11

Tragic Towns of New England

The Boston BTEA’s open shop drive inspired imitators in other parts of the commonwealth. In a few cases, the employers successfully drove down the scale, but, overall, union control over Massachusett’s major construction sites remained unquestioned. The construction unions’ grip on labor relations in the industry was, in some cases, stronger than their hold on their own membership. General feelings of loyalty to the unions were unshakable, but the once remarkably high level of participation began to dwindle.

The decreasing involvement did not flow from any particular set of choices made by the United Brotherhood or any of the other building trades unions. It was part and parcel of a basic reorientation of American cultural priorities of the era. The labor movement proved to be no more immune to the political complacency of the “Roaring Twenties” than any other institution. Membership in the AFL dropped by one and a half million during the decade. The Federation “shifted from militancy to respectability,” wrote historian Irving Bernstein. “With business supreme, the AFL sought to sell itself as an auxiliary of business.” This “business unionism” found a perfect voice in the leader of the AFL. William Green, an honest but uncharismatic officer from the United Mine Workers, stepped into the presidency after Samuel Gompers’s death in 1924. Green shied away from overt class conflict and preferred instead that unions “increasingly concern themselves to see that management policies are efficient.”¹

Neither Green’s personal timidity nor the conservatism of other AFL leaders, in themselves, account for the depths of labor’s “lean years.” Many labor officials believed changing economic conditions made combative unionism obsolete. The twenties were, after all, a decade of growth. The consolidation and implementation of years of technological innovations along with refined managerial techniques based on labor intensification boosted industrial productivity by 64 percent. Dividends doubled and mounting profits prompted business spokesmen to pronounce the arrival of a new and permanent prosperity. Though the accumulating wealth was spread unevenly among social classes, American workers still fared well. Between 1922 and 1929, average real weekly earnings increased nearly 15 percent. Secretary of Labor James Davis told the 1928 national Carpenters Union convention this: “There was never a time before when the worker was as well off as he is today. . . . For the first time in human history there is reason for thinking that involuntary poverty is a thing which can be conquered.” Such blithe spirits were not restricted to Republican cabinet officials. Former Socialist party member John Spargo argued that the successes of American capitalism disproved the dire predictions of Marxism and other class-based ideologies. “Here in America at least,” Spargo wrote in the tone of optimism that cut across political lines in the twenties, “the industrial system and the economic order resulting from it constitute the best and soundest part of civilization.”²

The mass availability of electricity, central heating, and indoor sanitation ushered in a new era of creature comforts. A consumer culture based on advertising and installment buying gave workers access for the first time to home appliances, radios, phonographs, and automobiles. “More and more of the activities of living,” claimed Robert and Helen Lynd in their famous study of Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s, “are coming to be strained through the bars of the dollar sign.” According to the Lynds, this focus on material acquisitions diminished the importance of local trade unions and a culture of labor solidarity. With their new cars and credit accounts, Muncie’s working-class families sought to escape rather than strengthen their working-class identities and communities.³

“The social function of the union has disappeared in this day of movies and automobile,” wrote the Lynds. Observers of the labor scene in Massachusetts generally agreed. The Worcester Labor News blamed poor turnout at union meetings on movies, radios, whist, victrolas, autos, and house parties. Unions scheduled fewer dinners and dances, bowing to the reigning preference for weekend activity—the family car trip. The number of marchers at Labor Day parades steadily declined in the early twenties until most cities in the state dropped the celebration altogether in 1926. By 1929, the only public recognition of the once festive and popular holiday in Worcester was a brief radio address by the business agent of the Carpenters District Council. Locals schemed to reverse the trend with fines for absences or prizes for high levels of attendance at meetings. Carpenters Local 1006 in Worcester held a “Get Together Dinner” for members and wives during which organizer Charles Kimball urged the women present to attend regular union meetings in order to reinvigorate the social and cultural aspects of the union.⁴

For all of organized labor’s setbacks in the twenties, the construction unions suffered less than other labor organizations. They continued to serve as the backbone of the AFL nationally and locally. Membership in the UBCJA in Massachusetts stabilized at slightly more than twenty thousand. The strong traditions and continuing skilled character of the building trades acted to undercut the listless unionism most observers noticed. The Lynds, for example, speculated that heightened acquisitiveness and individualism were directly related to the erosion of craft skills in industrial settings. Craft pride, they argued, had been replaced by consumerism as a motive force for workers. Construction, however, still required high levels of skill. To the extent that carpenters and other building trades workers maintained a powerful sense of craft, their attachment to their trade and its cultural trappings were less frayed. They had successfully resisted the open shop because their commitment to their collective identities as union craftsmen transcended contract unionism and the presence or absence of a signed piece of paper.

Certainly, the political atmosphere took its toll on the militancy and solidarity of the building trades. The tremendous show of collective unity between the Boston unions in 1919 was not repeated. One trade after another left the UBTC. The city’s Carpenters’ locals negotiated their 1923 agreement separately. For the rest of the decade, Boston’s carpenters stood outside the Building Trades Council and bargained with their employers alone. The number of strikes dropped sharply. From 1924 to 1928, the UBCJA national office sanctioned just six walkouts in all of Massachusetts. The apparent harmony of the period stemmed from the prevailing climate of labor peace, the relatively steady volume of work, and diminished rank-and-file pressure due to lessened participation.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to argue that a spirit of individualism had eradicated the culture of cooperation. Strikes may have been curtailed, but they did not disappear. In an eighteen-month span from 1926 to 1928, hundreds of Boston craftsmen walked off construction sites in sympathetic protests against the presence of nonunion workmen of other trades. Outside activities may have cut into involvement in union affairs, but they never replaced a fundamental loyalty. During the negotiations of 1928 (a year often considered a pinnacle of worker indifference) eight thousand Boston carpenters stood in a line stretching from Hanover Street to Washington Street from ten in the morning until six at night to vote on a set of contract demands.⁵

Putting aside the chronic problem of seasonal unemployment, the national construction job situation in the mid-twenties was as good as it had been in years. “I cannot recall a time when affairs in the building industry were running more satisfactorily,” said a pleased William Tracey, secretary of the AFL Building Trades Department, in the summer of 1926. “So far as I know, there is not a single building craftsman in the country who cannot find a job at good wages.” Tracey’s words rang true in Massachusetts’ commercial centers. A Worcester newspaper described 1925 as a “crack a jack” year for building. Carpenters worked steadily during the building seasons in Boston, Springfield, and Worcester. Smaller towns ringing metropolitan centers issued record numbers of building permits. Except for the winter months, construction unemployment figures in Newton and Quincy rarely exceed single-digit rates as residential builders hurried to keep up with automobile-aided Bostonians in search of suburban houses.⁶

Not all of the commonwealth’s carpenters were so lucky. Joseph Leitao and his brother arrived in the Fall River–New Bedford area in 1919. Both men had made their livings as carpenters in their native Portugal. “When I came here, jobs for carpenters was very slack. You take anything you can get.” Joseph worked off and on in the mills and on local farms. He drove trucks and swung a pick and shovel before finally establishing himself as a union carpenter twenty years later. His brother returned to Portugal after one year, his hopes deflated by the lack of opportunities. The Leitaos’s broken English hurt their chances to land jobs, but not nearly as much as their site of debarkation. Fall River was a textile town and the textile towns of Massachusetts had passed their prime. Their residents were feeling the pain of an industry’s death throes.

In 1924, a New Republic correspondent described Fall River as “a city of misery, want, unemployment, hunger and hopelessness . . . of grim and silent mill executives, of lounging men and unoccupied girls aimlessly walking the streets.” Fewer than a dozen of the city’s 111 textile mills were in full-time operation. The factories were in disrepair, filled with archaic machinery. Since the nineteenth-century heyday of the industry, Massachusetts’ mill owners had opted against further investment and modernization. The mills were “living skeletons,” in the vivid words of a Fall River clergyman, “stripped to the bone and sinew and sucked of their blood by greedy stockholders.”⁷ Few of the closed mills ever reopened their doors. The industry left New England for the sunnier climes of the South. The factory jobs were gone forever along with the construction jobs and other employment that depended so heavily on the fortunes of the textile plants. The flight of textile from Fall River was a harbinger of things to come. Most of the mill towns prospered into the mid-twenties before disaster hit. But when the collapse came, it was complete.

From 1920 to 1922, hundreds of carpenters were drawn to Lawrence. The American Woolen Company had contracted to build the Shawsheen Village and the resulting demand for construction workers boosted the membership of the Lawrence Carpenters local from its normal 400 to 500 to 1,500. But the Shawsheen complex turned out to be the last gasp of Lawrence’s mill owners. Within a few years, the industry had crumbled along with all related employment. “On account of conditions in the textile industry,” a report at the 1925 Massachusetts State Convention of Carpenters stated, “there has been practically no work in Lawrence this past year.” Nor was the impending building depression limited to Lawrence. Speakers at the 1925 convention sharply contradicted William Tracey’s rose-colored portrait of construction opportunities. Organizing efforts in Newburyport were dismissed as a waste of time, “as there is no work.” The situation on Cape Cod was described as “deplorable.”⁸ Massachusetts had become a divided state—relative prosperity in nonindustrial areas alongside absolute poverty in the textile and shoe towns.

In the summer of 1927, normally a time of peak employment, the unemployment rate for union construction workers in Fall River stood at 29 percent. In neighboring New Bedford, it was an astronomical 46 percent. “New Bedford had nothing,” remembers Leo Coulombe. “There were no mills, nothing going on.” The following winter, the rate hit 27 percent statewide for unionized carpenters—a figure that was high but still not outside the normal winter range of 20 to 30 percent. However, the distribution by town reflected the commonwealth’s uneven sacrifices. The same survey showed that the jobless rate was 43 percent in Lowell, 48 percent in Lawrence, and 60 percent in Holyoke. According to a less “scientific” but possibly more accurate account, nearly two-thirds of Lowell’s organized building trades workers had no work at all between 1926 and 1930. With the exception of a post office, scarcely any new buildings were erected in the entire city. Charity had replaced textile as the leading industry.⁹

“Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Maynard, and Fall River . . . are sad, sad places,” said Thomas McMahon, president of the United Textile Workers of America. “There is, perhaps, more destitution and misery and degradation in the mill towns of New England today . . . than anywhere else in the United States.” If McMahon had been an officer of a shoe workers’ union rather than a textile workers’ organization, he might have lengthened his list to include the shoe centers of South Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, Brockton, Stoneham, Haverhill, Newburyport, and Georgetown. Estimated unemployment in Massachusetts’ boot and shoe industry reached 65 percent by the end of the decade. In 1930, writer Louis Adamic toured Massachusetts on assignment for Harper’s magazine. Looking back several years later at the article he had written (aptly titled “Tragic Towns of New England”), Adamic concluded that “what was true” in the late 1920s in the industrial towns of Massachusetts “became largely true by 1932 or 1933 of the entire United States.”¹⁰

“The building trades felt the depression before everyone else,” says Manny Weiner, whose father was a member of Local 157. Weiner’s observation is a comment on the nature of building. The construction industry is always a barometer of economic trends. Private decisions in executive suites to curtail capital investment immediately lower the number of building permits and contracts for industrial construction. Consumer anxieties over purchasing power are promptly reflected in slumping housing starts. Political panic in the face of an eroding tax base inevitably wipes out plans for new schools, roads, bridges, and other public construction. The years leading up to the Great Depression were no exception to this pattern. The devastation of the shoe and mill towns spread like a cancer throughout the state. In the summer of 1928, the Worcester Labor News reported “scores of men at the [Worcester Carpenters District Council] Business Agent’s office every morning.”¹¹ By the end of the decade, all of Massachusetts building tradesmen functioned under depression conditions.

“I was born in 1916,” jokes Tom Harrington, “born either ten years too soon or ten years too late.” Harrington’s generation of carpenters confronted a frightening situation. Ready to enter the workforce and support young families, these men instead deferred their dreams, drastically lowered their expectations, and focused on the struggle to survive. “There was no work,” Ed Henley states simply. Pittsfield Local 444 reported that 70 percent of its members were out of work in September 1930. Another local estimated that only one in twenty was working in November 1931. In the Boston area, between two and three thousand of the twenty thousand building trades workers were on the job in March 1933. Minutes from the Springfield Carpenters District Council indicate that eight to nine hundred of the Council’s twelve hundred members were unemployed in May of 1934.¹²

The depression touched everyone in the industry, young and old, experienced and inexperienced. Like a raging forest fire, the depression was out of control, burning everyone in its path. Ellis Blomquist’s father was one of many ruined in the bank crash of 1929. “He was jobbing. He was working for himself with a few other guys. He had three houses going and the banks closed him down. It really broke his heart.” Today, Leo Coulombe shakes his head and wonders just how the Depression-era carpenters did survive. “You just couldn’t buy a construction job,” he mutters.

Many carpenters did what carpenters have always done. They tramped. Coulombe went to New Jersey and managed to find short stretches of work on the Pulaski Highway, a Du Pont factory, and a sewage plant. Chester Sewell pursued a similar strategy. “You just had to keep traveling. A hundred miles a day. Stop at a job and ask if they needed help.” Tom Rickard’s father regularly gathered a few friends and drove off for a week at a time, sharing gas and food expenses in search of work. Ernest Landry’s father worked as a maintenance carpenter for General Electric. When G. E. laid off all its carpenters, he left Massachusetts and the United States altogether to return to Canada. But the problem with tramping was there was really no place to go. The Depression was everywhere, as William Ranta of Worcester explained in a letter to the Carpenter. “‘Keep out, Keep out!’ That is the war cry we hear everywhere. Tens of thousands of our members are hopelessly out of work . . . They are wandering from place to place and when they see those ‘keep out’ warnings, what should they do?”¹³

The men who stayed home did what they could. “I would do most anything,” says Tom Phalen. “Go downtown, tie on with a trucking outfit for a day. I’d get a buck a day, no matter if it was twelve or fourteen hours, for moving furniture or freight, if they needed an extra.” Richard Croteau’s father cut ice and bootlegged liquor. Manny Weiner’s father picked up odds and ends in home repair work. John MacKinnon sold milk and cream for Morgan Creamery. Enock Peterson and a friend cut wood out in Sherbourne and Holliston to heat their houses and sold the extra for $2 a cord. “Oh God, I’d done everything,” says Peterson. “I’d always try to get a few hours of carpentry work. It was enough to keep the wolf away.” Oscar Pratt set his carpentry tools aside for two years after he finished his apprenticeship in 1931. Arthur Anctil went for two years without work of any kind. Ed Henley recalls being unable to find dishwashing jobs in restaurants. He had three young children at the time and now claims “if we hadn’t taken in boarders, we couldn’t have made it.”

For a few very men, the hard times of the Depression were someone else’s experience. Angelo DeCarlo worked for contractors Sam Abel and Hyman Ecklov. Their firm won enough bids to keep a stable crew. “I didn’t lose a day in the thirties,” notes DeCarlo. Similarly, Al Valli worked right through the worst years on public construction projects for contractor John Bowen, a political crony of Mayor Curley. The vast majority of capenters had no such luck. Many of them developed job-seeking rituals. These routines helped make the hunt for work more systematic, but just as important, provided some discipline to a life without the built-in structure of an eight-hour workday. According to Paul Weiner, an alleyway off School Street in downtown Boston became a gathering spot for the city’s Jewish carpenters during the Depression. Hundreds of men met there every day hoping, at best, for news of work and getting, at least, company and conversation. MacKinnon developed his own ritualistic method.

I took a dime in the morning and got on the street car and went as far as the street car went into Arlington. Up one street, down another street, looking for jobs. Then I walked back home to Mission Hill. If I didn’t get no job, the next day I’d go to Belmont and do the same thing.

A job was a blessing, but not without its own complications. “Everything was cutthroat,” says Pratt. On the handful of active construction sites, he recalls, “there were other fellows who were lined up along the fence on the sidewalks ready to take over their jobs the minute they got fired. Things were rough.” Every job was precious. The competition for work that always simmered between workers in the insecure construction industry frequently exploded into open warfare. In 1934 a Holyoke business agent refused to allow two Springfield carpenters on a post office job in Holyoke. In reprisal, Leon Manser, secretary of the Springfield Carpenters District Council, threatened to kick every traveling carpenter out of Springfield. In the climate of the Depression years, jurisdictional disputes over as few as two workers quickly evolved into life-and-death struggles. Hoping to avert an extended and bloody combat, Ernest Bessette of the Holyoke CDC set his case before Manser. Bessette’s letter reveals how critical every single job was.

90 percent of our membership was out of work and looking for a chance to go to work on this job, along comes two of your members and wants permission to go to work on this job, before any of our own members are put to work, can you think it was possible to sancsion these two men going to work in preference to our own members, just what kind of explanation could the Business Agent have made to our membership if he had done so. Would you have done any different in Springfield.¹⁴

Long-established working conditions went by the board. After an extended period of unemployment, Harold Rickard was hired on as a carpenter foreman on the Bourne Bridge project. The job operated on a ten-hour basis without overtime pay. Under the circumstances, Rickard says, “no one complained. They went to work.” With such a huge surplus of available labor, contractors bore down on the workers relentlessly and without fear. MacKinnon tells a story about Boston contractor John Bowen’s working style. “He had the filthiest mouth. There would be men working down in a hole on a foundation, and he’d be up on the bank cursing and swearing at them. He’d fire five or six and then hire another bunch looking for work, just to get more out of the men.”

Bowen’s curses were just a slightly more provocative expression of common contractor practices during the Depression. Builders routinely ignored negotiated working conditions and fired union activists who spoke up. Desperate workers reluctantly looked the other way at the growing number of contract violations. For many union carpenters, all the gains they had slowly won seemed to be unraveling before their eyes. There is a sense from letters of the period, newspaper and magazine reports, and even hints in interviews with carpenters fifty years later of a shattering of assumptions, a loss of control, and a feeling of being trapped, of being shaped rather than shaping their own lives. For those who had no work, survival was the first and foremost concern. The few lucky job-holders had other concerns—complicated in a different way. Should they accept a working environment that had been unacceptable a few short years before? If they objected, they did not work. It was, as R. Marlow of Natick Local 847 pointed out, a no-win situation: “No matter where you go you will find many good carpenters walking the streets either through lack of building operations, or because they will not accept employment under the conditions offered by some unscrupulous contractors.”¹⁵

The conditions Marlow referred to included wage payments well below the union scale—as low as the pre–World War I rates of 40 or 50 cents an hour. Union officials tried to slow the practice, but it was too widespread to stop completely. Organizer Charles Kimball publicly urged the expulsion of any union carpenter who accepted below-scale wages. “They are like a cancer, growing from within,” he charged, “and are not fit to associate with their brothers in unionism.” But even Kimball recognized that such a rigid approach ran the risk of wiping out the bulk of the union membership.¹⁶

Union officials used the internal system of justice to stem rules infractions. At a September 1932 meeting of the Springfield Carpenters District Council, for example, the business agent brought up thirty-nine union members on charges for working below the union rate. The usual procedures were followed: filing charges, holding hearings, and determining innocence or guilt. But the Depression required more bending than usual in meting out punishment. When three Springfield men were found guilty of lumping, that is, they had installed window casings and laid floors on a fixed sum per apartment basis rather than by the hour, the Council simply directed them to find another job rather than pay a stiff fine.¹⁷ Under depression conditions, a fine was sometimes an impractical method of enforcing discipline. There was just no water to be squeezed out of these rocks.

In early 1930, the Springfield CDC fined Wilfrid Jacques for accepting $1 an hour rather than the prevailing $1.25 rate. Jacques wrote a letter to Recording Secretary Charles Bennett to protest the “very unfair” action. His tale is a typical Depression story and illustrates the tension between the need to maintain union-sanctioned working conditions and the plight of individual working carpenters.

I have been working for this concern for six years and was considered one of their best men. Last winter I had to take a cut in my wages from 1.25 to 1.00 an hour which I fought against as much as I possibly could but the rest of the men wouldn’t stand by me. I hated to break the Union rules. I had no choice being hard hit and having a large family to support, but I got our boss to promise he would pay the scale in the early spring which he failed to do. So I went up to him and demanded my full wages which I got, but cost me my job and this $50 fine, while the rest of the men have benefitted by it and are still working and getting scale wages.

I think that being a member for seventeen years and never have broken the union rules before must mean something to you. I had to borrow to pay the fine and that has put us in a tough spot. I do hope you will take the depression into consideration and I’m sure you will see my side of the story.¹⁸

In many cases, the locals did see the men’s side of the story. In April of 1930, Charles McIntyre of Local 1105 approached his union to allow him to work below the rate. He told the members that “he found it almost impossible to get a job on account of his age but had a chance to get work if he could get permission to do so.” After a brief discussion, McIntyre’s request was granted.¹⁹ These isolated union efforts to check or tolerate rampant wage-slashing reminded carpenters of the rules that supposedly governed the job site and shored up faltering union consciousness. But in the final analysis, the impact of all the regulations, charges, reprimands, and fines was swept away by the brutal realities of an economic cataclysm. As long as massive unemployment persisted, employers inexorably drove wages down. Each individual local was powerless to alter the economic context that compelled members to transgress union rules. The ultimate irony was that the locals that fined individual violators were finally forced to accept collectively the very same wage reductions. Had Wilfrid Jacques accepted $1 an hour in 1932 instead of 1930, he would not have been fined. He would have been getting the standard union rate.

In the summer of 1930, the Builders’ Record reported that union craftsmen were “offering” to work for less than the union scale. Therefore, the BTEA publication argued, Boston’s employers should be released from their contractual obligations with the unions and allowed to lower their employees’ pay. The surprised Building Trades Council, accustomed to several years of cordial relations with the BTEA, called on BTEA Secretary John Walsh to “substantiate with facts his unsupported statements.”²⁰ In reality, both sides were shadow-boxing, dancing around a new and potentially dangerous form of negotiations for the unions. The contractors not only wanted reductions, they wanted them in the midst of the term of a collectively bargained agreement.

Other than the open-shop disaster of 1921–22, Boston’s union carpenters had never taken a wage reduction. Even then, the final agreement maintained the old wage rate. All along, the unions had refused to officially accept the 10 percent cut that prevailed during that eighteen-month strike. In addition, the city’s carpenters had never opened an existing settlement for employer concessions. Now, the BTEA wanted both. It was an unprecedented request, but both employers and workers recognized that the severity of the Depression was unprecedented as well. Carpenters may not have been “offering” to work for less, but they were certainly accepting less. The contractors were intent on using the drop in building activity as a lever to lower labor costs substantially. Workers prayed that the Depression would be short lived. As the unions saw it, their best chance was to tread water and hope that construction demand would rebound in time to avoid too many serious losses.

The initial flurry of charge and counter charge brought no immediate action, but the issue had been placed at the top of the negotiating agenda. In October of 1931, Robert Whidden, vice-president of the BTEA, contacted all the building trades unions in the city. Calling his letter “simply a friendly overture,” Whidden argued that construction recovery was impossible at the existing union pay scale. With wage reductions, however, he assured the unions that Boston’s builders and their construction clients would find the incentive to gear up for renewed production. A month later, John Walsh announced that the BTEA was not looking for a “permanent reduction in wages, but rather an earnest desire to put forth a measure of mutual helpfulness forced by extremely bad business conditions.”²¹

Again, the unions [along with Mayor Curley] rejected the BTEA proposal. But without economic recovery, the cuts could be staved off only so long. The crisis showed no signs of easing. On the contrary, it seemed to many that a permanent state of depression had settled on the population. “I have a definite feeling,” Louis Adamic said of American workers in the dreary days of 1931, “that millions of them, now that they are unemployed, are licked.” BTC officials refused to accept Adamic’s pessimistic description. No one understood the extent of the Depression better than construction workers. But that did not mean they had to act as if they were licked. Boston union leaders did not accept the logic of the employer prescription of reduced wages as a cure for their ills. The situation was bad, even desperate. But in the minds of the BTC officers, there was no proof that wage concessions would result in anything other than a fatally weakened trade union movement. The UBCJA national office sent troubleshooter T. M. Guerin to Boston once again to resolve the impasse. Guerin cajoled, wheedled, and twisted arms. By late November, he managed to convince local Carpenters officers and enough other construction union leaders to accept a 20-cent-an-hour reduction across the board. Starting January 1, 1932, BTEA members paid union carpenters $1.17-1/2 instead of $1.37-1/2 an hour.²²

The concessions in Boston triggered cuts in other cities. In the summer of 1931, delegates to the Springfield District Council had unanimously approved a resolution stating that wage cuts would not “be of any benefit to us.” The following spring, four months after the new Boston rate went into effect, Springfield builders reduced their carpenters’ paychecks by $2 a day without serious opposition. Occasionally, the concession fever did not even require employer initiative. On February 4, 1932, the Greenfield local voted to lower their wages from $1 to 90 cents. There had been no employer demand or hint of a demand. The Greenfield carpenters assumed it was just a matter of time and decided to offer a gesture of good faith by voluntarily suggesting the reduction. Town after town followed the concession pattern. When the dust finally settled, Boston’s carpenters remained the highest paid in the state. Outside the capital, no union carpenter earned more than $1 an hour.²³

The draconian cuts of 1932 whetted the contractors’ appetites. They wanted more and they wanted it quickly. Twelve months later, the employers in seven Boston craft associations proposed further reductions ranging from 25 to 45 cents an hour. But the Depression had bottomed out by the winter of 1932-33. Worker suffering was so widespread that it become harder for employers to justify and win support for even greater sacrifices. In February, a joint meeting of the Building Trades Council and all the other construction unions outside the Council (including the Carpenters) agreed to develop a united front against the employer demands. Representatives of the meeting notified the BTEA that lowered pay in any single trade would immediately produce a citywide general construction strike. The threat worked. The cuts were never implemented. The union carpenters’ scale in Boston did not change until they won a modest raise in 1936.²⁴

Again, developments in Boston influenced other cities. In May 1933, the Master Builders Association for Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee suggested another 25-cent reduction for area carpenters. As in Boston, the Springfield and Chicopee builders backed off in the face of a unanimous strike vote. Holyoke and South Hadley contractors, on the other hand, went ahead and managed to run jobs at 75 cents an hour for almost two months. After a strike threat and extended negotiations, the builders eventually relented and returned to the previous rate.²⁵

The beleaguered unions were clawing to survive. Fighting off plummeting wages and disappearing work rules on the job site, the locals also faced internal difficulties. The main problem was financial. Without any income or job possibilities, many members dropped out of the union. It was not a question of diminished union sympathies. It was simply, as John Greenland notes, that they “couldn’t afford to pay dues.” The unions desperately sought to hold the members together. Monthly dues were lowered and the national UBCJA office ruled that members were allowed to be behind in payments for a year without facing suspension. In 1932, over one hundred thousand union carpenters across the country were in arrears from three to twelve months. The Worcester Carpenters District Council imposed a $1 a day assessment on working members to assist others who were unemployed.²⁶ Individual carpenters lucky enough to have jobs took it upon themselves to help out less fortunate brothers. Enock Peterson covered dues payments for dozens of unemployed members. Al Valli took $150 out of his personal bank account to pay his local’s business agent when the union treasury ran dry. Harold Rickard hired as many carpenters as he could get away with when he was foreman on the Bourne Bridge.

All these charitable acts of assistance were hopelessly inadequate. More and more locals operated in the red. The carpenters in the shoe town of Newburyport had seen their local go broke back in 1925. The Newburyport experience was increasingly repeated as the depression became universal. Between 1929 and 1935, two UBC locals in Gardner, and one apiece in Canton, Ipswich, Shrewsbury, Taunton, Webster, and Wilmington either consolidated, let their charters lapse, or disbanded completely.²⁷ The less marginal locals survived but with far fewer numbers. Between 1930 and 1933, the combined building trades unions lost over three hundred thousand members nationwide. The Massachusetts carpenters locals were no different. (See the table below.) The 1933 state convention was canceled because too few locals could afford to send delegates.

The locals devised a variety of strategies to protect the members and keep the organizations afloat. Greenfield Local 549 tried to refuse any new entries in order to preserve the limited job opportunities for existing members until the national office overruled their protectionist action. Other locals rolled back officer salaries or turned the post of business agent into a volunteer position staffed on a rotating basis by jobless members. As the Depression dragged on, a growing number of carpenters raised the notion of work-sharing as a means of equalizing distress. At first, most unions resisted. The very idea cut against the grain of the carpenters’ work ethic. There was no doubt that building tradesmen eagerly sought collective solutions to counter employer domination. Over the years, they had created an elaborate set of rules to govern the workplace and a democratic system of justice within their unions. They willingly abided by a standard wage and a collectively bargained agreement. But within that cooperatively developed framework, it was an unassailable point of pride that success in the industry was a matter of individual achievement. If one carpenter worked more steadily than another, presumably that status was a testimony to greater competence, skill, and perseverance. Carpenters knew that stable employment with one firm was not always based on merit since favoritism and nepotism were ever present. Regardless, the hiring, firing, and promotion of individual carpenters had never been an arena of union intervention unless it was directly related to union activity. Voluntary assistance by a working carpenter to an unemployed member was entirely consistent with the unions’ culture of solidarity. Advocating even minimal mandatory allocation of jobs, however, was a daring and collectivist challenge to a traditionally highly individualistic domain.

The unions eased uncomfortably in this direction. By 1929, many locals required union-granted permits on overtime jobs. Fines were levied against members who worked more than eight hours without permission. Overtime bans, however, just scratched the surface of the job shortage crisis. In 1931, a delegate to the Springfield Carpenters District Council proposed a far-ranging twofold approach. He called for a hiring list that ordered preference on the basis of length of unemployment. Its universal application would be enforced by a fine on any member who failed to register. In addition, the delegate proposed a system of staggered work crews in which every contractor would be required to hire one group of carpenters one week and another crew the next week. The proposal proved premature. Opposition was so strong that even the author backed down. The resolution was defeated 50 to 0.²⁸

The unremittingly high unemployment figures persisted, and soon once radical-sounding suggestions appeared increasingly reasonable. With time, Springfield’s carpenters reconsidered their opposition to hiring restrictions. In February of 1932, the District Council endorsed the staggered system of two weeks on and two weeks off for crews on city work. The principle still grated, but “we feel,” said the Council, “that it is the best that can be got at the present time.” Carpenters in neighboring Holyoke also adopted the staggered system until the town goverment abused the mechanism. In March of 1932, the Holyoke Board of Public Works decided on a policy of open shop jobs with a union crew one week and a nonunion crew another. At the request of the Painters’ Union, the Holyoke Building Trades Council placed the Board on its unfair list. With jobs so few and far between, the Holyoke Carpenters District Council supported the BTC action with great reluctance. They issued a statement attacking the city’s antiunionism, but opined that “the so called stagger system . . . is the best that can be got from the present administration.”²⁹

The unions tried a host of other defensive measures. The Springfield CDC urged contractor E. J. Pinney to institute a six-hour day on his Technical High School project. In 1933, the Boston building trades unanimously endorsed an emergency 24-hour work week (three eight-hour days) and a negotiated thirty-hour week (five six-hour days) in the next contract. The Worcester Central Labor Union opened a campaign against the use of labor-saving equipment in construction after they learned that the four major city projects totaling $2 million employed only fourteen carpenters. Springfield’s carpenters aggressively lobbied local politicians to support a concrete (rather than steel) design for the proposed Ludlow-Springfield bridge over the Chicopee River.³⁰

In the long run, the defense of the union wage, the assessments on working carpenters, the declining dues structures, the shorter days, and the staggered crew system, barely made a dent in the overwhelming unemployment problem. Sharing the available work was admirable and highly principled, but more work was the only long-term solution. Jobs were what was needed, and the longer the Depression wore on, the clearer it became that the economy would and could not miraculously right itself. Employer promises of a building recovery in the wake of pay cuts had turned sour. Though few unionists ever accepted that argument, even the slimmest of hopes die hard. Construction activity continued at a snail’s pace and showed no signs of escalating. If conventional private-sector construction had reached a state of permanent collapse, where could building tradesmen turn for the promise of better days?