17

An Industry in Transition

It is an article of faith among union carpenters that they build a vastly superior product than their nonunion counterparts. The mercurial rise of the open shop has shattered complacent notions of union invincibility, but few longtime unionists question the quality differential. “The biggest mistake that the [unionized] contractors and the union makes,” asserts Ellis Blomquist, “is that they don’t advertise the skill of their trained people. The contractors talk about wages all the time. They should be looking to sell the fact that they have cornered the quality workmanship market.” The claim of unmatched workmanship is a chronic refrain. In his speech at the 1984 dedication of the Marshall Carpenters Training Center in Millbury, Local 33 Business Agent Robert Marshall (for whom the facility was named) cited economist Steven Allen’s findings that union construction tradesmen are as much as 38 percent more productive than unorganized workers. Allen’s frequently quoted study has reached mythic proportions in the building trades, serving as a scholarly affirmation of what union craftsmen have always felt in their gut.

“You can go out and see the type of work they do,” insists Tom Harrington. “There’s no alignment. It’s hit or miss.” Every union carpenter has a favorite story of a botched open shop job that had to be fixed by union trades workers. Bob Weatherbee describes one situation in which a business firm accepted bids on a large door installation contract from two builders, one union and the other nonunion. The contract was awarded to the low bidder, the nonunion contractor. “The contractor went in and hung the doors. Then they went back to the union company and hired them to repair all the doors and do it all over, which cost them probably 50 percent more in the long run.” Joe Power worked for years as a nonunion carpenter before joining the union in 1983. “The jobs were nightmares,” he grimaces. “I worked on one just before I got into the union where, a year later, the roof still leaked and they couldn’t open windows or sliding glass doors. They’d been through about a hundred guys there.”

Critics say that open shop firms hire a few experienced and relatively well-paid tradesmen to supervise a dozen or more unskilled and low-waged eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. The ABC’s Stephen Tocco does not deny this charge. On the contrary, he willingly defends it as a proper and rational organization of an enterprise. “It doesn’t bother me,” he says. “That’s the way it should be. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to know how to frame or put forms together. That’s what American productivity and American business is all about.” UBCJA Executive Board member Joseph Lia unintentionally endorses Tocco’s assumptions when he discusses the impact of specialization in the industry. “You need a good layout man and a good supervisor,” he said of new techniques in residential construction. “They can train somebody to do the rest. They tell somebody which side of the X to put the stud on, and put three nails in it. One man and 18 college kids. They get the job done.”¹

Allen’s study, prepared in 1979 and revised in 1983, suggests that open shop reliance on untrained helpers and apprentices reduces quality and productivity, particularly on large commercial projects. He contends that the union advantage in productivity stems from a lower ratio of supervisors to craft workers, made possible by the better trained and self-reliant union workforce. But Allen’s findings have been disputed by government and industry observers who claim that his data from the early 1970s do not reflect the qualitative leaps in open shop managerial sophistication since that time. Engineering News-Record, the journal of the industry, editorialized in 1978 that “the unionized segment of the industry no longer has a monopoly over qualified workers and quality work.” Tom Gunning, spokesman for an association of unionized employers in Massachusetts, agrees with ENR’s assessment. He warned delegates to the 1984 state carpenters’ convention that union members could no longer rely on nonunion bungling to preserve their jobs: “Open shop contractors have gained in experience, have become more competent while achieving their market penetration.”²

The question of productivity boils down to wages. If nonunion wages are low enough, open shop firms can function inefficiently with moderately skilled workers and still produce more output per labor dollar spent. On this issue there is no dispute. “Wages in nonunion house framing are abominable,” says Power.

A guy I knew from before was called up last winter [1984] and asked to do frames at 93 cents a square foot. I know people down on the Cape that get $1.25. Remember, this is the head man; he pays his guys $3 and $4 an hour. That’s low even by the standards of the late 60’s and early 70’s when I broke in. I was getting $2.50 an hour fifteen years ago.

Power’s friend sits at the low end of the spectrum, but open shop construction workers do earn significantly less than unionized workers—65 nonunion cents to the union dollar, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.³ Union supporters claim the differential is justified by higher productivity; open shop advocates suggest the margin explains the decline of union construction.

Whatever lower costs nonunion contractors can offer construction users flow from their organization of the labor force. “The real difference is crew makeup,” says Tocco. Unencumbered by jurisdictional boundaries and restrictions on the use of apprentices and helpers (except on publicly funded projects), open shop builders pay premium wages to foremen and lead men and whatever the market will bear to everyone else. As a result, it is to the contractors’ advantage to discourage the accumulation of skills by their employees in order to maintain a hierarchy of craft knowledge and corresponding pay scale. Too many accomplished mechanics would disturb the carefully constructed skill and wage pyramid. The ABC training program, known as Wheels of Learning, has been designed to match nonunion builders’ limited needs. Unlike union apprenticeships that attempt to teach a wide range of skills, the Wheels of Learning is a competency system based on task. That is, if a contractor needs a framer, or a form builder, or a roofer, there is a brief training program for each aspect of the trade in which the trainee learns that particular task and no other.

The net result is a highly specialized low-paid workforce and significant cost savings for the contractor. It is a simple matter of arithmetic. A union crew of twenty-five carpenters has, at most, four or five low-paid apprentices. The remaining twenty journeymen all receive the standard hourly union rate and perform a wide variety of tasks, from the straightforward to the complex. In parallel open shop crews, the ratio is often reversed; a handful of well-paid craftsmen watch over a sizable group of novices. A Fortune 500 company recently traced the relative costs of ten years’ worth of capital construction projects. They concluded that the open shop use of low-waged labor cut their construction bills substantially. The open shopper “has the freedom to manage its jobs,” they reported, and does not “have to pay skilled craftsmen to do unskilled tasks.”⁴

Bob Marshall knows that open shop contractors pay their workers less than union contractors but contends that they need other advantages to be truly competitive.

If they’re a bona fide contractor that pays their employees a decent wage and pays all the taxes, our contractors can compete with them. It’s the contractor who works out of the back of his truck, doesn’t pay any unemployment tax, doesn’t pay any federal or state tax, and usually hires a guy under the table that’s collecting unemployment—no matter what you do, you can’t compete with them.

In situations where the price of labor is fixed—publicly funded projects requiring the prevailing rate—union contractors in Massachusetts still dominate. Apparently, the knowledge and experience of both tradesmen and management in the union sector is sufficiently more extensive to maintain a hold on portions of the industry that do not allow wage-slashing. If anything, union builders hold a slight competitive edge on prevailing rate jobs that set their pay scale in accordance with the local union rate. Since approximately four dollars of the total collectively bargained package is made up of fringe benefits, union contractors need not pay payroll taxes on that deferred income. These savings represent a 5 to 7 percent advantage over open shop contractors who have no contractual benefit system with their employees and must pay the full rate in wages. Nonunion firms have made slight inroads into public sector construction in Massachusetts, but Marshall believes open shop underbidding in this market can be accomplished only through fraud.

Everyone is cheating everyone else. If you went into these companies’ books, there are very few paying the taxes they’re supposed to be paying or paying the employee what they’re supposed to pay. They’re doing it on piecework even on prevailing rate jobs—framing, shingling, roofing, siding.

Since much of the current union versus open shop debate in construction was initiated by large construction users, government policymakers, academic consultants, and antiunion ideologues, the content has inevitably centered on cost comparisons. The perspective of the working carpenter, union and nonunion alike, has received scant attention beyond the relative size of their pay envelopes. How do the daily work lives compare in the two sectors? What of the issues that have drawn carpenters to unionization for over one hundred years? What of the problems of job security and skill accumulation in a volatile and insecure industry?

Open shop builders claim that they are able to offer more stable employment to their employees because they are not bound by rigid jurisdictional guidelines. As a result, their argument goes, if carpenters temporarily run out of work, they do not have to be laid off. They can be put to work painting, laboring, or performing simple bricklaying and electrical tasks, until the contractor arranges for more carpentry work. This flexibility may hurdle some of the industry’s uncertainty on a month-to-month basis, but the overall organization of work in the open shop sector militates against long-term security. The heavy emphasis on specialization and a highly stratified workforce is an impediment to upward mobility in the trade. Since open shop builders depend on low-waged workers for a competitive advantage, there is no incentive for wage or skill advancement. On the contrary, a workforce top-heavy with skilled workers would immediately wipe out labor savings and refashion the open shop firm along conventional union lines.

Piecework as a method of payment also sacrifices long-term for short-term considerations. Piecework is a system geared for younger workers. The harder they work, the more hours they put in, the faster the job is done, the more money they earn. Pieceworkers commonly work more than eight hours a day, six or even seven days a week. Without any built-in limit on earnings, pieceworkers drive themselves mercilessly to produce more and more. It is a system that celebrates the present and breeds contempt for the future. But the pace is ultimately impossible to sustain. After ten or fifteen years of back-breaking labor, few tradesmen have the physical stamina or the psychological desire to adhere to the system any longer. They burn out, pure and simple.

The open shop organization of work has no room for specialized workers and pieceworkers who want to trade their low-waged niches for better paying, more complex, and less physically taxing lay-out or finish tasks. There are only a handful of such slots and the cost-efficient wage pyramid cannot be sacrificed for individual employees simply because they are advancing in years. As a result, nonunion firms have a high turnover rate. Over the course of a single year, they may in fact provide more job security, but few of the workers attracted to the rugged world of nonunion construction fresh out of high school are employed in the same capacity by the original contractor five or ten years later. A small number move up the company ladder, but most leave the industry, try to make it on their own, or turn to the unions. While serving as business agent of Local 40, Bob Weatherbee has observed a steady influx of carpenters frustrated by the limited opportunities in the nonunion sector.

A lot of our membership does not come in until they’re about 30 or 35 years old, until they’ve burnt out on house framing or forms. They know what they’re doing, but the owner has canned them because some kid 22 years old has come along and will do the job for cheaper. That’s when they join the union.

What is lost in many of the union–nonunion comparisons is the obvious fact that carpenters in both sectors work in the same industry. The highly dynamic state of present-day construction creates more similarities than dissimilarities for the two groups of workers. For example, whereas piecework is revered by open shop builders and banned by union work rules, the standardized character of much of today’s building process tempts union contractors to violate these prohibitions whenever possible. Drywall installation on union sites is frequently rewarded on a piecework basis, a fact known to union business agents, stewards, and members who remain helpless to enforce the rule without a formal complaint from an installer.

Even more than with piecework, the general deskilling of the craft cuts across union–nonunion lines. Recognition of the impact of specialization is problematic for advocates of union construction. Veteran carpenters like Ellis Blomquist can claim that unions have cornered the quality workmanship market and, in the same breath, deplore the limited craft knowledge of the younger members of his local. These seemingly contradictory statements reflect the dual nature of a changing industry. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that a significant percentage of the commonwealth’s most proficient carpenters do carry union cards in their wallets. On the other hand, subdivisions of the craft, prefabrication, and other simplifying building techniques create an on-the-job climate that reinforces highly particularized training and discourages the need for multiple skills. Michael Weinstein, who started as a union apprentice in 1972, believes there is a generation gap in competence.

If I had gotten in ten years earlier, I might be a much more skilled carpenter. Now you’re typed quickly to do one kind of work. There’s a real differentiation between people on the basis of how old they are, between how much they know and can do. Most of the old-timers are very well-rounded and very good carpenters. The opportunity for us to learn is just less great.

The decline in the demand for highly skilled carpenters is not a relentlessly one-way street. Gordon Boraks signed up as an apprentice ten years before Weinstein. Over twenty years later, he is convinced that the finish carpentry skills he acquired in the early 1960s still stand him in good stead. Boraks contends that the call for talented carpenters varies with trends in architectural and design tastes. He points to the Habitat-induced modular craze as one extreme. “They tried to eliminate every design detail. We would just go out there with a wrench and bolt those sections together.” Now he believes that the high cost of new construction combined with a renewed appreciation of historical authenticity has encouraged renovation in the Northeast and, once again, requires carpenters who can work with traditional building styles.

Boraks correctly cautions against exaggerating the demise of all skilled work, but even with the occasional step to the side, modern architects, engineers, and building materials manufacturers are traveling a clearly marked path toward simplification in construction techniques. Factory-assembled components and labor-saving machinery can be successfully adapted to remodeling as well as new work. Wood, the carpenter’s most basic building block, the material that once symbolized the craft, is finding fewer and fewer applications, increasingly replaced by longer-lasting and more pliable man-made products.

The substitution of laboratory processes for organic materials has radically altered the carpenter’s relationship to his or her work. Pile drivers like Tom Harrington lament the disappearance of wood in their wing of the craft. The pile drivers’ attachment to lumber products was not simply nostalgic; wood provided job security. “You had the wooden piles driven first, and that was a great thing for pile drivers because God took care of that. He gave us the termites that eat the piles that you had to go ahead and replace.” Today’s durable piles and piers are made of poured-in-place or precast cog materials manufacturers are traveling a clearly marked path toward simplification in construction techniques. Factory-assembled components and labor-saving machinery can be successfully adapted to remodeling as well as new work. Wood, site on rollers, finally shaping the heads of the wooden timbers with an adze before driving them down to the bedrock. Now the machines move on “cats,” and one worker hooks the pile up to the crane while another lets it loose at the proper location.

The phenomenon of a shrinking number of tradesmen per project is universal, from pile driving to finish work. “Jobs that would have carried a hundred people now carry twenty-five,” notes Weatherbee. The introduction of “flying forms” drastically scaled down labor requirements and revolutionized concrete forming. Starting in the early and mid-1970s, carpenters no longer erected distinct forms for each wall, column, or floor. Instead they built a set of forms at the beginning of the job, attached them to sections of staging, and watched giant cranes lift the whole assembly from floor to floor as needed. The forms were set, filled with concrete, stripped after the mixture hardened, and “flown” to the floor above, ready for the next concrete pour. Bob Bryant describes the breathtaking speed of the concrete work on Turner Construction’s Charles Square project in Cambridge.

The steward went to work there in July [1983] when there was nothing there. They dug the hole, came out of the hole, and went to the top on a poured-in-place job in nine months. They only employed 30 to 35 carpenters there on the concrete. You take a job like that seven or eight years ago, and they’d have 135 carpenters, and they’d be there close to two years.

The procedures at Charles Square are now the norm in concrete work. Not long ago, bridge building routinely involved crews of fifty to one hundred carpenters. Carl Bathelt reports that a recent bridge built across the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts peaked with twelve working carpenters.

Fewer workers, shorter projects. Speed, speed, and more speed. “If you don’t keep up, you’re let go,” says Angelo Bruno. He tells a story of the foreman on the Greenfield High School site who tried to boost production by pitting one pair of carpenters against another. Bruno was the steward on the job.

The foreman points to the faster pair and says, “Look at those guys go, and the others are getting the same money.” I said, “Sure, but you watch, you’ll pour those forms before they pour the other ones.” And, by Jesus, they did. They had to tear up the faster guys’ work and start over because it was out of line. But if you’re not fast enough, the contractor still lays you off. It doesn’t matter if you have to go back and fix the damn thing.

Joseph Lia tells a similar story, one that rings true for every carpenter in the industry today, whether union or nonunion. He watched a man hang doors, once a task that was considered the ultimate test of a carpenter’s ability. At one time, the crafty carpenter would use every trick in the book, every tool in his coveralls to shim, jockey, and nudge the door into its proper plumb, level, and square condition. The carpenter Lia observed hung a door every four minutes.

He did not square or level anything. Every screw went in with a hammer and in four minutes that door was swinging. I don’t think it would last a year, so I said to him, “How can you get away with that?” He said, “That’s the way they tell me to do it, that’s the way I do it.”⁵

The industry is in transition—on the site and in the contractor’s office. “I remember being on jobs from beginning to end with the general contractor,” Gordon Boraks says. “You’d be there to put up the fence, build the shacks, and all the way through the concrete and into the finish work. I did two years in one building.” When Boraks completed his apprenticeship in the mid-1960s, it was not unusual for the majority of the total job site workforce to be on one payroll. General contractors hired carpenters, laborers, and occasionally bricklayers, ironworkers, and painters. They employed permanent foremen and lead men for every trade and hired, laid off, and rehired entire crews as each phase of the project unfolded. The only paychecks not signed by the general contractor belonged to the mechanical trades workers—the electricians, sheet metal workers, plumbers, and steamfitters.

Specialization and an evolving construction management philosophy have deposited the broad-based general contractor into the proverbial dustbin of history. Current common wisdom compels builders to shed unwieldy payrolls and reemerge as administrators of subcontractors on the theory that specialty contractors can perform their limited functions more quickly and cheaply. Engineering News-Record took note of the general contractor’s changing job description in a 1971 editorial: “The CM, construction manager, is a new kind of guy who, as an owner’s agent, is reviewing design, estimating costs, scheduling phased construction and controlling the entire design-construct process.”⁶ The modern general contractor also reduces his financial risk by exchanging the uncertain outcome of the contract bid system for a guaranteed profit as a CM.

The shifting structure of the business end of the industry has cultural as well as purely economic overtones. Long-standing general contractors, such as Perini, Vappi, Volpe, Walsh Bros., O’Connell Bros., Aberthaw, and Macomber, had extensive social connections to the industry. Many of those companies’ founders either rose from the ranks or had personal ties to the tradesmen and their traditions. Following the current industry practice, they have reduced their hands-on roles but still maintain significant numbers of workers in their employ. The new generation of builders tend to be graduates of business schools or the speculative world of real estate development rather than the muck of the construction site. More brokers than builders, they prefer to discuss tax shelters and money markets rather than construction labor markets. “The most significant event in the last decade has been the entrance of the MBA into the real estate–community development business,” claims Anthony Ettore of the Arvida Corportion.⁷ Cognizant of their meager understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of construction techniques, they rely on their subcontractors to provide the necessary expertise.

These developments coincide with the decreasing importance of labor and the increasing impact of financing on construction. The National Association of Homebuilders calculated that labor costs declined from 31 percent of the total construction price tag in 1949 to 15 percent in 1982. The share of the housing dollar going to banks, landowners, and developers, on the other hand, climbed from 31 percent to 55 percent.⁸ For all the anguished outcries over excessive labor wages, the cost of money is the key to a present-day construction project. A developer’s rise or fall rests as much on his ability to package financial deals and comprehend IRS regulations as on his manipulation of the labor force. During the recent building boom, Boston and Cambridge carpenters have been putting in large quantities of overtime. Area developers profit more by paying extra wages than extending interest payments. “It’s cheaper to get the building up and open and ready than it is to just go along,” comments Bob Weatherbee. Or as one Wall Street analyst remarked, “It used to be that the winner was the guy who had the lowest construction costs. Now the winner is the guy who is the most sophisticated in arranging financing.”⁹

The changing face of management has reached down to the construction site. Job superintendents, traditionally former tradesmen, are now being recruited directly out of civil engineering programs. Turner Construction, general contractor on many of eastern Massachusetts’ largest projects, is only one of many firms that rely almost exclusively on college graduates for the position of superintendent. Taking orders from young, freshly scrubbed engineers whose familiarity with construction has been confined to a textbook grates on veteran carpenters. “Years ago when you went on a job,” says Weatherbee, “the super was a former carpenter. Today it’s an engineer and he does not come out of the field, and he has a background of antiunion feeling. He is the guy that opens the book up and it says: ‘to put up 10 feet of forms takes so many minutes.’ And sometimes maybe it does, but if it’s rough terrain

The executives running modern construction firms no longer believe that field experience is a prerequisite for on-site managerial capabilities. They esteem their own professional diplomas and see no reason why that spirit of professionalism should not imbue every level of the industry. A few years back, a giant southwestern residential construction firm hired an engineer away from Procter & Gamble to become its new chief construction supervisor. “I didn’t know a hammer from a 2 x 4,” the man told the Wall Street Journal. “Fox and Jacobs asked me why I thought I could build houses and I said, ‘You take men, materials, and the right equipment, and if you put them together in the right quantities you get soap. I figure you do the same to get houses.’”¹⁰

The unions have undergone their own process of rationalization. It has been years since even the smallest local was run out of the business agent’s home. The collectively bargained funds of the postwar era—health and welfare, pension, and annuity—have brought a host of consultants, accountants, and attorneys on board. The paperwork alone ties up the better portion of a clerical work week. Union officers have also had to learn new political skills in the face of shifting industry trends. At one time, the agents only played to two constituencies—the union membership and the employers. The relationships were regular, direct, blunt, and free of outside meddling. The local union was the hub of construction’s industrial relations. All activity was filtered through the business agent’s office and any other industry actors, from International officers to public officials, played, at most, supporting roles.

The strings attached to the growing dollar volume of publicly funded projects oblige union officials to translate bureaucratic regulations into serviceable union policy and to enter the world of lobbyists, legislators, and state and federal agencies. Instead of waiting until ground breaking to assure a union presence, the contemporary business agent tracks projects from their planning stages. Local 67 Business Agent Barney Walsh maintains, “We have to get to the City Council in Boston, or the town meetings in Milton and Dedham, or the BRA or Public Facilities, or whoever is awarding the contract before it even gets to the Dodge Reports in order to make sure that the jobs are built in the proper manner. That’s sometimes five or six years of meetings prior to a project starting.”

The extensive politicking and paperwork blossomed in the last decade, according to Bob Marshall. “We used to spend our time policing the job, checking on jurisdictional problems, walking the job, and saying hi to the steward. Now, it’s very unusual if I get out on the job site at all. When I started in 1975, the agent worked out of a notebook in the pocket. The office work is probably four times as much now.”

Not all of the changes are so recent in origin. Fifty years of legal and political developments have altered the options of the unions and their officers. The early twentieth-century business agent referred carpenters to the job and enforced working conditions. If an employer could not be deterred from violations of the contract or work rules, it was the agent’s duty to take whatever actions were necessary to insist on correct procedures. Jobs were “pulled” until the contractor sat down with the agent and mended his ways. It was, as historian David Montgomery has termed it, “the old Sam Gompers game of ‘Pull the plug; shut ‘er down lads and wait until the company talks.’”¹¹ The system was stormy but effective. Unionists and contractors engaged in a seesaw battle for power and control over the work site that shifted favorably to one side or the other depending on economic and political conditions in the industry.

The Wagner Act of 1935 brought the era of laissez-faire labor relations to an end. The legislation set a prounion precedent for federal intervention and breathed new life into industrial unionism. But for construction unions, long accustomed to a legitimately recognized seat at the bargaining table, the National Labor Relations Act represented no Magna Carta. It was, instead, largely irrelevant. The same cannot be said of the Taft–Hartley and Landrum–Griffin amendments to the NLRA in 1947 and 1959. Suddenly, severe legal restrictions stripped union business agents of their favorite tactics. “You lost your potency,” insists Oscar Pratt, “as you didn’t have the authority to tie up jobs.” The amended labor legislation subjected strikes, boycotts, and pickets to employer charges of unfair labor practices and the possibility of stringent monetary drains on union treasuries. Business agents, once ready to “pull the plug” on a moment’s notice, now hesitated to act without consulting an attorney. “In the old days,” Richard Croteau remembers fondly, “it wasn’t necessary to be a lawyer in order to be a BA.”

Business agents, like other trade union leaders, have developed working styles in keeping with the more regimented, bureaucratized, and legally cautious character of the modern American labor movement. The mold that produced gruff, cigar-smoking leaders such as George Meany and a host of lesser-known building trades officials has been cracked. Today’s big-city business agents wear their three-piece suits almost as comfortably as the professionals they rub elbows with in their daily rounds. They recognize that the decades of smoke-filled-back-room negotiations, of arbitrary and often undemocratic leadership, and a “public be damned” attitude will not wash in an era of antiunion political sensibilities. “I recognize that our image is probably the lowest it’s ever been,” offered Bob Marshall in 1984. “We get $17.11 an hour and people think we’re robbers.” While union public relation skills still lag distantly behind the slick, glossy formulations of the open shop sector and its corporate supporters, television cameras and newspaper reporters are no longer shunned like the plague.

The transition to a qualitatively different brand of unionism is neither smooth nor easy. Union leaders are torn between the old ways and the new reality. Reluctant to abandon the business unionism that once worked so well, many just hope to tread water until the current crisis somehow passes. They fear the consequences of wholesale changes in union strategies, such as the need to create a more vibrant and democratic internal union life, to redefine their job descriptions to include grassroots organizing, and to build political alliances outside the world of the building trades. They struggled to leave their tools behind and are now afraid to jeopardize their leadership positions by adopting experimental policies in uncertain times. But the most important truth is that construction employers have forever transformed the industry and there is no turning back. Like it or not, today’s union leaders are forced to consider new approaches or hopelessly scramble to keep up with the breakneck rate of change in construction.

Working on the T: Photographs by John Laurenson, Jr.

John Laurenson, Jr., spent much of 1982 and 1983 picking his way through the wooden planks, concrete form panels, and reinforcing steel rods strewn over the vast Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority construction site in the Porter Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A local photographer, Laurenson hoped to capture the gritty feel of the MBTA (the “T”) subway extension project that had torn up the streets of Cambridge, Somerville, and Arlington for so long.

“Dissatisfied with peripheral observation,” he wrote in 1983, “I gained access to the sites in order to understand their organization and to meet and photograph their inhabitants.” The results of Laurenson’s underground strolls portray today’s carpenter, ironworker, and laborer at work on rough concrete construction. The photos reproduced in these pages are from Laurenson’s exhibit, “Working on the T: Building the Red Line Extension,” displayed at the MIT Museum in 1983.