus the selected company would be the lowest bidder and would get the work.

And if one of the upstart firms were to dare to underbid the firm that had been picked to get the job? Well, the unions would take care of that, by idling that firm with a strike

All the contractors would have to do is pay the wiseguys a 2% tribute in return.

The Genoveses set up two seperate cartels – one for concrete subcontractors, the other for drywall and ceilings outfits.

The Concrete Club was run by the underboss of the Genovese family, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, who also happened to be a concrete contractor himself.

The Cement League – the trade association for union hirise concrete outfits in New York – was also in on the fix.

The other heavy construction trade group, the New York Chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America (the local chapter of a national heavy and highway contractors association), was not directly involved but they didn’t rock the boat either.

Charles Johnson and the leadership of the New York District Council of Carpenters (who operated under the protection of the Genoveses) played a major role as labor enforcers of the cartel.

Other mob families had to get their cut too – the Colombos, who controlled the Concrete Workers District Council of the Laborers Union, and the Gambinos, who dominated Teamsters local 282, were junior partners in the scam as well.

The Wheel dominated the drywall and ceilings industry. It was run by Genovese family captain and drywall contractor Vincent DiNapoli, who also ran the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, one of two major drywall contractor employers associations in the city.

The other trade group in drywall, the Greater New York Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries (the local chapter of a national carpentry trade association), while not directly part of the scam, also went along with the program.

The Genovese-dominated New York District Council of Carpenters played a similar labor enforcer role here. The Genoveses also dominated Manhattan/Bronx Plasterers local 60 and Brooklyn/Queens/Staten Island Plasterers local 202 – so they were able to keep those unions from fighting the Carpenters on jurisdiction or from trying to block the replacement of plaster with drywall.

The other drywall industry unions – Lathers local 46 and Drywall Tapers local 1974 of the Painters Union – operated under the protection of the Lucheses, but they didn’t try to go against the Genoveses.

Other construction market segments had similar cartels – and the wiseguys also ran similar conspiracies in the local trucking industry (private garbage hauling, air freight forwarding, fresh vegtable delivery, fresh fish delivery, garment hauling, building materials delivery, readimix concrete, commercial moving van lines, ect).

In those cases, the union – Joint Council # 16 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was a part of almost all of these cartels.

JC 16 wasn’t involved directly, but the wiseguys worked through their affiliated local unions – including locals 27, 138, 202, 277, 282, 295, 522, 550, 553, 584, 707, 732, 802, 805, 806, 807, 812, 813, 814, 817, 851, 917, 1034 and 1205 (with locals 282, 553, 807, 813, 814 and 1205 directly involved in the construction rackets).

Other corrupt Teamster locals in the region were also involved in the local drayage cartels in New York City – in particular New Jersey Joint Council # 73 and it’s largest affiliate, Union City Teamsters local 560 (the biggest local in the entire union) which was openly run by a Genovese family captain, Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and his Gambino soldier brothers Salvatore (a/k/a “Sammy Pro”) and Nunzio.

An International Ladies Garment Workers Union garment district truck drivers union, local 132-98-102 and Amalgamated Meat Cutters seafood workers union local 359 (the union at the Fulton Fish Market) were also deeply involved in the delivery rackets.

The Teamster factory worker unions (locals 210, 239 and 240 in the garment district, 808, 810 and 840 in the metal trades and 966 in the printing trades) had rackets of their own – mainly involving selling sweetheart contracts to sweatshop bosses so their workers would be blocked from joining a decent union that actually paid living wages.

All 5 of New York City’s cosa nostra families (Genovese, Gambino, Luchese, Bonnano and Colombo) and New Jersey’s Di Cavalcante family all had a piece of the Teamsters – some locals answered to one of those families, a few luckless locals had to pay tribute to two families and three unfortunate locals (the air freight locals, 295 and 851 and the private sanitation drivers local 813) had three seperate groups of gangsters feeding off their members.

It was actually hard to find a New York City Teamster local that wasn’t paying tribute to some group of hoodlums!

Other big cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland and that rapidly growing resort city in the Nevada desert – who’s growth was financed by “loans” from the cosa nostra controlled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund – Las Vegas) had heavy organized crime involvement in construction – but nowhere was their anything as elaborate as what the New York wiseguys and their contractor and union leader allies had built.

The gangsters suceeded for a time in building a wall around the New York market – keeping prices high, appropriating a higher share of construction profits than subs got in comparable markets and keeping the competition to a minimum.

This protection racket helped the leading subcontractors in the various market segments of the industry to preserve and expand their firms.

Of course, those higher than national average subcontractor profits came at the expense of below national average profits for real estate developers and bankers.

To a lesser extent, racketeers helped to preserve the strength of the unions, mainly because they needed the unions as a club to use against contractors that might try and break into the market.

There were other cities (Detroit, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis/St Paul, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco) where the existance of a strong local labor movement – based for the most part in large and powerful CIO industrial unions – that were willing to fight to preserve union conditions kept the construction trades strong.

The 1955 merger between the American Federation of Labor and the conservatized and politically purged Congress of Industrial Organizations into the AFL-CIO had further worked to give the appearance that American unions were strong and powerful and always would be – and none stronger than the building trades, who considered themselves to be the strongest unions in the world.

The problem was, in the rest of the country, the only thing keeping the construction unions up was sheer inertia – the contractors had gotten comfortable relying on the unions as a labor source over several generations (with many contractors themselves being former union members who’d come up through the apprentice system) and the clients, while not liking the high union wages that were passed along to them by the contractors, were not yet willing to go to war to reduce those labor costs.

In the cities where non construction unions were strong, that was basically the main thing that kept the trades afloat.

And, of course, in cities like New York, it was cosa nostra restraint of trade that was the main factor keeping the unions alive.

Few realized it at the time, but the building trades, which on the surface appeared to be the most powerful labor unions in the world, were built on a foundation of sand.

Within a few years, the fundamental weakness of the building trades unions would be starkly exposed.

VIII. “..a union-free environment…”

In the early 1960’s, in the Maryland suburbs between Baltimore and Washington DC, a group of large non union residential contractors who had grown up building the tract housing developments decided to make an organized effort to break into retail and Davis Bacon public sector work.

To further this aim, they formed an employers association, which eventually came to be known as the Associated Builders and Contractors.

They quickly discovered that the only thing keeping public works and light commercial work in the Baltimore-Washington corridor union was sheer inertia – it had been union for 60 years, and the developers had become accustomed to hiring unionized GC’s who in turn hired union subcontractors.

Given a viable low labor cost alternative, real estate developers and local authorities jumped at the chance to expropriate a higher portion of the surplus value produced by the construction workers who put up their buildings.

Soon, non union residential contractors elswhere looked to ABC – and the organization began to grow. Along the way, it launched a political campaign against state and local little Davis Bacon laws, that required prevailing wages (usually linked in full or in part to union scale) on government funded construction jobs.

In the industrial sector, non union oil field services contractors began to branch out into industrial maintenance work in the refineries and chemical plants – and from there, they leapfrogged into other large factories and power plants.

The reason those oil field contractors were non union was because the AFofL building trades had never bothered to organize the roughnecks (who they snobbishly looked down upon as unskilled cowboys and Mexicans who weren’t good enough to be in the building trades).

Even when the CIO’s Oil Workers International Union had came on the scene in the 1930’s, it had concentrated it’s efforts on the oil refineries and chemical plants, leaving the oil field workers unorganized.

The OWIU-CIO had later expanded it’s jurisdiction – to chemical workers and uranium enrichment plant workers – but the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers-AFL-CIO had never bothered to unionize the oil drilling crews either.

That was a fatal mistake.

Union heavy construction and industrial maintenance contractors soon found it necessary to set up non union subsidiaries to compete with the oil field outfits.

This process came to be known as “double breasting” and the construction unions had absolutely no plan to deal with this new attack. The industrial unions in the factories were not willing to do anything to stop the scabification of industrial maintenace. This was in large part due to the legacy of bitterness from years of jurisdictional fighting with the building trades (in particular the millwright locals of the Carpenters Unions).

The jurisdiction wars had won the construction unions few friends and many enemies among the leaders of the factory workers unions.

In the main, unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers of America, International Association of Machinists, International Union of Electrical Workers (a cold war era right wing splitoff from UE) and OCAW viewed the deunionization of industrial maintenace as a chance for them to offer the bosses the use of their skilled trades maintenance worker members as a low cost alternative to construction workers on major factory repair and maintenance jobs.

The main social base of the leaders of those unions was in the in house skilled trades maintenance workers in the plants, the most well paid and priviliged workers in those unions – so it was very much in the interests of the industrial union leaders to look out for those folks and maximize their work opportunities and incomes.

The Electricians Union found itself on both sides of the fence – the IBEW had a large power plant jurisdiction, and it’s electric utility locals faced the same pressure that the other industrial unions did to encourage the bosses to use lower paid in house skilled trades maintenace workers in place of higher paid construction workers (even if those workers were members of IBEW construction locals!)

The building trades also were finally having to answer for their decades of institutional racism and segregation.

Many civil rights activists in the South were Black union members – and their activism did not stop at the jobsite gate!

This was especially reflected in the “colored” locals that many unions had Jim Crowed their Black members into.

The United Paperworkers International Union actually faced an armed insurgency at the sulphite mill in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

The Black workers there had set up a militia called the Deacons for Defense (armed with guns that members of the “colored” Longshoremen’s locals in New Orleans had stolen from US Navy supply ships) so they could defend themselves against the KKK and the local police.

As it happened, a lot of the Klansmen also worked at the mill – some in management, but many as workers in the “white” local.

[Ironically enough, just a few years before, the AFL-CIO had spent tens of thousands of dollars making a documentary about the Paperworkers Union in Bogalusa - saying what a strong and progressive union it was, and proclamining the segregated company town as "Union City USA" - a model that other communities should aspire to!!!]

This wasn’t the only “colored” local in revolt – many of Mississippi’s civil rights leaders were members of “colored” longshoremen’s locals in Biloxi and Gulfport or “colored” Railroad Clerks freighthandler locals scattered across the state.

The International Woodworkers found themselves having to merge the “colored” and “white” locals in their plants across Mississippi and Louisiana, and they weren’t the only ones forced to renounce their previous racism (even the Musicians Union had to merge it’s Jim Crow locals!)

This naturally sent shockwaves into the building trades – both the unions that Jim Crowed Black workers (Carpenters, Painters, Laborers, Bricklayers ect) as well as the unions that used the “father son” system to keep out Blacks (Electricians, Sheet Metal Workers, Lathers, Operating Engineers ect) and the ones that restricted their membership to Caucasian men (Plumbers and Pipefitters, Boilermakers ect)

The latter unions, along with the Machinists and the railroad industry’s Locomotive Engineers, Trainmen and Railway Conductors unions, ended up being forced by the federal government to remove the Whites only clauses from their constitutions.

The Machinists were the last – they dragged their feet about amending the White supremacist bigotry out of their bylaws until 1971, making them the last Jim Crow union in America.

Electricians local 3 in New York was the first to see the begining of the end – they had set up a tokenistic program that let 200 men who didn’t have family connections join their apprenticeship program in 1961.

Although that was supposedly an affirmative action program, in practice, most of those 200 guys were White men who’d been shut out of the union by the “father son” system

And this slightly opened door to the apprenticeship program did nothing for the Black journeymen electricians who’d been shut out of the IBEW their whole careers.

Not to be outdone, Maurice Hutcheson, general president of the Carpenters, called for a program to let 2,000 young Black men be “pre apprentices” (that is, they’d have to attend a special union training program before being admitted to the regular program) alongside the union’s 30,000 young White male apprentices.

But it was way past time for tokenism!

All White jobsites in the middle of Black neighborhoods in the North were more and ore becoming the targets of protests – and many unions were being hauled into court for their racism, taking advantage of the new laws that made racial discrimination a violation of the federal civil code.

New York’s unions faced the most agressive protests, and the most lawsuits.

Sheet Metal Workers local 28, Steamfitters local 638 and Lathers local 46 faced the most litigation (and the longest running – the cases against those three unions were still in court over 40 years later!).

In 1968, the City of New York, in the face of the protests, proposed a tokenistic “trainee” program called the “New York Plan”, which would require that the unions let a limited number of Black and Puerto Rican young men be allowed to work as non union pre apprentices on union jobs – they would only be allowed to even apply to join the unions upon completion of their training (unlike union apprentices, who were union members from the time they started their training).

The City also, as a pilot project, had every subcontractor at the Hunts Point Terminal Proudce Market job hire a few Black or Puerto Rican journeymen, who would get to join the union.

As part of that plan, the mechanical contractor on that site agreed to hire 5 minority plumbers (1 Black man and 4 Puerto Ricans – all experienced licensed plumbers who, skill-wise, were actually more qualified than the average local 2 plumber)

That outraged Manhattan/Bronx Plumbers local 2, so the local’s officers called their 5,000 members out first citywide strike in almost 70 years to oppose the integration of their union.

They weren’t the only New York union to call a racist strike that year – the United Federation of Teachers – a supposedly liberal union led by nominally pro civil rights socialists – called it’s 40,000 members out on strike 3 times during that school year to oppose community control of schools in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

The teachers hate strike was far more successful than the plumbers – the UFT defeated community control, but Plumbers local 2 ended up having to let those 5 men join the union.

Meanwhile, a small group of Black construction workers from Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood who were members of the maoist communist Progressive Labor Party organized a group called Harlem Fightback.

Fightback had it’s roots in the protests against all White crews at Harlem Hospital’s expansion and other major city jobsites in that neighborhood – but it took the protests in a totally different direction.

Fightback organized Black construction workers into a union-like group, and organized them to travel around the community invading segregated jobsites as a group, to force the contractors to hire Black workers.

These raids were called “shape ups” because, nominally, the workers were merely exercising their right under construction tradition and union contracts to “shape up” (that is, to go onto a site and look for a job with the contractors doing work there).

After all, New York did have a longstanding tradition of men going in organized groups to jobsites to shape up – so, there was no reason why Fightback couldn’t do the same thing!

Of course, considering the long history of thug rule and gangster terrorism in the New York building trades, they didn’t come on these job hunting expeditions empty handed (baseball bats were necessary, and bats and chains as well – they were rarely used, but they had to be available in case anybody decided they wanted to play rough).

Most Black construction workers in New York were carpenters, bricklayers, painters or laborers (since most Black New Yorkers were migrants from the South, and those were the only trades down there that allowed Black men to work) – and, as it happened the Carpenters even had a Black Jim Crow segregated local in New York (Harlem Carpenters local 1788) – and most of Fightbacks shape ups were in 1788 country.

Those 4 unions also had bylaws that said that anybody, irregardless of race, who could get a job with one of their signatory contractors could automatically join the union – so successfully shaping up was a ticket to union membership.

The leaders of the New York building trades were deeply unhappy about this (the contractors weren’t too thrilled either) but as a practical matter there was not a whole lot they could do to stop it.

Some of the unions, the New York District Council of Carpenters in particular, did have a history of mobilizing “wrecking crews” (bands of members who were sent to invade and vandalize the handfull of scab jobs that occasionally popped up in the otherwise 100% union built city).

However, it wasn’t realistic to mobilize them against Fightback – sending a mob of White men to get in street fights with Black men in the middle of Harlem would have probably provoked a second edition of the Harlem Uprising of 1965 – and there was no way the unions or the contractors or cosa nostra wanted to take the political heat for anything like that.

Plus the Carpenters had the added problem that they had a majority Black local in that area – which side would those workers be on? (more likely than not – Fightback’s!)

As successful as Fightback’s shape ups were, the group had some internal problems of it’s own. As it grew and became more and more like a type of labor union, and as the contractors and unions had to accomidate to the group’s protests, it’s maoist leaders became less and less revolutionary activists and more like business agents (and in a real way they kinda were).

Like their 19th century utopian socialist forebearers, the communist activists of Fightback found that their radicalism got in the way of the day to day compromises with the bosses that were required of business unionists.

So, they dispensed with their radicalism and fully embraced their role as labor leaders trying to be junior partners of the bosses.

As it’s leaders became less political, there began to be rivalries over money, and control of jobs and other patronage matters.

This led to the head of the Brooklyn branch of Fightback (a leader who, unlike Fightback’s founders, didn’t have a revolutionary communist activist background) ended up seceding his chapter of the group and forming a rival organization called (what else?) Brooklyn Fightback.

Other groups of Black construction workers sprang up around the city – some of these groups also had Puerto Rican members as well. Like Brooklyn Fightback, they lacked the politcs of the original Harlem Fightback

In Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, a group of Chinese-American maoists who were members of the Communist Workers Party set up the Chinese Construction Workers Association (and, like Harlem Fightback’s leaders, they soon found that they had to turn their backs on their communistic political principles to be effective business unionists).

These groups (about 60 all told) came to be collectively known by allies and enemies alike as “the coalition” – a rather odd name, considering the fact that these coalitions were far from allies… in fact, most were openly hostile to each other.

At the same moment the coalitions were fighting for jobs on the streets of New York, the federal government reluctantly imposed affirmative action guidelines on Davis Bacon construction projects.

The administration of President Richard Nixon was far from pro Black, and had close ties with the leaders of the construction unions.

But, they really had no choice in the matter.

They were under heavy pressure from urban uprisings in the ghettoes, the rise of urban guerilla organizations like the Black Panther Party and the United Slaves Organization and the rise of maoist led Black workers groups throughout American heavy industry (most notably the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the United Auto Workers at Chrysler’s Dodge Main complex near Detroit, and… the coalitions themselves)

The affirmative action quota for construction was 28% minority (a few years later, a 6% women worker quota was added to that).

This affirmative action regulation gave the more conservative leaders of the coalitions the opportunity to present themselves and their organizations as “Equal Employment Opportunity Consultants” to the contractors, rather than revolutionary labor caucuses.

But minority construction workers wern’t the only ones getting militant – by the late 1960’s, White tradespeople were starting to fight back too.

The protests against the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War – while in the main composed principally of middle class students – had an impact on construction workers.

Initially, it was a reactionary one – symbolized by the “Hard Hat Riots” in Manhattan’s Financial District on May 6th and 20th 1970.

A large anti-war rally was held in front of City Hall on May 8, protesting both the US invasion of Cambodia on May 1 and the shooting of 14 anti war protesting students (4 fatally) by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4.

Out of respect for the murdered Ohio students, Mayor John Lindsay had lowered the flag at City Hall to half staff.

That anti war protest was just 2 blocks from the World Trade Center jobsite, at the time the largest construction project in the world.

Person or persons unknown mobilized a violent counterdemonstration against the anti war protests.

The core of the counterdemo was 200 workers from the WTC site – but they were reinforced by a large crowd of stockbrokers and other corporate executive types from the New York Stock Exchange and the many brokerage houses, banks and corporate law firms who’s offices surround the area, who joined in on the attacks on the anti war college students.

At the peak of the fighting, the majority of the violent counterdemonstrators were those Wall Street white collar guys who joined the protest as it progressed crosstown.

The counterdemonstrators attacked the anti war protesters, pulled the City Hall flag up to full staff and then invaded the campus of Pace University, across the street from City Hall, beating students and destroying the administrative offices.

150 cops were on the scene – but the only folks who got arrested were students and other anti war protesters.

This riot was much ballyhooed by the corporate media of the day as proof that the “silent majority” of White American workers were pro war and right wing.

In reality most working class Americans were opposed to America’s wars in Southeast Asia – support for the war only remained high among the upper classes – who’s sons did not have to fight in it.

In the days afterwards, the NYC Building Trades and the contractors openly organized pro war marches – with construction workers being paid to attend.

This culminated at a huge pro war rally on May 20, attended by over 100,000 people.

It was set up as a lunchtime rally – workers who attended the counterdemo got paid for their time at the protest, and they got free beer courtesy of the unions and the bosses.

Those workers who refused to participate (and there were some – in particular a number of pro communist DC # 9 painters who, of course, were anti war, would not attend the rally) were docked 2 hours pay.

As with the spontaneous march on May 6, there were tens of thousands of corporate lawyers, stockbrokers and bankers intermingled with the actual construction workers at the event (the organizers of the march gave those guys hardhats to wear – but they still were wearing their expensive business suits and wingtip shoes, no matter what they had on their heads!)

An anti war counterdemonstration was held nearby – 50,000 attended, mostly college students and middle class activists.

Between the beer and sandwitches carnival atmosphere at the pro war rally and an effort by the police to keep the two rallies seperate, there were few incidents.

These right wing rallies, organized by bosses and with stockbrokers in $ 1,000 suits intermingled with tradesmen, happened at a dangerous time for the American capitalist class.

There had been a wave of wildcat strikes in American heavy industry – just days before the “Hard Hat Riots” 200,000 freight teamsters had launched the biggest wildcat strike in American history, in defiance of the trucking companies, the union, the gangsters who ran the union and the highway patrols of a half dozen states.

The truckers strike shut down road freight coast to coast, paralyzed American manufacturing and inspired an illegal strike by New York City postal workers that quickly went national (the first federal workers strike in American history).

There had also been a wave of wildcat strikes in the auto, steel, electrical and coal mining industries (basically larger scale and multiracial versions of the Black workers strikes that had been going on for the previous 3 years)

More dangerously, the draftees of the US Army were engaging in a sort of wildcat strike of their own – many military units in Vietnam were refusing to fight, and some enlisted men had even resorted to blowing up their officers so they wouldn’t have to fight.

Incidentally, many of the leaders of these wildcat job actions were veterans who’d been radicalized by the war, and their participation in GI resistance to the war in Vietnam.

The Hard Hat Riots were supposed to be a counterbalance for that – but, unlike the other protests, it had to be bought and paid for by the bosses (and would not have succeeded without lots of businessmen participating in the protest directly).

Moreover, the construction industry had wildcat strikes of it’s own – mainly over safety issues (which has always been and remains the main cause of unsanctioned walkouts in the building trades).

Parallel to the wildcat strikes were a large number of officially sanctioned strikes by construction unions – with workers typically forcing their officers to call the walkouts and frequently making the unions stay out until high wage and benefit increases were won.

This was a national trend – but, as New York was the biggest union town, it had the most job actions.

The Hard Hat Riots was an attempt to hijack that militancy and direct it in an anti working class direction (and, other than the use of the riot for propaganda purposes by the capitalists and their media, it did not succeed).

Unions and employers associations across the country found that the only way to get labor peace on the jobsites was to buy it – which is why the early years of the 1970’s saw unprecedented wage and benefit gains for the trades.

This created much consternation among the moneymen who had to pay the bills.

It was all well and good for contractors to try and buy labor peace – after all, they were paying with the client’s money, not their own.

Finally, Corporate America decided to draw a line in the sand.

Roger Blough, the Chief Executive Officer of US Steel, called a secret conference of his peers in America’s leading corporations.

Blough’s closed door meeting was attended by the CEO’s of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Westinghouse, Haliburton, Du Pont, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, AMOCO, Texaco, Chase Manhattan Bank, Manufacturers Hanover, Citibank, Bank of America and 200 other major firms.

Joining the corporate titans were the Associated General Contractors (the biggest union employers association) and the group we met a little earlier in this essay, the scab contractors Associated Builders and Contractors.

Out of that secret meeting came an organization called the Construction Users Anti Inflation Roundtable (later more commonly known as the “Business Roundtable”).

Their goal was to break the power of the construction unions (which would also be a launching pad for dealing with their own unions as well).

Initially, the Business Roundtable started small – assisting ABC with it’s lobbying campaigns against Davis Bacon laws, encouraging the previously all union AGC to let scab contractors become members of their association ect.

On the ground, the oil companies made the first move.

They began having non union oil field service contractors do maintenance jobs at their refineries, replacing both union contractors and the refineries own Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union-represented in house skilled trades.

The chemical companies followed the oil companies lead – they also drove out the union contractors, and reduced the number of full time OCAW members on their payrolls, with non union oil field service workers picking up the slack.

Then, in Houston, the heartland of the oil and chemical industries, the oil and chemical companies demanded (and got) massive pay cuts from the Boilermakers, Electricians, Ironworkers, Sheet Metal Workers, Operating Engineers and the millwright local of the Carpenters Union.

Auto manufacturers and steel companies demanded (and got) similar concessions nationally from those unions too.

This trend accelerated after 1973.

What at first seemed like a recession caused by the OPEC oil boycott and the US defeat in Vietnam turned out to be a fundamental change in the balance of world economic forces.

The great prosperity that had been fueled by US imperialism’s triumph in World War II had come to an end – America’s imperialist rivals, West Germany and Japan, had fully recovered from the war, and were now taking their piece of the world’s economic pie (and unlike the USA they weren’t hobbled with huge defense budgets).

Coupled with the rise of new mini imperialist states like Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and the shifting of oil wealth from the American oil companies to the Arab kingdoms that actually produced the petroleum, this was a major change in the world.

The American capitalist class were no longer in a position to buy class peace at home by paying high wages to all of the strategic and well organized sections of the workers.

They could still pay high wages to SOME of those workers – but not all.

The rulers would have to impose pay cuts on some of the once prosperous workers – logically, the weakest workers, the ones with the least capacity to fight back in an organized way, would have to take it in the wallet.

As it happened, the two weakest sections of America’s prosperous blue collar workers were the construction workers and the Teamsters.

Their unions were gangster-ridden (and, in the case of the construction unions, deeply racist) and were mainly propped up by stronger industrial unions and organized crime.

Also, the workers they represented were employed by small competitive companies, who provided services to the larger corporations – if the unions were weakened or destroyed, those companies could be forced to reduce the prices they charged to their clients, which meant more profits for the nation’s top 200 corporations and banks.

The Teamsters were the first target – their union had centralized bargaining for most of their members, and their flagship contract, the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA), covered 400,000 of their 2,300,000 members (with another 50,000 workers under local “white paper agreements” patterned on NMFA).

The leadership of the Teamsters had also shown their incapability of controlling their members, because they had let the 1970 wildcat strike happen.

So, in April, 1973, the trucking companies demanded the right to hire an unlimited number of non union drivers, loading dock workers and other employees, and an unlimited right to set up non union subsidiaries that would not be covered by NMFA.

The concessions were summed up in an appendix to the April 1973-April 1976 NMFA, called the Special Commodities Rider (supposedly, the non union workers would only haul “special commodities” like fresh fruit – almost immediately, companies violated that rule by using their non union truckers to haul general freight).

The leadership of the Teamsters agreed to the Special Commodities Rider – and went even further by allowing union trucking companies to hire an unlimited number of non union drivers from labor leasing companies – paving the way for the destruction of their union in the freight sector before the decade was out.

The Teamsters leadership were able to get away with this massive betrayal of the nation’s truck drivers in part because the network of dissident shop stewards in the truck terminals who’d led the April 1970 wildcat had been decimated by a three year long joint trucking company/Teamsters Union/cosa nostra purge of loading dock dissidents in the truck terminals.

The teamster dissident purge extended from firings and abuse on the loading docks to beatings, shotgunnings and firebombings of dissident local officers all the way up to the July 30, 1975 assassination of former Teamsters General President Jimmy Hoffa by a team of hitmen that were allegedly jointly sent by Genovese family captain and former local 560 President Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Detroit cosa nostra captain Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone.

Hoffa was far from radical – in office, he had been a cosa nostra ally for over 30 years and he was extremely prone to making special substandard wage and benefits deals for trucking companies that had a “hardship” – and his sympathy for trucking company bosses made a lot of sense, because Hoffa himself was the hidden owner or part-owner of a number of Detroit-area trucking and limousine companies!

Hoffa had been kicked out of office and sent to prison for 5 years – nominally for jury tampering and pension fund fraud, but actually as the culmination of a 10 year long attack on the Teamsters by the feds

This “Get Hoffa” campaign (that’s actualy what the feds called it) was presented to the public as a struggle against gangster unionism – and in a way it was.

But, the real purpose of the attacks on Hoffa were because the Teamsters had helped the wealthier and stronger trucking companies stabilize the industry’s freight rates and put a floor under wages – which stopped the smaller, marginal “gypsy truckers” from paying sweatshop wages and charging rock bottom rates.

This was great for the trucking industry – but terrible for the major manufacturers and retailers who shipped their goods by truck (who wanted a war of all against all between the carriers to push rates to rock bottom levels).

Get Hoffa was really about breaking up the anticompetitive cartels that the Teamsters had set up, both in local cartage and nationally in over the road freight.

Because of the Get Hoffa campaign, Hoffa was seen by most teamsters as a martyr and a symbol of Teamster militancy while he was in jail – a time when Acting General President Frank Fitzsimmons and the other leaders that he left behind to run the union started making across the board concessions to the carriers (Hoffa, in jail, was able to escape political responsibility for their actions – even though they were folks trained by him and following his usual approach to trucking industry bargaining).

Hoffa, once on the street, did not automatically get put back in office by President Fitzsimmons and the other leaders he had left behind to run the union while he was in prison, so he had to break with them, and the gangsters and trucking company owners who stood behind them.

And, despite Hoffa’s longstanding disdain for democracy and his general orientation towards Napoleon-style despotic one man dictatorship, he had no choice but to create a mass movement to put himself back in office.

The leadership of that movement were his old local officer cronies, but the mass base of the Hoffa movement was made up of those dissident Teamster shop stewards in the freight terminals.

Bottom line, if Hoffa was able to come back to power, it would be riding on a wave of wildcat striking trucker militancy, despite his own personal conservativism and pro trucking company orientation.

That just would not do – so, in the wake of months of terrorism against pro Hoffa local officers in Detroit, the wiseguys had Hoffa kidnapped, murdered and his corpse was cut up and destroyed so there would not be a funeral or a gravesite for the Teamster dissident movement to rally around.

Beyond the violent purge in the Teamsters, worker militancy (in that union and others) was also throttled by the devastating economic effect of the 1973 recession.

Workers in 1970 had been emboldened to fight by the fact that unemployment was low and if you got fired here today, you could get a job across the street tomorrow.

In 1973, it was a different story – times were hard, and work was scarce.

Teamsters, auto workers, steel workers, coal miners, construction workers – all those folks who had been quick to wildcat just a few years before felt compelled to sit still and take it, no matter what the bosses or the unions did.

The construction workers were facing the hardest recession since the Great Depression, so they really wern’t in a position to fight back either.

The recession actually delayed the attacks on their unions for a few years – because their was so little work, it didn’t make sense to go for the jugular just yet (especially since the Business Roundtable had to fight a two front war – they had to fight the contractors to reduce their prices, and then lean on them to abandon their 100 year long relationship with the unions and go scab).

The New York Building Trades had special problems.

They not only had to deal with the disasterous economic consequences that came from the completion of the World Trade Center, which dumped 15 million square feet of 1st class office space on an already glutted Manhattan commerical market – thus killing commercial construction in the city for most of the rest of the decade, but the city itself was in a larger economic crisis.

In 1969, at the behest of the landlords, the City of New York had repealed it’s 1948 Rent Control Law (which had been passed thanks to struggles led by communist led tenant associations back in the 1930’s and 1940’s).

Rent Control had kept rents reasonable enough so that workers could live and thrive in the city – which is precisely why landlords hated it.

The City replaced Rent Control with Rent Stabilization, which gave landlords the right to petition a special city commission (the Rent Guidelines Board) every two years for a rent increase.

[Like clockwork, every 2 years from 1970 to date the landlords got their rent increase from the RGB]

The only wrinkle was that if a person had lived in an apartment prior to 1970, or was a relative of someone who had, their rent would still be covered by Rent Control.

The landlords found a couple of ways around that loophole.

In White working class neighborhoods that were near Midtown Manhattan or the Financial District, they drove out tenants through crime and terrorism and neglect (building supers and porters were fired, buildings were allowed to deteriorate, thugs were allowed to rob tenants ect).

Once the tenants were driven out, the buildings were either renovated or torn down and replaced by luxury hirises (the latter paid for by a $ 786 million long term low interest loan guarantee from the City of New York) and in either case more affluent people were brought in to replace the displaced workers.

In Black and Latino working class neighborhoods, or White neighborhoods that were too far for comfortable commuting to Downtown and Midtown Manhattan, the landlord tactics were much cruder and simpler.

They lit a match.

“Torches” (professional arsonists) were hired, buildings were burned, tenants and firemen were killed and maimed and insurance claims were filed and paid.

This campaign of landlord terrorism was carried out despite the fact that the Fire Department knew and could prove that these were all deliberate fires.

After a while, the City cut the FDNY’s Fire Marshal budget to stop the department from investigating all the arson fires.

Meanwhile, New York City’s manufacturers began an exodus from the city.

The city’s 800,000 factory workers had below national average wages, and often laborered under cosa nostra-brokered sweetheart contacts. But they also had a longsanding tradition of combativeness and a willingness to go on wildcat strikes dating back to the depression.

This was no longer acceptable to the bosses – who decided that increased shipping costs and, in some cases, higher wages were worth it, if they could break the city’s combative industrial proletariat.

Starting with the US Navy’s permanent lay off of 20,000 Metal Trades Council workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1969, manufacturers eliminated the jobs of 300,000+ workers in the first half of the 1970’s (thus rendering almost 10% of the city’s working class jobless)

The layoffs, the fires and an influx of cheap Southeast Asian heroin touched off an unprecedented crime wave.

Adding to the misery, the $ 786 million short term high interest loan the City had taken out to subsidize the developers came due in June 1975 – but the landlords, who had got a long term low interest loan guarantee to pay for their luxury real estate development projects, wern’t yet due to pay the City back.

This caused the City of New York to go bankupt and get taken into recievership by it’s banks. The bankers laid off 50,000 city employees, broke a series of municipal worker strikes and stopped most of the city’s Davis Bacon public works jobs.

This hit the Building Trades like a punch to the stomach.

The unemployment was so bad that about one fifth of New York’s 250,000 union construction workers had to permanently leave the trades, never to return.

Both in New York and nationally the construction recession lasted til 1978.

But the construction market that the unions came back to was a very inhospitable environment, with clients demanding that contractors seek wage cuts, the gutting of jurisdiction and work rules and, where possible, total deunionization.

IX. “..and the wolf finally came..”

New York construction workers faced a vastly transformed industry.

Arsonist landlords had put huge areas of the city to the torch, and, since NYC is the economic capital of the capitalist world, it was essential that those communities be rebuilt.

But, since those areas were poor Black or Latino communities where the landlords had demonstrated with matches and lighter fluid the fact that they could not profitably build there, it would be up to the City of New York to renovate those areas.

And the City was bankrupt, with it’s finances under the supervision of a Wall Street bankers junta, the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC). MAC had given the City government strict orders to reduce expenses – especially labor costs – by any means necessary.

Mayor Ed Koch, the conservative Democrat who came into office after the Fiscal Crisis, had figured out a unique way that the City could rebuild those burnt out blocks without having to pay Davis Bacon wages to the workers.

The City transferred the properties over to City patronage funded Community Based Organizations – local community groups, usually run by Democratic Party activists, that provided privatized social services.

Those agencies had already become accustomed to using low paid non union labor in their social service operations (and many CBO executives were rabidly anti union) so they were quite willing to act as the front men for non union renovation work in the burnt out neighborhoods.

It wasn’t that hard to find contractors either.

The cosa nostra-initiated cartelization of contracting had blocked the entrepeneureal ambitions of many business-minded company men (the priviliged, aristocratic, steadily employed layer of construction workers – a population segment that has always been the point of origin of the next generation of contractors).

As long as the Genoveses and their allies blocked new companies from breaking into the market, they had been unable to start their own businesses – or, at best, only able to eak out a marginal existance on the outer edge of the industry.

Also, the Coalitions integration of the trades had created a small layer of Black and Latino company men, some of whom were just as anxious to break into contracting as their White counterparts.

Both of those groups welcomed the opportunity to run work non union for the CBO’s.

Even some of the mobbed up contractors saw an opportunity here – leading some to set up non union double breasted shops to take the CBO work.

Even Vincent Di Napoli (the Genovese family captain and drywall contractor who ran the drywall rackets for cosa nostra) set up a company, Inner City Drywall, to do work on these scab CBO jobs.

This fit into a broader deterioration of labor standards at the mobbed up contractors – many had started employing “lumpers” (union carpenters paid a piece rate in cash off the books instead of union scale).

The New York City District Council of Carpenters was too weak from years of gangster infiltration and wiseguy rule to do anything to stop them.

If the union couldn’t even protect it’s members from getting paid less than union scale, hiring a force of openly non union workers and going double breasted was the next logical step.

These new breed of non union bosses had a labor source to supply the casual labor needs of their CBO jobs – the Coalitions!

Many of the Black and Latin union members who’d gotten in the trades through the Coalitions were hungry after 3 years of heavy unemployment – and more than a few were so desperate that they could be forced to work for scab pay and no benefits.

There were also recent recruits to Coalitions who had not yet worked union, so they wern’t union members yet – they were even better candidates to be sent to the scab jobs.

In short order, a third of the New York market went non union.

There was little serious union resistance – the only union that even TRIED to fight back was Drywall Tapers local 1974 of Painters District Council # 9.

The Tapers resistance was fueled in part by the fact that it’s leaders answered to the Lucheses, rather than the Genoveses – lumping and double breasting were mainly done by the latter group of hoodlums, with the former left out of the loop and not getting any of the tribute.

Beyond that, the Tapers, a much smaller and weaker union than the Carpenters, were being asked to take some deep concessions, including forcing their members to work on dangerous stilts when they did high walls and ceilings, rather than the much safer stepladders, baker scaffolds and pipe scaffolds they normally used.

Tapers local 1974 said no to stilts and went on strike in 1978.

So, Vincent Di Napoli and the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association approached the Genovese-dominated Plasterers Union.

Di Napoli and the association got the Plasterers to charter Drywall Plasterers and Tapers Union local 530.

The scab tapers union was put under the control of one Louis Moscatiello, a Bronx insurance broker and Genovese family soldier (who had never actually worked as a drywall taper one day in his entire life).

Moscatiello’s local 530 recruited scabs to break local 1974’s strike, and signed a sweetheart contract with Di Napoli and the MDA.

Plasterers local 530 wasn’t the only cosa nostra company union in the New York construction market, unfortunately.

Teamsters Joint Council # 16 set up local 363, a scab electricians union, to enable scab electrical contractors to be nominally union and (at least on paper) comply with State of New York training and licensing rules for electricians, while still paying substandard wages.

Teamsters local 363 had grossly inferior wages and benefits to the real New York City electricians union, Electricians local 3 – and 363’s training program was grossly inferior to local 3’s college level apprenticeship, which was the finest building trades education program in the entire country.

To add insult to injury, local 363’s White officers (operating out of the violently racist Howard Beach section of Queens) actually claimed that their bogus training program was better for Black and Latin workers than local 3’s – precisely because they had low expectations for their minority trainees, and they didn’t bother to thoroughly train the participants in their program – let alone expect them to do college coursework, like the real Electricians Union did!

The real purpose of Teamsters local 363’s trainee program was to let scab electrical contractors use cheap minority labor – unlike legitimate apprenticeship programs which require that there be 3, 4 or even 5 journeylevel workers for every apprentice, 363 let their contractors have 1 trainee for every journeylevel electrician – in effect letting the bosses pay half their workers a substandard wage.

363’s low wage scab contractors were the only “union” companies on many city funded scab residential renovation jobs, and they also had a heavy presence on Davis Bacon school construction jobs run by the Board of Education.

As union residential construction wilted in the New York market, the unions totally imploded in much of the rest of the nation.

The dryrot started in Houston – where the National Constructors Association and the oil companies had gotten so many concessions from the mechanical trades.

The trades in Houston – first and foremost the Carpenters – were asked for deep concessions. They gave everything the contractors asked – and the union contractors went double breasted anyway!

The big clients, mobilized by the Business Roundtable and ABC, pushed the contractors to end their relationships with the unions – or to, at the very least, go double breasted and transfer as much union work as possible to their new scab companies.

Incidentally, this was the exact same model of union busting that was decimating the Teamsters Union in the trucking industry at the same time.

To add insult to injury, the reduced union pay scale was used as an excuse to reduce non union pay even more!

In short order, Houston went scab – all of the residential work, all of the retail store and shopping mall work, most of the hirise office building work in downtown Houston and a huge chunk of the oil refinery and chemical plant maintenance work too.

Next came Atlanta – the union contractors, pushed by ABC and the Roundtable, asked the Carpenters for a wage freeze followed by a 30% pay cut. Other unions were asked to make similar concessions.

The Carpenters gave everything they were asked – and so did the other trades.

And the union contractors still shifted their work to their double breasted companies – and cut the pay of their non union workers.

Atlanta went even more thoroughly non union than Houston did.

Next came Miami and Ft Lauderdale – a market area that went overnight from almost as heavily union as the Midwest to almost completely scab.

The same pattern – the unions gave up the store, the clients, at the urging of ABC and the Business Roundtable, pushed their contractors to go scab and the market, once nearly 80% union, went non union overnight.

The same pattern happend in New Orleans, Denver, Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Charleston, Nashville, Dallas/Ft Worth, Jackson, Little Rock, Souix Falls, Casper, Albuquerque, Phoenix…

The whole Sunbelt of the South, Southwest and Rocky Mountain States became union free environments – in some cases, (like Denver and the mining towns) the fall came after over 100 years of heavy unionization.

Even Washington DC (the home of most construction union headquarters) and DC’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs, was thus deunionized.

As was Los Angeles (a city which once had more union construction workers than any other community in America).

Las Vegas was just about the only island of construction unionism left in the Sunbelt – basically thanks to the casinos – those resorts were run by cosa nostra, financed by Teamsters Central States Pension Fund “loans” and were staffed by members of the two largest locals in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, Culinary Workers local 226 and Bartenders local 165, making the city too heavily pro union for the ABC and the Roundtable to break the building trades.

Up North, the rural areas of Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri similarly became centers of “merit shop” construction, as did rural Washington State, Oregon and California.

It was a catastrophe – in 1975, over 42% of the nation’s construction was union (and that itself was a sharp decline from the 80% of work that was union in the 1960’s) by 1980 it was barely 30%.

The Carpenters Union, the biggest construction union with over 700,000 members, fell the hardest – membership fell to 500,000 by 1980, 350,000 by 1985.

Boilermakers, Painters, Plasterers, Bricklayers, Electricians, Operating Engineers, Ironworkers ect all saw similar loss of membership.

One construction union, the Wood, Wire and Metallic Lathers, actually disbanded – between all the drywall work they’d lost to the Carpenters and the deunionization, they had no choice but to fold – the Lathers’ biggest local, the 4,500 member New York Lathers local 46, became an Ironworkers local, the remaining 8,000 lathers in the rest of the union became members of the Carpenters.

This union decay was at a time when the construction industry workforce was growing – from 4,325,000 (1,725,000 union, 2,600,000 non union) in 1973 to 4,600,000 (1,600,000 union, 3,000,000 non union) in 1980 – basically, the scab side grew by 400,000 workers while the union side shrank by 125,000.

The defeat of the building trades would have been bad enough if it had only been a loss for construction workers.

However it had a ripple effect that went across the entire American working class.

The weakening of the construction unions severely hurt the building maintenance trades as well.

Companies that had dispensed with contractors that used union construction labor certainly didn’t want to have union labor cleaning their offices either.

So they went on the offensive against their janitors, firemen, oilers and stationary engineers.

Hardest hit was the Service Employees International Union (”Building” was dropped from the name in 1968 – because by that point the vast majority of their members were hospital workers or civil service employees).

In pretty much every major city except for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Boston and Chicago’s Loop, SEIU janitors directly employed by building owners were laid off and replaced by non union minimum wage workers employed by cleaning contractors.

The pay drop was drastic – in Los Angeles, janitor wages fell overnight from $ 13/hr to minimum wage – $ 3.35 – with no pension or health insurance.

And even the cities that survived the unionbusting the union only remained in the downtown office buildings – the suburbs were as agressively deunionized as any other area.

And the downtown workers in those few highly unionized cities may have stayed union but, like every other janitor in America, they now worked for cleaning contractors, rather than directly for the owners of the buildings.

Like the new breed of construction contractors, these firms were almost always double breasted.

Unlike the construction contractors, many cleaning firms were national and even international in scope.

The biggest, Copenhagen, Denmark-based ISS, operated on 3 continents – 100% union back home in Copenhagen but agressively anti union everywhere else in the world.

But most of the cleaning contractors that came to dominate property services were US based firms like American Building Maintenance (ABM) and OneSource. They were very much double breasted – like ISS they were union in some areas, and ferociously scab in others, deending on the strength of a given area’s labor movement.

There was also an ugly racial aspect – many of the SEIU janitors were African American – most of their replacements were undocumented Latino immigrants.

The SEIU did nothing to resist the attack.

And they had their reasons.

After all, they were adding tens of thousands of hospital workers and civil servants every year, often organized thanks to backroom patronage deals with Democratic Party controlled local governments (which often involved Democratic Party controlled public worker company unions being absorbed into the SEIU as a body).

Those arraingements had made the SEIU the fastest growing union in America – from 480,000 in 1975 to over 688,000 a decade later, at a time when most American unions were rapidly shrinking.

In light of all that easy growth in the public sector, why on earth would the SEIU chiefs want to go to war with these agressive multinational cleaning contractors on behalf of a few thousand Black janitors?

It would be another decade before the SEIU leadership even so much as lifted a finger for the janitors.

The International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers was also hard hit, on two fronts – unionbusting and automation.

New heating, ventilation and air conditioning and elevator technology made it possible to run the systems of a modern building with far less labor.

With the exception of a few hundred old coal-fired boiler equipped public schools in New York City, most buildings used automatic steam, oil or gas fired boilers – so no need for a stationary fireman to shovel coal and remove ash.

On the steam, oil and gas fired units, automated boilers didn’t need the cleaning and constant monitoring the older manual systems did, so the oilers wern’t needed either.

This caused the IBFO’s membership to catostrophically decline from 40,000 in 1975 to only 25,000 by 1985.

And this was a continuation of a long term trend – the Firemen & Oilers had been losing members ever since the mid 1950’s, when fuel oil began to displace anthracite coal as a building heating system fuel.

The reality was, the decline of coal had killed off the fireman’s craft , and very few oilers would be needed in the automated boiler rooms of the future.

(By 1995, the IBFO itself entered into history – and after it disbanded, what was left of it’s membership were absorbed by the SEIU).

The Stationary Engineers division of the Operating Engineers Union suffered losses too – but not as severe as the SEIU or IBFO.

Stationary engineer work is highly skilled and requires lots of specialized training and state and local licenses.

Unlike the firemen and oilers, it could not be automated out of existance (although automated systems did replace some stationary engineers) nor was it possible to use minimum wage workers to run the boiler rooms.

So, they only lost about 10% of their membership in the boiler rooms.

But the remaining stationary engineers frequently ended up having to work without firemen or oilers to help them and surrounded by low wage non union janitors.

Worse yet, the stationary engineers, still union but now having to work in non union boiler rooms, were no longer able to do things like checking the union cards of any and all workers coming to do jobs in occupied buildings and banning the non union workers from getting onto the floors to go to work.

That alone had kept construction in most of America’s office buildings 100% union – without the stationary engineer card check, it was far more possible for scab outfits to work in occupied commercial structures.

Of course, the IUOE’s “Hoisting and Portable” (construction) side members were more and more finding themselves the last union trade on all non union jobs, so the union did nothing to try and organize any kind of resistance to this attack on their brothers and sisters.

The Teamsters were also under attack (and hobbled by it’s corrupt cosa nostra dominated leadership’s open complicity with the unionbusting – and the low intensity war between the allies of cosa nostra backed General President Frank Fitzsimmons and the supporters of murdered former General President Jimmy Hoffa).

The Teamsters lost over 600,000 members – 200,000 in the freight sector alone!

The Teamsters were also a building trades union – arguably the most important becaues everything the workers install on the job comes on a truck.

In places like New York City, the Teamsters had an elaborate shop steward system (the so called “working teamster foremen”) who’s whole job was to sit around jobsites, check every delivery truck to see if the driver was union and if not, to make the truck leave the site without unloading and/or make the contractor hire a teamster for the day before the rig could be unloaded.

In effect, the teamster foreman system made it extremely difficult for scab contractors to work on major union jobsites in the city.

Because of the building trades dependence on the Teamsters to keep union jobs union, a weakened Teamsters meant a weaker building trades.

The United Mine Workers of America, the strongest union in rural America, was also under the gun (literally – as in the guns of National Guards troops, highway patrolmen and private security guards).

The Miners had 3 national strikes in a row defeated by a combined attack from the federal, state and local governments and security guard thugs hired by the operators.

The miners fought heroically – with shotguns, dynamite and “jackrocks” (spikes designed to puncture the tires of coal trucks) in hand.

But, despite their bravery, their local mine-by-mine resistance was hobbled by a union leadership utterly incapable of organizing a winning fightback against their attackers.

UMWA membership plummeted – from over 240,000 in 1975 to barely 75,000 just 5 years later.

Those 165,000 deunionized miners didn’t leave the industry – thanks to the UMWA’s massive defeat, they were forced to mine non union.

Thus an industry that had been majority union since 1935 became 70% open shop (which is how it remains to this day).

As the UMWA fell in coal country, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers suffered similar reverses in the oil patch.

Companies that had grown used to using non union maintenance labor decided that they would rather have non union permanent workers in their refineries.

Some of this was accomplished by having contractors permanently taking over some of the refinery operating work – while, of course, layoffs and NLRB decertifications were in the mix too.

The OCAW lost a third of it’s membership, shrinking from nearly 150,000 members to barely 100,000.

The UMWA and OCAW weren’t the only industrial unions on the ropes.

The United Steel Workers of America faced a massive disaster in the basic steel industry. 450,000 of their 1.1 million members worked there – and even that was 10% less than peak employment in the 1960’s.

But now, thanks to the failure of steel executives like US Steel’s Roger Blough to modernize the steel mills, the American steel industry was in a crisis.

The steel companies solved that problem by mass layoffs (over a quarter of a million from 1977 to 1980).

Cities like Youngstown, Ohio, Gary, Indiana, Homestead, Pennsylvania and Sparrows Point, Maryland, company towns that had been built around the steel industry, were unceremoniously abandoned – stripped of their primary employers, they suffered rapid decay and impoverishment.

Meanwhile, the only growing sector of the steel business was the non union “mini mills” in the rural South and Midwest.

The USWA leadership’s only “solution” to this crisis was to agressively promote class partnership with the steel companies – basically a modern form of the company unions that had existed in the pre CIO era steel industry – and to actively oppose any effort to fight back against the bosses.

Meanwhile, the USWA’s membership crashed from over 1 million in 1975 to just 575,000 a decade later.

The United Auto Workers had similar problems in the auto industry, as did the International Association of Machinists in the machinery and precision metal parts industries, and both the International Union of Electrical Workers and the United Electrical Workers were similarly on the ropes at GE and Westinghouse.

To make matters worse, there were two historic defeats of the unionized working class in those years.

Transport Workers Union local 100 lost a strike at the New York City Transit Authority in 1980 (which symbolized the breaking of the power of New York’s once combative unionized workers)

And President Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike at the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981 and the permanent firing of all 11,000 of the striking air traffic controllers.

Neither the TWU local 100 defeat in New York nor the PATCO defeat were in any way responded to by the trade unions.

Most airline unions openly scabbed on the air traffic controllers!

Members of the Airline Pilots, Flight Attendants, Teamsters and Transport Workers unions were ordered by their union leaders to scab on the air traffic controllers strike – hypocritically, members of the largest union in the industry, the Machinists, were told that they could honor PATCO’s picketlines – but only if every other airline union also refused to scab!

As the air transport workers union leaders abandoned their brothers and sisters in the control towers to their fate, the New York City Central Labor Council didn’t lift a finger on behalf of the transit workers – nor did the still 150,000 strong building trades, nor did the still 150,000 member Teamsters Joint Council 16, nor did the over 200,000 unionized municipal workers in New York City nor did the railroad or interstate bus drivers either.

Almost 2 million unionized New York City workers were told by their union leaders to walk to work, while the 40,000 transit workers were left to twist slowly in the wind by themselves!!!

Coming on the heels of the collapse of the construction unions in the South and West, the breaking of the industrial unions made the construction unions’ survival in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Pacific Coast less and less likely.

The only thing that was left was the building trades in mobbed up cities like New York, Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, St Louis and Kansas City.

As luck would have it, those islands of gangster unionism were not going to last much longer either.

X. “…a pattern of racketeering activity…”

The bid rigging cartels that cosa nostra had perfected in New York City (and the smaller less effective versions that existed in Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, St Louis and Kansas City) had served their purpose.

They had allowed the largest and most developed of the subcontractors in those areas to preserve their market share and to keep a larger share of the profits generated by the value created by their workers going into their bank accounts rather than the pockets of the GC’s, developers and bankers.

Of course, that very success had triggered profound resentment from the owners and their bankers and GC’s – especially in a national climate where, thanks to ABC and Business Roundtable unionbusting, the share of profits that went to the owners was going up at the expense of the share of profits going to the subs.

If owners everywhere – even in the outer edges of the mobbed up cities – were getting on the gravy train, why couldn’t they get their piece of the pie?

Furthermore, monopolization was stagnating the technological edge that New York contractors had always maintaned.

Intense competition had bred firms that were quick to adapt to new technology and methods (and the contractors that were stuck in the past were quickly replaced by upstart companies willing to try the new ways of working).

But, the cosa nostra cartels had blocked the advancement of new companies, and had preserved old contractors who were past their prime.

The construction financiers understood that something had to be done – to break the power of the mafia, to weaken the unions and to bring back cuththroat competition between subcontractors.

Only the government could do that.

So the banks, real estate developers and General Contractors began reaching out to law enforcement to “liberate us from the Mob Tax” (their name for the 2% tribute that their subs paid to the mob – the cost of which, to add insult to injury, was almost always secretly passed on to the owners and their GC’s).

To carry out the wishes of the owners, the FBI launched the LILREX (Long Island Labor Racketeering and Extortion) probe – focused mainly on Vincent Di Napoli’s Wheel in the drywall and ceilings industry and the involvement of the New York City District Council of Carpenters and Drywall Plasterers and Tapers local 530 in that bid rigging cartel.

The first trial coming out of the LILREX probe ended up in a mistrial – and, literally the night before the second trial, Teddy Maritas, the president of the New York City District Council of Carpenters, mysteriously “disappeared” while on his way to a late night meeting under the Throggs Neck Bridge with person or persons unknown.

Maritas was almost certainly murdered – more likely than not by one or more of his co defendants, who may have feared he would cooperate with the feds and tell all he knew about the Wheel and all the other rackets.

In the wake of Maritas “disapperance” – and the ongoing RICO Act litigation that lived on after his death, the UBC took the NYC District Council of Carpenters into trusteeship.

They found that the union had suffered a massive decline in membership (from 40,000 down to 25,000) largely due to the rise of lumping and the collapse of the union in the residential sector.

The trusteeship didn’t do anything to try and reorganize these recently deunionized carpenters – all they did was disband locals in Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn who had suffred the bulk of the membership loss, and merge their members into new locals with more territory but less members.

Other unions had taken similar losses – and had seen similar efforts by cosa nostra to allow the use of non union labor (or underpaid union members) on the industry’s fringe.

This union decay was partially masked because it came at a time when an unprecedented building boom hit the city’s luxury office building sector.

Speculators were throwing up hirise office towers right and left – even if they didn’t have any tenants lined up to fill the space.

There was a similar race to build luxury apartment buildings on Manhattan’s now throughly gentrified Upper East Side, as well as in up and coming areas of the West Side and Downtown Manhattan where working class tenants had been driven out by the landlord terrorism of the previous decade.

At the same time, a massive complex of 4 hirise office towers and dozens of hirise apartment buildings was built on a platform of World Trade Center landfill extending out into the Hudson River.

It was called Battery Park City – it was the second largest construction project in the entire world at the time, and the biggest job in New York City since the 7 towers of the World Trade Center complex were finished in 1973.

Thousands of unionized tradespeople who otherwise would have been jobless were absorbed by the Battery Park City job.

This is the time when a Coney Island, Brooklyn-based moderate income apartment building developer named Donald J. Trump propells himself – with borrowed money and an instinct for agressive self promotion – into the luxury sector.

These office building and luxury hirise jobs absorbed much of the labor that had been displaced by the deunionization of outer borough apartment building construction, thus averting a major crisis for the unions.

And, even with LILREX on the horizon, cosa nostra was still a major player at the table, brokering who got to do what work where, when and for what price.

Even after a second probe was launched – against “Fat Tony” Salerno’s Concrete Club (with the Laborers’ Concrete Workers District Council also in the hot seat along with the NYC District Council of Carpenters) – the wiseguys still called the shots in NYC’s construction industry.

It would turn out to be the mobsters’ last hurrah – after the 1980’s, the all but open gangster rule in the construction trades would become impossible.

Meanwhile, outside of New York, the collapse of the building trades continued.

The construction unions – first and foremost the Carpenters – all but collapsed in California outside of the Bay Area, above all in now almost completely deunionized Los Angeles County.

Even in the Bay Area, US Steel hired ABC’s flagship contractor, the violently anti union industrial maintenance General Contractor BE&K, to renovate the firm’s old Pittsburgh Works in Pittsburgh, CA (the mill, renamed the USS/POSCO Works, was to be the flagship plant of a joint venture between US Steel and South Korea’s Pohang Iron and Steel)

BE&K wasn’t just another scab contractor – their main business was supplying armed scabs to break steelworker and paperworker strikes!

Using them at the USS/POSCO Works job was a line drawn in the sand.

And not just against American construction workers – especially since the Pittsburgh job was the fifth largest construction project in the entire world at the time

The biggest was the Canary Wharf office building/luxury housing district on the East End of London, followed by the Battery Park City job that I mentioned above (both of which were built by the same developers – the Reichmann family’s Olympia & York of Toronto), followed by the Yanbu oil refinery complex in Saudi Arabia and the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad line in the Soviet Far East.

Of the top five, only Battery Park City and the BAM railroad were built 100% union.

To their credit, the Northern California Building Trades did stand up to US Steel – the job was agresssively picketed on the regular, and the resistance didn’t let up from start to finish.

The fightback could have been stronger – United Steel Workers of America local 2701 could have organized it’s members to refuse to work behind the picketline, Teamsters Joint Council # 7 could have mobilized it’s steelhauler membership to refuse to pick up finished steel from the plant, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the United Transportation could have gotten the train crews they represented to do the same and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s local 10 and Inland Boatmen’s Union could have similarly disrupted seafreight deliveries to the mill (which were vital – as much of USS/POSCO’s raw material came by cargo ship from South Korea).

But on the whole, even with those critical limitations, by the standards of the day, the Pittsburgh Works struggle was a victory.

USS/POSCO was finished as a mostly scab job (BE&K was forced to hire a few union subcontractors), but US Steel never again renovated a mill with scab contractors and no other manufacturer has since tried to renovate a factory in Northern California with all non union labor.

Lucky they fought back – over in England, the Union of Construction and Technical Trades and the Transport and General Workers Union basically rolled over and let Canary Wharf go non union

Of course both UCATT and T&G had been weakened by a series of defeats in the 1960’s and 70’s and were further politically imobilized by the ongoing two year long war that the British government was waging aganist England’s strongest union, the National Union of Mineworkers.

The 1984 annihilation of the NUM was England’s PATCO – and in the wake of a loss of that magnitude, there was no way the British construction union leaders could see a winning fight against Canary Wharf – a jobsite in the heart of the British capital.

London’s highly combative Irish, Afro Carribbean and Polish immigrant construction workers surely had different ideas – but the leaders of UCATT and T&G sure as hell wern’t asking for their input on this!

Nor did it ever occur to the leaders of UCATT and T&G to reach out to their North American building trades cousins for support.

That was truly unfortunate – because, at the same time as Canary Wharf’s developers, the Reichman family’s Olympia & York Co, were building scab in London, they were building Battery Park City 100% union in New York City, and they also had numorous union jobs in their home city, Toronto, Ontario.

Had the British unions reached out across the pond, and at least tried to get some kind of sympathy strike on the Battery Park City job, or on one of the Reichman’s Toronto projects (which might not have been so hard – after all, a large portion of union trades workers here are Irish or Afro Carribbean immigrants who used to work in London) it might have been possible to turn the Canary Wharf job.

Especially in light of the financial fragility of Olympia & York (they actually went into Chapter 7 liquidation towards the tail end of the Battery Park City and Canary Wharf projects) it might have been possible to make them go union, with just a little pressure on their jobsites on both sides of the Atlantic.

But that didn’t happen.

In the wake of the Canary Wharf defeat, Great Britain’s construction unions collapse, an over 200 year tradition of unionized English construction labor goes down the drain, Greater London returns to it’s 19th century status as the main supplier of immigrant construction workers to the New York City labor market and the United Kingdom as a whole becomes a low wage non union skilled labor reservoir for all of Western Europe.

That’s what happens to workers who’s leaders refuse to fight back!

In any case, California construction workers were extrordinarily willing to resist the open shop.

The Associated Builders and Contractors found that out the hard way when they made the mistake of holding their annual meeting in San Fransisco a couple of years after the USS/POSCO crisis.

They were greeted by a citywide construction workers wildcat strike and a large angry crowd of 6,000 workers surrounding the George Moscone Center, the venue for their conference.

The union dissident workers who had organized the wildcat strike had suggested that anybody coming to the Moscone Center to confront the ABC buy as many packages of eggs as they could carry.

Most of the workers followed that suggestion (reporteldy buying up San Francisco’s entire supply of fresh eggs that day) – consequently, the ABC delegates ended up with yolk and egg whites dripping off their suits as they walked into the confab!

Unfortunately, the leaders of the California Building Trades did not take advantage of the California construction workers spirit and willingness to fight that had been shown so clearly at USS/POSCO and at the mass picketing of the ABC convention – it was a tragically wasted opportunity.

And it wasn’t like the Californian construction workers were the only ones willing to fight.

Far from it – in International Falls, a bordertown between Minnesota and Ontario, International Paper had tried to do the same thing US Steel did at USS/POSCO, use BE&K to renovate a unionized factory.

They faced violent opposition from the Minnesota building trades – including a mass rally in front of the paper mill that nearly turned into an uprising – as well as hostility on the plant site from members of the United Paperworkers International Union who had to work side by side with BE&K’s non union maintenance workers.

Parallel with that was a campaign of ostracism and harassment that International Falls residents (most of whom were paperworkers or the relatives of paperworkers) waged against the families of BK&K workers who had temporarily settled in town.

But, like the California union leaders, the chiefs of the Minnesota unions refused to unleash their members in a broader struggle.

And, in the plant itself, the leaders of UPIU locals 49 and 159, as hostile as they were to the armed scab presence in their mill, never took the ultimate step to stop BE&K – shutting down the mill with a strike!

Emboldened by the UPIU’s failure to fight back at International Falls, International Paper launched a unionbusting offensive at Jay, Maine, the company’s largest UPIU represented paper mil – where IP succeeded in breaking the UPIU.

Had the Minnesota unions been willing to take the International Falls struggle all the way things might have been different – both for the construction unions and the factory worker unions.

But the resistance wasn’t limited to the north woods.

In New York City, the building trades unions – in particular the New York City District Council of Carpenters – systematically harassed scab jobs in the part of the city that had stayed union, Manhattan below 96th St.

This sometimes took the form of “wrecking crews”- large groups of union members sent to invade, vandalize and destroy scab jobs – and sometimes it took the form of mysterious nighttime pipe bomb explosions by person or persons unknown.

The New York unions had even gotten desperate enough to take on jobs that were protected by cosa nostra (as long as they were paying tribute to a family other than the Genoveses, the main mafia family in the construction industry).

One of those wrecking crews – deployed against the Gambino protected Bankers and Brokers Restaurant job in the financial district, got Westside Carpenters local 608 Business Manager John O’Connor shot in the butt 4 times by a hitman acting under orders of Gambino family boss John Gotti (or, as the colorful Queens mob boss put it “put a rocket in his pocket!”).

[To add insult to injury, Gotti would later force O'Connor to testify as a character witness for him at a racketeering trial!]

Parallel to the union efforts in Manhattan below 96th St, their was a whole other set of construction worker organizations waging mass struggle in the streets.

That was the Coalitions, the armed minority worker groups who had been fighting to integrate the business for the previous decade and a half.

Coalitions regularly organized groups of minority workers and sent them out on old schoolbusses to travel around to jobsites and “shape up” (that is, invade and shut down production) those sites where there were not enough minority workers on the job.

These shape ups were daily events and had successfully broken the color bar in the New York trades – giving the city the only racially integrated Building Trades unions in the nation.

The Coalitions had their weaknesses (infighting between the 60 different groups, the growing influence of cosa nostra and an occasional willingness by coalition leaders to let certain sites stay segregated for a price) but they were also leading a movement of workers on a mass scale.

It was tragic that the Building Trades and the Coalitions were never able to join forces to take on the scab residential contractors in Manhattan north of 96th St, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

After all, many of the workers on those sites were Coalition members – and, since so many Black, Latino and Chinese union workers had come into the unions through the Coalitions in effect the Coalitions were a human bridge between the scab sector and the union sector.

Sadly, not only did the unions and the Coalitions not work together, but the very existance of the Coalitions is what kept the unions from expanding the wrecking crew tactic from Manhattan below 96th to the city as a whole.

To have largely White wrecking crews fighting minority shapers would be a disaster for the unions – and, to get Black and Latin workers, many of whom basically owed their union cards to the coalitions, to fight the shapers would be all but impossible – and the construction union leaders were fully aware of those realities.

Even when work collapsed after the completion of Battery Park City and all the speculative towers in Midtown, the New York unions still held their members back.

The closes the New York Building Trades came to a serious mobilization was a “rally for jobs” they organized in the winter of 1990 – 20,000 workers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and rallied in front of City Hall.

Even then, the program put forth at the rally was limited to “job creation” (translation – taxpayer subsidies for the real estate developers to build office buildings and luxury apartment houses) with not a word about organzing the majority of the industry that was now scab.

In short, in all three of those cases – California, Minnesota and New York City – workers were wiling to fight against the scab contractors, even if it meant risking injury or arrest.

All they lacked was a leadership capable of leading them in that struggle.

Most of the construction unions had absolutely no answer to dealing with the non union crisis.

The best some unions could come up with was pay cuts and work rule elimination – but those concessions merely emboldened the unionbsters.

At worst, unions came up with schemes to make union members subsidize those few developers that stayed union (the officers of Elgin, Illinois Electricians local 117 came up with that idea) or to use dwindling union funds as capital for real estate speculation schemes that would be built union (the leaders of Ft Lauderdale Operating Engineers local 675 went down that road).

None of these ideas involved organizing or struggle or workers in motion against the bosses – that was beyond the pale!

Meanwhile, as the labor leaders floundered, the federal government had seized control of the largest blue collar union in the United States.

The leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, facing a stark choice between serious jail time and letting their union get taken over by the feds, choose the second option.

The feds intended to break cosa nostra rule in the Teamsters – and, above all, to break up the cartels that mobsters and local Teamsters leaders had set up in branches of the local hauling industry in a number of major cities, above all, New York.

The intent was to let independent operators break into those markets, to break up efforts to keep rates high enough to guarantee high profits for the dominant firms in those markets and to consequently reduce freight rates to as low a level as possible, even if those prices were below the operating costs of those local carriers.

The biggest trucking companies didn’t have a problem with this – after all, they’d still make their money, and they’d even be able to break into markets the mob had kept them out of.

The little guys on the other hand had major problems with this – and would resist as much as possible.

As for the truck drivers, trotskyite socialist-led union dissident caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union abandoned their longstanding principled opposition to government intervention in the union, and jumped aboard the FBI takeover bandwagon (as did a number of local Teamster officials who had their own beefs with the international IBT).

The federal takeover of the Teamsters would be a model for other government efforts to put cosa nostra dominated unions under federal control – especially the New York City unions, where cosa nostra presence rose to it’s highest and most systematic levels

The 80 years of wiseguy rule in the New York Building Trades was about to end – but the question was, without mob domination, how would the unions survive?

XI. “!Si, Se Puede!”

Meanwhile, out in California, the building trades were presented with yet another opportunity to reunionize the industry – this time, in the state’s Southland.

In the spring of 1990, Los Angeles local 399 of the Service Employees International Union launched an organizing drive among janitors working for ISS in the Century City office building complex.

This campaign was part of the “Justice 4 Janitors” project that the international leadership of the SEIU had launched 5 years earlier, to try and reunionize the office building janitors who’d been deunionized back in the late 1970’s.

Officially, the SEIU leaders never talked about that deunionization – or the ethnic cleansing replace-Black-Americans-with-Latino-immigrants aspects of it.

SEIU propaganda presented the industry as if it had never ever been unionized at all, like this was a first time organizing drive, rather than bringing the SEIU back to a business that had been union for over 50 years at the time the unions had been broken just 11 years earlier.

There were some other disturbing aspects – like the union’s very patronizing view of the janitors as victims, or the focus on getting white collar professionals to pity the janitors rather than trying to build solidarity with their fellow building workers, or the utter recklessness with which janitors were marched into a confrontation with the Los Angeles Police Department during a rally in a basement parking lot at Century City.

25 workers got hurt in that latter episode – including a pregnant janitor who was kicked in the stomach by an LAPD officer and lost her baby – and many arrested janitors got deported back to Mexico or Central America.

But, the strike was the first major building worker walkout in California in 20 years.

And they succeeded in getting a union contract at Century City and a number of other major office buildings in downtown LA.

A near minimum wage union contract that was almost $ 8/hr less than 1979 union scale – but a union contract nonetheless!

And it had caught the imagination of workers all over Southern California – and not just the White professionals and clericals that the SEIU wanted to pity the janitors, but the blue collar Latinos who had come to be a majority of LA’s private sector workforce in the previous decade.

Justice 4 Janitors also gave the American labor movement the opportunity to take advantage of the heroism, street smarts and activism skills of the many Salvadoran and Guatemalan communist political refugees among the janitors.

Incidentally, those aforementioned revolutionary Central Americans had tried to take their rightful place in local 399’s leadership after the strike. They, along with White, Black and Mexican American LA municipal worker activists in local 399, had run a slate of candidates in the local 399 executive board elections right after the strike.

That wasn’t part of the plan – janitors (and LA County clerical and service workers, for that matter) were supposed to be voiceless faceless victims, not active participants in the political life of their own union.

So, the SEIU international blocked the new local 399 officers from taking office, and the militant newly organized janitors were removed from local 399 and attached to local 1877, a local run by conservative Chicano officers and, more importantly, based 400 miles away from Los Angeles, up in San Jose (the better to keep LA janitors from participating in the political life of the local!)

Despite this disgusting betrayal, the positive energy that came out of the Justice 4 Janitors strike (not to mention the rebellious spirit brought about by the Los Angeles uprising against police brutality in 1991, where Blacks and Latinos had united across racial lines to fight the LAPD) had inspired many other groups of Latino blue collar workers in Los Angeles to unionize.

Among the workers to try and go union were the LA harbor port truckers – they’d been abandoned by the Teamsters at around the same time the janitors had had their SEIU union contract ripped up in 1979, and now they were trying to join the Communications Workers of America.

They were followed by the trade show carpenters and freight handlers at the LA Convention Center – who had been similarly abandoned by the Carpenters and the Teamsters unions, and who were also going with the CWA.

There was also a joint organizing drive by a number of industrial unions (and the CWA) focusing on the workers in the many factories along the Alameda Corridor railroad line running from East LA to the Port of Los Angeles.

Those campaigns all ended up being defeated – although in the port truckers case the collapse of the CWA’s efforts did create a pool of militant Mexican trucker activists -and, ironically enough, militant accountants – yes, you read right, militant CPA’s – who served the Latino owner operator driver community and who were motivated by the CWA drive to help the drivers go union and get back the statutory employee status, and all the tax benefits that go with that status, that had been taken away from their White predecessors when the Teamsters abandoned the docks.

That pierside militancy by Latino truck drivers embarassed the Teamsters leadership into actually trying to reunionize the port truckers (an effort the Teamsters have been involved with ever since, right down to today)

But, above all, there were the struggles of the many Mexican immigrant carpenters working in residential construction in LA’s “inland empire” outer suburbs.

The Mexican immigrant carpenters had come to the industry around the time the union collapsed.

Even when residential had been union in California, it had long had lower wages and benefits than the commercial sector.

By the 1970’s, union carpenters in the homebuilding sector had lost their hourly wages and were now paid on a piecerate basis, that is, carpenters got paid based on how much rock they hung, or how much millwork they installed, or how many doors they hung, as opposed to a uniform hourly wage.

Contractors loved piecework, because it pushed workers to drive themselves to the limit and beyond to do as much work as possible (no matter what impact it had on their bodies and long term health).

Those piecework agreements were flatly illegal under the UBC’s constitution – which had banned piecework back in 1881.

That didn’t stop the union from agreeing to piecework pay – which tended to drive out older carpenters who couldn’t work as fast as well as carpenters who had the option of working commercial and earning more pay for easier work.

It wasn’t like California was the only place where piecework existed – in New York City, lumpers were paid piecerates.

But there it was illegal, not formally written into the contract (which in NYC also said that all carpenters got the same wage, no matter if the job was commercial, residential or Davis Bacon).

But piecework formally sanctioned by Carpenters Union agreements opened the door for the contractors to bring sweatshop conditions to homebuilding and really paved the way for the deunionization of residential construction.

When union homebuilders went scab, they had pushed their drywall subs to sharply reduce piecework, driving rates to rock bottom levels.

The White, Mexican American and Japanese American carpenter workforce who had built LA’s suburban houses largely fled the residential sector when piecerates were cut – accelerating an exodus out of residential that began when workers were stripped of their hourly wages and had piecework imposed on them by their union.

The lucky among them got the dwindling number of union jobs (and their wern’t that many – the Southern California Council of Carpenters had shrunk drastically from 40,000 members down to only 11,000) with the rest taking scab commercial jobs that were lower paying, but at least still paid an hourly wage.

A core of experienced Mexican American carpenters remained – and the drywall contractors encouraged them to become “jefes” ["chiefs"] – the bosses of crews of piecework carpenters.

These ex union members made the transition – hey, it wasn’t like there was enough union work remaining for them to stay on that side of the business – but it was a big sacrifice in terms of pay and benefits.

Their pieceworkers – who on average got 4 cents for every square foot of drywall they hung (at 32 square feet a board that works out to $ 1.28 for every piece of sheetrock that they put up) – fared even worse.

Most of these pieceworkers were very young desperate undocumented immigrants from rural Mexico, recently arrived in America and new to the industry who had no choice but to take what they could get.

For the first couple of years of the scab era, the ex union member jefes had tried each spring to bargain as high a rate as possible with the Pacific Drywall Association (the old employers association, which the drywall subs had maintained even though they no longer needed it to bargain with the Carpenters Union).

Every year they had the same result – they’d get a raise at the begining of the building season in April, and it would be taken away by early summer and the lower rates would be reimposed.

So, in June 1992, jefe Jesus Gomez suggested to his fellow team leaders that they should organize a strike.

The other leadmen agreed – and it was on!

The jefes were able to mobilize 6,000 non union carpenters to walk out, shutting down over 200 major tract housing developments across Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernadino, Riverside and San Diego Counties.

Unable to find Mexican immigrants willing to scab, the drywall contractors got White scabs – ex residential carpenters who had drifted away to better paying scab jobs when the Carpenters Union fell apart in residential.

The striking carpenters went on the offensive.

They would organize armed pickup truck caravans of strikers – dozens and sometimes even a couple hundred strikers would converge on a scab job and then, often with their shotguns in hand they would invade the site and make the scabs leave.

At this point, the contractors would call the police or, in more rural areas, the county sheriffs department or the California Highway Patrol.

Sometimes, these hypocritical contractors, who in normal times regularly hired undocumented immigrants, would even call the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

That didn’t stop the strikers.

Instead, they’d fight the cops!

And most of the time, they beat the police and won!

Literally hundreds of strikers were arrested, often for serious felonies (kidnapping, assaulting a police officer ect) – and almost all of them ended up being released with minor charges, thanks to the social power unleashed by their strike.

The indomitable fighting spirit of the residential drywall carpenters attracted support from other sectors of the community – Catholic churches offered food, meeting spaces and moral support, local grocery store owners donated free groceries, an AFL-CIO funded immigrant social service agency supplied lawyers and media relations reps to the strikers and, finally, the Southern California Council of Carpenters got in the mix, letting the jefes use union halls as bases of operation for the strike.

By December 1992, after 6 months on strike, it became clear that this walkout was close to unbreakable, and that the residential sector would not restart unless a union contract was signed, so negotiations began.

Unfortunately for the striking residential carpenters, at this point the Southern California Council of Carpenters had stepped in to bargain on their behalf with the Pacific Drywall Association, with Los Angeles District Council of Carpenters chief Douglas J. “Cash” McCarron and his brother Mike as the point men for the UBC.

The McCarron brothers soon totally elbowed Jesus Gomez and the other jefes out of the negotiations entirely and took over the talks – creating a situatuation where White bosses and White union officers negotiated a contract for Mexican carpenters – behind closed doors, with the workers totally kept out of the conversation.

The McCarron brothers, it almost went without saying, did not in any way attack the idea of union piecerates.

Far from it – Douglass had actually been a union pieceworker when he was on his tools as a union residential carpenter (and not a particularly ethical one at that – he got the nickname “Cash” because he allegedly worked for less than union rates on some jobs he worked on).

Cash McCarron advocated the rather scabby idea that it was good for union members to be paid based on output rather than hours worked (and, implicity, he supported the age and disability discrimination, and the physical damage done to the young strong guys, that naturally goes along with piecework).

Even within the framework of piecework, residential piecerates were kept low, with the rate only going from 4 cents per square foot to 7 1/2 cents per square foot (plus a small per square foot contribution to the Carpenters Welfare Fund health insurance plan).

Also, the drywall contractors were allowed to continue using a 100% company man workforce – that is, the contractor selected all of his/her own labor, with none of the carpenters dispatched from the union.

These agreements didn’t even have shop stewards on the jobsites.

Therefore, there was nobody on the site to enforce the terms of the pact, and since carpenters had no union-controlled way of getting a job, if a carpenter complained to the union and got fired, he basically succeeded in getting himself blacklisted.

Worse yet, a third of the strikers – the 1,800 striking carpenters in San Diego County – were left out of the settlement and abandoned to their fate.

They ended up having to approach Painters District Council # 36 to organize and bargain for them.

The remaining 4,200 carpenters were divided up among the the existing residential carpenter locals in the District Councils of Carpenters in the counties of LA, Ventura, San Bernadino, Riverside and Orange.

Many of those unions had been near death due to declining membership – the strike saved them, and enabled their leaders to stay in office.

As for the jefes?

They were left on their tools – totally and utterly excluded from the leadership of the union, even though they had saved the Carpenters Union in Southern California.

Even Jesus Gomez, who had become the main public face of the strike and among the best of the leaders that had emerged from the struggle, found himself locked out and excluded from the leadership of the Carpenters Union.

But there was a price to pay for keeping those agressive and innovative workplace militants from their rightful place in Carpenters Union leadership.

The Southern California Council of Carpenters tried to organize the framers – the carpenters who put up the wooden shells of the houses (the wooden studs that the drywall carpenters nailed their sheetrock to).

But this drive was led by SCCofC organizers, unlike the drywall campaign which had been led by jefes who had earned their status as leaders of carpenters.

Plus, the framers had seen the results of the drywall strike up close and personal, since they worked on the same sites in the same houses with the drywallers.

They’d seen the jefes elbowed out of leadership by the Carpenters Union and they’d seen a union contract negotiated without a shop steward or hiring hall system, which pretty much guaranteed that the contractors started violating the deal almost as soon as the ink was dry!

Consequently, they were reluctant to risk their jobs and freedom and their status in this country just to get sold out by a White-led union that basically didn’t care about them anyway.

As a result, the framers campaign limped along for 2 years with little results before it totally fell apart.

The Southern California drywall strike had held enormous potential – for reunionizing the industry, for restoring the union to the residential sector, for organizing the fastest growing component of the industry – the Mexican immigrant workers (who within the decade would make up close to a third of the carpentry craft nationwide).

It was a tragedy and the moral equivilent of a crime that the Southern California Council of Carpenters wrecked that amazingly powerful struggle from within!

Especially considering how much success the Service Employees International Union was able to get with it’s immigrant workers organizing effort, Justice 4 Janitors – they were able to organize over 200,000 office building janitors during the 1990’s and were able to position their union to launch a further campaign to unionize security guards.

Beyond the organizing, the SEIU got an enormous amount of public goodwill from the Justice 4 Janitors campaign – millions of Americans now had a positive opinion of the once little known labor organization.

The Carpenters could have had that kind of success – or even greater.

But, the union was not willing to take the risk of opening up a struggle against scab contractors, so it didn’t happen.

But, the betrayal of the drywall strike worked incredibly well for the McCarrons – it catapulted Cash into the General Presidency at the 1995 general convention (a post he holds to this very day), while his brother Mike ended up as the leader of all Southern California and Nevada union carpenters when all of the district councils in the region were disbanded and collapsed into a regional council built around the ruins of the old Los Angeles District Council.

Meanwhile, as the McCarron brothers were sacrificing the future of the Carpenters Union in California, the leaders of the Carpenters and Laborers unions in New York City were about to pay the price for the past.

XII. “…in exchange for a plea of guilty to one count of racketeering…”

The New York construction unions were facing a series of racketeering probes – from the New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney’s office, and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The objective of these probes was not prosecution, but the imposition of some sort of court ordered monitorship over the unions – modeled on the racketeering consent decreee the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had submitted to a few years earlier.

There had already been progress in that regard – the international leadership of the Laborers International Union of North America had signed a similar consent decree so it was a matter of time before the locals came in line.

The political and economic objectives of the planned consent decreees were similar to the goal with the Teamsters – to prevent those unions from colluding with contractors and gangsters to fix prices and restrict competition in their industries. The goal was to break up these cartels, increase competition and by doing so reduce costs and increse profits for the big corporations that these small businesses provided services for.

The international consent decree along with local trusteeships and monitorships in the Teamsters had had an effect on the prices local delivery companies charged – with the primary beneficiaries being large corporations.

There were problems with this that the feds didn’t quite anticipate.

Union leaders who have their social base among the more priviliged steady employees of the small businesses that benefited from these cartels have a strong tendency to look out for the economic interests of those firms and to want to take their side in their struggle to exproporate as much as possible of the profits created by their workers and to give as little of that profit as possible to the big corporations they perform services for.

Those union leaders will only act against the class interests of that group of bosses under exreme duress – making it difficult for the government to force those labor leaders to consistently act in the interests of the big corporations.

That’s what eventually crippled the government’s monitorship over the Teamsters and it would also prove to be a severe problem in the construction unions.

In any case, the government launched it’s New York construction efforts with a civil case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 against the New York City District Council of Carpenters.

The New York Carpenters were not only the biggest building trades union, they also had the broadest range of involvement in racketeering – most notably, in the two most powerful bid rigging cartels, the Wheel and the Concrete Club (both of which had been subject to previous criminal prosecution) – plus they also had suffered from gangster influence for the longest (since 1916).

So it really wasn’t that hard to come up with evidence for a civil racketeering complaint against the NYCDCofC.

And in the face of possible loss of both union positions and freedom, the leaders of the District Council agreed to a racketeering consent decree.

The District Council’s consent decree was similar to the one the feds had imposed on the Teamsters – the union would still be run by it’s own leadership, but they would have to run the union based on the rules in the consent decree, and they would have a court-appointed monitor who would review their compliance with the decree.

The decree ordered that the NYCDCofC’s leadership would now be elected (since 1916 New York carpenters had been ruled by an appointed leadership), and alongside the elected executive would be an elected legislature, the Delegate Body, made up of representatives directly elected by the local membership.

The feds had imposed direct elections in the Teamsters at the international level based on the idea that an elected union leadership would be more legitimate in the eyes of the workers and would also be a constituency loyal to federal control (since without the feds they would not have been allowed into office).

The feds were trying the same approach here.

The decree also changed the job referral system for the local men – now each local would have an out of work list, with workers who’ve been on the list longest the first to be dispatched to work.

Contractors were still allowed to have the foreman plus a maximum of 50% of the crew be company men, but the shop steward and at least 50% of the crew had to be from the out of work list. Companies did also have the right to request members by name from the list – basically, they’d be company men who were local men in name only.

Business agents lost the right to decide who would be shop stewards and the right to pick and choose who got work from the hall and who didn’t.

Also, certain individuals with strong organized crime ties were banned from holding union office (almost all of the NYCDCofC’s litigation around the consent decree was related to preserving the job of one particular Carpenters Union shop steward at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center who was allegedly connected with the Genovese crme family, professional handball player Anthony Fiorino).

And, the District Council was directed to set up an organizng department, to try and deal with the scab contractors who now made up a majority of carpentry contractors in New York City.

Now, these weren’t bad things in and of themselves – what’s really sad is that the New York carpenters had not been able to get these reforms based on their own struggles – but, of course, the feds had an ulterior motive in bringing these changes.

That is, the feds wanted to break the NYCDCofC away from it’s alliance with the subs that provided steady jobs for the bulk of New York’s company man carpenters and to instead have the union fight for the demands of the banks and the developers (that is, shifting the profits of real estate development away from the subs and up to the GCs, owners and bankers and a breakup of the cosa nostra cartels).

This would turn out to be impossible – the union’s leadership would not break with it’s social base – the company men – and those company men would not break with the subs who gave them their high incomes. Nor was it possible to build a new social base for a new NYCDCofC leadership that might find supporting the developers demands in their class interest.

But it took a while for the government to figure that out.

Meanwhile the feds took the Laborers International Union of North America under a natoial Teamsters-style consent decree (the immediate issues being LIUNA President Arthur Coia’s ties to Rhode Island’s Patriarca crime family, and Coia’s efforts to buy Lamborghini sports cars without paying the hefty sales tax on the $ 450,000 autos).

This was a stepping stone to taking one of LIUNA’s 3 New York City district councils into trusteeship – the Mason Tenders District Council (the other two – the Concrete Workers District Council and the Pavers and Rammermen’s DC, were not affected).

The MTDC’s members were the building laborers who cleaned up after the other trades on jobsites as well as interior demolition workers and, of course, mason tenders (the laborers who mixed mortar, stacked brick and erected and tore down scaffolds for bricklayers, stonemasons, terrazzo masons, plasterers and cement masons).

The terms of the MTDC consent decree were very similar to the NYCDCofC, with the exception that the Mason Tenders also had most of their 18 New York locals merged down into just 4 locals – Long Island Laborers local 66, Asbestos and Lead Handlers local 78, New York Laborers local 79 and Waste Handlers local 108.

The idea there was that various small locals were under the flag of a different one of New York City’s 5 cosa nostra families – Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, Bonnano and Luchese – and the only reason that LIUNA had kept all these little locals was so each family could get a piece of the pie (a theory which was basically correct).

The thinking was, by making them into 4 big areawide locals, the feds would dilute cosa nostra influence.

It also helped matters that the social base of the leadership of the MTDC and it’s two biggest affiliates locals 66 and 79 were labor foremen and company man laborers for GC’s.

Alone among contractors, GC’s had a direct material stake in the portion of real estate profits going to the subs being reduced and shifted upwards towards the developers and the banks (because that shift would lead to the GC’s getting a bigger piece of the pie too).

Since the GC’s would benefit from this shift, their company men supported it – which logically led to the Laborers Union, alone among construction unions, having a reason to support the new order in the building trades.

This is why, of all the unions that would go through a process of judicially imposed reform, the Mason Tenders District Council was the only place where those reforms gained any kind of permanence.

One of the most immediately visible changes imposed by FBI reformism in the building trades was a new wave of organizing activity.

The MTDC Laborers were far more visible in this – their organizing arm, the Laborers Eastern Regional Organizing Fund, launched a high profile organizing drive, which was visually symbolized by Scabby the large inflatable rat – an air filled rubber mascot who would soon be a regular visitor to just about every union picketline in the tri state area.

The first group of contractors that Scabby and LEROF’s organizers targeted were the interior demolition outfits.

These companies had once been 100% union.

But the wiseguys had let these contractors to use non union undocumented immigrant workers from Poland, Croatia, Mexico and Ecuador on union jobs, which soon led to this whole market segment going scab.

In it’s first big organizing victory, LEROF got those contractors and the 2,000 laborers who worked for them to come back to the union (but at a price – a lower “B Man” pay scale for the majority of demolition workers).

There was also an attemt to unionize the GC’s who were renovating city-owned abandoned buildings into luxury housing in Harlem and other rapidly gentrifying parts of the city.

However that didn’t work, because those contractors paid their laborers subminimum off the books wages – and no union scale, no matter how low, could compete with $ 4/hr in cash!

Also, at LEROF’s direction, the MTDC enrolled over 1,000 new members, so union contractors would always have readily available labor at a moment’s notice (even if it meant that most of those workers would not have a steady job).

Unfortunately, the substantial membership gains that the MTDC made (about 4,000 new members – bringing the council up to 10,000 laborers) were somewhat offset by the loss of over 1,000 jobs in the waste handling sector.

Those laborers had worked at landfills and recycling plants operated by the city’s 300 private waste hauling companies.

Those firms were members of a cartel that had been set up back when New York commercial waste removal was privatized in 1957.

The trade waste cartel was jointly run by the Genovese, Gambino and Luchese families, and Teamsters local 813 served as the enforcer/junoir partner (with the MTDC as an even more junior partner).

That cartel, which had saved the small independent waste haulers from being driven out of business by the big national waste hauling firms (which had happened everywere else in the country in the 1970’s and 80’s) and had kept prices high and eliminated all competition between firms in that sector.

The waste haulers cartel cost landlords and major corporations a lot of money (relative to what they paid for waste hauling in other major cities), so they had the City of New York launch a waste industry cleanup plan.

Working jointly with the nation’s three largest private waste hauling firms (BFI, WMX and Allied), major local property owners and the federal government, the City of New York Trade Waste Commission broke up the commercial refuse cartel, ousted one legged Jewish gangster Bernard Adelstein from his five decade long dictatorship over Teamsters local 813, installed a pro FBI reform regime in his place and let the big 3 waste haulers come in to and dominate the New York market (which the gangsters had so long kept them out of)

In the process, almost 200 private carters were driven out of business.

Even with the expansion of the new New York operations of BFI, WMX and Allied over 1,000 laborers – a third of the laborers in the waste handling industry – ended up losing their jobs.

For the 2,000 who kept working, their jobs got a lot harder and more dangerous – and their union, Laborers local 108, was a willing junior partner in the takeover effort (as was the new FBI-appointed leadership of Teamsters local 813).

For New Yorkers as a whole, corporate waste hauling rates went down by a third, while small businesspeople saw their rates climb by 40%.

In any case, LEROF had put the MTDC on the map and made the union a lot more influential in New York labor affairs.

The NYC District Council of Carpenters Organizing Department tried to follow in the Mason Tenders footsteps.

They were able to carry out the rallies with Scabby the rat and to get the DC to sign up 2,000 new members (following the logic that contractors had a right to have a pool of available labor at all times – even at the busiest part of the year – even if it meant that many of those workers would be denied the possibility of steady employment).

The Carpenters Organizing Department was also able to sign up a lot of startup contractors who were just getting in the business.

But, they were unable to get two of the biggest scaffold outfits in the city to come back to the union after they had been allowed to go scab (after years of violating their union agreements by paying carpenters off the books).

The main result of that campaign was that all of the scaffold carpenters who were still in the union had to take a pay cut, as their work was transferred from carpenter locals to the lower paying Timbermens local 1536. In the case of one of the scaffold outfits, the 1536 pay cut basically legalized an informal, illegal wage and benefit reduction that that company had illicitly imposed on it’s company men some years before.

Nor were they able to organize the GC’s and carpentry subs renovating city owned buildings in Harlem (for the same reason that LEROF failed – because those firms only paid their carpenters $ 7/hr off the books and no matter how low the union went they could not beat that!)

The Carpenters also had a serious problem in their cabinet shop sector.

Thanks to a deal that the union had cut with the woodwork contractor who did the store fixtures at Barneys Department Store (the biggest retail construction job in New York City in the 1990’s), the Manufacturing Woodworkers Association had won the right to unlimited use of non union made woodwork and woodwork made by non UBC shops on their jobs in the city.

To add insult to injury, a Westchester-based ambulance drivers union, Yonkers, NY Teamsters local 531, began signing sweetheart contracts for cabinet shops in the city’s northern suburbs. Pennsylvania-based locals of the United Steel Workers of America also began signing low wage contracts with shops that shipped to the NYC market too.

Also, at the same time, the man who owned the largest cabinet shop in Manhattan, a Harlem-based store fixtures plant called Schultz Industries, was looking to retire.

With none of his relatives willing to take over the business, he sold Schultz to the Harlem Commonwealth Council, a non profit community development agency run by a group of Democratic Party politicians in the neighborhood, with the assumption that they’d save the plant and the jobs of the 400 cabinetmakers who worked there.

Unfortunately, the politicians looted the plant, abused it’s line of credit, demanded that the NYCDCofC rip up the union contract for the 400 Black and Latino shopmen who worked there and, when the union said no, laid all of them off and replaced them with 200 low wage non union White shopmen.

In the end, the Democratic Party pols ran the 60 year old business into the ground in less than 2 years – leaving 600 union carpenters jobless.

Between the MWA concession and the Schultz Industries situation, there was a crisis in the cabinet shops represented by the NYCDCofC’s 3 cabinetmaker locals – and in the 6 locals of the New York Industrial Council – layoffs were rampant and no matter how many members the DC recruited on the construction side, they did not replace the jobs lost on the industrial side.

The District Council also had extreme difficulty dealing with the many contractors that were nominally union, but were in practice paying below union scale wages off the book (a practice that union carpenters referred to as “working for cash”).

This was concentrated in new construction of luxury residential hirises (the only part of the residential market segment that had stayed union) where contractors in the hirise concrete and drywall sectors were the most common offenders.

Cash was also common in office furniture installation, the most competitive part of the commercial sector – and also the segment where the NYCDCofC had the least capacity to enforce union conditions (furniture contractors are the last on the site and often they don’t even have a shop steward on the job to make sure union conditions are enforced)

The feds had forced the NYDCofC to expand it’s shop steward system, to keep a lid on this practice.

This was not done out of any sense of altruism towards the carpenters that were being forced to work for substandard pay and no benefits.

Instead, the driving factor was because those firms were cheating the clients – instead of legally paying lower wages and charging lower prices to the client (thus passing the labor cost savings upwards) those contractors were paying lower wages but were still billing at the higher union rates, and pocketing the labor cost savings themselves.

This is why stopping cash became vitally imporant for the government (and it remains a priority to this day).

The union, by contrast, had far more limited reason to deal with cash.

The benefit funds were being cheated – but, company men were getting steady work, and, far more important, the subs were doing what they had to do to stay profitable – which tended to motivate the union to look the other way at this practice.

If anything, the union actually made it easier to pay cash, by imposing the “request system” which let the contractors pick and choose which local man carpenters they would hire (making carpenters that much more dependent on staying in the boss’ good graces at any cost – even if it meant being cheated on wages and benefits!)

The government did try and build a union leadership that would be loyal to their agenda – but, as was the case nationally in both the Teamsters and the Laborers this proved to be impossible.

In the New York Carpenters, the local reform caucus, Carpenters for a Stronger Union was far weaker than it’s counterpart in the Teamsters, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and CSU had a far smaller and more unstable social base than TDU did.

Therefore, it was unable to win the DC’s first free elections in 79 years.

So, shortly after the incumbent Fred Devine administration won reelection in the DC elections, it was removed by a UBC international trusteeship, which itself came in the face of a state investigation and on the heels of a state criminal case against Devine.

But, the new administration, while run by different individuals, was still loyal to the subs, instead of the GC’s and the developers.

The feds would end up imposing monitorships on most of New York City’s construction unions (Operating Engineers, Plumbers, Roofers, Concrete Laborers, Bricklayers, Teamsters, ect ect ect) but they were no more successful than the Carpenters effort.

Nationally, the federal monitorship over the Teamsters would itself falter – the section of the trucking industry that had remained union wanted a union leadership that was loyal to it, rather than to the shippers, so the pro-FBI Ron Carey adminstration soon gave way to the pro-trucking company administration of Jim Hoffa (the labor lawyer son of the legendary murdered Teamsters General President Jimmy Hoffa – Hoffa the younger is still Teamsters General President to this very day).

Meanwhile, nationally, the Carpenters Union was launching organizing efforts (as the union’s membership dipped below the 320,000 mark – lowest since the Depression – as the carpenter jurisdiction expanded to over 2 million workers).

But those organizing efforts typically consisted of adding new members to the union so the bosses always had lots of unemployed union members to choose from (at the price of those workers not having steady jobs), weakening job referral rules so companies could pick and choose who they would hire (the “portability” system – the national version of the New York “request system”), offering to do other trades work for less pay (the “wall to wall we do it all” concept) and signing up contractors in scab markets by offering them substandard pay and benefits.

These efforts did nothing to stop the membership loss – and did a lot to making the UBC a much weaker union.

This was most true in McCarron’s old stomping ground – California – where the largest organizing campaign, the signing up of the tilt up contractors who did the concrete work on shopping mall jobs, basically involved letting those firms use carpenters to do work normally done by operating engineers, teamsters, iron workers, cement masons and laborers, let the tilt up contractors use lots of low paid apprentices and let them run all company man crews without even having a shop steward.

But at least they were organizing actual construction workers – the Laborers and the Operating Engineers were organizng evey sort of worker except for tradespeople – nurses, Indian reservation clerical employees, chicken processing plant workers and just about everybody but construction workers.

And the other trades did less than that – they didn’t organize at all!

At the end of the 1990’s, the building trades were in deep crisis – shrinking unions in a growing industry, a 2 million person island (and getting smaller every day) in a sea of over 10 million workers (with fresh labor coming over the southern border fences and off the planes at Kennedy Airport every hour).

XII. “…user friendly unions…”

This is when the 40,000 Man March went off in New York City – another chance for construction workers to fight back, and yet another opportunity squandered by those worker’s leaders.

This is also when the largest official building trades organizing effort in the country, the “B -Top” (that’s short for “Building Trades Organizing Program”) in Las Vegas’ rapidly growing residential sector, sputtered to a halt.

Only the Carpenters and Laborers were at all serious about organizing the home building sector (and were comfortable enough with the racial implications of taking in several thousand Mexican workers into what were still majority White unions).

But, both the UBC and LIUNA had a “wall to wall we do it all” vision – that is, that all residential tradespeople would be in one union.

Considering the deskilled nature of modern residential construction, that might not have been such a bad idea.

The problem was, the leaders of the Carpenters wanted all the workers to go into the UBC – and the officers of the Laborers wanted everybody to be initated into LIUNA.

But, B-Top or not, Las Vegas Laborers local 872 and Las Vegas Carpenters local 1977 (and Los Angeles based regional residential carpenters superlocal local 1506 – Cash McCarron’s old West Side of Los Angeles residential construction local, which now had members across California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Colorado) would continue to organize.

And, with the exception of the Ironworkers, Painters and Roofers none of the other Las Vegas unions would organize at all – B-Top or not.

Among other issues, the leaders of the other trades were not at all comfortable with a future as majority Latino locals (which would, sooner rather than later, replace their White officers with Mexican business agents).

The Ironworkers organized a national superlocal of Mexican immigrant reinforcing ironworkers, local 846, with a substandard pay scale, inferior benefits, no hiring hall system and a predominantly White leadership.

They did sign up new members – but at a cost both to those Latino ironworkers and to their White and Native American Indian counterparts who were currently in the union.

The Painters Union made similar efforts to organize Latino commercial painters and the Roofers made a play to organize Central American residential roof shinglers – they didn’t have much success, but at least the leaders of those unions tried!

Outside of those last two big union construction islands, Las Vegas and New York City, construction worker organizing was almost non existant.

The only exception was the Carpenters – but for the UBC, “organizing” far too often meant: signing substandard contracts with individual firms while market segements as a whole stayed non union; recruiting lots of new members, far more than could actually be steadily employed as a means of artificially creating a large pool of desperate and broke workers available at a moment’s notice for the bosses; trying to get companies to use carpenters to do other trades’ work and, most disgustingly, hiring the homeless at close to minimum wage to staff union picketlines.

There were a few bright spots on the horizon though.

In 1999, John Reiman, a union carpenter who was a member of a small San Francisco based trotskyite socialist group called Labors Militant Voice led a wildcat strike at the San Francisco International Airport job. Over 4,000 workers followed Reiman onto the bricks, shutting down one of the biggest jobs in the country at the time.

Organizing the non union majority as such wasn’t the issue – the San Francisco walkout was more about preserving union conditions (like “Black Fridays”, a Bay Area past practice where workers get every other friday off on big jobs) and about resisting the class collaborationism of the leadership of the Northern California Regional Council of Carpenters.

However, Reiman and his comrades, despite having the leadership of 4,000 workers who were willing to wage an illegal wildcat strike, wavered and faltered at the head of the masses.

At one rally in front of the NCRCofC building, Reiman actually stopped a group of 200 carpenters who were ready to invade the RC building, drive out the leadership and put their own leaders in charge of the council.

Reiman, afraid that this was getting too radical for the conservative pro contractor company men and foremen who he wanted to get involved with his caucus, Working Carpenters for a Stronger Union, actually stopped the workers in their tracks and got them to go home.

The Northern California Regional Council leadership, sencing weakness, went for the jugular, launched an offensive of their own against WCSU that didn’t stop til Reiman was expelled from the union.

Beyond occasional flareups like the 40,000 Man March and the San Francisco wildcat, there wasn’t a whole lot of struggle on the union side.

Conditions get worse and worse on the union side – illustrated graphically by the wave of construction worker deaths on high profile hirise jobs in New York and Las Vegas – but the unions don’t lift a finger to fight back.

Even the most minimal resposes to those abuses (like the 1 day strike at the MGM Mirage CityCenter job in Las Vegas in July 2008, the biggest – and deadliest – job in the world right now) only happen in response to massive pressure from the workers and are sold out almost immedately by the leaders of the building trades.

The general response of the Building Trades has been to tag along behind the bosses – symbolized in New York by all the rallies that have been held to promote unpopular megadevelopment plans – like the Johnson family’s Hudson Yards Stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan or the Atlantic Yards stadium/office building/luxury hirise development that billionare developer Bruce Ratner and centimillionare music producer Jay-Z want to build in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

The rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans marked a colossal wasted opportunity for the building trades. In the wake of the horrific storm, 30,000+ Mexican workers, along with several thousand Central Americans and several hundred Native American Indians, came into the Crescent City to help clean up the debris.

These “Texan” workers (the euphamism the local media and the contractors used to describe these immigrant workers – even though everybody knew where they were really from!) were grotesquely underpaid, lived under horrible conditions (many had to pay rent to sleep in city parks!!!), had abysmal safety conditions and in general were brutally superexploited.

The Laborers Union, to their credit, sent two organizers (both Latino men) into New Orleans to try and organize the “Texans” (and, jurisdictionally speaking, most of the “Texans” were in LIUNA’s trade autonomy, since initially almost all the work was housewrecking or interior demolition). The only bad thing that can be said is that the Laborers didn’t send more organizers onto the scene.

Other unions wern’t nearly as helpful.

Service Employees International Union local 100 set up a “training program” to teach demolition skills to Black refugees who had fled from New Orleans to other parts of the state, with the intent of sending the Black workers back into the city to compete with the “Texans” for the available sweatshop labor demolition jobs.

In other words, not only did SEIU local 100 start out with the offensive and deeply racist concept that Black workers are so unskilled and stupid that they actually need special “training” to do unskilled demolition work – the union also wanted to help the contractors batter wages down even further by having their students compete with the “Texans” for jobs!

But wait, it gets worse!

New Orleans Carpenters local 1846 and the Louisiana District Council of Carpenters actually got involved in the racist campaign that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had launched against the “Texans” – down to and including sending a large contingent to a racist anti-Latino rally that Mayor Nagin held in front of the Louisiana state capitol.

While that rally was a rare example of Black-White racist unity against Latinos, it was still counterproductive – plus it totally betrayed the basic labor movement principles of “an injury to one is an injury to all”, and it totally alienated “Texan” carpenters away from the Louisiana Carpenters Union.

It wasn’t that suprising that New Orleans Carpenters local 1846 was on the wrong side of this question – after all, this local’s last major initiative back in 2000 was to scab on an IATSE local 39 trade show stagehands strike at the Morial Convention Center!

But it was still incredibly destructive for that union to take that racist stand!

Thanks to the racism of SEIU local 100 and Carpenters local 1846, a great once in a lifetime opportunity to organize those “Texan” workers was wasted!

Just about the only people in America trying to organize construction workers at this time were the Catholic Church and various immigrant rights groups, who were setting up shape halls for the immigrant day laborers who were now the backbone of suburban residential remodling work.

These groups tended to have a strong aura of social work about them, and were, like most American charities, set up as undemocratic 501(c)(3) corporations ruled by non elected boards of directors (usually composed largely of social service professionals with no actual workers in positions of power), rather than as democratic labor unions run by elected representatives who actually used to work in the trade.

However, the day laborers did succeed in imposing a de facto $ 10/hr minimum wage for their work in many areas, and it became a lot more difficult for scab contractors and homeowners to stiff the day laborers out of their pay.

Sad to say, that modest “victory” (above minimum wage off the books pay instead of subminimum wage cash) was one of the few bright spots for construction workers in the 2000’s.

XIII. “Who will build the future?”

So, how the hell do construction workers get out of this trap?

Does anybody have a way out?

Sadly, it has become all too clear that the leaders of the building trades unions absolutely do not!

They’ve been trying the same old business unionist tactics – only with far less gusto and agressiveness than in the past – and, predictably, this has not gone anywhere!

But it’s not like the workers centers and the Catholic Church have an answer either – either for the immigrant workers they organize, or the non immigrant majority who they have no answers for at all.

This is not to say that the folks who run the unions, and the directors and professional staff of the workers centers (and for that matter even the priests, monks and nuns) are bad people – just that their political horizons are narrow.

Many of these construction workers leaders are willing to fight – within the narrow limits of reformism, in other words, in terms of what the businesspeople who control the system are willing to concede.

The problem is, at one time, those limits of reform went pretty far – in the old days, when American capitalism was stronger, it was far more possible for bosses to give substantial concessions to particularly strategic and well organized groups of workers like building tradespeople.

That’s not possible anymore – imperialist America is in crisis, has been for the last 30 years, and for the last three decades the rulers have been making workers pay the price (in particular, those groups of workers who were able to win high wages and other major concessions from the bosses).

So, the more we limit ourselves to the bosses’ horizons, the less and less we will get – hell, if present trends continue, we may see almost all construction workers reduced to the day laborer standard of living within our lifetimes!

Instead, we have to fight for what we need – both in terms of our direct interests as construction workers and more broadly for our class as a whole – irregardless of the capitalist class’ ability to pay.

Now, that sounds pretty radical, like something that will bring us into direct conflict with the powers that be – and indeed, that’s what’s going to happen.

But what’s the alternative?

Union decay – declining living standards – deathtrap jobsites… and do we really want a future like that?

Now, construction workers have shown a great capacity to struggle and resist, and to fight for their demands against great odds – as long as they have a leadership that is willing and able to lead them into the fight.

Above and beyond that, we really need to think about working class issues beyond the jobsites – the mortgage crisis and the epidemic of forclosures and evictions – the health insurance crisis – the wave of brutal deportations that ICE has been inflicting on our immigrant brothers and sisters – the crisis of police brutality aimed at our Black and Latino inner city brothers and sisters – the imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and I could go on and on.

We need to link up with our brothers and sisters from other trades (and those who are locked out of the job market entirely) to fight for our broader class interests – and yes, that means eventually completely overthrowing this capitalist system where our hard work enriches a few at the top.

Again, radical talk and indeed nothing but talk until and unless we get the kind of leadership that can lead us in that direction – but we really don’t have a whole lot of other choices, other than more misery and social decay.

- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, local 608 carpenter

for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE

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“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”

originally published on Thursday, September 4, 2008