15

The Prudential Boom and Beyond

The 1950s had been good to union carpenters. From 1950 to 1960, wage hikes across the state ranged from 33 percent to 42 percent. Other building trades workers fared equally well, and in fact, successful contract negotiations in one trade often boosted expectations in another. In 1956, Boston carpenters went on strike after rejecting an Associated General Contractor (AGC) and Building Trades Employers Association (BTEA) offer of a 30-cent raise over two years. During the walkout, carpenters learned that Boston’s bricklayers had signed a one-year contract calling for a 25-cent raise. Refusing to be outdone, carpenters’ officials promptly adjusted their demands upward from a 35-cent to a 45-cent package over two years. A union spokesman declared: “We feel the difference between the carpenters and the bricklayers is large enough right now. We don’t intend to stand by and let the gap be widened any more.”¹ Rejecting offers of mediation from state officials, the union continued the strike until the employers relented, agreeing to a 40-cent raise.

Boston’s locals were not quite as successful in negotiations during the 1958 recession. Despite employer warnings that they would use rising joblessness (almost three thousand Massachusetts construction workers had exhausted their unemployment benefits) to hold the line on wages, union members voted 4 to 1 to authorize a strike for a 50-cent package over two years. On May 12, sixty-five hundred carpenters walked off $100 million worth of construction projects. After twenty-one days and the intervention of International officers and federal and state mediators, the union settled for a 40-cent increase over three years.²

Before the war, bargaining a contract had been fairly uncomplicated. “Back then, all it amounted to was wages,” says Carl Bathelt. “You didn’t even need an agreement.” In fact, there were no written contracts in many of the state’s smaller towns. In the 1942 State Council’s booklet of wage scales, only half of the thirty-eight local unions and district councils indicated that they had written agreements. Seven areas had oral understandings and the remaining twelve set their wage rates without an agreement of any kind. Contractors haggled with union representatives, but a handshake at the end of the sessions was enough to govern the coming year’s labor relations. As late as 1956, locals in Attleboro, Clinton, Franklin, Lawrence, Northampton, and Westboro operated without bothering to sign a piece of paper. Even when they were recorded, the agreements were simple. “When I took over as BA in 1954,” says Thomas Phalen of Fitchburg Local 48, “the contracts were one page long, and everything was on one side of the paper.”

Once the unions began to expand their negotiating agendas, the system of informal agreements was obsolete. “Before then, you got your wages, period,” comments John Greenland. “Then we started to get more social benefits.” Following the lead of the needle trades and miners unions, building trades officials called on employers to establish funds for illness and retirement benefits. In 1948, the Boston locals of sheet metal workers, asbestos workers, roofers, and electrical workers established health and welfare funds. In Springfield, the operating-engineers union negotiated a similar fund the following year. Ernest Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Metropolitan Boston, labeled these funds “one of the greatest union gains in many years.”³

In 1950, negotiators for the carpenters proposed a health and welfare fund and a pension fund to the AGC and BTEA. The contractors firmly rejected the ideas, arguing that construction workers moved too freely from one employer to another and in and out of the industry to make such agreements feasible. Phil Conte, who has participated in decades of bargaining sessions as an employer representative, remembers the initial reaction as “absolute terror and anger.” As chairman of a committee on the proposal, Conte disagreed with his fellow employers, suggesting it was “not a wild dream of the unions.” Most of the contractors, he remembers, took a narrower view, claiming that the funds were “not necessary to put up a building.” The proposal was set aside for further discussion.

In 1952, the Springfield District Council of Carpenters and the Northern Massachusetts District Council (representing the Fitchburg-Leominster area) signed agreements with their employers for 7-1/2-cent hourly contributions to a health and welfare fund to be administered by a joint union-management board of trustees. In their negotiations, the Northern Massachusetts Council also won an employer-financed vacation fund. In 1955, the Boston District Council, Brockton, Fall River, Newton, Middlesex District Council, and the Norfolk County District Council joined the pioneers with their own health and welfare programs. Ten years later, every local in Massachusetts belonged to one of the state’s twelve funds. The Boston fund opened with a $300 life insurance benefit, a $10 daily hospital room allowance, a $600 surgical fee, and an $80 maternity benefit. Since then benefits have risen with hospital costs and now include dental programs and the services of a vision and diagnostic center in Cambridge.

By 1962, eighteen of the state’s twenty-eight agreements included a pension fund as well. Tom Harrington was on the negotiating committee of pile drivers Local 56 that year. Winning the pensions took “a hell of a big fight,” he says. “The contractors called us socialists and communists.” Oscar Pratt negotiated for the Brockton local. “There wasn’t an employer who didn’t fight anything of that kind,” he reports. The Brockton contractors accepted the proposal only when they realized they could deduct their fund contributions as business expenses. New Bedford carpenters paid a steeper price, striking for two months before agreeing to forgo a wage raise in exchange for the funds.

Contracts also incorporated language that gave carpenters greater control over the pace and quality of their work. Nowhere has the tension between the contractor’s goal of maximized production and the carpenter’s desire for craft pride exploded more intensely than in the age-old conflict over speed and rest breaks. In the old days, Richard Croteau observes, many contractors would not hire carpenters who smoked pipes because lighting and relighting the tobacco took too long. Bob Weatherbee’s memories are similar. “When I came in, we were like dogs. If you lit a cigarette, you were fired.” A cup of coffee provoked the same response. “If you brought your own,” says Joseph Emanuello, “you had to sneak it. You’d get fired if you were caught.”

The demand for a coffee break turned into a struggle to preserve the workers’ dignity. Tom Harrington describes the lengths to which carpenters went before coffee breaks were accepted as part of the daily routine. “You had to sneak it,” he says. “A laborer would get it. You’d get behind something, drink your coffee down, scald your mouth, dig a hole, and bury your cup.” Union negotiators found winning a coffee break to be as tough as any issue they had fought for. “We had one devil of a time to get it in the contract,” Harrington continues. “The contractors would say, ‘Nothing doing, nothing doing.’ They wouldn’t have it. When we finally won it, business agents had to go around en masse to make sure we actually got it.”

The 1958 agreements included a five-minute morning coffee break for the first time. Contracts from this period include long-standing as well as recently bargained job practices. Travel pay, show-up pay, and double pay for overtime protected the wage standards; employer responsibility for sharpening tools protected the handsaw dulled by concrete form work; and drinking water and toilet facilities protected the comfort of the carpenter. Enforcement of these provisions, especially working conditions, has proved to be another matter, but the contracts of the fifties ushered in a new set of expectations for union carpenters.

“Since the 1880’s,” writes Steven Miller, “Boston’s manufacturing story had been one of uneven, relentless decline. . . . Heavy industry always had been located outside of the capital city, first in the satellite cities of Lowell and Lynn, and later in other parts of the country and the world. The port was strangled with the emergence of New York as the major east coast shipping center, and was dead by the turn of the century. Even the small industries that grew on the easily exploited Irish labor force after the Civil War died or moved out.”⁴

The city retained enormous wealth and resources, particularly in financial and educational fields, but the region’s Brahmin elite had blocked substantial capital investment in Boston for decades. The rise of the Irish political machine, symbolized by the legendary James Michael Curley, had provoked the undying hostility of the city’s former political rulers. While construction in many American cities picked up in the late 1930s, “the negative attitude of the Yankee-dominated insurance industry was so fervent that no mortgages on buildings in Irish-dominated Boston were granted.”⁵

Curley’s political downfall in 1949 was engineered, in part, by a group of professionals and business executives who called themselves the New Boston Committee. Ten years later, attorney Charles Coolidge and banker Ralph Lowell initiated an even more aggressive business posture. Not content to defeat enemies, Coolidge and Lowell formed the “Vault,” a publicity-shy organization of top business leaders, to reassert corporate influence over the city’s political future. With Vault support, John Collins was elected mayor of Boston in 1959 and quickly moved to involve the business community in city affairs. Mayor Collins, along with Coolidge, recruited New Haven city planner Edward Logue to administer the newly established Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and oversee the physical transformation of downtown and the renaissance of the city as a financial center.

The first landmark of the Collins-Logue administration was the Prudential Center, built on top of the former switching yard for the Boston and Albany Railroad in Back Bay. The design of the 750-foot tower introduced a new scale of construction activity to Boston. A total of 660,000 bags of cement were poured into the Prudential foundations and 60 million pounds of structural steel were fastened with 400,000 high-strength bolts.⁶ Bob Thomas, along with most of his contemporaries, thinks the Pru marked a watershed in Boston’s building history. “It made a vast difference in the trades,” he insists. According to Thomas, there were at least three thousand union carpenters working in the downtown Boston area at the time. Local 33, with a membership averaging just over six hundred in the fifties, was overwhelmed by the boom. Cliff Bennett, business agent from 1958 to 1973, reports that he called unions across New England and ultimately welcomed hundreds of men from across the border in Newfoundland in order to supply the Prudential’s ravenous appetite for carpenters.

From 1958 to 1959 (the year of the Prudential’s ground breaking), the value of new office building leaped from $16 million to $68 million in Boston.⁷ Construction workers streamed into the city in search of work. They found jobs in every corner of the downtown area as the boom continued into the 1960s. The city’s skyline moved ever higher. The Prudential was followed by the 60-acre Government Center on the sites of Scollay and Bowdoin squares, along with a barrage of banks, offices, and hospital buildings.

The unprecedented demand for labor encouraged the unions to call for large wage increases. Union officials held out threats of work stoppages willingly, knowing that contractors were reluctant to interrupt mounting business activity. Only a fifteen-hour marathon bargaining session averted a strike in 1963, as the AGC and BTEA agreed to a $1.05 package in exchange for five years of labor peace. In 1969, thousands of carpenters throughout eastern Massachusetts walked off $1 billion worth of construction projects. After forty-four days, negotiators agreed on a three-year contract that promised $8.80 in wages and fringe benefits by 1971. When the politicians had gathered for ground-breaking ceremonies at the Prudential site, Boston carpenters grossed $136 a week. In the 1969 settlement, after a decade of continuous building, the final raise brought their weekly paycheck (including benefits) to $352.

The redevelopment of Boston triggered building across the state. From the roadways of the Massachusetts Turnpike to the buildings of the University of Massachusetts campus, construction workers reshaped the physical appearance of the commonwealth. From 1961 to 1972, the construction labor force in Massachusetts grew by almost twenty-six thousand. In the first half of the decade, the rate of construction growth exceeded the national average and the pace only accelerated in the second half. From 1967 to 1972, building employers in the state raised their revenues 79 percent, up to $4-1/2 billion.⁸

Carpenters look back fondly on the boom-time spirit of the 1960s. It was one of those rare periods when individual workers held the upper hand as employers competed for a limited pool of skilled labor. Supervisors often looked the other way at a slip-up, a mistake, a curse hurled at a foreman, or other actions once considered certain grounds for immediate discharge. Lay-off day, usually a source of dread and anxiety, turned into just another working day. A telephone call to the union hall or a former employer almost certainly produced another job assignment. By 1969, construction unemployment had dropped to 5 percent nationwide, the lowest point in twenty years.⁹

Quitting a job before its completion, previously unthinkable, became an option as men hunted overtime pay and better working conditions. “If a foreman looked at you cross-eyed,” says one older carpenter, “you’d pick up your tools and go to another job down the street.” For the first time, workers were able to choose jobs based on desirability, not just availability. Mitchel Mroz was one of hundreds of carpenters who worked at the giant Turners Falls Dam project in the western part of the state. “The Dam couldn’t get enough help, so they went on a ten-hour day, five days a week. Then guys would hear about it and they’d leave their other job to make more money. Then another contractor would put more hours on, and guys were jumping around from job to job. If they could make more, they’d quit and move on.”

The experience in Massachusetts reflected the national surge in the fortunes of construction workers. Wages and prices were rising in the inflationary Vietnam years, but none more quickly than in the building industry. By 1970, construction settlements were running at an average of 15 to 18 percent a year, while manufacturing agreements were jumping at no more than half that rate.¹⁰ Contractors were thriving as well. Bankruptcies, always a chronic problem in the volatile industry, hit a fourteen-year low in 1969, and total construction earnings climbed each year to a record peak in 1973.¹¹

There had always been voices of doom in the midst of the general contentment. Warnings of impending crisis stemming from a contracting labor force and expanding demand had been sounded for years. The low birthrate of the Depression years created a dip in the population of adults available for all industries in the fifties and sixties, and construction had been particularly hard hit. With increasing postwar employment opportunities, fewer new entries into the labor force were attracted to the demanding and insecure world of construction. Younger tradesmen were not replacing the retiring ones in sufficient numbers. As a result, there was a proportionately higher number of construction workers aged forty-five to sixty-five than in other industries.¹²

When a 1966 federal study forecast a need for 670,000 new construction workers in the upcoming decade, alarms rang in every corner of the industry. Engineering News-Record, the industry’s trade journal, instituted a regular survey of labor shortages by trade and city. Large contractors, labor relations consultants, government policymakers, and major industrialists with large capital commitments in construction projects predicted spiraling building costs. Construction spokesmen inaugurated a campaign saddling the building trades unions and their restrictive admissions procedures with responsibility for the manpower crunch. They accused the unions of taking unfair advantage of labor shortages and argued that the resulting pressure on wages was producing a new unproductive atmosphere on the job site. A Detroit builder dusted off the old saw connecting productivity and low pay, claiming there was “an inverse ratio between the amount of wages paid and the will to work.”¹³

The rhetoric quickly escalated. Editorial writers pointed the finger of blame at the unions not only for labor shortages, but for all outstanding problems in labor relations. In 1966, construction management consultant John Garvin set forth a program to “reform” collective bargaining arrangements and “eliminate the present imbalance of power” favorable to labor. Garvin proposed regional negotiations to strengthen the hand of scattered local contractors, the elimination of union rules prohibiting new technology, and the replacement of union hiring halls with employer-controlled data banks of workers.¹⁴

Journalists picked up the drumbeat. A Fortune article by Thomas O’Hanlon titled “The Unchecked Power of the Building Trades” attributed rising costs to the “murderous bargaining strength . . . [of] the most powerful oligopoly in the American economy” and its “stranglehold on construction.” O’Hanlon’s remedies paralleled Garvin’s. He suggested that a traumatic confrontation with the unions would be necessary “if the industry is to become rationalized.” The Wall Street Journal and other business publications also endorsed Garvin’s ideas and called for quick action.¹⁵

In 1970, the Bureau of National Affairs published a book by M. R. Lefkoe, a business consultant on the payroll of several large construction firms. Lefkoe’s work, The Crisis in Construction: There Is an Answer, recited the by then standard litany of complaints but went on to address the heart of employer concerns, the fear of loss of management control. Lefkoe recognized that construction workers had used promising economic conditions to win a measure of control and autonomy over daily life on the job. This, more than any other, was the issue that disturbed construction management. “Skilled craftsmen,” he wrote, “knowing that they are so much in demand that they can always find work, have no qualms about not reporting for work whenever they please, or leaving one job for another if they don’t like their working conditions or anything else about a job.”¹⁶

According to Lefkoe, contractors had effectively relinquished authority to the unions over matters as diverse and important as the regulation of the labor supply, job assignments, output quotas, crew sizes, and the introduction of labor-saving machinery and prefabricated materials. “As long as contractors continue to accept the theory that the jobs they create belong to the men they employ to fill them (and to the unions that represent those men),” he continued, there would be little hope for a return to the proper managerial role.

Contractors publicly paraded their “helpfulness” in an effort to pin responsibility for mounting building costs on the unions. After settling a sizable wage package, Frank White, executive vice-president of the Connecticut chapter of the AGC, described the bargaining process: “They demand, we give, and they take.” Long strikes failed to moderate union demands as individual contractors inevitably broke with employer associations, rehiring workers on the basis of national or interim local agreements. Tradesmen often found work with contractors eager to get a leg up on their idled competitors. Workers therefore patiently bided their time until the recalcitrant builders were forced to give in. “We didn’t negotiate,” complained a Miami member of the AGC. “We pleaded. With an excess of construction activity and a serious shortage of manpower, too many builders didn’t care what they were paying.”¹⁷

The contractors’ laments failed to shift responsibility. In fact, the opposite occurred. Critics outside the industry simply added another target to their broadsides. “Chaos in the Construction Industry,” a 1969 report from the National Association of Manufacturers, assailed the twin problems of “the excessive, collective economic strength of the construction unions and the reciprocal lack of bargaining power of contractors and contractor associations.”¹⁸ In his book, Lefkoe had warned that “if companies from within the industry fail to take appropriate action,” someone else would. As a spokesman for a group of large builders, Lefkoe’s recommendations revolved around expanding the functions of contractors. Other forces in construction, however, had made it clear that they were skeptical of contractor ability to rein in the unions.¹⁹

Preliminary actions had already been taken. At a national conference on construction problems, Winton Blount, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, described labor conditions as “chaotic and unbelievable, completely out of hand.” He placed equal blame on the unions and on a decentralized management that simply passed increased labor costs on to customers.²⁰ Blount, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other industrialists questioned contractor interest in slowing union wage demands. While sympathetic to contractor concerns of managerial control, they first wanted brakes on their mounting construction bills.

In 1969, Roger Blough, one-time chairman of U. S. Steel, formed the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable to monitor and intervene in the building industry. The original policy committee of the Roundtable (renamed the Business Roundtable in 1972) included the chief executive officers of General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Union Carbide, AT&T, and Kennecott Copper. Since then, the organization has come to include some two hundred of the nation’s top chief executive officers whose companies spend an estimated $100 billion on capital projects. The formation of the Roundtable altered the terms of the discussion as a new set of players moved to wield their considerable influence. It was the most dramatic and organized entry of powerful construction clients into the workings of the industry since Boston’s “gentlemen engaged in building” locked out the city’s carpenters in 1825.

These modern-day gentlemen alternately expressed concern and contempt for their building employer brethren. Ready to find common cause against the unions, the Roundtable leaders were not, however, prepared to accept contractors as equals in wealth, power, stature, and above all, management sophistication. Initial Roundtable policy statements continually harped on construction’s underdeveloped state, describing it as “differ[ing] in important respects from conventionally structured industry, where management manages.” Their first report rejected the “peace at any price” approach, sternly lecturing weak-kneed contractors: “There is no substitute for firmness in collective bargaining.” They chastised builders for using overtime to attract labor, arguing that regularly scheduled overtime magnified labor shortages, reduced labor productivity, and created excessive inflation. They attacked the union hiring hall system, concluding that any benefits were outweighed by “badly handicapping the ability of the contractor to manage his work force.” Reforming the referral system was a hopeless task, the report stated. Like Garvin, Lefkoe, and others, the Roundtable advocated an employer-developed data bank of craftsmen. “Such a system would represent a long step in the direction of restoring to construction industry employers the control of the recruiting and hiring process that employers in other industries traditionally exercise.”²¹

The Roundtable’s authors called for the destruction of customary standard wage-skill structures and the development of new categories of multiskilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers. Contractors, they charged, have blindly accepted archaic trade practices and union-defined craft jurisdictions, thus granting, in effect, “management-approved status.” Without the restoration of genuine managerial authority in hiring, training, output, pay scales, discipline, and supervision, the report concluded, the union hiring hall would continue to “very substantially usurp the employer role normally reserved to management in other industries.”²²

The first Roundtable report, released in 1974, kicked off a $1.4-million study of the industry. Though this massive volume of paper recommendations carries no binding weight, it has been and is being used effectively as an organizing tool. In December of 1982, Roundtable chairman Charles Brown (formerly of Du Pont) convened a meeting of the fifty largest contractor associations to open the operational phase of the report. Brown told the assembled builders that contractor-owner cooperation was the key to thorough reform. If they were “only moderately successful” at implementing the suggested changes, he predicted the industry could save $10 billion annually.²³ The Roundtable proposals have clearly emerged as the guidepost for governmental construction policy and the industry’s collective bargaining sessions.

The national building trades unions, somewhat awed by the Roundtable’s collective influence, have treated the powerful organization gingerly. Joseph Maloney, secretary-treasurer of the AFL–CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, described the unions’ accommodating stance to a 1984 Roundtable conference. “I submit that we responded not at the speed of a glacier,” Maloney said defensively, “but by making more changes in local labor agreements than were made in the previous 80 years.” Union leaders occasionally blast Roundtable antiunionism for the benefit of the rank and file. On a day-to-day basis, however, every national union has accepted the Roundtable framework. The much ballyhooed National Market Recovery Program, issued jointly by the AFL–CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) and the National Construction Employers Council, is little more than a point-by-point response to Roundtable recommendations. The two hundred chief executive officers have accomplished many of their goals. They have succeeded in frightening many union leaders, muting adversarial relations, and setting the tone for the present-day agenda in construction labor relations. “The change in attitude,” claims Daniel Kuise, director of collective bargaining services for the AGC, “has been phenomenal.”²⁴