5

Union Building

The crowd quieted as Local 33’s Harry Lloyd stepped to the podium of Faneuil Hall. As chairman of the giant March 20, 1894, labor rally, Lloyd opened the meeting. He introduced the speakers, including featured guest Samuel Gompers, and set the tone for the evening. “During the last winter,” Lloyd began, “we have had a depression such as our country has never seen . . . our members were on the verge of starvation.”¹

The panic of 1893 had, as Lloyd observed, closed the doors of hundreds of banks and thousands of business firms. At the peak of the crisis, an estimated fifty thousand in Boston and two thousand in Springfield were out of work. In smaller towns, unemployment rates were irrelevant. There was simply, as the Boston Globe put it, “no work.” The panic extended the anxiety of joblessness to a previously untouched spectrum of the population. Itinerant workers had become a permanent feature of the American economic landscape but the winter of 1893 witnessed a new and “better class of tramps.” A study of homeless workers in fourteen cities revealed that over half had “trades, employments or professions requiring more or less skill.” Men were tramping who had never tramped before.²

Working-class hardships intensified class tensions. The usually cautious Lloyd lashed out at the “kid glove aristocracy” of the city of Boston where the gulf between the rich and poor was particularly visible and irritating. In his Faneuil Hall speech, Lloyd contrasted the “miserable pittance” of charitable donations for the unemployed with the $400,000 worth of contributions to the new music hall. The wealthy “listened to the singers while the poor starved,” he commented bitterly.

Editorializing in Boston’s Labor Leader, Frank Foster angrily charged “that those who built the palaces of the Back Bay should not be compelled to live in the tenement houses of the slums.” Unfortunately, the palace builders were stuck in their tenements with little chance of a regular job. The Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 10,747 of the state’s 22,781 carpenters were out of work that year.³

The depression set back the development of the Carpenters Union. Membership dropped as carpenters strained to pay union dues, let alone food and shelter bills. Two-thirds of the national union’s members were unemployed and over a third of the locals suffered wage reductions. Boston’s carpenters managed to hold the line on wages. Local 56 turned aside a contractor offer of steady employment in exchange for lighter pay envelopes. As carpenters lost jobs and bargaining leverage, the number of strikes declined. Throughout the crisis, P. J. McGuire preached against hasty strikes. He argued that any ill-advised job actions, however justified, were likely to be defeated and would add to demoralization in the ranks. The 1894 national convention acted to ensure discretion, limiting the number of officially sanctioned strikes and outlawing winter work stoppages altogether.⁴

Hard times increased the appeal of a shorter day. With wage increases out of the question, carpenters once again focused on reducing the hours of work. By 1892, carpenters in forty-six cities worked for eight hours, but none of those cities was in Massachusetts. Veterans of the 1886 and 1890 Boston strikes publicly criticized those who had stood on the sidelines. They argued that a victory then might have helped cushion the misery of widespread unemployment in 1893. The unemployed were clutching at straws; they welcomed any proposal to spread the available work around. The Master Carpenters Association of Boston agreed to begin an eight-hour schedule as an emergency measure by November 1893, only to renege on their promise in October.

Working-class fortunes picked up in the second half of the 1890s. Economic recovery settled the panicked employment environment and encouraged carpenters to raise their banners of 1886 and 1890 again. In June of 1894, a New England convention of union carpenters discussed a coordinated eight-hour-day campaign, but it was left to the tightly organized Lynn Local 108 to crack the eight-hour barrier in November of 1894. The Lynn local stands out as a particularly militant and effective union in the 1890s, in large part due to the city’s long labor tradition and the prominent support of the well-organized shoe workers’ unions. Through the rest of the nineties, other locals followed Lynn’s example, exchanging wage freezes or even reductions when necessary. By 1902, employers in virtually every town in the state accepted the shorter day as the industry standard.

The national union more than made up its depression losses, counting 68,463 members in 1900. Four years later, the state of Massachusetts alone had 12,000 union carpenters. From the end of the depression until World War I, carpenters in Massachusetts assumed more and more control over their working lives. Union membership grew steadily, and carefully planned strikes brought on the closed shop and an elaborately constructed system of work rules designed to protect and advance the interests of the working carpenter on the job site. In many ways, this was the most significant union-building era in the history of the Brotherhood, as it consolidated its position in every city and town in the commonwealth.

Union members shed their depression-era mentality and resumed their posture of militancy. Demanding better wages, shorter hours, and the enforcement of union work rules, Massachusetts carpenters laid down their tools with increasing frequency. From January to December of 1900, they called twenty-one strikes across the state. Hard times had taught carpenters to choose their battles carefully. Fifteen of the twenty-one strikes succeeded either partially or completely. The results of four were unclear and only two failed outright.⁵

The high success rate prompted many employers to avoid conflict. Typically, a representative of the union approached local contractors with a request for a wage increase and an eight-hour day. After a few quick conferences, a settlement would be reached based on the original union demand or a slightly modified version. In those cases when employers were reluctant to comply, a short walkout was often enough to change their minds. In Springfield, for example, carpenters asked for the eight-hour day with no loss in pay ($2.75 a day) in 1901. The masters met, discussed, and rejected the union proposal. But further negotiations split the masters. Some granted the shorter day; others capitulated after several days without employees. As a contemporary account reports, “The victory was so substantial that a closed shop agreement was entered into the same year.”⁶

The issue of the closed shop, that is, the exclusive hiring of union members, ranked as high as wages and hours as a priority for union carpenters. The presence of nonunion workers on a job was a sore spot, a reminder of incomplete union authority. A thoroughly organized workforce was a precondition to job-site control. Even a handful of men outside the union community represented a threat, encouraging employer disdain for union work rules. The Lynn local had won preferential hiring for union members along with the eight-hour day in 1894. Locals without such agreements were forced to monitor and challenge employer hiring practices constantly. In 1898, for example, Springfield carpenters refused to stay on a L. F. Carr building project. The carpenter foreman had declared an open shop policy, remarking that union membership was not “any of my business any more than what church they belong to.” The strikers accused him of abusing the workmen and firing without cause. But the real problem, they acknowledged, was the nonunion foreman’s stubborn refusal to operate a closed shop. The union carpenters had taken up the grievance “to test their strength.”⁷

For some carpenters, mere possession of a union card was not enough. A card-carrying member who violated cardinal principles of unionism was still outside the pale. In May of 1900, seven carpenters employed by Doane & Williams of Holyoke walked off their jobs after the contractor hired a union painter who had worked during a previous building trades lockout. After two days, the Building Trades Council voted that the men could return to work, but only after the Council received a $10 fine from the guilty painter. Union discipline was enforced through strict sets of rules. Brockton Local 624 issued $25 fines to members who worked below the standard rate. The Fall River Carpenters District Council by-laws and the Holyoke Building Trades Council constitution prohibited members from working with nonunion men. These rules were obeyed. A Holyoke contractor named Dibble had hired sixty-five union carpenters and three union painters on a project for the local Street Railway Company. When the railway company decided to bring three of its own nonunion painters on the job, the carpenters’ business agent objected. The company brushed off the protest, and all the union painters and carpenters immediately walked off the job. Later that day, a frantic railway representative informed the agent that the painters had been removed and pleaded for the return of the union tradesmen.⁸

During 1901, carpenters staged dozens of successful one-day walkouts against the presence of nonunion men. Carpenters in Fitchburg, Gardner, Milford, Pittsfield, and Westfield prevailed in strikes over wages, hours, and union rules. New locals were formed in Beverly, Newburyport, Northfield, Rockland, Waltham, Wareham, and Whitman. Whether formally acknowledged or not, de facto closed shop conditions ruled these carpenters’ jobs. There were failed attempts to keep nonunion men off jobs, such as a June 1901 strike by nineteen Cambridge carpenters. But more often than not, the offending parties either joined the union or were dismissed under the gun of a threatened work stoppage. The ultimate sign of the closed shop, of course, was that such actions were usually unnecessary. Most contractors in Massachusetts hired only union carpenters.

A 1902 agreement in Boston represented an explicit written recognition of the unions’ rise to legitimacy. From the early 1880s the fiercely antiunion Master Builders Association had set the tone for the industrial relations in the city. As the unions’ permanence became assured with their control over the area’s labor market, a growing number of contractors appealed to Association leaders to drop their implacable opposition. Reluctantly, the MBA stepped back from direct involvement in labor relations, leaving those matters to employer associations in each trade. In 1893, the MBA established a Joint Committee for Arbitration that effectively outlawed sympathetic strikes, but administration was left to the separate trades. The Joint Committee broke down ten years later, and the Masters retreated to their downtown offices, petulantly recalling the happier days of 1886 and 1890 when it had not “become the vogue to ‘patch up’ contentions . . . and to ‘recognize’ aggregations which had not put themselves into a fit condition for recognition.”⁹

Individual craft unions welcomed the diminished role of the MBA. Certainly, the combined power of one set of contractors could not compare with the collective strength of all the city’s building employers. Unionized carpenters, in particular, found the Master Carpenters Association (MCA) much more flexible. In March 1902, Boston’s five thousand organized carpenters threatened to strike for a wage increase. Two months later, the Master Carpenters granted an eight-hour day at 35 cents an hour. On October 22, the MCA signed a formal contract with the United Carpenters Council, the umbrella organization of the twenty-seven Boston locals. The settlement continued the May agreement on wages and hours, added a 2-1/2-cent raise for 1903, and specified time-and-a-half pay for overtime and double time for work on Sundays and holidays. In addition, the MCA promised to allow union business agents unrestricted access to job stewards during working hours and both sides agreed to submit all disputes to a new joint arbitration committee.¹⁰

The contract was extended to the eighty-two-member Boston Builders Exchange in April 1903 and governed relations in the industry for several more years. The Masters could never bring themselves to accept a closed shop formally, but in fact, only union carpenters worked their jobs. In turn, union members promised to work exclusively for “recognized builders,” that is, members of the MCA or the Exchange. The carpenters’ continued demand for preferential hiring for union members was the only unresolved conflict during the years the pact held sway. The original document guaranteed “the principle that absolute personal independence to employ or not to employ” was unquestioned. The wording remained intact. In an arbitration ruling by Judge George Wentworth in 1905, the Council won all its requests (the forty-four hour week during summer months, 41 cents an hour, double-time pay for all overtime, and an extra holiday) except the closed shop.¹¹

Bargaining successes prompted unions to incorporate further measures aimed at controlling the labor supply. For example, the 1903 Boston agreement established a joint union–management committee for apprenticeship. The unions hoped to resurrect the organized training procedures that had, by and large, suffered in the late 1800s. Indentures continued well into the 1800s, but training was erratically carried out and enforced. Reginald Grover’s father moved into a Brockton contractor’s home in 1895. Grover remembers hearing that his father’s duties included “taking care of the horse and babysitting for the kids.”

More often than not, apprenticeship was a low priority for local contractors who were unwilling to make a commitment to an untrained worker in an industry based on short-term employment arrangements. Writing in 1912, James Motley claimed:

The apprentice is simply not wanted: for no large contractor desires boy labor merely because it can be secured at a low wage. The time consumed in teaching the trade to beginners would cause a delay in work, more expensive than the sum saved on wages. Indeed the apprentice is physically in the way, on a large building where all work must be done in order and on time.¹²

Employer indifference proved to be more potent than union interest in the 1903 instance. Five years later, the joint committee collapsed from lack of employer support, an experience that was repeated in cities across the country.

Such defeats, however, were few, and victories were common. The relative strength of union carpenters was by no means matched by other American workers at the turn of the century. On the contrary, the ability of building trades workers to enforce standard wages and hours as well as working conditions made them the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of the workforce labored outside the trade union movement, and many of those workers who were organized were suffering a state of decline. The number of unionized workers in the expanding manufacturing sector was very small—no more than 6 percent in 1900—and they consisted almost entirely of those highly skilled operatives whose craft knowledge had not yet been undermined by the factory system.

Turn-of-the-century union carpenters were growing in influence and power; factory workers of the same era were struggling to retain what little strength they had. Steelworkers, for example, practically lived in the steel mills, working ten- or twelve-hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week. Most earned between 14 and 25 cents an hour. A survey of twenty-eight steel plants in 1900 showed that only one of every nine steelworkers was paid as much as a carpenter in Springfield. The position of the unions was equally precarious. The once substantial Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, representing the top strata of the workforce, had fallen victim to a concerted steelmaster antiunion campaign. By 1900, not a single mill of consequence in the steel centers of western Pennsylvania recognized the Association. Regarding workers’ ability to press for improved working conditions, F. N. Hoffstot, president of Pressed Steel Car Company, summarized their options neatly: “If a man is dissatisfied, it is his privilege to quit.”¹³

How had the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America emerged as the country’s largest trade organization when unions like the Amalgamated Association were crushed? With the exception of periods of general economic downturn, how had carpenters been able to improve slowly but steadily their hourly pay and working conditions? And finally, in an era when a U.S. Steel executive could boast: “I have always had one rule—if a workman sticks up his head, hit it,” what possessed a man like Otto Eidlitz, one of the nation’s most powerful builders, to proclaim: “It is without question, not only the right but the duty of labor to thoroughly organize itself, and it . . . is a power for good in the trade”?¹⁴

Building in the second half of the nineteenth century was not, as a contractor wrote in 1921, “a gentlemen’s vocation.”¹⁵ Despite the addition of a number of sophisticated large-scale employers in the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eidlitz in the East, Norcross in New England, Griffiths in Chicago, and Wills & Downey in New York, the industry was still checkered with the local speculator–contractors who had entered the field after the Civil War. The advent of the skyscraper brought forth the professional builder—the executive who scheduled, coordinated, and managed promotion, financing, engineering, materials purchase, and labor relations. But for every such Norcross, Eidlitz, or George Fuller, there were dozens of men who operated by the seats of their pants and carried their offices in their heads.

Low capital requirements encouraged small employers. A minimal supply of tools and equipment combined with a general familiarity with building methods was enough to send many an aspiring contractor off to the construction wars. The irregularity of demand, product, job size, duration, and location offered little incentive for massive investment and the emergence of highly capitalized employers. Furthermore, contractors were only one of the actors in the erection of a building—and not necessarily the major one at that. The owner provided the demand, the banks the credit, the architect the design, the suppliers the materials, and the actual construction was performed by employees of not one but many contractors and subcontractors.

The various parties in construction had differing stakes in the industry’s labor relations. Building owners wanted jobs finished and tenants moved in. Delay induced panic and steep financial costs. Owners occasionally threatened to pull contracts if builders ran into on-site labor troubles. Since bank penalties for construction halts exceeded the price of minor advances in worker paychecks, many owners had little patience with virulently antiunion contractors. The contractors, in turn, were willing to forgo endless battles as long as increased labor costs could be passed on easily.

According to builder L. J. Horowitz, the owners’ interests tied contractors’ hands in relation to the unions. Trade unionism in the building industry was “unavoidable,” he argued, “because the average owner is unwilling to have his building operation made the battleground for deciding the issue between a union and non-union operation.” Horowitz contrasted the short-term orientation of construction actors with the well-funded stability of factory owners. An antiunion manufacturer “might justify a battle for two or three years to gain the open shop.” That luxury of time was not available to builders. For them, he concluded, “the intelligent course to pursue would be to correct what was wrong in unionism rather than to exterminate it . . . this was clearly a case for a surgeon and not an undertaker.”¹⁶

Even bitter foes of the labor movement like William Sayward reluctantly came to terms with building trades unions. Sayward, the one-time scourge of Boston’s carpenters, delivered a speech in 1894 as secretary of the National Association of Builders, admitting that “not only are organizations of workmen right and proper, but they have the elements, if wisely administered, of positive advantage and benefit to the employer.”¹⁷ The advantages and benefits referred to by Sayward were the union’s ability to solve the industry’s chronic problem—a stable source of labor. An employer’s need for construction workers ebbed and flowed with the season, total volume of work, and life cycle of a single project. Efficiency and profitability often hinged on absolute flexibility in hiring and firing. In order to compete successfully, contractors wanted the minimum number of workers at any given time to carry out building tasks. As a result, most builders retained a small core of regular employees and recruited the rest on a job-by-job basis.

Since individual contractors could not predict labor requirements with any real degree of accuracy, building trades unions understood the potential power of a union-based hiring hall. A local that contained the majority of a community’s construction labor pool became an invaluable asset. If a union could supply half a dozen skilled craftsmen on a day’s notice, the employer was relieved of a lengthy, expensive, and unreliable recruitment process. This solution to the labor supply problem far outweighed the added costs to builders of union recognition and above-average construction wages.

Building employers understood the pitfalls of this bargain. Ceding control over labor supply patterns represented a significant loss of managerial authority. They periodically attempted to correct their vulnerability. In 1888, the National Association of Builders tried to set up their own training programs. But this end-run around the unions collapsed precisely because of union-sponsored boycotts. In 1898, the Boston MBA established an Employment Bureau to register tradesmen. Again, this alternative to the union hiring hall failed to attract a critical mass of workers and never got off the ground. Too many contractors were unable to see beyond their next progress payment to make the long-term investment implicit in an employer-controlled hiring setup.¹⁸

It would be a mistake to overplay the impotence of the nation’s contractors. The brick wall thrown up by the Boston MBA in 1886 and 1890 overwhelmed lengthy and well-organized strikes. Clearly, the collective strength of united building employers was capable of running roughshod over any nineteenth-century construction union. And like factory owners, builders had taken steps to stem the tide of unionism. In 1887, William Sayward organized the National Association of Builders. In five years, the NAB was a powerful force with a membership of thirty-five hundred firms. But employers who were often competing for the same building contracts found it difficult to sustain organizational unity. The depression also set back organizing among contractors, thinning the ranks of employers’ associations as well as unions. In fact, the unions recovered considerably more quickly. Testifying before the U.S. Congress in 1899, P. J. McGuire characterized contemporary employer organizations as still weak.¹⁹

They regained strength in the new century. Beginning in 1900, builders in New York and Chicago locked out building tradesmen in order to roll back union gains. These counterattacks spawned a national open-shop drive in construction. The first local sign of impending union reversals came in the Fall River strike of 1900. On May 27, three hundred union carpenters struck for an eight-hour day, joining the city’s plumbers already on strike. The planned strike day had been pushed forward after Leeming & Jones fired thirty carpenters who had refused to work with a scab plumber. The walkout initially took its normal course. The men found jobs in nearby New Bedford and Taunton, and in Bristol, Newport, and Providence in Rhode Island. Predictably, a few contractors reduced the hours on their sites after the first week. But the rest of the employers failed to fall in line. By the end of June, the strike was lost. Though the men won their jobs back, they still worked nine-hour days. The Fall River strikers were not beaten by an overt open-shop campaign. Instead, a combination of a building slump, lack of expected financial support from the national union, and the disappointing absence of solidarity from masons, bricklayers, and plasterers doomed the carpenters and plumbers to isolation and defeat. The results gave heart to employers yearning for an end to union expansion.²⁰

In the early spring of 1904, a group of builders convened in the scenic Connecticut Valley to reinvigorate an empty shell of a masters’ organization. They vowed to use that season’s bargaining sessions to keep the lid on wages and union power. The militant Holyoke and Springfield labor movements were singled out as prime irritants. The previous summer, one hundred carpenters had successfully halted the mammoth Fiberloid project in Indian Orchard until all the nonunion workers were replaced. In addition, Springfield’s radical Central Labor Union was growing in numbers and political influence. And finally, during the winter of 1903–4, committees representing contractors and the Springfield carpenters district council had virtually settled on a 50-cent increase (from $2.75 to $3.25 a day) to go into effect May 1. In April, a delegation from the New England association of builders convinced their Springfield and Holyoke counterparts to retract the upcoming raise. They encouraged the contractors to take the offensive, hoping “to bankrupt the unions” and end the “abject surrender to union dictatorship.” Bankrolled by the association, builders from the two cities withdrew their earlier offer and refused to consider any raises.²¹

Seven hundred carpenters from Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee laid down their tools in May. As in Fall River, the initial prospects looked promising. Some of the men traveled to jobs in New Hampshire and Connecticut. Others stayed and collected strike benefits. Neighboring locals pulled workers off sites run by Springfield contractors. The Springfield Central Labor Union endorsed the strike, warning employers to jettison dreams of crushing unionism. “The unions are here to stay,” the CLU announced, “and the employer that reckons otherwise will learn to his sorrow his mistake.”²²

The politically sophisticated Springfield District Council appealed to the general public. In an open letter, the union compared the 25-cent rise in wages over fifteen years to the masters’ 60-cent increase in billing-per-man charges. “Our wages only average $650 per year,” the Council computed, “and that is not enough to enable us to properly provide for our families, buy tools, and pay for cartage of tools from job to job.” The letter called on the public to “judge who is right” and to support the strikers by hiring union carpenters for building work.²³

This bold plan to bypass the contractors was crafted by business agent Walter LaFrancis. In the first week of the strike, forty-five union members formed a house-building cooperative. Offering to supply materials and labor, they advertised low-cost, high-quality residential work built at the new rate of $3.25 a day. They promised “to demonstrate how cheaply good houses can be constructed when the profits of several contractors and middlemen have been eliminated.” Mindful of the competitive threat, the union assured the MBA the co-op would be dismantled if the strike were favorably resolved.²⁴

Bolstered by the national open-shop drive and local and regional business support, the MBA held its ground. When independent contractor Thomas Gifford agreed to pay the new scale, an MBA delegation pressured him to reverse his decision and brought him into the association. Notified of the union’s proposed co-op, the contractors convinced area materials suppliers to raise lumber prices for non-MBA members. Though only marginally successful in recruiting nonunion strikebreakers, the heavily subsidized employers were better prepared to survive a long standoff.

The unions scrambled to hold the strike together by late June. Regular meetings of Springfield and Holyoke businessmen in support of the MBA provided a continuous flow of financial support for the open-shop campaign. Carpenters abandoned hopes of a wage increase and focused instead on maintaining the closed shop. After fourteen weeks, the bitterly divided carpenters narrowly voted to return to work. Gleeful employers offered them work at the old rate and under strict open-shop conditions. In a speech to the Board of Trade, F. W. Job, secretary of the Chicopee builders’ association, reported on the “happy lot of master carpenters” over the strike’s resolution. Job proclaimed a new era in construction in the region based on open hiring policies, that is, no discrimination against nonunion carpenters, no limits on output or the number of apprentices, and no sympathetic strikes. Accustomed to the closed shop, union members seethed at the terms of the settlement. Reports of assaults on scabs surfaced in the press. Many carpenters packed their bags, never to return. Those who remained worked to see that the open shop “would exist in name only.”²⁵

The lesson of the Springfield-Holyoke-Chicopee conflict was clear. Contractor victories required regional support from builders’ associations and local support from non-building employers. A group of local contractors, left to its own devices, was still no match for a well-organized union backed up by a dedicated labor movement. In 1906, Pittsfield carpenters sought to elevate their $2.50 daily rate to the $3 level of all the neighboring Berkshire towns—Great Barrington, Lee, Lenox, Adams, North Adams, and Williamstown. The contractors offered to pay the higher scale to the “best men” but rejected a higher standard wage. Armed with offers of sympathetic action from the Pittsfield Central Labor Union and Building Trades Council, and the Berkshire District Council of Carpenters, the Pittsfield men opened their strike with the usual array of tactics. They took out-of-town jobs or offered to work directly for the public at the $3 rate.

The contractors’ empty threat of an open shop had little effect. They had done precious little organizing. Employer unity was so fragile that the unions were able to lure higher-paying Berkshire area builders into Pittsfield to take over construction sites stilled by the strike. The dominoes started to fall after three weeks. Individual contractors unilaterally instituted the union demand. One builder was quoted as saying, “I am about sick of holding out against the union’s demand.” Within a few days, a verbal agreement was reached, granting carpenters $3 for an eight-hour day. The settlement was a complete triumph for the union. The only concession salvaged by the contractors was an understanding that business agents would notify job foremen before entering a site.²⁶

Pockets of open-shop construction remained in Massachusetts through the years leading up to World War I. Builders on Cape Cod, in Worcester, and a number of other towns outlasted repeated efforts to enforce union work rules. Yet the unions always survived and prospered. Worcester locals 23 and 877 were strong and active organizations. Joint meetings regularly drew six to seven hundred carpenters. Their Carpenters’ Hall, with two large meeting rooms, served as the center of activity for the city’s labor movement. New locals in the Worcester County towns of Westboro, South-bridge, Webster, and Grafton sprang up in the shadow of the state’s major open-shop city. The locals were effective enough to keep wages and hours on a par with closed-shop strongholds. As elsewhere, carefully planned strikes brought desired results. In 1916, for example, three hundred union carpenters in Worcester struck for an 8 -1/2-cent raise. One day later, their wish was granted. For all their organization and militance, however, Worcester’s unions could not make the final step. They never wrangled a closed shop from the local Builders Exchange and the city continued to be one of the state’s few hospitable environments for nonunion contractors and workers.²⁷

The open shop came and went in other areas. Beginning in 1908, Haverhill builders announced that they would no longer “discriminate” between union and nonunion carpenters. In a strike the following year, the builders turned to Boston’s Master Builders Association for assistance in maintaining the open shop. The MBA quickly sent a trainload of nonunion men to take the places of the striking unionists. Unfortunately for the Haverhill contractors, the Boston employers had lied to the scabs, telling them the strike was over. When a large crowd of union carpenters met the train at the depot, the strikebreakers willingly accepted the union’s offer of return fare. The strike ended in a compromise, but the contractors had played themselves out. By 1913, the earlier demands for wages and hours had been accepted and, according to the Haverhill Evening Gazette, the city’s carpenters were “so well organized” that the closed shop was not even an issue.²⁸

The union grew rapidly in the prewar years. A state report described an annual growth rate of two thousand union carpenters as “normal.” By 1917, total membership in Massachusetts had risen to 18,655.²⁹ Not every bargaining session brought success; nor did every strike. But wages steadily climbed, hours dropped, and union control over the job site strengthened. Most of the labor conflicts concerned wages and hours, but carpenters also walked off jobs to protest the presence of nonunion workers, in sympathy with grievances of other union construction workers, to claim jurisdictional precedence over other crafts, to force employers to pay the standard wage rate, to refuse to handle materials from mills in the midst of labor disputes, and to protest “pusher” foremen.

Some strikes involved whole cities; others a single building project. Some succeeded, others failed. In the fairly typical year of 1906, 2,171 carpenters in over a dozen cities struck for a total of 169 days. The issues ranged from five hundred Lawrence carpenters seeking to boost their $2.50 a day rate to twenty men on a job in North Attleboro refusing to work with nonunion workers. The Lawrence tradesmen won a $3 scale after twelve days. In North Attleboro, nonunion carpenters filled the positions of the strikers. The success/failure ratio showed no consistent pattern, varying from year to year and town to town. Of the nineteen carpenters’ strikes in 1910, six failed. Victories tended to come a little easier in disputes over bread-and-butter issues; conflicts over the right to enforce union rules were tougher to win. In 1910, for example, only two of the twelve strikes over wages and hours failed. On the other hand, in 1909 and 1910, carpenters were only successful in driving nonunion workers off the job in two of five cases. Similarly, four of the five sympathy strikes in those years failed.³⁰

Union leaders called virtually all of the walkouts. But strikes became such a matter of course that, on occasion, rank-and-file members simply acted on their own convictions, violating union orders and agreements with contractors. At the beginning of a 1909 strike of Pittsfield bricklayers, masons, and laborers, Carpenters Local 444 decided against sympathetic action. Nonetheless, scores of carpenters chose to leave their jobs when nonunion bricklayers were brought in. In 1916, Fall River carpenters employed by A. H. Leeming walked out after a nonunion foreman was hired despite an oral agreement between the city’s contractors and carpenters local accepting an open shop and outlawing strikes.³¹

May 1 was “opening day” for walkouts. The beginning of the building season was the optimum time to strike. Disputes were usually settled in a week or two. Few lasted into September. In many instances, there was no clear ending date. If a strike was lost, carpenters found work elsewhere while replacements filled their old slots. Even in triumph, improved conditions sometimes just glided into place. In May of 1910, Springfield contractors rejected a request for a half day on Saturdays. Rather than striking, carpenters took advantage of temporary labor shortages to challenge the builders without a loss of pay. They vanished as a group from job sites across the city at noon on the first Saturday in May. They returned on Monday morning and, facing no reprisals, went back to work. The same tactic was repeated the following Saturday and Monday. After two weeks, with no words exchanged, union carpenters had unilaterally instituted a forty-four-hour week.³²

By World War I, Massachusetts carpenters had effectively built their unions. The long strikes of 1900–1909 did not always end in victory, but the cumulative impact of all these conflicts was the clear installation of the United Brotherhood as the permanent representative of the state’s carpenters. Union carpenters have continued to wield the strike weapon to this day, but have never matched the frequency and duration of the walkouts in this era in any other period. The unions largely accomplished what they set out to win—higher wages, shorter hours, and above all, the regulation of the labor market through the closed shop.

In and Around Boston and Cambridge, 1907–1911