19

Who Will Build the Future?

In 1895, a civil engineer named Sanford E. Thompson was hired to develop a method of timing the movements of construction workers in order to improve their efficiency. Thompson designed and patented a “watchbook” (a thick notebook concealing two or three stopwatches) in order to perform his duties “without the knowledge of the workman who is being observed.” The young engineer vehemently denied that his invention involved any deception. “There are many cases,” he explained, “in which telling the workman that he is being timed in a minute way would only result in a row and in defeating the whole object of the timing.”¹ After seventeen years of secretive observation, Thompson had refined his system to the point where he was able to publish his data in a massive volume entitled Concrete Costs (1912).

In the book, Thompson restricted his attention to the growing application of concrete as a structural material. He released the results of his studies of carpenters building concrete forms. Table 162—“Making Column, Beam, Girder, Slab, and Wall Forms on Bench Ready to Put Together”—broke down this operation into no fewer than fifty-nine separate motions. Some of the steps took as little as one or two seconds (carrying 1 × 2 cleats 50 feet); some took as long as sixteen minutes (“average men” making 4 x 4 bolted clamps by hand). Table 163 divided the slightly more complex “Assembling and Erecting Column Forms” into seventy steps. For those who may have questioned Thompson’s figures, a little note at the top of each chart assured readers that there was “no allowance made for rests and delays.” This “scientifically precise” measurement of worker activities was, in Thompson’s mind, a precondition to redesigning work habits more efficiently. After all, he noted, a similar time-and-motion study of bricklaying had resulted in the reduction of individual movements required to lay a single brick from eighteen to five.²

Thompson’s original employer and mentor, and coauthor of Concrete Costs, was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the “father of scientific management.” Taylor was the man who had elevated the stopwatch to a symbol of an all-encompassing philosophy and dedicated his life to revolutionizing American industrial management practices. Descended from a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor had temporarily left behind his privileged world in 1878 to enter the Midvale Steel Company workforce at the age of twenty-two. Beginning as a laborer, he rapidly rose to supervisory positions, all the while studying and monitoring company machinists. On-site education completed, he left the mill in 1890 to preach his managerial doctrines full-time for the next twenty-five years.

Taylor accepted labor radical “Big Bill” Haywood’s formulation that “the manager’s brains are under the workman’s cap” in turn-of-the-century American shops and factories. Unlike Haywood, Taylor found that condition intolerable. He believed that excessive worker craft knowledge undermined the efficient operation of an enterprise. For industrial capitalism to perform most effectively, he argued, managers needed to have a monopoly on managerial functions. The route to complete control lay in removing all decision-making responsibility from workers and reducing their role to unthinking agents of company-defined rules and laws. In Taylor’s model factory, managers designed the work and delivered the orders; workers numbly carried them out. Taylorism was, according to Harry Braverman, nothing less than “a means for management to achieve control of the actual mode of performance of every labor activity, from the simplest to the most complicated.”³

Thompson was Taylor’s choice to extend these theories to the world of the building trades. Concrete Costs was meant to be just the first in an extended series on construction, but Taylor’s death in 1915 cut the joint project short. The premises of the book they did finish, however, indicate what they had planned. The authors relentlessly criticized inept contractor practices. Labor cost estimating was guesswork, they charged, and foremen did not manage. They proposed dividing supervisory duties into seven separate positions: job designer, materials routing clerk, cost and time clerk, inspector, repair boss, instruction card man, and gang boss or foreman proper. The final two roles were the critical ones. Workers needed detailed “instruction cards,” which told them not only what to do, but how to do it. “The workmen are relieved of their duties of laying out their work,” they wrote, “and of deciding just how they shall do it.”⁴

For builders anxious to convert to Taylorism, the authors emphasized the importance of separating workers during the transition period. “If more than one man or one gang is started at once, there is apt to be trouble,” they warned. “They will talk the matter over and figure out grievances, instead of going at the job in earnest, and may refuse to work.” If physical separation was impossible, Taylor and Thompson recommended firing any workers who were “holding back the rest of the gang.” Once harmony had been established, an employer was ready to institute the Taylor utopia of building.

The carpenters should be divided into small gangs, usually consisting of 1 or 2 men each. Each gang should repeat the same work over and over. They may: lay out the work; make one kind of form unit repeatedly; set columns; brace columns; set posts; set girders; attach end of girders to columns; set beams; attach end of beams; and so on.⁵

Taylor believed that the centerpiece of scientific management was the definition of the “task.” Once each fragment of a worker’s activity had been minutely examined, dissected, and recorded, the brains under the workmen’s caps could be discarded. That was the beauty of the time-and-motion study. Properly applied results, argued Taylor, automatically granted total authority to the manager. He advocated wage systems that meshed with his overall aproach. Hourly pay clearly provided little incentive for increased production. The old system of piece rates, negotiated between worker and employer, left too much power over pace in the hands of the workers. Taylor therefore called for payment based on the task. That is, foremen were advised to determine how long each particular task should take and fix a price accordingly, with no worker input.

Taylor often claimed that he did not oppose the concept of unionism, but most early twentieth-century American trade unionists clearly understood the implications of scientific management. For a number of years before, during, and after World War I, a virtual state of war existed between industrial workers and the invading hordes of stopwatch-toting Taylor disciples. Scientific management undermined the heart of worker self-respect and the ability to wield power at the workplace. As John Frey, editor of the International Molders’ Union Journal, told a commission investigating the application of scientific management, “The greatest blow that could be delivered against unionism and the organized workers would be the separation of craft knowledge from craft skill.” Frey went on,

The really essential element in [workers’ craftsmanship] is not manual skill and dexterity, but something stored up in the mind of the worker. This something is partly the intimate knowledge of the character and usage of the tools, materials, and processes of the craft which . . . has enabled the workers to organize and force better terms from the employers.⁶

The pay system Taylor proposed contradicted one of the fundamental principles of building trades unionism. Among the most important trade evils that had given birth to the UBCJA were piecework, lumping, and any other method of payment that rewarded carpenters on the basis of tasks performed or individual worker competency. The Brotherhood had formalized its opposition to such wage systems in its constitution: “We are opposed to any system of grading wages in the local unions, as we deem the same demoralizing to the trade, and a further incentive to reckless competition.”⁷ The installation of Taylor’s obsessive specialization by task would have produced a highly stratified and divided construction labor force in which each worker would receive a distinct rate of pay. In the eyes of union carpenters, this was piecework carried to its logical extreme, the destruction of craft integrity, and a deathblow to worker influence over wage rates.

On the national and local level, Brotherhood leaders insisted on a standard hourly wage scale in all negotiations. The rate was understood to be a minimum. Employers who chose to pay more to foremen and lead men were free to do so, but they were required to pay every other carpenter a uniform amount. Taylor had always contended that scientific management benefited workers as well as employers by boosting wages through the removal of wasteful and unproductive working habits. Few craftsmen bought that argument. Union members pointed out that task-oriented pay rates forced higher output, increased physical danger, and ultimately lowered rather than raised wages since employers could unilaterally alter the rate at any time. As one student of the building trades wrote in 1912 after interviewing construction union members, “This opposition to a system of payment . . . has its origins in the fear that payment by the piece will result in the gradual reduction of the piece wage, and that in the end the fast worker will receive no more than he formerly obtained on a time wage, while the slower workman will receive considerably less.”⁸

Perhaps most important, unionists objected to piece rates because they promoted self-advancement at the expense of fellow workers, undercutting bonds of unionism. For this reason, the Brotherhood resisted the notion of helpers and other semiskilled categories and stuck to an arrangement of standard-waged journeymen and regulated apprentices. In an early issue of the Carpenter, Peter McGuire emphasized the connection between pay systems and collective union consciousness.

Piece work has a tendency to make men selfish and to give to a few who are content to work early and late, a chance to monopolize the trade to the exclusion of better men, who while recognizing the necessity of industry, are yet unwilling to sacrifice their physical vigor by such abject slavishness to gain.⁹

In one form or another, scientific management finally swept through the nation’s mass production industries. Mechanization of traditional craft skills and the introduction of the assembly line allowed manufacturing employers the freedom to institute many of Taylor’s precepts if not his entire system. Construction, however, remained largely immune to his prescriptions. Unionized areas had firmly established the uniform rate and severely limited piecework by World War I. The decentralized industry, the lack of a uniform product, the persistent demand for high levels of skill, and the ability of unions to enforce work rules prevented Taylorism from taking hold. Writing in 1930, industrial relations scholar William Haber maintained that the implementation of scientific management depended on accurate indices of productivity. The construction process and product was simply too fluid, he insisted, for reliable and constant measurements. “The nature of building operations does not permit the ready introduction of methods used in housed industries,” Haber concluded.¹⁰

The underlying themes of modern management philosophy were never far from the surface, however. Building employers of the American Plan era used the language of scientific management to justify their open shop drives of the 1920s. That language and those themes have remained remarkably consistent up to the present day. In 1921, A. Perley Ayer of nonunion Aberthaw Construction told the Boston Chamber of Commerce hearings that, since his company was not bound by a union contract, Aberthaw averaged four lower-paid helpers for every five carpenters they employed. “It is a proposition,” he testified, “of using a man for a job who is sufficiently good for the job and no better.”¹¹ No clearer statement of the modern open shop system has ever been articulated by an ABC spokesman. Similarly, Stephen Tocco’s remarks in 1985 echo the sentiments of those who came before him. According to the Yankee chapter’s executive director, “When you have a foreman in the same union as the men, you have very little management control over the job.” That very union rule sparked Boston’s earlier builders to undertake the 1921–22 open shop campaign. The more things change, the more they stay the same. American contractors, from the Boston Master Builders Association to Business Roundtable devotees, have continually framed their disputes with the building trades unions in terms of the fundamental right to manage.

The difference between 1985 and 1925, or even 1885, is that today’s building employers have successfully broken through the industry’s structural barriers to “rationalization” and “modernization.” They have begun a process of redesigning the nature of work in construction that perpetually eluded their frustrated predecessors. ABC contractors have triumphantly introduced organizational measures that American Plan builders only dreamed of. Apparently, Taylor’s and Thompson’s efforts were not in vain. Current open shop builders have swallowed some of the trappings of scientific management hook, line, and sinker. Open shop Brown & Root, the country’s sixth-largest contractor, introduced efficiency experts and time-and-motion studies to their operations in 1980. The giant Houston-based firm, with almost $4 billion in contracts in 1984, used time-lapse photography to film the erection of twenty-four concrete columns. In nationwide advertisements, they explained how their “flexible open shop policy” allowed them to “make immediate changes in work assignments, material handling, and supervision to gain maximum benefits from our research.”

Experts analyzed the film, breaking down the job into a series of timed operations . . . When we asked crew members for suggestions on how to get the job done faster, they came up with eight ideas, including reducing the crew from four to three members. . . . The result: a second column, was completed in five, instead of seven, hours, indicating a potential saving of 312 manhours for the column erection operation.¹²

The reorganization of construction work is by no means restricted to the open shop sector. Specialization is rampant in the union sector. The division of labor has reached new heights. Much of the modern carpenter’s job is now concentrated in interior work, since basic structural carpentry has either declined in duration with the flying-form system or disappeared altogether with the use of structural steel. Taylor’s and Thompson’s description of an optimal “gang” has been matched and superseded by today’s large-scale framing and drywall operations. Typically, within one such contractor’s crew, one carpenter will lay out exclusively, another will pin metal track to the lay-out lines on the concrete floors and ceilings, another will cut and install metal studs in the tracks, another will secure preassembled metal door and window frames, several more will attach the sheetrock, yet another will insulate the walls, and on and on. Finish crews operate in the same fashion. Their work is broken down so that different carpenters hang the doors, attach the prefabricated cabinets, fasten the hardware, etc. Whether consciously or not, today’s builders have followed the lines laid down by Taylor and Thompson in 1912: “The principle is to get each man accustomed to and expert in his work, to give each man a definite thing to do, and finally to let each man feel that he must work steadily in order to keep up with the gang ahead of him or out of the way of the gang behind.”¹³

Despite the similarities between the union and nonunion sectors in the 1980s, there remain important differences. Tasks have been differentiated and defined—just as Taylor proposed—throughout the industry. But each specialized union carpenter (with the exception of apprentices or under-the-table pieceworkers) receives the identical union wage. And for all the work rule concessions of the past fifteen years, union regulations governing foremen’s union membership, overtime, jurisdictional boundaries, the union hiring hall, journeymen–apprentice ratios, on-site safety, and the closed shop are still intact. These and other union rules have buffered the relationship of the union carpenter and his/her employer for a century. They have stood the test of time, serving as the central battleground for control of the construction site.

Unionism in the building trades also represents something intangible that transcends the legalese of contract language. The feeling of solidarity can not be seen or touched, but it is part of the distinction between workers’ experiences in the two sectors of the industry. It has served as the foundation of the union carpenter’s culture of cooperation and his unchanging commitment to the principle of a uniform wage. In the 1980s, the notion of “solidarity” often has a hollow ring to it, a tired word conveniently trotted out on ceremonial occasions for rhetorical rather than substantive purposes. Nonetheless, the tattered concept still carries weight for Massachusetts’ union carpenters, young and old alike. “People feel like they’re in something together,” observes Michael Weinstein. “People use the word ‘brother’ a lot and it means something. It’s not a joke. It’s meaningful.” The Brotherhood has seen, at its best, a community of shared values. Like any community, members must hold to their common vision or step outside. “In the old days,” recalls Richard Croteau, “if a carpenter worked a nonunion job, he wasn’t just fined. The rest of the members looked down on him and ostracized him.” Or as Leo Coulombe put it bluntly, “I’ve been a union member all my life. I don’t want to be a scab now.”

Those sentiments stand in sharp contrast to the professed ideology of the ABC. Open shop spokesmen unapologetically equate their “merit” system with an American tradition of individualism. The stratified wages presumably separate the wheat from the chaff, providing a chance for those who are aggressively ambitious to take the opportunity and run. The advancement of one is achieved at the expense of another. The cultures of cooperation and individualism have often been suspended in a state of tension in the unionized wing of construction, but in today’s nonunion building environment, the two cultures have been clearly separated and one completely discarded. “Personally, I could never be in a union, “remarks Stephen Tocco candidly, “because I think I’m better than the guy next to me. And I want to get paid more for it.”

Without a union, says Joseph Petitpas, “everyone would be an individual and nobody would have a voice in nothing. If you went up for a raise, the boss would tell you, ‘Hey, go home. I got another guy to take your place in a minute.”’ “Without the union, we’d still be back in the Dark Ages,” agrees Angelo Bruno. “No question about that. As an individual you can do nothing. As a group you can fight.” But Bruno insists that the absence or presence of a union is not enough. It must be the kind of union that involves, challenges, and listens to the membership. He thinks today’s locals often lack the creativity and democracy that characterized unions in the past.

At union meetings, whatever you thought was up for discussion. We would all discuss it and whatever came out of it, that was it, as long as it was for the benefit of the majority of the members. Your unions are going to hell when the people who don’t fall in line are called the negative ones. It isn’t always the conformists, the men who say yes all the time, who are the best unionists. Sometimes, it’s the ones who ask, who want to know what’s going on—they’re the real unionists.

The collective strength of such a union is frequently greater than the sum of its individual members. The presence of a union has long given carpenters the sense of power necessary to act in their own behalf. Older carpenters constantly refer to the many “quickie” strikes over contract violations, such as inadequate toilet facilities or drinking water, unsafe scaffolding, inferior staging planks, the lack of electrical grounding for power tools, or the appearance of nonunion tradesmen. Most such walkouts were settled within a few hour or days. “You always had the by-laws with you,” Enock Peterson stresses. “If the contractor challenged you, you had the laws right there. He had an agreement and he was going to live up to it.” Carpenters knew that their unions would back them up in a fair grievance, finding them another job if they were dismissed for speaking up. This knowledge bred confidence and assertiveness. Paul Weiner reports that his father often quit sites with poor safety conditions, knowing another job would be available. “He would say, ‘If I work for you, I put this staging up right.’”

Tom Harrington describes a walkout of pile drivers during the construction of the Prudential Center. The pile driving contractor was from out of town and employed building techniques that had never been tolerated in Boston, particularly in the use of one man per skid rig. According to Harrington, three was the norm and any less endangered the individual worker and other craftsmen on the project. “We couldn’t get anything straightened out on the job. So one day everybody just got mad and walked off the job and left all their gear and walked to the union hall.” The workers voted overwhelmingly to stay out until the issue was resolved. “It only lasted a couple of days,” continues Harrington, “before we had some of the wheels in from the outfit and got things straightened out. It ended up being much better for the contractor and for the men and the job went slick as could be after that. Men worked both in safety and in harmony.”

The pile drivers of Carpenters Local 56 won that harmony through decisive and collective action. But circumstances in Massachusetts have changed since the Prudential was built. Carpenters, particularly outside metropolitan Boston, no longer take their unionism for granted. A strong labor organization provided a backdrop of security for the wildcatting pile drivers in 1959. The impulse for similar militance today is always tempered by the fear of the looming open shop. The building boom of the early and mid-1980s has temporarily put such anxieties on hold. Nonetheless, “staying competitive” remains the current union byword. Every false step is seen as an open invitation to the double-breasted and nonunion contractor.

Nineteen eighty-one opened the second century of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. The future that its members face is perhaps more uncertain than at any time in the last hundred years. Working carpenters are confronted with the most extensive on-site changes since the Civil War-era shift of millwork from hand to machine manufacture. The 1980s are clearly a decade of transition. What remains to be seen is whether this period is one of the recurrent watersheds that mark a new stage in the evolutionary process of the construction industry or if we are in the midst of a fundamental break with long-established methods of building.

The gradual transition of the craft worker from fabricator to installer is gaining steam. Preassembled components, modular construction, and simplified building techniques are rapidly replacing more complex conventional construction methods. Multistory, factory-built homes can now be shipped on flat-beds to the site, complete with fixtures, hardware, and a coat of paint, requiring only electrical and water hookups to be ready for occupancy. On-site building is broken down into more simplified and minute operations. The pace of specialization and deskilling is quickening in residential and commercial construction alike, as the industry sheds its backward image.

Each new labor-saving innovation weakens carpenters’ bargaining power in relation to their employers and, consequently, threatens the basis of unionism in the industry. Events outside the industry pose equally serious problems for building trades unions. The generally weakened state of the AFL–CIO, the shaky public perceptions of unionism, and the reinvigorated political and business antilabor crusades have cut into the membership rolls and placed the Brotherhood and other construction unions on the defensive. Ironically, the unions have come to depend heavily on the good graces of federal, state, and local governments—sources of aid that traditionally inspired grave doubts and mistrust. Publicly funded projects are now a bulwark of union employment, offering the protective umbrella of the Davis–Bacon Act and parallel state prevailing wage laws. But some amendments by former secretary of labor Raymond Donovan and antiunion campaigns in a number of state legislatures have jeopardized those safeguards as well.

Carpenters used the staying power of a powerful craft identity to withstand crises in the past. From the obvious gesture of the sympathy strike to the more subtle internal life of the union, carpenters and their labor organizations created a remarkable and enduring culture of solidarity. They erected a self-contained value system that rewarded clever and artful work practices, a complete familiarity with every aspect of the building process, mutual assistance and social cohesion, and a deep and unshakable pride in the value of their contributions to their communities. These beliefs generated problems as well as solutions as a consequence of the rapid and sharp differentiation between those “inside” and those “outside” the world, but their persistence also explains the tenacious hold of the craft union culture. Carpenters operated in a transient and mobile industry whose very structure forced individual workers to develop highly personalized survival schemes. Nonetheless, they never relinquished their commitment to collective and egalitarian principles, most notably the uniform wage, the ultimate expression of solidarity within the trade.

Some construction analysts have argued that building in the United States can never be rationalized along the lines of a manufacturing industry. Each project is too singular and American tastes too idiosyncratic, they believe, to accommodate a mass-produced, automated building product. Most observers believe, however, that no industry can stand forever outside the inexorable march of technological determinism, that sophisticated manipulation of preassembled components will combine the advantages of economies of scale with individual design choices. In any case, they suggest, the traditional and romantic notion of the capenter, weathered hands skillfully guiding a hand plane through a curled forest of wood shavings, will be restricted to work on costly custom-built houses, the renovation of existing buildings, or, more likely, serve as a nostalgic memento of the past.

If all-around craft knowledge stands at the center of a carpenter’s identity, what will be the result of the systematic destruction of trade skill? What will become of the carpenter’s elaborately constructed world-view? What criteria can the “new” refashioned, specialized, and deskilled carpenter use to define an equally fulfilling social role? Who will the models be and where will they come from, if not from the preceding generations? And finally, can the carpenter’s collective voice—the craft union—survive in the absence of a high level of trade skills?

Industrial union advocates have long claimed that the craft culture represented little more than an arrogant and self-inflating method of separating the political interests of trade workers from the bulk of the working population. If, in fact, the experience of building tradesmen and women becomes more akin to the on-the-job situation of other workers, more broad-based forms of labor organization may indeed become more appropriate and fruitful. The common thread would then be the coincidence of membership in identical job categories rather than an unusual degree of pride in that particular occupational choice.

The passing of the craft culture, should it happen, will not come without some very serious losses. In a society in which status and achievement are linked to material wealth, conspicuous consumption, and educational, professional, and leisure-activity credentials, carpenters have proudly and unmistakably defined their own self-worth through their work. An autonomous working-class culture has always struggled to plant roots in American life, yet the carpenter has managed to create a supportive and functional, if insular, ethic that rewards collective and egalitarian behavior. In the long run, the deskilling of the contemporary carpenter seems to be a foregone conclusion. If and when that occurs, it is very possible that not only carpenters but all of us will lose an important alternative tradition to mainstream American values and work culture.