Miriam Frank
Mark Erlich wrote With Our Hands: The Story of Carpenters in Massachusetts, his history of the carpentry trade in Massachusetts, during an extraordinarily creative period in U.S. labor studies. During the late 1970s, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and its state councils sponsored ambitious public projects focused on labor unions, working-class culture, and community history. The NEH altered its funding priorities early in the 1980s, but many state-based councils continued to support working-class themes in public projects.
One influential national project was a 1981 narrative display for the centennial of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA), commissioned for the lobby of the union’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Two years later, Erlich, a journeyman carpenter in Boston’s Local 40, took up a new task: to research and narrate the lively hundred-year history of the carpenters union in Massachusetts, on the job, at the union hall, and in its busiest communities.
By framing this ambitious project with everyday themes of work, family, and community, Erlich, with the research assistance of David Goldberg, was documenting and interpreting U.S. labor history along new lines, with less emphasis on institutions and more interest in working-class continuity via the union’s own stories. Determined to find a new readership who would feel these histories as their own, they developed comprehensive narratives highlighted by vintage photos, historic documents, and excerpts from oral histories. Similar initiatives were being developed around the country with radio broadcasts, documentary films, and traveling photo and art exhibitions.
Erlich and Goldberg were especially lucky in their photographic research. The verbal narrative takes regular breaks to allow glimpses of construction in the making, from building sites at their foundations, to a solitary worker climbing the laminated beams of an arched church roof, to a series of complicated interior angles of the “T” subway extension beneath the streets of Cambridge and Somerville.
The Massachusetts Carpenters History Project started up with Erlich and Goldberg interviewing veterans of the trade statewide. They supplemented that research with documents from government archives, museums, historical societies, and union field offices. And they discovered artifacts of the Brotherhood’s proud traditions, from vintage albums to handwritten correspondence. They noted trajectories of prosperity with plenty of work to go around and harder times of tough solidarity. Reports of pitched battles over wage cuts and threats of economic collapse were offset with tales of alternative directions in co-op housing and political missions.
Carpenters’ associations in Massachusetts cities and mill towns were active well before the founding of the UBCJA in 1881. With Our Hands traces the roots of that growth. In those early years, local unions affiliated with related building trades organizations, all struggling and plucky enterprises, were always aiming towards solidarity and stabilization of the trade. By the mid-1880s, the national union was chartering locals in Massachusetts and by the end of the decade it had become an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Massachusetts carpenters had become a force in the state’s economy and an influence throughout the northeast. Union craftsmen built manufacturing mills, public buildings, and working-class living quarters, which were necessary for the state’s thriving industries and civic centers and supported family stability in developing communities.
The boom times didn’t last. The “American Plan” was a national wave of anti-union actions that followed the World War I armistice and shattered the long tradition of union security and organizational strength. Carpenters demanded their share in the wealth that efficient construction had brought to the state and they fought hard to buttress their hard-won reforms. But the contractors fought back by enforcing wage cuts. Against tremendous economic pressures, carpenters across the nation battled the bosses who were ignoring their rights.
The main contractual issue was the “union shop” provision that required all labor on a construction site to be performed by union members. Contractors wanted to dismantle this practice so that they could hire workers at lower rates, and they won backing from chambers of commerce and big-city builders. Contractors also demanded the removal of foremen, typically union members, from work sites in the union’s jurisdiction. Management’s intention was to replace union foremen with non-union supervisors, men tested for loyalty, a quality the bosses most preferred.
In the rough campaigns that followed, wages were cut and hours expanded with no overtime. Popular newspapers ran hostile ads, employers restricted union officers’ access to members during work hours, and supervisors deployed trained dogs as strategic enforcers in worksite skirmishes.
The bosses’ goal, the open (non-union) shop, prevailed in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But Boston carpenters would not settle. A major strike during the winter of 1921 grew into a pitched battle and then a lockout. Union members held the strike until April, then accepted a ten percent wage cut with no official settlement nor direct access to union representation. But this was no surrender. The union continued to organize and successfully reclaimed their members with an improved settlement in May 1923.
The rest of the decade continued to be rocky, a prelude to the troubles of the Great Depression. Construction workers had to deal with a weak economy throughout the 1920s. Carpenters’ jobs, then as now, were like most jobs in the building trades. When jobs flourished, the good wages were great to have and workers felt satisfied with what they had accomplished. But then they needed that next project.
The World War II period and the postwar aftermath were boom times for military projects and a challenge for the peacetime housing market. During the war, union standards changed quickly to meet military needs. Vast new facilities rose up at training camps, naval harbors, and air bases. Soldiers with or without union cards applied to the trade, passed the tests, and performed well enough to continue as army carpenters. At war’s end, returning soldiers made their own places in the flourishing peacetime housing industry. Developers scrambled to meet massive consumer demands and built quickly. New single-family homes went up in areas that a few months earlier had been bare tracts. During the 1960s and 1970s these developments formed the working- and middle-class suburban communities that shaped U.S. family culture for decades to come.
By the mid-twentieth century the union’s essential expertise and pragmatic organization were enabling vital commercial infrastructures that would lay the groundwork in Boston and other communities for a modern and prosperous future.
The Massachusetts carpenters had survived some of their leanest years by limiting admission to the trades and tightly controlling wage levels and the distribution of work. White men, especially relatives of workers already in the trade, benefited the most from these restrictions.
Rules of seniority that favor traditions of the closed shop, such as father-to-son apprenticeships, have been strong bulwarks against working-class poverty in many white communities. However, that same system has permitted discriminatory sex- and race-based hiring practices throughout the industry.
The trade as it was depicted when With Our Hands was published has changed both technically and commercially. And, in terms of equality of opportunity, it is not the union it once was. In its second-from-last chapter the book offers a few glimpses of changes that were due and did come, as can be seen with a set of important photos of male and female carpenters, some white, others not.
Massachusetts is only one of the locations where these issues have yet to be solved. Even today the dilemma is national and pervasive and it blocks opportunities for economic equality. This is a troubling legacy, not only in the U.S. construction industry, but also in much of the U.S. workforce.
MIRIAM FRANK retired from 35 years of teaching humanities at New York University and at labor service organizations around the United States.