13

Jobs, Jobs, and More Jobs

New Deal legislation created jobs for millions of Americans, but it did not bring recovery. In fact, the Depression outlasted the New Deal. Under pressure from an increasingly conservative Congress, Roosevelt had backed away from his more ambitious programs by the end of the 1930s, steering a cautious and conciliatory course. Administration policies had helped to lower the unemployment rate to a limited extent—from the high twenties to the teens. But in 1939, almost 9.5 million Americans were still out of work. It took four more years to reach pre-Depression levels. The return to full employment had, in the final analysis, little to do with the reform programs of FDR’s “Brains Trust.” Only the monumental task of preparing for entry into World War II was finally able to generate enough work to erase the suffering of the jobless.

The build-up began in 1939 and instantly restructured economic priorities. Accustomed to more than a decade of lean years, Massachusetts carpenters suddenly found themselves in the midst of another war-induced construction boom. “All the private work died,” recalls Paul Weiner, and so did much of the civilian public work. The Boston Herald reported that by October 1940 many WPA projects in the commonwealth had to be suspended because so many skilled craftsmen had been diverted to military construction.¹ Carpenters were set to work on the Boston Army Base, Air Force bases in Weymouth and Westover, the extensive expansion of Fort Devens, and the mammoth $29-million military encampment project at Camp Edwards.

All the work was welcome, perhaps none more so than that at Camp Edwards. For the first time since the early 1920s, carpenters in troubled southeastern Massachusetts found a stable source of employment. Men traveled from the Fall River, New Bedford, and even Brockton locals across the Cape Cod Canal to build the camp. Joseph Leitao got hired on—his first job as a carpenter since leaving his native Portugal in 1919. Though Leitao had been shut out of his trade for twenty years, he had retained his skills. As American involvement in the war stepped up after Pearl Harbor, contractors were delighted to find trained men like Leitao. The labor pool was shrinking as younger carpenters signed up for the armed forces while the demand for their labor was expanding.

The military was “crying” for skilled workers, Leo Bernique says, and, by and large, did not find them. Manny Weiner’s father worked on a military base alongside tailors and shoemakers. Anyone who had the nerve to say he was a carpenter got a job, says Weiner. Camp Edwards provided a haven for the legions of unemployed shoemakers from Brockton, according to Oscar Pratt. Fort Devens served the same function for the unemployed of northern and central Massachusetts. Thousands of workers labored seven days a week at Devens. “We had butchers, barbers, bakers, everything,” chortles Thomas Phalen. Two or three hundred people at a time went to the Devens employment office. “If you had a union book,” says Phalen, “all you had to do was hold it up and you’d get a job. Every foreman wanted you because it made things easy for him.” Military needs overrode all other considerations. Most jobs worked the men as long as they could stand it. “Quite a few of us went down to Castle Island in South Boston,” remembers Ellis Blomquist. “We were there for six or seven months shoring cargo. We were working two days and three nights right through just to get the ships out. You didn’t dare go near a wall, because you’d fall sound asleep leaning against it.”

Since the military administrators of World War II respected local working conditions, the work was unionized and the new “carpenters” joined the Brotherhood. They were not always received with open arms. The construction relieved some, but not all, of the anxieties of long-standing members. No one knew how long the war would last nor what to expect after the war. The memories of the Depression were too recent and vivid to welcome comfortably the potential competition of hundreds of new members in each local. Furthermore, the new workers had no sense of union tradition and little motivation to develop one. They rarely attended union meetings and, says Pratt, “had no concept of what a union was all about. They just knew that they had to join a union to get a job.”

The great majority of the wartime tradesmen later returned to their previous occupations. “You had to have them during the war,” nods Phalen, “and they’d use them wherever they could—boarding up, nailing, shingling. But when the job was over, they just disappeared.” Still, their sheer numbers had an impact on the unions in the war years. Membership in the Fitchburg and Leominster area locals spurted to eight to ten thousand. A number of locals took advantage of the new population to replenish their depression-ravaged treasuries. Worcester, Lawrence, or other outside carpenters seeking work at Fort Devens were forced to pay an extra initiation fee to the local unions. New Bedford’s Local 1416 refused to go along with the common union practice of lowering initiation fees for the Camp Edwards project. Sticking to the standard $75 price of admission, Local 1416 rebuilt its bank account from $1,000 to $262,000 in one year. A Herald reporter covering the story claimed that other New Bedford unions were “down on the carpenters” for their policy.² Given the overwhelming public support for universal sacrifice for the war effort as well as the already strained relations between prewar and wartime carpenters, the decision of several locals to profit from the new men’s presence inevitably created, as Paul Weiner indicates, “a lot of hard feelings.”

The government came in for its share of hard feelings. In 1942, the Roosevelt-appointed War Labor Board developed a set of guidelines for wartime labor relations. Under the banner of “equality of sacrifice,” the Board offered union shops to organized labor in exchange for wage freezes, compulsory arbitration, and a no-strike pledge. The trade-off appealed to many workers who had been struggling to create or stabilize labor organizations, particularly in industrial settings. For union carpenters with a long history of a closed shop, the sacrifice was obvious and the benefits nonexistent. The Board’s policy provoked scattered wildcat strikes and, ultimately, a major confrontation with the United Mine Workers. The Carpenters tolerated the ruling. The lack of organized resistance, however, did not imply contentment, says Tom Harrington. It was “sand in the claw for myself, my father, and all union men that I knew, that their wages were frozen but the profits of the contractors were never frozen. It seemed like the rich got richer and the poor stayed just the way they were.” Harrington and others waited restlessly for the end of the war to bring their brothers back from overseas and to correct inequities at home.

The veterans who returned from the European and Pacific fronts found a country ready to build. The hardships of the Depression and the imposed sacrifices of the war years were over. American industry was preparing for a shift to peacetime production and the American people were ready to spend money for long-delayed consumer necessities—clothes, appliances, cars, and above all, houses.

“After the war, there were just not enough houses,” recalls Ernest Landry. He went to work on a 475-unit project in Chelsea. Chelsea was not alone; in every town across the country 2 × 4 wood frames sprouted like weeds, on individual lots or in the instant communities of housing developments. From 1945 to 1955, private housing went from a $1-billion to a $22-billion industry. The ballooning economy required nonresidential work as well—new plants, warehouses, and offices. Nationwide, commercial construction expanded by 1,485 percent in the decade following the war.³ The volume of the work was unprecedented, as was the scale of each job. Contractors continued the pattern set during the war, hiring a hundred or more carpenters per site. Richard Croteau remembers the period as “unbelievable.” All six hundred members of his Lawrence local were working steadily on large-scale commercial jobs, including a four-and-a-half-year-long Western Electric project.

After years of cuts and freezes, wages started to climb. During the war years, carpenters in the cities of Boston, Springfield, and Quincy earned $1.50 an hour, only 12-1/2 cents more than they made in 1929. In some of the outlying areas, the fifteen years between 1929 and 1944 had brought no gains. Carpenters in Hudson and Marlboro, for example, never received more than $1 an hour. By 1950, however, Boston carpenters were paid $2.37-1/2, and the lowest rate in the state had jumped to $1.70.

The housing and commercial boom was accompanied by continued military construction. When the guns stopped firing in 1945, federal expenditures slowed briefly. But the new role of the United States as a world power and the onset of the Cold War moved Congress to beef up the military budget. During the 1950s, funds allotted for the construction of new military facilities escalated by 969 percent.⁴ Wilbur Hoxie, safety engineer for the U.S. Army, remembers that Boston’s building trades unions sent two thousand men over a seven-year period beginning in 1947 all the way to Limestone, Maine, to build the world’s largest reinforced concrete arched hangar. A thousand carpenters built housing at Westover Air Force Base between 1948 and 1950. “I remember when we used to line up for payday,” smiles Bob Jubenville. “The line would go all around between the houses; it was half a mile long.” For many, the military work was the introduction to a measure of security in construction. Leo Coulombe worked as a foreman at Camp Edwards. From that time on, “I didn’t have to ask for a job,” he says. “They used to come to get me.”

Jubenville and Mitchel Mroz, both of Greenfield, were among the state’s many carpenters who entered the service and worked in carpentry shops in England and France during the war. Jubenville had joined the union in 1938; Mroz signed up when he returned, taking advantage of the union’s offer of free admission to veterans. The homecoming of the nation’s servicemen replenished the ranks of the locals, but the existing pool of skilled union carpenters could not keep up with the feverish demand for new construction.

Good times had arrived. Seasonal weather variations dictated that carpenters still averaged the traditional forty weeks of work a year in 1950, but wages were rising and jobs were plentiful. The problematic shortage of craftsmen was a boon to union members; their training and experience virtually guaranteed stable employment. Union strength was at an all-time high. Big projects were invariably built by union trades workers and even residential work was largely organized. A 1950 National Association of Home Builders survey showed that 65 percent of the employees of NAHB firms were union members. In Massachusetts, the union presence was even stronger. Arthur Anctil of Taunton, Joseph Emanuello of Weymouth, Enock Peterson of Framingham, and Thomas Phalen of Fitchburg point out that their areas had been solidly union well before the war. Boston and some other larger cities had long been union building towns. There are no adequate statistics, but most observers agree with Croteau of Lawrence that “anyone who swung a hammer belonged to a union.”

But Croteau and many others believe that the very successes of the unions during the postwar boom laid the groundwork for their decline. Steady work made the members “fat and lazy,” he says. “They forgot where they came from.” Extra change in the pocket eased the struggle for security. Carpenters, once confined to urban working-class neighborhoods, now drove cars from the construction site to homes in the suburbs, far from the union halls.

Union members opted for commercial work. Housebuilding was hard, repetitive work. Residential contractors developed informal quotas, expecting a certain number of walls and roofs framed every day. It has always been that way. John MacKinnon worked on dozens of triple deckers in Dorchester during the 1920s for Gillis and McGillvery.

You put three men on one side of the house and three men on the other side and shingle that house. You shingle one side in a day from the bottom to the roof and if you were working for Gillis and McGillvery and it happened to be Gillis that day, he would say to you, “If you worked a little harder, you could put on the trim.”

Industrial and commercial jobs were not necessarily easier, but their massive scale and individual designs made production quotas harder to pin down and enforce. Jobs lasted longer and, with hundreds of construction workers on some projects, supervision was often a little looser. “We found it much easier to work on these [jobs],” says Joseph Lia, General Executive Board member of the International. “Sometimes we could hide, disappear a little bit, nobody would know the difference. On housework, they could almost count the studs that went up at the end of the day.”⁵

Housebuilding is construction’s most volatile wing. Highly responsive to subtle shifts in demand as well as fiscal and monetary policies, the industry’s erratic peaks and valleys have long been used to forecast national business cycles. Smaller residential builders frequently function on the margins, alternating between dreams of prosperity and fears of extinction. Employment in the residential sector, even in the halycon days of the fifties and sixties, has always been very risky. Individual jobs last weeks, not months. The feast-or-famine nature of the business makes long-term planning impossible. Most union carpenters were only too glad to leave that world behind.

In their rush to commercial projects, union carpenters ignored developments in house building. A fully employed membership viewed residential jobs as second-class work. But the insistent call for more housing created a vacuum that needed to be filled. A new group of builders emerged. Some were former union men hoping to strike it rich as subcontractors for tract developers. As Don Danielson, former staff member of the International, put it, “A carpenter would say, ‘I’ll frame ’em up for so much a piece, I’ll take eight or ten houses.’ Then anything goes: one guy and four cousins, anybody can throw ’em up and sell it.”⁶

There was also a generation of newcomers with no union tradition. Eric Nicmanis, now a nonunion framing contractor on the South Shore, arrived in the United States shortly after the war and worked on farms in West Virginia and New Hampshire. “Some friends in Boston came to visit us and said they had a lot of building going on and they need carpenters and they were making better money than we did on the farm.” Nicmanis left New Hampshire, moved south, and began his framing career, putting up ten to fifteen house shells a year.

Nicmanis went to work for Campanelli, then the biggest developer in eastern Massachusetts. Many carpenters point to Campanelli’s rise as the first break in union control of homebuilding. Arthur Anctil remembers when Campanelli bought huge chunks of land in Raynham, subdivided, and built the first large developments. According to Chester Sewell, “Campanelli had no use for the union. He came up here [Framingham area] and built all these gangs of houses.”

Like most of the postwar developers, Campanelli revived the lumping system, paying individuals or small crews for particular tasks, such as framing or roofing. “He hired kids,” says Sewell, “giving them so much to just board and roof with plywood.” Campanelli managed to attract some union carpenters too. Though he paid no overtime, he encouraged workers to keep at it for as many hours a week as they wanted to work. “It bothered me an awful lot that he was getting all of this work so that all of a sudden some fellows that weren’t strong union members went with Campanelli because he gave them steady work. He was the one who really weakened the union here,” concludes Sewell.

The nonunion homebuilders took root in the rural areas where the unions were weakest. Once established, they bid on jobs closer to urban centers. Ed Gallagher, of Local 275 in Newton, says Campanelli and other developers took over the residential work in his area by 1958. By the end of the decade, homebuilding in Massachusetts had reverted from an entirely union operation to a predominantly nonunion industry.

For the first time, commercial and residential wage rates for carpenters drifted apart. Large general contractors bidding on multimillion-dollar projects worried less about wage hikes than did small builders operating close to the vest. The big builders focused on completion dates and an adequate supply of skilled labor. With labor costs diminishing as a percentage of total construction costs, commercial contractors willingly accepted union demands for higher wages in exchange for qualified workers. By 1959, union carpenters in Framingham, Worcester, and the Boston area earned $3.40 per hour. Others across the state made slightly less, but still considerably more than unorganized carpenters. During the fifties, on the other hand, nonunion homebuilders either paid lump sums or $2 to $2.25 on an hourly basis.

In Boston, the nonunion homebuilder was a non-issue. The bulk of the city’s jobs were in the commercial sector. Inroads into residential work mattered little. In other areas where it was more important, the unions expressed only slight concern. “We had plenty of work,” says Joseph Emanuello, “so we thought we didn’t have to picket.” Most locals shared this attitude. “Everybody that I talked to said there’s nothing that we can do,” reports Chester Sewell. In isolated instances, unions tried to pressure nonunion contractors. The Brockton local picketed Campanelli, for example, but the glut of nonresidential work discouraged sustained campaigns.

In 1955, locals in Cape Cod, Cape Ann, and the Pioneer Valley instituted a dual wage system, one rate for residential and another for nonresidential work. In Greenfield, union contractors were required to pay $2.50 per hour for commercial work and 10 cents less for house building. In the next few years, the dual rate spread to other areas, including Lynn, Taunton, Springfield, and a number of towns in western Massachusetts. In some cases, the differential was minor, in others significant. In Franklin, the standard rate in 1968 was $5.50 per hour; carpenters who worked on jobs under $25,000, however, got only $3.55 per hour. By the end of the 1960s, the system faded away, ineffective at slowing the disappearance of unionized residential and small commercial work.

Dual rates had supporters and critics. Emanuello thinks the system came too late to do any good. Croteau agrees, citing an overwhelmingly apathetic response when he first proposed it in his local in 1950. By the time dual rates were instituted, both men believe the momentum had gone too far. The Greenfield experience is instructive. Nonunion builders entered the Pioneer Valley a few years after establishing beachheads in the eastern part of the state. The western Massachusetts locals had some time to prepare. Angelo Bruno claims, “We were pretty much on top of it and the split scale worked up to a point.” Greenfield is located six miles from Vermont “in the fringe areas between unionism and nonunionism,” says Bruno. “The work we had started to lose wasn’t from the people in our area, it was the contractors coming down from up above. We kept some of the big ones in line by signing letters of intent and forcing them to abide by our conditions. Cushman was always nonunion in Brattleboro, but when he came down to Massachusetts, we went to work on him and signed him up.”

Employer abuse of the dual rates undercut support within the union. Contractors shifted carpenters from low-scale to high-scale jobs during the course of a single day, but paid the lower rate for all eight hours. “This kind of thing kept coming back to the hall,” says Mitchel Mroz, “and people said, ‘if that’s the way the contractors are going to do it, we’ll get rid of it.’” Abuse was not the only factor. The system was killed by the same dynamics operating in the rest of the state—apathy predicated on good times in the nonresidential sector.

Bruno stresses that residential work in his local “didn’t really go downhill until all this work started coming through—Interstate 91 in the late fifties, the Rowe atomic plant in the early sixties. That’s when the small stuff went out. Everyone went on the big jobs. We saw it happening, but no one cared.” Mroz underscores the point. “It was the god almighty dollar. When all those big jobs were going, people could work all the hours they wanted. They even told the guys they could almost fall asleep on the job and still get paid for it. There were twelve-hour shifts and you could work twenty-four if you wanted. They offered that so they could get the help.”

Support for the split scale gradually vanished. Union members felt it was abused and irrelevant; nor did the unionized employers care. The contractors on the Pioneer Valley contract negotiating committees were all big builders. None of them built houses. Union officers and rank-and-file carpenters recognized that homebuilding was falling out of their grasp, but the loss seemed incidental when stacked up against the surplus of better-paying, more secure nonresidential jobs. Occasionally, a voice in the wilderness cried out. At the 1965 state convention of carpenters, General Executive Board member Charles Johnson complained: “This organization was founded on home construction, and we are letting it go by the board.”⁷ But these periodic warnings were rarely followed by organizational action. Few union members felt a sense of urgency as long as union-controlled commercial work remained plentiful.

Rooftops and Train Tracks: From the Twenties to the Fifties