16

The Rise of the Open Shop

Just as he had the year before, John Burns, secretary of the Massachusetts State Council of Carpenters, told delegates to the 1970 convention that construction employment in the state had reached an all-time high. Burns noted, however, that opportunities were growing in the nonunion sector as well. The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a national organization of open shop builders, had chartered a Massachusetts chapter in 1968. At the time, slightly over forty members had signed on. Two years later, the chapter had 150 members holding millions of dollars worth of new construction contracts. Executive Board member Thomas Moseley seconded Burns’s alarm. Residential work in the Brockton and Norfolk area was built entirely nonunion, he reported, and these once small housebuilders in the ABC were “now in the bracket where they are taking on projects amounting to a million dollars or more.”¹

The industry was in a whirlwind of change. After two decades of virtually uninterrupted record revenues for contractors and escalating wages for workers in a comfortably unionized environment, the operating assumptions were suddenly up for grabs. Public officials, previously content to criticize the industry from the sidelines, were being pressed by the Business Roundtable and other “reformers” to intervene in the industry. With rare exceptions, federal policy had not ventured beyond jawboning in construction labor relations. The major experiment of the Johnson administration—Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz’s suggestion to exchange moderated wage increases for a guaranteed annual employment scheme—had been decisively rejected by both contractors and unions during a New Jersey strike.

In January of 1971, President Richard Nixon warned industry leaders to voluntarily slow the wage–price spiral or face governmental action. The following month, Nixon suspended the Davis–Bacon Act, a law that fixes the pay scale (on the basis of the “prevailing” wage in the area) on federally assisted construction projects. On March 29, the White House restored the legislation and announced the formation of the Construction Industry Stabilization Committee (CISC) headed by Harvard professor and construction insider John Dunlop. CISC was empowered to establish wage guidelines, police collective bargaining agreements, and return unsatisfactory settlements for further negotiation. By the time CISC was disbanded in the spring of 1974, both strikes and wage increases had been significantly reduced.

CISC’s effectiveness was only partly attributable to its heavy hand. A number of developments were crystallizing in the early 1970s to make federal intervention possible. International officials of the building trades unions, stung by public criticism of their organizations and irritated by the fiercely independent bargaining stances of their locals, quietly welcomed Nixon’s actions as a vehicle to yank free-wheeling locals back into the centralized folds of the Internationals. Several Washington journalists reported International leadership’s off-the-record glee whenever CISC slapped down an “excessive” local demand.²

Local officers and rank-and-file members wondered, too, if basic principles of unionism had suffered during the boom years, particularly in the arena of jurisdictional disputes. The repeated interunion conflicts had brought forth some of the harshest and most embarrassing criticism of the building trades. The president of the International Union of Operating Engineers reluctantly attributed many of the chronic jurisdictional problems to “plain thievery among the trades.”³ The 1960s had witnessed a near tripling of strikes over work assignments. The combined construction unions fought with nonconstruction labor unions, such as United Mine Workers District 50, to maintain exclusive control over the industry. The building trades’ inward focus had long alienated them from the rest of the labor movement. In 1968, for example, less than one-quarter of the carpenters’ local unions in Massachusetts bothered to affiliate with the state AFL–CIO.

Further, the trades were embroiled in a never-ending series of battles with one another. The carpenters fought with the laborers over the erection of scaffolding and the stripping of concrete forms; with the lathers over the installation of drywall; with the ironworkers over setting precast concrete; and with the sheet metal workers over metal trim. Other crafts were equally guilty. Individual locals within the same trade haggled over geographical jurisdiction, as in the long-standing feud between the Springfield and Holyoke carpenters locals over the town of Chicopee. Finally, the boom years produced an explosion of bickering and political maneuvering between individuals, locals, and regions. The bulging treasuries and the growing power and prestige of the unions made the prize of union office considerably more attractive and competitive than it had once been. Every potential internal sore point festered into open conflict. The traditional rivalry between eastern and western Massachusetts managed to find its way to the floor of the annual state convention when, as Angelo Bruno relates, “we were told that anything west of Worcester was nothing but dirt and chicken farmers.”

In 1964 Charles Johnson, General Executive Board member, delivered a candid and farseeing speech to Massachusetts carpenters:

We of the Building Trades always felt that we were so powerful nobody could lick us, so we decided we could fight amongst ourselves, and nobody would pay any attention to us. We were so well entrenched with our union builders and with our union contractors’ associations that we thought they would take our guff forever. In different parts of the U. S. they are just turning their backs now on the craft union in this country that built America.⁴

Four years later, Director of East Coast Organizing Abe Saul echoed Johnson’s scolding: “The trades are too busy squabbling with one another, too busy looking for power within the Building Trades Council to concentrate on the common enemy, the ‘scab’ contractor, and he has taken advantage of it.”⁵

The once tiny ABC, originally little more than a casual federation of small builders, had gradually picked up members and contracts through the 1960s. At the end of the decade, union construction workers erected almost 80 percent of all new building nationally, but the pendulum was swinging the other way. By 1972, national membership in the ABC had climbed to forty-six hundred, including seventeen of the Top 400 contracting firms. Buck Mickel, president of giant Daniel Construction, indicated that the ABC’s success depended heavily on Business Roundtable sponsorship. “Open shop territories,” he said, “are being expanded principally by input of industry in insisting that projects be built open shop.”⁶ Roundtable members, such as Du Pont and Dow Chemical, refused to allow unionized contractors to enter bids on their capital projects. Even the AGC, once the domain of union contractors exclusively, offered a symbolic gesture of approval to the new order by electing their first open shop builder as president in 1973.

Ultimately CISC, the Roundtable, and other inflation-watchers found their greatest ally in the perilous workings of the market. The great postwar construction boom peaked in 1973 and then slid into a long and severe recession. In May of 1975, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that construction unemployment had jumped to 22 percent. Contractor failures were at their highest level in thirteen years. James Sprouse of the AGC claimed that “only the great depression surpasses [1975] as being the most difficult of times for the construction industry.”⁷

The Northeast was particularly hard hit. When the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO released their own findings on construction unemployment, President Bob Georgine suggested that 27 percent was a more accurate national figure. He went on to say that “in New England, there are cities that make some of the distressing figures I have just cited sound like boom towns.” In Massachusetts, total receipts for building employers actually decreased by 8 percent between 1972 and 1977, and in the worst years (1973–1975) construction employment dropped 26 percent, making it one of only four states in the nation to suffer a net loss.⁸

In 1972, ten thousand construction workers marched on the State House to protest Governor Francis Sargent’s order halting a number of major projects. The resulting loss of public jobs reinforced the already slumping private market. In 1973, Joseph MacComiskey announced that the prospects for work on the North Shore were “worse than I have seen it in twelve years.” John Greenland went further in his description of the Boston area: “The work situation over the last twelve-month period has been the worst in the last twenty years, and unemployment in the winter months reached an all-time high.” Relief was years away. Tom Gunning, executive director of the BTEA, estimated that unemployment among area union carpenters ranged from 50 to 80 percent in the winter of 1976.⁹ Carpenters fled the state in search of work, some as far as the pipelines of Alaska and the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

The fortunes of the open shop mounted with the decline of union employment. “We have not only lost the Garden Type Apartments to non-union contractors,” wrote John Burns in 1973, “but we are slowly losing Shopping Centers, Motels, and Industrial work to the contractors who we at one time called wheelbarrow contractors . . . because of this situation many of our members are dropping out of the union.”¹⁰ The nonunion sector was gaining just as quickly in other states. By 1975, over nine thousand companies had joined the ABC. The AGC held its first annual “Right-to-Manage Conference” to teach union contractors how to switch to a nonunion operation. A Wharton School of Business study estimated that total open shop construction overtook union building by the middle of the decade.¹¹

Union negotiators, accused of holding the industry and the American public hostage just a few short years before, were suddenly granting major concessions in wages and working rules. The “give-back” bandwagon began to roll in 1972. Ironworkers in Florida froze their wages and Rhode Island laborers took a pay cut. Carpenters in Missouri agreed to work Saturdays as make-up time for foul-weather weekdays at regular pay instead of overtime. Over the next few years, construction workers across the country accepted wage freezes and cuts. In May of 1975, the Massachusetts Council of Construction Employers, representing twenty-six state employer groups, won a “Memorandum of Understanding and Intent” from all seventeen building trades. Established as guidelines for local negotiations, the document called for lower pay scales for residential and maintenance work and the “elimination of restrictive work practices.”¹²

Despite the skidding numbers in total construction dollar volume, the “wheelbarrow contractors” were growing in strength. Joe Carabetta started out with a shovel in his hand and eventually built a $180-million business. One-time shoestring operations like Seppala & Aho of Ipswich, New Hampshire, joined the upper echelons of the building fraternity. Matty Aho, the eldest of the Ahos, had been in and out of Carpenters Local 48 in Fitchburg, while his brothers worked in the family business in the years after World War II. When Nashua, New Hampshire, started a development binge, Matty left the union for the final time and set the firm’s sights on larger-scale projects in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. From 1972 to 1975, Seppala & Aho ran seventy-two sites in Massachusetts alone. Midway through 1976, the company was responsible for thirteen separate multimillion-dollar contracts.

Union members harbor a particular distaste for the contractors from Ipswich because of their almost theological antiunionism. The company has consistently rejected union contacts, arguing, in the words of Martin Seppala, that labor agreements are “unnecessary.” “We try to walk uprightly in the fear of God,” wrote Seppala to Carpenters official Joseph Muka. “His demands far exceed the laws of men and differ considerably.”¹³ “They have their own religious organization through which they bond people together,” Ellis Blomquist says of the Finnish-born contractors.

And when they really got going, they began importing people from Finland. You see, there’s two groups in Finland. One is quite religious and the other is quite socialistic. It’s the same over here. My father was a very strong socialist and Democrat. The socialists were always pushing union organization, fighting for decent wages and working conditions. The other group tended to stick to the Bible and the colorful old legends from Finland. Seppala and Aho tapped into that religious group and set up their own church practically, you know, very strong against smoking and drinking and unions. But in that way, they were able to hold people together well.

The construction unions in Massachusetts targeted major open shop builders like Seppala & Aho, Campanelli, Carabetta, and Abreen (whose treasurer, Philip Abrams, had been national president of the ABC). Eighteen hundred workers picketed an $8-million shopping mall in Swansea; fifteen hundred marched on an $8-million Hilton Hotel and shopping center complex in Natick; and smaller numbers walked picket lines at the Braintree Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, publicly subsidized housing projects for the elderly in Dedham and Greenfield, and dozens of other construction sites across the state.

Months of unsuccessful picketing at the $6-million Harborlight Mall on Route 3A in Weymouth burst into violence in July of 1976. South Shore construction workers, struggling with 55 to 65 percent unemployment rates, charged onto the Seppala & Aho site, knocked down part of a cement block wall, and ripped up electrical and plumbing fixtures. An angry laborer told the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. “We didn’t want to get the poor guys working there. It’s the [supervisors] in the trailers we ought to be getting.” Frightened by the confrontation, Weymouth selectmen temporarily suspended the developer’s building permit. When construction resumed, however, the site was still manned by nonunion workers earning as little as $3 to $4 an hour.¹⁴

Occasionally, the picketing paid off. But more often than not, owners, developers, and open shop contractors rejected any negotiations with the unions. By the end of the decade, 60 to 70 percent of all building in the state was erected under nonunion conditions. Massachusetts pension fund figures for 1977 indicate that working union carpenters barely averaged thirty-three weeks of employment for the year. Those were the lucky ones. Thousands of union carpenters left the area or the trade altogether. Over the course of the decade, statewide membership in the Carpenters Union dropped by one-third.¹⁵ The national picture was equally disquieting. The UBCJA lost 91,000 members from 1975 to 1981, and the recession in the first term of the Reagan administration only aggravated an already difficult situation. In October 1982, over 1.2 million building trades workers were out of work. The 23 percent construction unemployment rate was the highest in the thirty-four years that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had kept such records.

Fierce competition over the limited number of construction contracts gave an additional edge to open-shop budget operations with low labor costs. Most industry observers agree that nonunion contractors currently hold a 70 percent market share of the industry. That estimate includes virtually complete mastery over residential and light commercial work and a surprising portion of the industrial and large-scale public market. Open shop firms accounted for 29 percent of the Engineering News-Record’s Top 400 in 1984. And, even more suggestive of future directions, eight of the nation’s top ten contractors were “double-breasted,” that is, they incorporated both union and nonunion subsidiaries.¹⁶

The one-two punch of open shop success and declining construction volume inevitably knocked down union wages and benefits. Freezes and rollbacks actually outnumbered increases in 1984 union contracts. “Never before has there been a reduction in wages and fringes as great,” said Robert Gasperow of the Construction Labor Research Council. First-year hikes averaged just 8 cents or 0.4 percent, the lowest average in the post–World War II era. Union negotiators barely improved their standing in 1985, winning a paltry 1.6 percent average increase. The slim pickings are, in the words of AGC President Doug Pitcock, “a reflection of realism in the marketplace.” The 1984 and 1985 contract negotiating sessions marked the culmination of a decade of retrenchment for unionized construction workers. Despite occasional gains in union strongholds with booming markets, the cumulative impact of the 1970s and 1980s has sent construction unions reeling and granted employers a measure of uncontested authority they had not enjoyed since the 1920s. “The industry is rightly rejoicing,” crowed the Engineering News-Record in mid-1984, “over the course that its collective bargaining has taken.”¹⁷

[On] any scheme that requires Capital & intelligence they come to Boston for help.

—John Murray Forbes, nineteenth-century financier

Massachusetts has always been a divided state. From John Winthrop’s “City on the Hill” to Kevin White’s “World-Class City,” Boston’s leaders have entertained an elaborately constructed self-conception of uniqueness. Birthplace and training ground of the nation’s educational and medical elite, sober-minded legal and financial wizards, cultural arbiters, and political rulers, proper Bostonians have looked east to Athens, Paris, and London for role models as cosmopolitan centers of civilization. A casual westward glance induced shudders of embarrassment at the remainder of the commonwealth with its tolerably quaint but assuredly provincial towns and villages. The political and economic divisions have been real and continue to rankle. Boston has certainly stood apart in the field of construction. The city’s architectural designs have been more experimental, the buildings taller, and the wages higher. For the carpenters of Massachusetts, the chasm has never been greater than it is today.

The drought of the 1970s had ended. During that decade, Massachusetts lost over eleven thousand construction workers. By the mid-eighties, the state’s economy had recovered. Jobs are now available but the rebound has not been evenly distributed. Since the Reagan recession hit manufacturing the hardest, towns dependent on the region’s still viable machine-tool industry suffered the worst shocks. Boston, on the other hand, based on a growing service sector, barely felt a tremor. In fact, beginning in 1981, the city embarked on a colossal building boom, reaching $1.4 billion in 1984 in private development alone.¹⁸ At times, it appears that every corner in downtown Boston has a tower crane lifting materials up to workers building new offices, hotels, public buildings, retail outlets, or medical and educational facilities. The skyline is unrecognizable to anyone who has left the city for more than a few years.

Nor are there any signs of slackening. The rest of the United States remains mired in sluggish building swamps, but Boston construction investment is on the rise. As Robert Ryan, former director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, wrote in 1983: “Development completions . . . scheduled for the next four years will surpass, in value, those of the previous eight years.”¹⁹ Neighboring Cambridge has witnessed a parallel revamping of its physical appearance. While banking, insurance, and law firms are flocking to downtown Boston’s new highrises, high-tech companies and educational consultants, eager to find a home in the long shadows of MIT and Harvard, are driving up rents on office space in Cambridge.

The feverish pace of building activity has separated Boston-area unions from the experiences of most construction locals in the country. At a time when “concessions” had become a household word, eight thousand Boston carpenters rejected a 31 percent increase in wages and benefits over two years, the largest offer ever made to a Boston construction union. After a five-week strike that brought $2-billion worth of construction to a halt, carpenters settled in July 1981 for a two-year contract with a $5.60 raise. When the contract expired in 1983, officers of the Boston District Council negotiated a 13 percent further increase, boosting the total package to $18.86 in wages plus an additional $5.98 in benefits by 1987.

As a sign of the times, the Boston carpenters broke away from joint bargaining sessions with other locals in eastern Massachusetts in 1983. Though their wage scales had differed, locals as far west as Worcester, south as far as Hingham, and north as far as Haverhill, had sat for years at the same negotiating table with carpenters from Boston. The mounting gulf in the relative fortunes between the cities convinced Boston-area officials to go it alone. Without the same optimal conditions, unionists in outlying towns have not been able to win comparable gains. By 1985, carpenters in the state’s least fortunate locals received almost $5 an hour less in wages and benefits than their Boston counterparts.

As Bob Bryant notes, “You get outside [Route] 128 and you got a big, big problem.” Carl Bathelt, business agent for Springfield Local 108, points out that the number of members of the Western Massachusetts Contractors Association has dwindled from two dozen to eight. Holyoke, his home base, once had eight union contractors and now is reduced to two. Angelo Bruno claims that the town of Greenfield has had only two union jobs in three years. Asked in March of 1984 what the situation was in the Northampton–Greenfield area, Bruno replied quickly—“desperate.” Mitchel Mroz confirms Bruno’s glum outlook. Interviewed on the same day, he reported that only 20 percent of the members of Local 402 in Northampton were then working. The inevitable migration to the big city has occurred. With opportunities waiting for experienced trades workers at higher wages, carpenters from towns in a 50- to 75-mile radius are commuting daily and frequently transferring their union books to one of the four locals in the Boston District Council.

The shortage of union jobs outside Boston is not due to the depressed state of the economy. There are construction jobs, but they are not necessarily unionized. The ABC now includes close to six hundred contractors in Massachusetts. Most are in the $3 to $5 million annual volume range, though some reach up to $90 million. Brotherhood organizer Steve Flynn told the 1984 state convention that nonunion carpenters outnumbered union carpenters in Massachusetts 3-1/2 to 1.²⁰ The unions have relinquished more and more jobs in the outlying areas, falling back on publicly funded work protected by prevailing wage legislation, giant industrial and commercial projects, or construction users that have strong and comfortable ties with individual union contractors. Stephen Tocco, executive director of the Yankee chapter of the ABC, believes that 70 percent of the private work in Massachusetts is built nonunion and claims that open shop contractors are beginning to make inroads in the Boston market. The open shop has swept through the western and central regions of the commonwealth and is steadily inching toward the eastern shores. “The first line was drawn somewhere around 1–495,” wrote Boston Globe reporter Bruce Mohl in 1984. “Then the construction unions closed ranks behind Route 128. Now they are circling the wagons around Boston.”²¹

The ABC has not restricted its strategies to underbidding in their efforts to woo contracts away from the union sector. Under Tocco’s skillful direction, the ABC has developed an extensive political, legal, and public relations agenda. Tocco, whose op-ed columns and quotable sayings continually pop up in the Massachusetts media, has adopted the stance of the underdog, the victimized open shop builder just out for his fair share of the American dream. Characterizing building trades officials as ruthless, power-hungry monopolists, Tocco has suggested that their policies “present a mirror image of the Robber Barons unions fought so courageously and righteously many years ago.” For public consumption, ABC leaders in Massachusetts insistently deny any antiunion convictions. In one op-ed piece, Tocco even praised the leadership of the United Auto Workers for their exploratory steps toward a labor–management partnership. Unfortunately, he continued, local construction officials “continue to repeat their weary rhetorical flourishes.” They fail to understand, he argued, that their “archaic and useless practices” are outmoded in an era of internationally integrated economies in which competitiveness and productivity provide the only rewards.²²

Tocco has used this reformer image to skirt accusations of antiworker bias and recruit some surprising allies. In 1984, the ABC charged that Boston’s Catholic Archdiocese’s firm policy of hiring union construction companies amounted to “economic injustice” and therefore contradicted the Church’s own teachings in the bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy. In addition, Tocco has justified lawsuits against the commonwealth’s 5:1 journeyman–apprentice rule on publicly funded projects as well as legislation to reduce the state prevailing wage rate as efforts to provide opportunities for minority workers in the face of the unions’ history of racial discrimination. Despite the ABC’s own dismal record on minority hiring, Tocco’s rhetoric has won the support of Saundra Graham, a progressive black legislator from Cambridge, and the editorial staffs of the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

Union leaders have not been without their own weapons. In the 1983 contract negotiations, Boston Carpenters officials won a clause aimed at double-breasted firms that may have a profound impact on the industry. The practice of double-breasting has become widespread since the early 1970s. Almost every major contractor who has not shed his contractual ties to the unions altogether has established a nonunion alter ego. In eastern Massachusetts, the Macomber Company has Erland, Marshall has Algonquin, J. J. Walsh has Walsh Management, and on and on. A series of court rulings in the mid-seventies provided legal sanction for this procedure, requiring only a “maximum separation of operations” between the two entities. In practice, this technical nicety is often overlooked. Nonunion counterparts of union companies are seldom more than dummy corporations in a relative’s name. Office space, equipment, and even payrolls overlap, as company accountants juggle both sets of books to maximize earnings. As firms gradually shift the bulk of their business from the union to the nonunion side, they offer their union employees the no-choice option of dropping their union books or unemployment. Contempt for legally mandated separation has reached such heights, says Bob Marshall, that double-breasted outfits slip magnetic signs with the nonunion name over the union firm’s logo on company trucks as they cruise from one job site to the next.

Double-breasting has made a mockery of labor agreements in the industry. Contractors abide by union contracts only when they feel they must. Whenever possible, they operate in their nonunion guise, ignoring the very wage rates, fringe benefits, work rules, and safety provisions that they agreed to at the bargaining table. The provision in the Boston settlement was intended to halt the double-breasted dodge by requiring all subsidiaries of any contract signatory to abide by the terms of the agreement. This powder keg of a clause almost precipitated a strike. Employer negotiators branded the demand “un-American and communistic,” but apparently the thought of jeopardizing billions of dollars of present and future development during the booming summer of 1983 overrode their philosophical objections.

The impact of this “work-preservation” clause is still not clear. While some predominantly union contractors divested their marginal nonunion companies, the worst offenders have stonewalled, refusing to act or divulge pertinent information. In March 1985, the Boston Carpenters and the Bricklayers (who have a similar clause) jointly filed forty-four lawsuits against builders seeking back payments of contractually obligated benefits from the double-breasted firms. An anticipated but problematic consequence of the contract language is a further separation of Boston and the outlying areas. Successful prosecution of the lawsuits may not be universally productive. “I’m afraid what will happen,” sighs Bob Marshall, “is that the contractor will work his union arm in Boston and his nonunion arm outside of Boston because we’ll have driven him out.”

One creative method of generating union construction jobs across the commonwealth is the aggressive investment of union pension funds. For years, both union and employer trustees passively administered the joint funds, relying on the expertise of outside money managers. A series of reports in the 1970s revealed that the intentions of the funds’ investors were not necessarily benign. Their vaunted professional experience had resulted in 4 to 5 percent rates of return and a disturbing pattern of investments. A 1979 Corporate Data Exchange study indicated that union pension fund investment fueled a significant portion of the nation’s nonunion real estate development. Perhaps more shocking was the revelation that fund managers had purchased 13.5 percent of the common stock of Halliburton, the parent corporation of nonunion building giant Brown & Root. “They were using our money to put us out of work,” concludes Local 67 Business Agent Barney Walsh.

Walsh took the lead in a campaign to regain control over investment policy in Massachusetts. He brought all the building trades unions plus the Carmens’ Union into the Massachusetts Development Finance Foundation, a multimillion-dollar supertrust that handles roughly 10 percent of the various joint funds. “We are almost the same as a lending institution or bank as far as financing a project,” reports Walsh, “except that our expertise is probably far better because our Foundation is made up of management people on one side and the people who build the projects on the other.” The critical difference between a MDFF and a conventional bank loan is that the Foundation will only approve projects that are built entirely by union labor. Developers submit loan proposals to the trustees and each craft decides whether or not to participate and how much to invest. The MDFF has funded a $2.1-million office renovation in Cambridge, a $4.2-million office building expansion in Braintree, and a $23-million Hilton Hotel in Lowell that employed over three hundred union workers.

The Foundation is moving carefully, anxious to avoid legal entanglements with the suspicious administrators of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the federal legislation that governs pension investment. The stakes in future investment directions are enormous. Walsh ultimately hopes to recruit the funds of every AFL–CIO union in Massachusetts into the “socially desirable” investment policies of the Foundation. In other states, funds have merged to sponsor low-income housing for workers or hotels that are built and staffed by union members. The concept of unions having a voice in what is built as well as who builds it has awesome implications considering the amount of money involved. Most observers estimate that by 1995 pension funds will climb to $3 trillion, representing 85 percent of the nation’s total capital investment.

The sizable pension and annuity funds have found another unconventional home. The Boston District Council of Carpenters plans to open the doors of the First Union Federal Savings Bank of Boston on January 1, 1987. Located in a South Boston industrial park, this federally chartered savings and loan institution will be one of a handful of union-owned banks in the country. According to Richard Kronish, an adviser to the union on the project, returns on the two funds should generate sufficient earnings to free the bank to offer union carpenters and, potentially, other trade unionists highly competitive rates on residential mortgages and consumer loans.

The District Council is making other moves in the private housing market. Spurred by the critical shortage of low- and moderate-income housing in the Boston area and recent Church pronouncements on social and economic justice, the Boston Catholic Archdiocese approached the Carpenters Union to develop a joint plan to provide affordable homes for local residents. A series of meetings with union leaders representing electricians, painters, and plumbers, as well as city and state officials, has produced a definite commitment to establish an owner-operated prefabricated housing manufacturing plant in the Boston metropolitan area.

This scheme marks a significant break with traditional union wariness of manufactured housing, long viewed as a competitive threat to conventional on-site construction methods. In the past, union officials derided the quality of factory-produced systems in the hope that a reputation for poor workmanship would doom the successful marketing of prefabricated units. “Manufactured housing is here to stay,” admits Andy Silins of the Boston District Council of Carpenters. “So we should get in on it, make the jobs union jobs, and guarantee a good product. Furthermore, I don’t see any other way to address the problem of affordable housing.”

Silins’s willingness to recognize a societal problem beyond the confines of narrow union concerns and suggest an appropriate solution dovetails with the Archdiocese’s agenda of increasing the supply of moderately priced shelter and encouraging worker participation programs. As of mid-1986, financial arrangements for the facility had not been finalized. A number of proposals have been floated, ranging from the buy-out of an existing company to the creation of an entirely new entity. But as Silins notes, “However it is originally financed, everyone involved wants to see it become worker owned.” Assuming the project proceeds as planned, workers at the new plant will be governed by standard industrial contracts of their respective trade unions, but they will also be the standard-bearers for an often neglected tradition, that is, a “social unionism” in which attempts to cure societywide ills are made under the banners of the craft unions.

The unions have beefed up their apprenticeship programs in order to preserve their claim to represent the most highly qualified carpenters in the industry. Since 1966, union contracts have stipulated that a certain portion of the paycheck be funneled into an apprenticeship fund. The programs used to function twice a week on a local basis. Central and eastern Massachusetts carpenter apprentices now learn the craft with a new wrinkle. The $4-million Marshall Carpenters Training Center in Millbury, complete with classrooms, dormitory, cafeteria, and gym, opened its doors in 1985. Today’s apprentices leave their jobs for two weeks at a time to live at the center and receive full-time instruction. It is an experimental approach, based on the assumption that one well-equipped and well-staffed central resource can provide a better education than several marginally financed programs.

Union leaders are conscious of another desperately important rehabilitation project—the image of the building trades unions. The open shop antiunion vendetta fused with the complacency of the postwar unions to draw a composite picture of construction workers as, in the words of Barney Walsh, “fat cats.” Recently, union members have sought to correct the impression of an overpaid workforce by citing the litany of supportive statistics about seasonality, danger, and annual income. The contract covering Boston’s carpenters from 1983 to 1987 includes a specific provision for shoring up the crumbling image. Five cents per working hour is deducted from every carpenter’s paycheck and sent to the Boston Carpenters Promotional Education Program, an undertaking jointly administered by contractors and the union. The goal of the program is to promote union construction, a task currently carried out through newspaper advertisements, special supplements, highway billboards, and taxi-top signs.

Many unionists recognize that tangible contributions to their fellow citizens are the clearest expressions of concern and the best way to demonstrate a community of interests. Greenfield’s carpenters have always been, according to Mitchel Mroz, “very community oriented.” In the last several years, they built YMCA summer camps, buildings and dugouts for the local Little League, and undertook the extensive reconstruction of a historic covered bridge. Union carpenters across Massachusetts have been instrumental in a number of similar volunteer community projects. In the past year, Woburn and Lynn carpenters helped roof a senior citizens’ center in Wilmington, Berkshire County Local 260 members built “Santa’s Christmas Cave” for children in North Adams, and Boston trades workers helped rebuild a fire-gutted shelter for homeless women.

The cumulative effect of the volunteer projects, the promotional program, the Millbury center, the prefab housing plant, the bank, the pension fund investment, and the clever use of contract language has been to refocus the activities of existing union members, boost morale, create some new jobs, and remodel the unions’ public face. They have not, however, arrested the open shop movement. That will happen only when the current ratio of union to nonunion trades workers is reversed. “We controlled the work when we controlled the manpower,” John Flynn, chairman of the short-lived New England Construction Organizing Committee, once said. “That’s all we ever had to sell.” Union control over manpower implies bringing the unorganized workforce into the unions. “We have to make every carpenter a union carpenter,” states Gordon Boraks. Boraks’s formula may be perfect in its simplicity, but entrenched attitudes inside the construction unions make that goal considerably less simple to achieve.

“Organizing is the lifeblood of any labor organization,” International officer Dick Griffin told the 1982 state convention, “[but] we don’t do it.” Many unionists believe that the prosperity of the postwar era rested on limiting access to the union. As long as the unions carefully regulated the total pool of skilled workers, they were able to guarantee relatively steady work. This restrictive system worked effectively until the overwhelming demand for construction labor in the 1960s outstripped the union supply and pushed builders to recruit outside the union structure. Pat Campbell, now general president of the UBCJA, underlined the connection between past union practices and current problems in 1973 when the open shop was still in the early stages of its march to domination: “A lot of the people that we have kept out is the work force today that is competing with us.”²³

Inside the unions, the still commonplace belief that restrictive policies are superior to an open-door organizing strategy has outlived any accuracy it may have once had. But myths hang on in the absence of evidence of successful alternatives. Many union leaders have privately understood the need to expand the unions’ ranks, but have been reluctant to advocate that view to the membership. After preaching the opposite for so many years, union officials fear that a call to open the doors will only instill short-term fears of increased competition for a fixed number of jobs. Staking out such a position has, in many instances, added up to political suicide for elected union officers. But some leaders, such as Griffin, believe the unions can no longer afford to ignore the need to organize.

We seem to operate as individuals and, yet, the very title of our organization is brotherhood. We seem to spend more damn time fighting with each other . . . organizing doesn’t seem to be anything that we care about anymore because it requires effort and time and personal sacrifice on our part. And if we keep going like this, pretty soon we’ll just have a token organization.²⁴

Organizing successfully is not simply a matter of overcoming resistance among the membership. The labor movement of the 1980s is in a state of general disarray and decline. In this climate, organizing is a difficult proposition at best, and in construction it is even worse. “Organizing in the construction industry, past, present, and future, is very hard,” comments Barney Walsh. “With an industrial union, you have more or less a captive audience in that building. With us, if you go to organize a job, and you hand out cards, by the time you’ve got enough, the people are probably laid off.” In the past, the transience of the work and the workforce has prompted organizers to focus on contractors rather than workers. The customary technique involved recognizing when a budding builder was outgrowing his initial workforce of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. An organizer would then approach and explain the advantages of a contract and the union’s ready supply of skilled workers that would allow the builder to expand further the scale of his operations. The tactic was simple, required little organizing exertion, and usually worked—as long as the unions controlled the labor force. However, today’s large number of skilled or semiskilled nonunion craft workers makes such an appeal obsolete. Open shop contractors have demonstrated an alternate path, that is, growth through labor recruitment outside the unions.

The crisis of the last few years is now so severe that the call for full-scale organizing is once again being heard in the halls of the Internationals. The Brotherhood instituted Operation Turnaround, a campaign that Organizing Director Jim Parker says emphasizes “trying to make union contractors that we have more competitive.” Parker argues that restrictive work rules must be eradicated, nonproductive contract clauses removed, and unnecessary strikes eliminated.²⁵ For many locals, making union contractors more “competitive” has, in practice, meant accepting wage freezes or reductions. Turnaround’s orientation has dovetailed with the concessionary bargaining environment and employers’ insistence that competitiveness depends on lower labor costs. Since most open shop builders set their wages in relation to the union scale, some industry analysts question the long-run effect of concessions in construction. Will they make union contractors more competitive or just drive down wages in union and nonunion sectors?

Turnaround’s goal is to keep contractors currently under contract in the union fold through bargaining measures. There is also growing sentiment in the building trades to consider grass-roots organizing. Michael Lucas, national organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has suggested taking “a look at what the people did who built our unions” when they recruited nonunion craftsmen “one at a time.” Lucas’s call poses a challenge to today’s unionists. Can the carpenters of 1986 duplicate the efforts of Quincy Local 762’s John Cogill who paid nightly visits to the unorganized carpenters of his community in 1912 in order to get “every man that works with carpenters’ tools in the United Brotherhood?”²⁶ Can they match the efforts of the organizing committe of the Lawrence local that Richard Croteau recalls made successful home contacts as late as the years immediately following World War II? It is too soon to answer such questions. Bottom-up organizing has not been given much of a chance in the 1980s, but, when it is, it is certain that it will be harder now than it was forty or seventy years ago when mastery of a trade was often equated with ownership of a union card.

“We’re amateurs,” Griffin admits about current UBC organizing drives. “We don’t know how the hell to do it.”²⁷ As with any new direction, mistakes are inevitably made. Bob Weatherbee tells two stories of trying to organize with officers of other trades who were unprepared to take the kinds of risks that organizing in the eighties requires.

I went on a prevailing rate job with an agent from a specialty trade. He was dealing with six people from his trade’s nonunion company. He said all six would have to leave, be replaced by his people, and then they could apply for the apprenticeship program in the spring.

We also approached a very large nonunion minority-owned company in Boston. The founder was antiunion, the son you could speak with. We had the whole thing rolling—carpenters and laborers. We had a foot in the door. We sat down at the table, ready to take everyone in. The laborer [agent] said the two foremen (who had been with the guy 20 years) could not be foremen. Why? “Because it’s in our by-laws that you have to be a member for two years before you can be a foreman.” The agent said, “The two foreman come from me.” Thank you very much, the meeting is over. So you’re driven into a position where you start arguing among yourselves. It’s very unfortunate.

There is enough blame to be shared equally by all the trades. Some union leaders believe that coordinated organizing campaigns are the only way to overcome interunion bickering. Successful organizing, Griffin has said, “can only be accomplished through a unified program by building trades unions, not a single craft union.” Joe Power points out that the declining number of workers on construction projects makes this cooperation even more crucial. “The trade structure can’t last,” he argues. “I was on a six-story job with two carpenters, four ironworkers, one plumber, one heating guy, and two electricians. They can break you down forever with such few numbers.” The concept of industrial unionism in construction flies in the face of a century of craft unionism. Similar suggestions in the past have met with adamant opposition. But the time may have arrived, as Anthony Ramos, executive secretary-treasurer of the California State Council of Carpenters, recently suggested, for the building trades unions to “become one army instead of a bunch of battered regiments.”²⁸

The alternative is not promising. The inability to drop jurisdictional rivalries and approaches that were established in a more restrictive atmosphere makes any organizing almost impossible. Union officials acknowledge the current crisis, but still hold residual doubts about the wisdom of bringing more members into the union structure. Organizers who do not truly welcome new members but instead set strict rules under which newcomers may enter invariably alienate the very people they hope to organize. As a result, many unorganized workers reject even the best organizing approaches. The unions’ restrictive policies, Mike Harrington warned in 1973, are “making a bunch of union haters” out of those who were left out in the cold. Today’s nonunion workers often do not believe things have changed. As one nonunion apprentice commented bitterly during an abortive organizing drive aimed at a large Massachusetts electrical contractor, “They just want the work we’re doing. They don’t want us.”²⁹

Boston’s carpenters locals have each created a new full-time organizer slot in response to the open shop threat. Their main job is, according to Bob Marshall, “to hold on to what we have at the present time” rather than organize workers. They coordinate picket lines at nonunion sites and monitor open shop builders on prevailing rate jobs to ensure compliance. Their efforts have, in a number of cases, been successful in maintaining a strong union presence in Boston. The larger issue of organizing in Massachusetts and the nation as a whole has still not been addressed, however. Can the rising tide of the open shop be reversed or is it a permanent new fact of life in the construction industry? Bob Weatherbee believes that the basic nature of employer–employee relations will, at some point, dictate a need for unionism in the open shop sector. “Management will blow it themselves,” he suggests. “They create their own problems. They’ll push and push and push until there’ll be a rebellion.” Richard Croteau agrees but wonders if the unions’ present course will help or hinder that inevitable development.

It will not turn around because the unions are going to make it turn around. It’s going to happen the same way that it’s always happened. When the people who are working on the nonunion job finally say, “Hey, what we need here is a union.” That’s when it will turn around.

Working Lives/Union Life: Modern Times