New Tools, New Materials, New Methods
“When I joined the union in 1943,” Robert Thomas says, “the old-timers then were what I consider to be real true craftsmen. They were more or less used to working with their hands and their tools. It was a necessity. At that time they didn’t have all the sophisticated power machinery that they have today.”
Before World War II, hand labor dominated on-site construction. Door, window, and trim manufacture had long since passed to the factories, but carpenters still installed all the rough lumber and millwork with hand tools. Power equipment was available. In fact, from the time that Rudolph Diesel won a patent for the pressure-ignition internal combustion engine in 1893, gasoline-driven equipment had slowly made its way onto the job site. Hoisting rigs, air compressors, and primitive earthmoving machines took over arduous manual tasks and expanded the visions of designers and engineers. In its early stages of development, however, this equipment was bulky and inflexible and the prohibitive expense restricted it to larger building projects.
Bob Jubenville’s first job was on the Sunderland Bridge across the Connecticut River in 1936. Building bridges is a major endeavor; the jobs have long life-spans and involve large numbers of workers. As a result, road and bridge contractors benefit from investment in labor- and time-saving capital equipment. The Sunderland contractor chose to experiment with state-of-the-art machinery, purchasing a gas-driven table saw for the carpenters. Jubenville reports that the boss’s toy was a mixed blessing for the men who handled it. “They were dangerous. They had to be cranked up and the handles would come off sometimes. A guy broke his wrist because they’d kick back.”
Mitchel Mroz also started his career in heavy construction, working with concrete forms. “On the big jobs, they had standard mixers for concrete. A truck would come with two batches of sand and stone. Then you’d throw in your cement bags—six of them. You put in the water, mix it up, and you’d have a [cubic] yard of concrete. You’d start at seven in the morning and sometimes it was ten or eleven at night before you’d get home on a 100-yard pour. The old-timers used to mix it all by shovel and hand.”
The old days were not necessarily better; there was nothing glorious about concrete form work in the first third of the twentieth century. “Form work was all bull work. There weren’t any cranes to pick things up. You know what they say, you had to have a strong back and a weak mind.” A 1930 survey of the building industry by William Haber supported Mroz’s remarks. Professor Haber archly noted that “strength and moderate skill in the use of hammer and rule are all that are required [on form work].”1 In the late 1930s, trucks began carrying premixed concrete to the job, ending the fourteen-hour days of hand mixing. The trucks were small, handling 2, 3, 4, or 5 cubic yards of concrete at most. Since then, concrete manufacturers have learned to produce and transport larger batches. Today, dozens of 15-yard trucks regularly line up ready to deliver their load for poured-in-place highrise or highway projects.
Jubenville’s prewar encounter with a power saw was unusual. Most carpenters, from rough-form builder to finish man, relied exclusively on hand tools. The widespread introduction of portable electric power tools after the war transformed the carpenter’s day at work. The reciprocating saw, the drill, the power-actuated fastening gun, and above all, the circular saw (conventionally known by the brand name Skilsaw) forever changed how the carpenter cut, shaped, and fastened materials.
Many carpenters viewed the flurry of new tools with alarm. Still reeling from the calamitous Depression, few workers welcomed laborsaving innovations. Leo Coulombe admits that the Skilsaw made cutting easier, but he still worries, over thirty years later, that “it took work away from a lot of people.” The older men, in particular, resented the new saw and opposed its use. Joseph Emanuello points out that some carpenters went to great lengths to express their hostility. “One guy took the Skilsaw on the roof of the building and threw it off. He said, ‘The saw’s too fast, I’m going to cut by hand.’”
Others accepted more readily. Thomas praises the role of power tools in the trade. “They speed up the job and take a lot of hard labor out of it.” Paul Weiner agrees. “It’s very positive. Instead of breaking your back cutting fifty boards in one day, you can do the work in a few minutes.” Ernest Landry claims it was an adjustment, but he did get used to power tools and even learned to like them. Ultimately, he believes, the electric planes, drills, and saws “do a better job” than their manual counterparts.
In retrospect, it is hard to believe that the circular saw and electric drill, now such integral parts of the construction process, created such a controversy. Industrial workers had long since been forced to accept technological marvels that dwarfed the invention of the circular saw. At the same time as Joseph Emanuello’s friend was throwing his saw off the roof, for example, computer-controlled machines were driving oil refinery workers to unemployment lines.2 But the pace of technological change is a relative, not absolute, phenomenon. People respond to changes in their immediate environment, and carpenters had experienced no challenge on this scale to their work methods since the inception of factory-produced millwork in the late nineteenth century. Two, perhaps three generations of carpenters had learned their trade and passed it on with little change from one to the next. New and unfamiliar patterns cause fear. Leo Coulombe, Oscar Pratt, and many others of today’s retirees remember quite clearly that the older carpenters of the fifties were frightened by the Skilsaw. The early models had only marginal safety features and often proved dangerous in the hands of a first-time user. Chester Sewell saw a workmate almost cut his leg off, and a sufficient number of similar horror stories circulated among the older carpenters to reinforce the built-in reluctance to disrupt their culture of work.
“We couldn’t refuse to use them,” Pratt points out, “even though we could see they were going to knock the heck out of the trade.” But, he notes, they were expensive and that created another problem. Skilled workers took pride in their tool collections. “Every available carpentry tool that you could get, you’d have,” asserts Joseph Emanuello. The tool chest traveled to the job site with the carpenter. But with the prohibitive costs of early power tools, jobs would go only to the men who could afford the price if a contractor expected carpenters to supply them. The unions quickly recognized the potential dangers. As early as 1932, the Springfield District Council proposed fining union members $25 if they furnished electric hand-driven machinery to a contractor.3
By the time power tools inundated the field, the unions had successfully spelled out employer responsibility. Union by-laws contained provisions requiring employers to supply whatever power tools, levels over 30 inches, long ladders, sawhorses, and extension cords were used on the site. The occasional infractions only underscored the stakes involved. In 1964, a Chicopee contractor told a union business agent that the work of Donat Charpentier, member of Local 685, was unsatisfactory and tried to prove his point by referring to the superior speed of another union worker, Philador Lemay. Upon investigation, it became clear that Lemay’s superiority rested on his willingness to use his own truck, 4-foot level, and electric saber saw for company purposes. Lemay was found guilty of violating union rules and fined $25.4
The Skilsaw symbolized a loss of control and a new order, but it brought external changes as well. The traditional image of the nattily dressed carpenter whose white shirt and bow tie were covered by a pair of white overalls gradually disappeared. The overalls had served a dual purpose: they protected the layer of clothes underneath and held an astonishing array of hand tools in dozens of pockets and openings. The power tools made some of the hand tools obsolete or redundant, and the modern carpenter found he could carry all the tools and nails he needed in a simple apron or pouch.
The power tool invasion was accompanied by a host of new materials. Escalating wood costs meshed with shifting architectural tastes to simplify design and installation techniques. Oil-based products, like rubber baseboards and plastic casings, superseded complex wood moldings that had been fabricated on the job from multiple pieces of millwork. Plywood replaced tongue-and-groove boards in concrete forms, house sheathing, and sub-flooring. Asbestos and aluminum siding challenged the centuries-old exteriors of wood shingles and clapboard.
Heavily wood-framed multistory buildings, already virtual dinosaurs, completely disappeared. Concrete, the preferred medium for commercial construction, was not a wood product but its erection still required dozens of carpenters on a big job. The development of precast concrete—giant slabs of factory-made concrete shipped to the site—cut into the work load. John Greenland remembers the first time he saw a wall of precast concrete at the Howard Johnson’s in Boston’s Kenmore Square. “The framer came in, took a big goddamn side off the truck and put it up and in. It was amazing.” Like precast, the use of steel as a structural building block reduced the need for carpenters on the exterior frame.
Inside the buildings, walls were covered by sheetrock, a gypsum-based product produced in large rectangular panels. Sheetrock quickly became the industry standard, first in residential construction, then throughout the industry. A 1956 study by William Haber and Harold Levinson estimated that 95 percent of all new houses built in the 1930s contained a plaster finish on the interior walls. Plastering was a time-consuming process. Angelo DeCarlo, who worked on dozens of houses in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston in the twenties and thirties, suggests that finishing plaster walls regularly took two weeks for each unit. During the first week, carpenters nailed small strips of wood lath across every stud to hold the wet plaster; the following week, the plasterers took over, applying first the base and then the finish coat of plaster. On the other hand, sheetrock (or drywall, as it is also known) was installed in a matter of days, requiring only a few thin coats of joint compound or spackle before painting. By 1952, Haber and Levinson claimed that 50 to 60 percent of all new homes used drywall.5 Today, the plaster technique is reserved for restoration or specialty purposes.
Drywall is heavy work. Individual sheets weigh from 50 to 100 pounds depending on size and thickness. At a time when established carpenters had attained a measure of security with somewhat less demanding work, few of them jumped at the chance to learn the new branch of the craft. Contractors relished drywall because the standard sheet sizes (4′ × 8′, 4′ × 10′, 4′ × 12′) and the repetitive character of the work made the volume easy to measure. A trade based on speed, production quotas, and constant wrestling with heavy materials attracted few carpenters. The very makeup of the product—two layers of thin paper sandwiching crushed gypsum—only confirmed the distaste of men used to handling wood.
Nonetheless, sheetrock graced the walls of most new houses in the fifties and someone had to put it up. Harold Humphrey, who has worked with drywall ever since it became popular in the Northeast, says the vacuum was filled by a new influx of French Canadians. Initially, they came for a few months at a time, saved their earnings, and returned to Canada. Brothers, cousins, or groups of friends traveled together and worked as a team. After the framing carpenters had completed their work, the sheetrockers whipped through a house in a cloud of gypsum dust, paid either by lump sum or per piece of sheetrock. Eventually many of them settled in New Hampshire, Vermont, and sections of Massachusetts. Today, much of the drywall work in Massachusetts is installed by first-generation French-Canadian contractors and workers.
Humphrey says “the older American carpenters never got the knack of drywall. Since they thought it was too heavy, they were licked right there.” Ernest Landry admits that he held that view. He refused a job when told he was expected to “hang” 60 sheets a day. As a finish carpenter, he told the foreman, “That’s not for me.” Leo Bernique, who has spent much of his life on highly skilled finish work, contrasts two jobs he held in 1983. At Suffolk University, the work was careful and demanding and he loved it. On a job at Boston University, he worked in a sheetrock crew. “It was tedious,” he reports. “There was no challenge. You couldn’t breathe. You were just making a day’s pay.”
Humphrey thinks many carpenters have lived to regret their disdain for drywall. Metal studs have displaced wooden studs in the partition walls of commercial buildings and that framing system has been incorporated into the work of the sheetrocker. Over the years, drywall contractors have emerged as significant sources of employment for nonresidential as well as residential carpenters, crowding out other employers who work strictly with wood. Barney Walsh, business agent of Boston’s Local 67, estimates that drywall now accounts for a third of the total work in his area. A generation of drywallers has now perfected the installation methods, moving quickly with as little wasted motion or material as possible. All-round carpenters or those who are skilled in other parts of the craft have little chance of competing with a drywall specialist. Bernique acknowledges, “The French Canadians do it year round. You can’t beat them.”
Drywall may have been the biggest, but it was not the only sub-specialty of the trade to appear in the postwar years. “When I learned the trade,” notes Oscar Pratt, “I learned it from the footings to the last piece of finish that went on a building. Since the 1940s, the new materials started to break the trade down.” Bob Thomas thinks the push toward specialization intensified in the sixties. “You’d begin to see one man set door bucks, another put in cabinets, another put up acoustical ceilings, or lay floors.” The longer carpenters trained on a particular task, the more efficient they became. Contractors grew reluctant to lose speed with nonspecialists. “You do something long enough,” comments Thomas, “and you got to be clever at it.”
Bob Thomas By Nordel Gagnon
Richard Croteau thinks specialization has hurt the union. As the craft becomes an amalgam of sub-trades, the common thread of the carpenter’s identity is weakened. Many of the specialty contractors, especially in drywall, arrange to pay on a piecework basis. They skirt union regulations against piecework by issuing one check based on the union hourly rate plus a supplementary “bonus” check that covers the difference. Some of the fastest sheetrockers are able to take home well over $1,000 per week. With those earnings, even workers who carry a union book are unlikely to complain. And, as Croteau observes, the union cannot successfully police violations without cooperation from the members.
Ed Gallagher agrees that the splintering of the trade means carpenters “owe their allegiance to fewer people.” Many of the specialized skills, such as ceilings, floor laying, and drywall, are performed indoors. In a healthy economic climate, these workers can be employed fifty-two weeks out of the year. They rely less on the union to cushion seasonal layoffs and more on individual employers for a stable relationship at a piece rate. Specialization has, in effect, sharpened a chronic division in the industry between “company men” (those who identify their fortunes with a particular employer) and the bulk of working carpenters whose overlapping loyalties may include the union, various contractors, and an amorphous craft identity.
In an environment riddled with insecure employment opportunities, workers inevitably struggle to find stability. A common solution is to seek less lucrative but more reliable carpentry maintenance work in hospitals, schools, factories, or other large institutions. Others leave the construction industry altogether, settling into alternate occupations. For those who stay in the trades, hopes of stability are often tied to the search for a permanent employer. Ernest Landry worked for five years with the Salem-based Pitman & Brown. He recommends “hooking up with a contractor and staying with him. Every job he takes, you’re one of the men and you know what to do.”
In many cases, the goal is to find a “good” employer, that is, one who builds and retains a regular crew rather than constantly hiring and firing. Arthur Anctil built houses, schools, and churches for Witherall from 1923 to 1940. The business, he says, operated like “a family.” Anctil was elected to a number of union offices over several decades, and despite his strong identification with the union, he still refers to his former employer as “we.” Leo Coulombe had a similar experience in his fourteen years with Harry Thorley, a local New Bedford contractor. “He was one of the best, a gentleman. If you were sick, you never lost a day’s pay.”
A long-term relationship with a contractor is often viewed as recognition of competence and trade skill, especially if it leads to periodic stints as foreman or even superintendent. Yet the term “company man” has a decidedly pejorative ring. Though some craft knowledge is clearly indispensable in order to move from job to job, it is a common observation in the industry that hiring is done on the basis of “who you know, not what you know.” Extended ties to a contractor are often judged as excessive loyalty, insufficient independence, and an uncritical acceptance of company practices. Nor are these views necessarily the sour grapes of those who never “made it.” Joseph Emanuello worked for O’Connell for a number of years, but he is quick to point out that “I always considered myself a union man, never a company man.” Tom Phalen spent fourteen years with W. J. Hanley until the Fitchburg contractor ran out of work during World War II. After two years at Fort Devens, he chose not to return to Hanley so he would not “feel obligated or part of the family, because local contractors sometimes thought they owned you.”
Even carpenters like Landry who strongly favor finding a permanent employer caution against harboring illusions. “If you didn’t do exactly what a lot of contractors said,” he argues, “you’d get through at night. They used to hire twenty men in the morning and fire twenty-one at night.” Joseph Petitpas supports Landry’s contention. “Years ago, Coleman Brothers and them used to hire fifty guys in the morning, lay forty-nine off at night, hire fifty more the next morning, and lay forty-nine off at night until they got the crew they wanted. When the guy wasn’t producing, down the road he’d go. That’s why the union started saying, ‘Look, we’re giving you forty men and we’re not sending you another forty.’”
A 1960 Harvard University study of the Boston building trades demonstrates the hazards of “company man” aspirations. Though one-third of those employed had company connections, they were not necessarily regular employees. In fact, the survey of thirty-five general contractors (who hired laborers, bricklayers, and supervisory personnel as well as carpenters) showed that only three bothered to offer steady employment to as much as one-quarter of their annual labor force. And even those rare demonstrations of loyalty came from very small firms with total employment figures of eight, fifteen, and thirty. The larger contractors (the fifteen who employed a hundred or more workers a year) who dominated the industry were less reliable. Less than 6 percent of all their employees could be considered “company carpenters,” i.e., employed on a year-round basis.6
In the unionized sector of the industry, an alternative strategy was to be part of the union “in crowd.” Since many requests for manpower came through the union hall, active union members and friends of the business agent counted on relatively steady employment. Perhaps they worked for many different employers, but new job placements quickly followed layoffs. This quest for security also had its critics, convinced that jobs were won through friendship and political ties rather than merit or skill. Angelo DeCarlo worked for Abel Ecklov from 1917 to 1941 and had little use for the referral system. “They always had their favorites,” he comments. Al Valli agrees that business agents practiced favoritism, but is not as critical. “It’s only natural to take care of your friends,” he says. When he was unemployed, he would call his agent. “If he had a place to put me, I’d go and if he didn’t, I’d go find my own.”
The unions remain the most reliable sources of employment. A union card has been a requirement for carpenters on large-scale jobs in Boston for almost a century. That does not mean, however, that union hiring halls have supplied all the labor power. Barney Walsh says that his local refers 25 to 30 percent of the carpenters on union jobs in his jurisdiction today. According to Abraham Belitsky, author of the Harvard study, similar conditions prevailed twenty-five years ago. His survey of building employers indicated that one-third of their labor force came from union referrals, one-third from previous employment with the company or personal references from a foreman, and one-third were hired off the street at the job site.7 Oscar Pratt, former business agent of Brockton Local 624, claims that an increasing number of jobs have gone through the union hiring halls as the proportion of large contractors has grown. Bob Marshall, business agent of Boston Local 33, sometimes prefers to deal with national contractors exactly for that reason. “They’re in for a short period and get all their employees right from the hall.” Pratt says the locals have tried to discourage carpenters from finding their own work. The union allows individual solicitation, but he argues that the presence of job seekers on the site encourages employers to lay off their existing set of employees and institute the “revolving door” hire-and-fire policy.
Carpenters could always fall back on finding their own work. “I always got my own jobs,” claims Leo Coulombe. It was a matter of pride for him not to go through the union. The options varied from town to town and year to year. In the twenties, Enock Peterson recalls, “we had a business agent but there was no office. So you’d go out and get your own job.” Carpenters moved to where the jobs were, in or out of state. Travelers shared rented rooms and food expenses, hoping to get home to their families on the weekend. Croteau describes the classic method of finding work. “You’d get three or four guys together in a car, drive around watching for trucks with loads of lumber. Then you’d follow it to the job and ask for work.”
Construction is a notoriously unsentimental business. Despite the occasional accolade to the “good” employer, most carpenters today observe that “you’re just a number.” The loyalty that Anctil and Coulombe cite has waned with the succession of regional and national contractors over local employers. Local contractors shared communities with their employees. Criticisms affected their reputations and their ability to land contracts and find skilled workers. The Belitsky dissertation, published in the transitional year of 1960, concluded that local firms frequently “carried” men through slack periods. In contrast, national contractors hired and fired strictly on the basis of their needs.8
For several years, Bob Thomas worked for Grant, a small contracting company. “I never lost a minute of work. If things were slow, we’d sit in the office. It’s completely different with big outfits. You’re a name on the payroll. If you’re doing the job, fine. If you don’t, they’ll get somebody who will. That’s the way it is, from the top echelon all the way down the line.” Tom Harrington remembers when one of his father’s employers would visit the family on Sunday for home brew. “Contractors used to be close to the men. Now it’s big offices and big oak tables. The only time a man working outside knows who his big boss is is if he sees it on a sign or in a newspaper.” Ed Gallagher, business agent of Newton Local 275, says this trend has had an effect on relations with the union. “There used to be more personal contact. You’d know the owners on a first-name basis. Now the agent meets with the project manager to handle problems.”
The hunt for complete security in construction employment is futile. There is no informal tradition of job tenure, nor has any collective bargaining agreement ever included provisions for seniority. Construction is one of the few organized industries in which unions have never challenged the employer’s unilateral right to lay off without notice. Contractors regularly dismiss long-term employees for reasons as arbitrary and diverse as advancing years, declining health, injury, company reorganization, personality conflicts, or most commonly, lack of work. The various individual strategies to ward off the anguish of insecurity—union man, company man, or a protective demeanor of independence—are fragile reeds at best. With no institutionalized protections, carpenters have been forced to follow their own paths, knowing what slender threads their livelihood hangs on.