9

Cooperatives: Building Without Bosses

During the spring of 1921, a group of Boston area tradesmen traveled daily to the South Shore town of Quincy. They were building a new $8,000 house for a Boston journalist. The house was nothing special—a small bungalow, half wood and half brick on the outside. But inside, as the job neared completion, the tilesetters discreetly placed a number of bluish-green tiles above the mantelpiece. The tiles contained the names and local unions of the men who built the house along with a small design of characteristic tools of each trade. The house was, according to John Nason, “the first product of a thousand cooperative working builders, with the boss eliminated and with democratic management substituted.”¹

Nason was the president and business manager of the Building Trades Unions Construction and Housing Council, a Boston building cooperative incorporated in late 1920 at the urging of several members of the Boston Bricklayers’ Union. Shortly after the war, that union had appointed a committee to establish contract bargaining guidelines. After months of discussions, the group concluded that continually escalating building prices functioned as an obstacle to further wage increases. Employers forcefully argued that labor costs had to be held in check before overall costs could stabilize. Unionists disagreed, but realized that they had to counter this argument effectively in order to win raises. The Bricklayers’ committee claimed that the price of labor had little impact on spiraling costs. Instead, they blamed contractor and subcontractor overhead.

Nason and another committee member named George Edwards believed that the unions had to do more than present their case rhetorically. If, as they suggested, excessive employer overhead produced overpriced buildings, builders who disdained profiteering should be able to reduce construction costs substantially. But few conventional builders volunteered to cut their profit margins. “We determined,” Nason told a Boston Chamber of Commerce hearing, “that we ourselves were more competent to carry the thing on and reduce the cost than could be done under the general contract system.”² After laying bricks for eight hours a day, Nason and Edwards spent their evenings lobbying building trades union officials to support the establishment of a union-run building cooperative.

Their proposal was not a completely new idea. Nineteenth-century America had seen waves of producer cooperatives come and go. The Knights of Labor considered cooperatives the seedbeds of a new society. Terence Powderly, head of the Knights, had long favored the creation of cooperatives over other trade union tactics, such as strikes and boycotts. Powderly believed that the K of L cooperatives would expand and flourish, taking on more and more essential productive tasks until they eventually replaced the existing wage system. In 1887, the Knights sponsored 135 producer co-ops including boot and shoe companies in Lynn and Spencer, Massachusetts. The AFL had never put much stock in these worker-ownership schemes, preferring to improve the lot of union members through collective bargaining with employers. But cooperatives were not an entirely foreign concept for AFL-affiliates either. The UBCJA, for example, set up a short-lived Northwestern Cooperative Building Association in Minneapolis in 1886.³

Brotherhood carpenters in Massachusetts had their own extensive experiences with worker-initiated firms. Striking carpenters had frequently used the competitive threat of a union-operated building company to bring reluctant contractors back to the bargaining table. In some cases, the unions simply allowed individual members to approach the public as contractors, as they did in the strikes in Fall River in 1900 and Pittsfield in 1906. In others, the unions organized full-fledged cooperatives, ready to capitalize on the skills of the membership for large-scale projects, as they did in Lawrence in 1900 and Springfield in 1904. The practice continued into the 1920s. When builders in Worcester locked out the city’s construction workers in April 1921 in order to impose a 20 percent reduction, the Carpenters District Council immediately authorized twenty members to set up their own businesses. Less than a week later, a joint meeting of all the building trades announced plans to form a Builders’ Cooperative Society that would “furnish employment to hundreds of members.”⁴ In each case, the union’s public stance was identical. We are the builders, they would announce. We know the work and how to do it. We will demonstrate that the contractors can afford our wage requests by performing carpentry at the proposed higher wage rate without increasing the consumer’s bill.

These tactics proved useful for a number of reasons. First, if worker-initiated building got off the ground, it provided extra income for striking carpenters and saved the locals the expense of strike benefits. Second, it was an effective method to win public approval for union demands. Third, the threat of union competition often did force the employers to reconsider their negotiating position. And finally, it was a morale booster for the men. It reminded them of the crucial role they played in the industry. The unions’ public statements were not overblown propaganda. The workers were the builders. The fact that they could provide quality construction without the contractors reinforced self-respect and pride in work.

The Nason and Edwards scheme initially piqued interest for these same tactical reasons. In the midst of the 1919 strike, the two enthusiastic bricklayers convinced the Boston Building Trades Council to support a plan for a building cooperative to construct “up to date and artistic houses for workers.” The BTC leaders’ search for every strategic advantage during the strike momentarily dovetailed with Nason’s and Edward’s larger social vision. On May 29, the Council announced that it intended to purchase a 12 acre tract between West Roxbury and Dedham in order to build eighty houses.⁵ The plans were not carried out, and council leaders may have never intended to use the idea for anything more than a bargaining chip. The strike ended successfully for the unions. The men returned to work, and the grandiose co-op structure temporarily slipped between the cracks.

Nason and Edwards refused to let the matter die. Meeting weekly with other interested unionists in a small room at Wells Memorial Labor Temple, they enlisted the aid of Harvard economist Edmund Lincoln to develop a feasible and financially sophisticated blueprint for the cooperative. They decided to go to the general membership of the various trades—some twenty thousand workers—and ask for a $1 contribution per person. With that initial capital, they hoped to launch a cooperative bank that would grant construction loans to workers in need of housing. The worker would then pay off the loan in rent with an ultimate option to buy. According to the prospectus, the financing served to provide start-up capital, boost housing demand, and alter economic priorities such that “the worker should have the right to work and use the land and also to receive the full return of his own toil.”⁶

The authors had high hopes, lofty goals, and boundless enthusiasm for the project. They buttonholed union leaders, journalists, and local politicians to promote the scheme. One sympathetic account in the Boston Globe described the Council as “one of the most unusual undertakings of its kind ever launched in the world” and predicted that it might be an “incentive for a widespread progressive labor movement involving labor’s general participation in the management of industrial enterprises of all classes and kinds.” The Boston cooperators received encouragement from similar enterprises across the country. The St. Louis and Minneapolis Building Trades Councils established their own contracting companies. Building trades delegates to the 1921 Illinois AFL convention won the unanimous passage of a resolution calling for a statewide building cooperative. “The workers in the building trades are quite capable of conducting the building industry,” read the wording of the resolution. “With the co-operation and loyalty of every trade unionist and co-operator in the State it would only be the matter of a few years when the Building Trades of this State would be the masters of their own destiny, and the builders of most of the buildings in the State.”⁷

Undertakings packaged in such grandiose terms rarely meet the impossibly high expectations they foster. The Boston Construction and Housing Council was no exception. Still, by the end of 1920 almost $10,000 had been raised and a rough organization was in place. Nason took the Council’s one full-time salaried position at the bricklayers standard union rate. During its first year, the Council completed contracts for two houses, a number of garages, and extensive minor home repairs. Despite the stated goal of providing steady year-round work, the cooperative was forced to hire by the job, giving priority to Council members. The lowest number of men on the payroll was sixteen, but by mid-winter 1921–22 the total number of employees had increased to twenty-eight.⁸

The cooperative was meant to be more than another name on the bottom of a worker’s paycheck. Though a few of the charter members withdrew and returned to conventional construction, the majority relished the difference. One worker told a researcher:

When I go to a boss and ask for a job, do you suppose he asks me how well I’m trained? Not in a lifetime. What he wants to know is how fast I can work, not how well. I don’t want to work that way. I know my trade from A to ampersand; I like it; it’s the best work there is if you can have a free hand, and the cooperative gives me that. I want the chance to put my heart into my work, not just to spend so many hours a day doing what somebody tells me to do.⁹

The cooperative was structured to foster those feelings as much as possible. All the estimating, purchasing, and building was done by Council members. The client just provided the architect’s plans. On the site, the workers elected a building committee with a representative from each trade and one general foreman. Each craft was responsible for its set of tasks. Supervision was perfunctory. As Nason remarked, “we don’t expect that [the foreman] will spend much time supervising. The men are working for themselves, so they don’t need that.”¹⁰

For all the positive feelings, the Council was unable to generate sufficient capital funding. Nason reached out to unionists outside the building trades in order to increase the number of shareholders, but still fell short of the money needed to bid on the sizable projects that would have created more employment and more income. In 1922, the Council made a fatal investment error, buying a large piece of land in Dorchester outright. Nason hoped to build a two-story apartment house and sell it quickly in order to shore up the Council’s shaky finances. When the inevitable delays occurred, the cooperative ran short on cash and missed several payrolls. The business never recovered, limping along until the Depression, when almost every marginal building firm was destroyed.

The Building Trades Unions Construction and Housing Council was a noble, if quixotic, experiment. Cooperative members got a taste of a worker-initiated, worker-controlled, democratic operation. Its very existence was premised on the irrefutable fact that building tradesmen had all the tools, literally and figuratively, to conduct work on their own. Sixty years later, after decades of further deskilling and specialization in the industry, the notion that construction craftsmen have the wherewithal to “build without bosses” still has a powerful appeal. In 1984, tradesmen in Buffalo, New York, formed the Buffalo Building Trades Council Construction Corporation, a nonprofit union-directed building firm, as bargaining leverage during difficult contract talks. Unlike Nason’s and Edwards’s Council, the Buffalo company was strictly a negotiating ploy, to be dropped in the event of a satisfactory agreement. Like the experiment of the twenties, however, the Buffalo formation also rested on the assumption that building trades workers can construct the buildings of America by themselves. That collective sense of self was and is not common among American workers, yet it has been a recurring theme for skilled construction workers. The Boston cooperative removed the concept of workers’ control from the abstract into the realm of reality. Though it failed, the brief history of the Council stands as a concrete monument to Nason’s dream that a productive enterprise could “be run by men and not by dollars.”¹¹

Houses, Factories, Ships, and Railroads, 1897–1925