Battling Carpenters: World War I and the 1919 Strike
The Brotherhood had demonstrated convincingly that it could organize carpenters and negotiate agreements with contractors in the private sector. The entry of the United States into the First World War in April 1917 posed a new and more complicated set of problems for the trade union movement. The federal government emerged as a primary construction purchaser, redirecting the building industry’s priorities from conventional construction to temporary military housing, shipbuilding, and ammunition factories. Bargaining with an individual employer or an association was one thing; taking on the government in the midst of a wartime emergency was another matter.
Building tradesmen were concerned that the new prominence of federal agencies in the industry might undermine established working conditions. The volume of military construction was substantial enough that federal guidelines and standards inevitably set the pattern for all construction. On the eve of the war, Samuel Gompers promised President Woodrow Wilson organized labor’s support and, in effect, offered a wartime no-strike pledge. The unqualified character of Gompers’s statements concerned UBCJA officials anxious to install safeguards in any wartime agreements. An editorial in the Carpenter reminded Gompers that sacrifices for the war effort did not necessarily imply diminishing worker protections. “Patriotic manifestos, unsupported by definite administrative plans, offer no such guarantees,” warned editor Frank Duffy.1
The Brotherhood did have such plans. The union offered its thirty-five years of experience as a recruiter, trainer, and supplier of labor as a model for an effective and fair wartime labor policy. The May 1917 editorial suggested the unions could play a similar role for federal construction needs: “The AFL, with its great army of skilled mechanics, is in a splendid condition today to be of valuable service if the Government will have the forethought and vision to avail itself of its assistance in a spirit of cooperation compatible with the democratic ideals for which the labor movement stands.”2 From the union’s point of view, cooperation entailed a recognition of existing labor conditions, particularly the closed shop.
In June, Gompers huddled with Secretary of War Newton Baker. The results of their conference confirmed the apprehensions at UBCJA headquarters. Gompers had won a federal commitment to prevailing wages, hours, and many working conditions, but specifically exempted the closed shop from the list of prevailing conditions. In essence, the head of the AFL had exchanged a universal union pay scale for open shop operations. Antilabor federal authorities seized the opportunity and issued contracts equally to both union and nonunion contractors in what had been strict closed shop areas. The building trades wing of the AFL was furious with the terms of the Baker–Gompers agreement and none more so than President William Hutcheson of the UBCJA. With a pen stroke, Gompers had wiped out the fruits of years of difficult battles. Hutcheson balked at waiving the closed shop. In protest, he refused to participate on any of the tripartite boards set up to oversee federal labor contracts. A showdown was unavoidable. Sooner or later, union craftsmen would challenge the federal policy.
In early November, a large group of union tradesmen walked off the $9-million open-shop destroyer plant project in Squantum. On November 7, the Building Trades Councils of Greater Boston and Quincy endorsed the walkout and called a general strike on all military work in the area. Thirteen hundred men struck the Watertown Arsenal, the Charlestown Navy Yard, the Federal Appraiser’s stores in Boston, the Magazine Station in Hingham, and the Marine Hospital in Chelsea. A war of words broke out as each side accused the other of unpatriotic actions. The unions argued that the strike was against “un-American conditions,” while employers and federal officials claimed the walkout jeopardized the war effort. Aberthaw, one of the largest open shop contractors in the area, plastered their Squantum job site with hortatory posters in English and Italian:
THIS WORK IS MORE THAN A CONSTRUCTION JOB. It is our chance to help win the war. Our work must be done in the same spirit as the work of our friends, brothers, sons who fight the battles. This plant is being built to guard their lives. A delay on your part may mean death to them.3
Employer appeals to patriotism were laced with venomous denunciations of those who questioned the military juggernaut. Union critics of wartime labor policies paid a high price. On the national level, Hutcheson and the UBCJA leadership were regularly labeled traitors and slackers. Though other AFL officials privately supported the carpenters, they chose to stay in the background, intimidated by the public abuse that followed Hutcheson’s condemnation of the Baker-Gompers agreement. In a later New York ship carpenters strike, United States Shipping Board head Edwin Hurley charged Hutcheson with “adding to the fearful danger our soldiers already face.” Influential preacher Billy Sunday whipped antiunion hysteria to a higher plane, invoking the name of God to denounce the UBCJA chief’s treason.4
Boston-area unionists gritted their teeth and resisted similar indictments in the local media. John McDonald, secretary of the Building Trades Council, angrily complained that contractors were exploiting the workmen and the government by gutting traditionally accepted working conditions and charging exorbitant rates under the phony guise of patriotism: “We are just as patriotic as they are and we believe more so; although we don’t wave the American flag continuously or endeavor to use it as a protecting shield to gather in excess profits and break down conditions at the expense of the wage-earners.”5
A livid Stanley King, assistant to Secretary Baker, arrived in Boston and ordered the men back to work. King told the press that the Boston building trades unions were the only ones in the country to violate the Baker-Gompers compact. King’s order was seconded by James Donlin, president of the AFL’s Building Trades. Amazingly, the union leadership held firm despite the pressure. Nor did individual workers waver. All the projects remained shut down. The Building Trades Councils voted unanimously to ignore Donlin’s telegram and announced pointedly that “any settlement to be made will be made by the joint building trades of Boston and Quincy and no others.”6
On November 16, the strike ended. The Departments of War and Navy promised to confer on the open shop conditions. The Building Trades Councils declared the men would return to work out of “pure patriotism” on the basis of nothing more than such an assurance. The end of the Boston dispute did not, however, resolve the larger issue. For the next several months, building tradesmen across the country refused to allow the government to sabotage firmly established working conditions. Scattered walkouts impressed the importance of the closed shop on the Wilson administration. The persistence of the strikers and the Brotherhood in particular paid off. In April 1918, the government disbanded the ineffectual tripartite boards and appointed a National War Labor Board. Under the new arrangements, local conditions were guaranteed. If an area had a closed shop before the war, so it stayed.
The War Labor Board won the approval of organized labor. Labor disputes slowed as unionists discovered that the Board’s rulings were surprisingly considerate of their grievances. Even the harshest critics of governmental intervention in labor relations, such as William Hutcheson, accepted the Board’s machinery. When several Brotherhood locals requested support for wage strikes in October 1918, the union’s general executive board rerouted the appeal to the appropriate federal representatives. Not everyone was equally pleased. Employers were generally less sanguine, fearing that federal sanction of “a living wage” gave unionism too great a boost.
Furthermore, the War Labor Board established an unwanted, if mild, precedent of state involvement in internal business affairs. In a period of opportunities for inflated profits and instant fortunes, employers wanted to pursue their interests unfettered by even half-hearted federal watch-dogging. Shortly after the war, Newton Baker confirmed many unionists’ suspicions when he concluded that labor had been “more willing to keep in step than capital.”7
James Donlin, like Baker a sharp critic of wartime labor militance, spelled out the implications of that double standard.
Wages did not keep pace with the increased cost of commodities. Big business, little business, all business showed a total disregard for the Government in its life and death struggle. Evidently no one expected business to be even reasonable when there was an opportunity to profiteer. Business, more subtle than labor, reaps the riches and avoids the criticism. Still the occasional murmur of the worker was magnified. He was accused of being disloyal.8
Arthur Huddell of the Boston Building Trades Council echoed Donlin’s evaluation. In the Boston area, he claimed, “profiteering on labor was an outrage and a disgrace.”9
Though wages rose during the war, prices practically doubled from 1915 to 1919. Nor did the steadily upward climb end with the Armistice. Between June 1919 and June 1920, the cost of living continued to soar at a 22 percent clip. A Boston Globe survey showed that from 1914 to 1920 carpenters’ wages lagged over 14 percent behind a cost-of-living index.10 Federal policy had stabilized production during the war, but the Wilson administration showed little interest in smoothing the transition to peacetime. The sudden and complete eradication of military industries severely affected carpenters’ fortunes. Private residential construction rebounded in 1919 but not nearly enough to provide jobs for those displaced from the vanishing shipbuilding and military housing sectors.
The echoes of the wartime experience hovered over labor relations in the stormy year of 1919. The trauma of overseas death and destruction and the mounting anger at domestic profiteering provided a backdrop for workers eager to make up for their sacrifices. When the Holyoke Building Trades Employers Association locked out the city’s construction workers in May, the unions justified their wage demands by pointing to wildly inflated prices and unremitting rent-gouging. The Building Trades Council saved its most caustic barbs for the employers’ attempts to continue building with hungry war veterans at “starvation wages.” Sparing the returning heroes the usual invectives hurled at scabs, the Council, sternly lectured the BTEA on the ethics of their strategy: “It must be remembered that these boys were making sacrifices while the employers were making huge profits.”11
The Holyoke craftsmen were but one splash in a national pool of striking workers. In all, over four million workers went on strike in 1919, an incredible 23 percent of the total labor force. Tens of thousands of workers struck in Massachusetts alone. Textile workers in Lawrence walked out for the eight-hour day with no reduction in pay. Telephone operators in Boston and across New England won a series of demands in April. Striking against the federal government (which still held wartime control over the telephone companies), the operators broadened the labor movement’s horizons beyond private-sector unionism. “I do not believe,” wrote one observer, “that an industrial issue has ever before penetrated every village, hamlet or town of New England as has this strike of telephone girls.”12 In the state’s most famous strike of that year, Boston’s policemen organized the nation’s first police union. Following the dismissal of nineteen union leaders, the city’s police force walked off their jobs in a bitter and protracted battle that ended with the replacement of an entire generation of law enforcement officers.
The strike wave was not only a matter of immense numbers, but of unprecedented scope. Every section of the workforce took part and, as historian David Montgomery has written, “every conceivable type of demand was raised”—improved wages, reduced hours, union and shop committee recognition, joint negotiating councils, defiance of governmental decrees, and freedom for jailed unionists.13 The remarkable general strike in Seattle involved 110 local unions (many with binding contracts) supporting the city’s locked-out shipyard workers. The Seattle General Strike Committee, representing thirty-five thousand workers, took responsibility for the delivery of food supplies, health care, and public order, virtually functioning as a substitute city government. Realizing the action’s historic significance, the union-owned Seattle Union Record raised the possible implications of such a general strike.
Labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries, but Labor will REOPEN, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed to preserve public health and public peace. If the strike continues, Labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities, UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT. And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!14
It was a time of heightened political consciousness and solidarity within the labor movement as a whole. Skilled craft workers shed some of their aloofness toward semiskilled and unskilled workers. During the New Bedford textile strike, the local Building Trades Council voted to stop all construction work on the mills if the mill owners brought in scabs. Brockton carpenters won some extraordinary contract language, proving that questions of workers’ control were not limited to the Seattle strike. After three weeks on strike, the Brockton men won a 15-cent-an-hour increase, a shorter work week, and an astonishing clause that read: “The union also reserves the right to restrict the amount of profit the master carpenters shall receive from the work of each carpenter.” A joint union-master committee was put in place to establish the maximum figure and monitor the agreement. This step limited potential profiteering and injected the working carpenter directly into the heart of the building industry.15
In April, May, and June, carpenters struck in Arlington, Burlington, Melrose, Natick, Needham, Newton, North Attleboro, Reading, Stoneham, Wakefield, Watertown, Wellesley, Wilmington, Winchester, and Woburn. But the biggest strike was left to the carpenters of Boston. In early May, carpenters in the thirty locals affiliated with the Boston Carpenters District Council voted 6,000 to 700 to strike, if necessary, for a jump in wages from 75 cents to $1 an hour and a forty-hour week. The Boston Building Trades Employers Association rejected the union position, but as the strike deadline neared, most of the non-BTEA employers bolted. On May 14, 4,500 carpenters won the demand outright, requiring only 1,400 others to walk out.16
The 250-member BTEA (formed in 1916 out of those MBA employers who were prepared to bargain with the unions) counted on the general postwar construction downturn to sober the striking carpenters. Discouraged by the large number of builders who granted the union demands, the BTEA nevertheless understood that an unyielding stance on their part would eventually force non-BTEA contractors to retract the wage advance. In a series of statements, the Association outlined its position. A 33 percent pay increase would only act, they argued, as a “hindrance to the resumption of work in the building trades.” They claimed the wartime raises were more than sufficient since the buying public still needed “time to adjust itself” to the higher costs of building. The Association further accused the unions of nipping a “renewal of confidence” in the bud by deterring those owners who had been on the verge of a “partial adjustment.” And finally, the BTEA held out little hope for union success. “It is almost a foregone conclusion that the big issue in breaking the strike will be the unprecedented scarcity of construction work, coupled with the excessive increase in wages demanded under such adverse circumstances.”17
Market conditions favored the contractors. In past disputes, carpenters had generally succeeded in booms and failed in slumps. But 1919 was not an ordinary year and reliance on ordinary tactics proved fruitless. The BTEA had not considered the reinvigorated solidarity sweeping the labor movement. They expected the squabbling between building trades to continue right through the carpenters’ strike. They had good reason. Four years earlier, the carpenters, lathers, and plasterers had pulled out of the AFL-affiiliated Boston Building Trades Council and reemerged as the rival Allied Building Trades Council. Thus, when the carpenters struck in May 1919, the employers expected sympathetic support would only come, if at all, from the two other trades in the ABTC.
The two councils met early in the strike, however, and decided to bury the hatchet. They agreed that if a scab appeared on any struck job, union craftsmen in every trade would immediately walk out, precipitating a general construction strike. Support for the carpenters steadily mounted as the dispute continued. The District Council was financially solvent. By the end of May, $25,000 in strike benefits had been distributed. On May 26, the sixteen hundred members of the UBC shop and mill locals in the Boston area joined the strike. That same day, the thirty-five building trades of the city united under a new charter from the AFL in the United Building Trades Council. The fledgling organization declared its intention to “work as a unit in combatting any attempts of the employers to change the conditions of work” and voted additional funds to support the strikers. On June 2, the plasterers laid down their trowels, bringing the total number of building trades workers on strike to four thousand.18
The formation of the United Building Trades Council threatened an even greater impasse. In early June, the Council voted to call out its thirty thousand members if an agreement was not forthcoming. The prospects of a general strike in Boston brought Mayor Andrew Peters into the fracas. After two weeks of negotiations, Peters convinced the BTEA to accept a novel compromise authored by UBCJA International Vice-President T. M. Guerin. The agreement covered all thirty thousand tradesmen in the UBTC and provided for a standard wage for all skilled construction tradesmen—90 cents an hour immediately and $1 an hour beginning April 1, 1920.
From the union perspective, the standard wage encouraged cooperation and unity among the trades; from the employer vantage point, the common scale removed one of the motivations (the desire to win higher-paid work) for jurisdictional disputes. Both groups hoped the uniform conditions and the ensuing stability would help revive the slipping market. For the duration of the settlement—until December 31, 1920—Boston’s construction workers were granted a closed shop once again. In turn, they agreed to submit all disputes to a board of arbitration. It was a major union victory, cementing union control in the industry and advancing solidarity between the trades. The Carpenter hailed the contract as “one of the most significant documents of the kind ever signed.”19