NEW YORK CARPENTERS
AT THE MILLENIUM
by Gregory A. Butler
As I write, in October, 1999, we happen to be in the biggest building boom since the 80's, and right now, most brothers and sisters are working.
This is especially true for the ceiling guys and gals and the sheetrockers. Also, the concrete guys and gals are very busy with a number of luxury apartment houses going up in Manhattan, including Donald Trump's 90 story tall largest apartment building in the world.
Some of the gravy has even trickled down to the woodworkers and the furniture guys and gals.
And it looks like this might last a couple of years. Until the market for luxury apartments and first class office space gets overbuilt and the jobs stop breaking ground, that is.
1). BUT HOW MUCH OF IT IS UNION?
Also, on the union jobs, it seems like the union is actually making an effort to enforce the 50/50 rule and keep the non union guys and gals out of major unionized buildings.
Of course, there IS an election coming up, District Council Delegates September 10 and District Council Executive Committee December 14 and 15. And during the last election campaign, in 1995, the union kept as many folks as possible working, even gave the retirees a pension increase, until right after the elections, when things went back to normal.
But, the McCarronized District Council is making an effort to organize the non union. Of course it's the typical NLRB style one contractor at a time effort that isn't likely to sign up more than a few dozen carpenters at best.
But it's more than was done in the past.
The only problem is, organizing one contractor here, two contractors there, 15 carpenters here, 20 carpenters there, as well intentioned as it may be, just won't cut the mustard.
Especially since, based on the District Council's own figures, less than 37.33% of the carpenter work in New York is done union. In some areas, like the Bronx, less than 10% of the work is union.
Even in public works, there is a large and growing non union presence. Nearly 50% of the carpentry work on School Construction Authority projects is non union.
Since there are 20,000 or so working carpenters in the District Council, and we only do a third of the work, there must be at least 40,000 non union carpenters out there.
This explains why there are 1,300 men and women on the bench in the middle of a building boom.
It also fits in with the national trend: of America's 2 million carpenters, less than 300,000 are in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC).
2)IN THE DAYS OF McGUIRE
When our union was founded in the 1880's, the method of organizing they used was what they called a "trade movement"
The organizers of the union, who in those days were mainly rank and file carpenters who did organizing in their spare time, no 6 figure salaries and expense accounts in those days, would mobilize all the union carpenters in an area.
Then, they would organize a march to all the non union sites in the area. Often, they would have a band in the march to attract as much attention as possible.
The brothers would march up to each site, go on the job, and stop work, and persuade as many non union mechanics as possible to leave the site and march with them.
It, by all accounts, was a fast and effective way of organizing. Plus, then as now, contractors have deadlines to meet and revolving lines of credit from the banks that have to be paid, and it often was cheaper to settle than to take a long strike.
3) "...BUT THAT WAS 100 YEARS AGO, WHAT ABOUT NOW?"
In more recent times in New York, similar tactics have been used.
Starting in the 60's groups of Black and Latino tradesmen fought to get employed in the construction industry.
After trying to persuade the union leaders to integrate voluntarily, and trying the court system, some radicals among the Black workers came up with an idea.
They would take busloads of jobless minority construction workers around to jobsites that were all White. They would get off the busses, stop every trade on the site from working and not let any production get done until the site was integrated.
This got the contractors attention.
The original group that put these actions togehter was called Harlem Fightback. They started out in 1965, and over the years, some folks split off and set up other groups, and some groups sprang up in other minority communities, among the Latinos and the Chinese. But, all these groups are known as "the coalition" on New York jobsites.
The bus shape up crews were on the prowl from '65 until the early 90's. They got a lot of Black, Latino and Chinese brothers and sisters in the unions, and opened the door for many other minorities, myself included.
But by the 90's, the leaders of the coalitions deveolped a bureaucrat mentality not unlike the attitude some of our union leaders have.
Some cut crooked deals with the employers, others tried to be respectable "equal employment opportunity consultants". But without the power base of the busses, the coalition began to fade from the scene.
Across the country, in Los Angeles, in 1991, some Mexican American drywall carpenters got tired of low pay and bad conditions.
Many of the Jefes [crew leaders] had been members of the UBC in the 60's and 70's, so they tried to organize, strike and bargain with the drywall contractors in suburban Los Angeles.
They organized two large strikes in the late 80s, and, in 1991, they shut down residential construciton in Southern California.
These brothers and sisters took the strike to the streets. They had caravans of pick ups going around to jobsites to persuade the scabs to join the strike and leave the job.
At one point, they even blocked the I 5, a major Los Angeles freeway. In another incident, 3 strikers who were arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department were broken out of the squad cars and freed by the strikers.
These carpenters got so out of hand that, at one point in the strike, the California Highway Patrol had a standing order to stop any pick up with a UBC bumper sticker driven by a Mexican, with the assumption that the driver was going to disrupt a jobsite.
But, these brothers and sisters had the misfortune to be in what was about to become Doug McCarron's Southern California Regional Council.
McCarron got them a settlement, but..
1) They ended up with a piecerate contract. The carpenters, like most non union drywallers, had been paid by the square foot, and paid a miserabley low 4 cents at that, but union carpenters aren't supposed to get piecerates, we're supposed to be paid by the hour.
But McCarron got the drywallers a raise on their piecerate. It violated the international constitution, but McCarron ended getting it amended to legalize piecerates for UBC members for the first time since 1881.
2) The drywallers in San Diego were left high and dry by McCarron. They ended up joining the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades, disgusted by McCarron's double dealing.
Back in New York, in 1998, some of the tradespeople here, especially the plumbers and the laborers, showed some rank and file millitancy.
There was an official New York City and Vicinity Building and Construction Trades Council rally against a non union contractor, Roy Kay Inc., who was the prime contractor on a New York City Transit Subway Command Center.
This was the first major NYCT job to go non union since the 1930's.
The rally was SUPPOSED to be another boring official lunchtime rally.
But 40,000 workers showed up, instead of the 10,000 that the BCTC expected. And, instead of passively listening to Buisness Agent speeches, the workers siezed Madison Avenue, in front of the headquarters of NYCT's parent Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and then, led by the laborers and the plumbers, siezed the streets of midtown.
We marched to the site, across town at 10th avenue, and shut down midtown in the middle of a buisness day. The only thing that stopped us from taking the site was a mace attack by 200 cops, 39 tradespeople getting locked up and a steamfitter getting his head stepped on by a police horse, fractureing his skull.
The rat contractor had to stop operations for the day, needless to say. If the pressure had been kept up, the job could've been turned around.
But the building trades council begged New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for forgiveness for the "riot" and promised that there would "never again" be a rally like that.
So, they have had some token picketing, and that's that. And the job will be done soon and done virtually all non union the biggest rat project done here in a long time.
4) THE BOTTOM LINE
Most of us are working now, or, if we're on the bench, can expect a job in the next couple of days or a week or two.
So, a lot of brothers and sisters aren't too worried about the union, and where our leaders are taking us.
But now, when it's busy, is the time to make some changes. Even Dougie Mac McCarron and his minions admit that. Of course we don't want the changes that they want.
We need to set up a movement, to organize our unrepresented brothers and sisters.
But the current leaders of our union, both the McCarron folks and much of the official "opposition" aren't going to do this on their own.
So, we have to change the union, and the only way to do that is to set up caucuses of rank and file carpenters, to change the union from within, to make it the fighting organization we need to face the challenges of the millenium.
CARPENTERS FOR A STRONGER UNION, New York City is trying to make a move in that direction. But we can't do it alone, we need the help of every rank and file carpenter to make these changes.
Also, we are going to have to ally ourselves with the rank and file of the other trades, and of the Teamsters. Power comes from unity.
It's the only way out of a "union free" future.
CONTACT CARPENTERS FOR A STRONGER UNION, New York City, by mail at:
1580 Amsterdam Avenue,#46 or by email at keysersoze608@hotmail.comNew York, NY 10031
email GANGBOX at gangbox@excite.com