Portrait of a Puzzling Industry
The building industry, disjointed, disorganized, with a clientele suspicious and largely uninformed of its complexity, with an architectural profession almost equally uninformed and clamoring for a recognition of superior knowledge of the problem which it never possessed and cannot maintain, with the banking and lending institutions throughout the country taking no stand for a stabilized industry, but relying on an assumed satisfaction with plans and specifications made in a medium they do not comprehend and written in a technical language that they cannot fully understand, with bonding companies as ready to insure the performance of an inexperienced beginner as an experienced builder, so long as the premium is paid, with importunate novices clamoring that they can build cheaper than anyone else, with the sheriff waiting in the treasurer’s office while frantic collections are being garnered in the banker’s office to stave off for another brief period the hand of bankruptcy that overtakes fifty percent of his kind in every five-year cycle—is it any wonder that we have never met seriously to stabilize labor relationships? Is it not a great wonder that absolute anarchy in the industry does not completely overwhelm it?
—William Starrett, 19281
In all fairness, “absolute anarchy” was too strong a phrase, even for an exasperated building contractor. William Starrett’s portrait of his environment may have been overdrawn, but he did, nonetheless, capture important elements of a business filled with a bewildering array of actors—all with pivotal roles. The very number of players—architect, banker, contractor, developer, engineer, right down the alphabet to worker—combined to create an industry without a clearly defined center. Starrett, a member of a prominent New York building family, was neither the first nor last to harp on the vacuum at the core of the industry. This universe of interdependent constellations perpetually irked business analysts more comfortable with the organizing logic of a dominating institution or figure.
In a 1947 cover article entitled “The Industry Capitalism Forgot,” the editors of Fortune lashed out at the “feudal character” and “picayune scale” of construction’s homebuilding wing. It was, they sputtered, “the one great sector of modern society that has remained largely unaffected by the industrial revolution.”2 Much of their irritation focused on the limited ability of building contractors to chart their own destinies as compared to employers in other industries. Local or regional in scope, pre–World War II American construction employers shared little of the authority or august aura of their peers in basic manufacturing. There were no Carnegies, Rockefellers, or Fords erecting offices, bridges, or houses. Instead, even major builders like Starrett portrayed themselves as handcuffed by their occupational environment.
Starrett and Fortune’s editors believed a qualitative leap in employer size was the appropriate prescription for construction’s supposed ailments. And, in fact, their plea for bigness has, to some degree, been answered in the past forty years. Construction giants, such as Fluor, Bechtel, and Brown & Root, currently operate on a global scale; even homebuilding now has billion-dollar firms. The 1982 Census of Construction Industries, most recent of the Commerce Department’s regular five-year surveys, reported that 71 percent of the nation’s total building business receipts belonged to just 4 percent of the construction firms. In Massachusetts, the figures are even more extreme. Three percent of the state’s construction companies performed 91 percent of the work.3
These data can be misleading. The top 3 or 4 percent do not represent a handful of massive corporations exerting a stranglehold on the market. Unlike most other industries, construction remains a relatively easy field to enter. With a grand total of 1.4 million construction establishments in the United States in 1982, 4 percent adds up to 52,668 companies—hardly a monopoly. Similarly, the top 3 percent in Massachusetts includes over a thousand firms. Certainly, the industry has become increasingly centralized, but the figures also reveal the remarkable persistence of the small “mom-and-pop” outfit. The census indicated that 932,608 companies across the country functioned without any employees in 1982 and collectively managed to carry out $41 billion worth of business, 11 percent of the nation’s total construction volume. These individual builders or working partners offer no serious threat to the multi-billion-dollar giants, but their existence is testimony to the continuing niche for small builders.4
More important for the purposes of this book, construction workers experience their work environment as decentralized. Giant payrolls are the exception, rather than the rule, even among the larger firms. Most building employers still operate in local or regional markets. Sixty percent of the construction workforce (craft workers as well as office staff) in the United States work in companies with fewer than fifty employees. Even more astonishing, fully one in four is employed by a contractor with fewer than ten workers.5 The combination of working within small or medium-scale operations and the accessibility of self-employment has had an enormous impact on the historical consciousness of American construction workers. Over the course of their working lives, a significant number have been, in turn, employed by others, self-employed, or (less likely) employers.
The vast majority of building trades workers collect a paycheck. But within that framework, tradesmen and -women who will never open their own businesses have temporary escapes from the status of a hired hand. Frequently, they will work on their own in the evenings and on weekends. At some time, most carpenters will offer bids on jobs, even if it is just a matter of repairing a porch, installing kitchen cabinets, building a deck, or adding a room. They will order their own building materials, pay a neighborhood teenager, and fight to collect an overdue bill. As a result, they will have faced, from a worm’s-eye view, some of the issues confronting their employers. Whether it be working “side jobs” or buying a pick-up truck for tools and materials, from time to time most construction workers will grapple with a fuzzy self-definition that straddles strict class boundaries. Autoworkers, check-out cashiers, and nurse’s aides are unlikely to open a factory, supermarket, or hospital, but carpenters and other building trades workers can harbor small-scale designs of independence within their occupation. The chances of truly “making it” may be remote, but the nine hundred thousand self-employed builders counted by the census do underpin a construction culture in which distinctions between employer and employed are sometimes blurred and the common concerns of everyone who builds for a living can be exaggerated.
Despite its internal disorder, decentralization, and vestiges of occupational mobility, construction has a long history of organization—among both workers and employers. In many ways, trade unionism blossomed among American building trades workers because of, not in spite of, the decentralized character of the industry. The indispensable level of the workers’ skills gave them extensive bargaining leverage against employers with limited financial resources and uncertain political cohesion. Individual builders rarely had the luxury to withstand lengthy strikes by a workforce that was not easily replaced. Thus, both sides had a compelling incentive to organize their constituencies thoroughly.
The nature of the unionism that evolved in the building trades also flowed from the makeup of construction. Craft unionism—the organization of workers on the basis of a common trade skill—spoke to the carpenter’s need for a secure identity in an insecure climate. Craft unionism offered a haven, creating a semblance of order out of chaos. Membership in a building trades union represented more than an automatic economic move. It functioned as a validation of an occupational choice, providing extensive social and cultural services, constantly reaffirming the value of a life spent handling wood. From the beginning, pride in one’s craft and one’s labor organization went hand in hand not only for the union organizer but for the typical working carpenter.
The form of craft unionism symbolized the kind of solidarity that existed for carpenters—one that was based on a feeling of kinship with fellow carpenters rather than the generalized working population. The union’s hand of friendship was usually extended to other construction unions but less consistently toward labor organizations outside the industry. At its most extreme, this standoffish stance became outright hostility toward unskilled workers. During much of the highly charged debate on craft versus industrial unionism in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the national leadership of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America argued fiercely against the wisdom of organizing on an industrial basis.
In order to succeed, craft unionism in construction required firm and total control over the labor market. A local union’s bargaining strength was directly related to the complete organization of the carpenters in its community. Unorganized skilled carpenters represented a serious threat to the union, an opportunity for contractors to staff their sites adequately with nonunion tradesmen. The need for control over the labor supply also drove the unions to adopt diametrically opposed strategies. Once a local signed up the bulk of its potential membership, the open-arms approach gradually gave way to policies based on limiting the labor supply and excluding further competition for scarce jobs.
Union attitudes toward apprenticeship have always demonstrated the perceived need to control access to the construction site. Naturally, union members sought to limit rapid influxes of carpenters from any source, but since the apprenticeship system was the only formal means of entry into the trade, it provided a convenient handle for regulations. The threat of an unrestricted number of openings has frightened older carpenters for more than a century. Young, strong, agile, eager, and low-paid apprentices present an obvious and attractive alternative to higher-paid journeymen past their prime for cost-conscious builders. Construction unions quickly moved to establish fixed journeymen–apprentice ratios.
As early as 1868, the president of the National Union of Bricklayers announced: “It is only by limitation of apprentices that we can hope to regulate the demand for our labor.”6 Such statements invariably set off howls of indignation from employers and free labor market defenders. Union leaders were accused of seeking labor monopolies and artificially raising prices through the exclusion of unskilled and semiskilled workers. Unionists responded, defensively at times, that no skilled mechanic would ever remain in a trade that was perpetually seeking to replace him.
In a 1903 editorial in the Carpenter, the journal of the United Brotherhood, General Secretary Frank Duffy suggested that the number of apprentices should be tied to the amount of unskilled work built into the craft.
The limitation of apprentices should be directed, as far as possible, toward eliminating the class of men who to-day merely exploit the trade, lower the standard of workmanship, discredit the just claims of good mechanics and demoralize the entire craft. . . . In limiting apprenticeship in this manner, the unions would only be following the example of many trade associations and professions that now legally prescribe the methods of entering their ranks and enforce compliance with their rules.7
The economic need to exclude excess carpenters dovetailed neatly with the cultural need to create a tightly knit community of carpenters with a clear collective identity. In Massachusetts as in other states, this process of craft union/craft identity building was hastened by the minimal ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions within the workforce. Carpentry always has been and still is a predominantly white male trade in which craft knowledge is passed from father to son. Black carpenters were scarce in Massachusetts until fairly recently; there were no Rosie the Carpenters in World War II; and even ethnic differences among the white men faded in the face of the largely native-born, Canadian, or northern European origins of the workforce. While this homogeneity has been one source of tradesmen’s mistrust of affirmative action in the industry and “outsiders” in general, it has also played an important role in cementing bonds of solidarity within the trade.
Thus, the very structure and dynamics of the construction industry have bred seemingly contradictory responses from the people who labor in it. Fierce individualism and a strong collective consciousness are married in the brand of craft unionism peculiar to the building trades. Workers view their employers as opponents within the bargaining context, as allies in relation to the larger social and political environment, and as role models for those seeking a route out of the drudgery of wage labor. The unions combine a warm, supportive, even nurturing, atmosphere for those “inside the family” with a studied indifference toward those outside the industry.
What has held all the disparate strands of the carpenter’s life from spinning off into a formless existence is the glue of the self-conception of a carpenter as a culturally valuable entity. Craft pride has been at the core, expressed in a variety of ways—in the turn-of-the-century carpenters with white coveralls over their white shirts and ties, in the ample toolboxes overflowing with finely honed saws and chisels and esoteric tools that are included “just in case,” and in the ultimate compliment of being considered a “good mechanic” by one’s peers. Respect must be earned, but it is ultimately guaranteed for those who choose to stick it out. The inclusive nature of the craft union culture has allowed the continuation of one of the most astounding characteristics of the industry—the uniform wage for all journeymen in the union setting. In a society that reveres pay-scale hierarchies and provides status rewards on the basis of income differentials, union carpenters and other organized building trades workers have offered a distinctive and almost subversive model for compensation systems.
The American carpenter today performs many of the same tasks as his predecessors. Every morning he shows up at the construction site ready to erect the foundation, structural frame, partition walls, or interior finish. But developments in the industry are challenging the relevance of the once remarkably constant self-definition. Technological innovations have simplified the work, rendering the carpenter more of an installer than a fabricator and planting doubts as to whether the future holds room for an entire occupational category of “good mechanics.” The rise of the open shop in construction and the overall antiunion political climate diminishes the once undisputed position of the craft union as the organized expression of the carpenter’s needs.
This book recounts the history of carpenters in Massachusetts. The contemporary image of crisis that pervades the field is not without precedent. On the contrary, with the exception of a few stable decades in the post–World War II era, carpenters, their trade, and their labor organizations have been under perpetual attack. Craft pride has served the carpenter well, as a bulwark against the slipshod contractor, the reckless foreman, labor-saving devices, and the fundamental insecurity that has driven so many out of the industry. That sense of pride, however, has also been in a chronic state of tension in a world of work that simultaneously reinforces and undermines the very craft that carpenters depend on. New conditions, new circumstances require new and creative approaches, but a look to the past also reminds us that few of the battles the modern carpenter faces have never been taken up before.