UNSHARED SACRIFICE
NYC union construction workers make major adjustments to our wages,
benefits and work rules to protect the profits of the real estate developers
The intense high profile volatile conflict between New York City’s real estate developers and General Contractors and the 100,000 men and women who work for them ended with a whimper rather than a bang on Thursday, June 30, 2011.
Despite all the demands for 20% pay cuts and the threats to assign non union workers to union sites, in the end the contracts negotiated, while still concessionary, weren’t dramatically out of line with the givebacks the unions have been making over the past half decade.
This wasn’t due to any extraordinary resistance on the part of union leaders, unfortunately.
The reality was, the bosses were divided and acting at cross purposes.
The real estate developers and their trade group the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), the General Contractors and their trade group the Building Trades Employers Association (BTEA) and their supporters on Wall Street and in the corporate media had one agenda.
The 716 specialty subcontractors and their 11 separate trade associations who directly employ 67,000 construction workers had a totally separate set of goals.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, so they didn’t get to wage the kind of anti union war that some forces on the management side were calling for.
Let’s take a look at why their war on the construction unions turned into a campaign that failed.
1. Market Retention, Market Share
Louis Coletti, the bellicose chairman of the Building Trades Employers Association and self proclaimed “spokesman for the construction industry” had been loudly demanding 20% wage cuts for the past six months.
Coletti had also circulated a 26 point ultimatum demanding that union construction workers give up the 7 hour workday, Saturday as a time and a half day and the right to have employer supplied toilets, electric lights, heat and elevator service on the jobsites, among other concessions.
In the end, the concessions the unions actually gave up were far less extreme –or at least the unions that held out until the June 30 deadline.
Operating Engineers local 14, the union whose members operate the cranes and hoists (temporary freight elevators) on hirise construction sites, allowed the Contractors Association of Greater NY, the Building Contractors Association and the Cement League to weaken their shop steward system.
The old rule was, local 14 required a “master mechanic” (shop steward) on any job where more than 5 hoists or earth moving machines or 3 tower cranes were in use. Now, they will only require stewards on jobs with 5 hoists/machines or 3 cranes that are also worth at least $ 50 million dollars.
Operating Engineers local 15, the union that represents earth moving equipment operators, “oilers” (crane operator trainees) and the mechanics that service the tower cranes, gave similar givebacks to CAGNY, BCA and the Cement League.
From now on, contractors will only have to have an oiler on the job if the project is worth $ 50 million and has 5 hoists/machines or 3 tower cranes.
Ironically, most of the handful of master mechanics and oilers in the city are the relatives of bosses, which is, in a double irony, precisely why the union fought so hard to save those jobs.
Both of those jobs are patronage gigs that you only get if you have a connection with somebody or are related to somebody.
In the case of the local 15 oilers, contractors hire them and sponsor them for crane operator licenses to avoid hiring and sponsoring local 14 apprentices (who – thanks to a federally mandated affirmative action program – are mostly women or minority males)
So the workers who will be losing these positions are, typically, the cousins and brothers-in-law of the contractors who will be laying them off!
As for the other 6,300 operating engineers, minimal concessions were made at their expense.
The main giveback was reducing overtime rates from double time to time and a half – a significant pay reduction, since elevator operators get there before everybody else and only leave when everybody else has already gone home.
Above all, the BTEA’s high profile demand that New York contractors gain the right to bring low paid crane operators from other cities to work here appears to be dead in the water at the moment.
That would have required approval from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the NYC Department of Buildings and the state Labor Department. Those agencies have all balked, due to questions about the skill and safety of out of town operators, thus stalling that bid.
Since New York is a high risk environment for crane operation, bringing out of town crane operators here could potentially be highly risky both for construction workers and the general public.
Bottom line, the Operating Engineers fought to preserve what they have.
That position makes a lot of sense – the economy is going to come back sooner rather than later, so why give up what we’ve fought for over 170 years now only to have to work cheap during the next building boom?
Unfortunately, not every union followed that approach.
Substantial givebacks were put on the table by the District Council of Carpenters in their negotiations with the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries and the union’s “me too” negotiations with the Cement League, the Floor Coverers Association, the Hoisting and Scaffolding Association, the BCA, CAGNY and the General Contractors Association (those agreements always follow the Carpenters Wall, Ceiling pattern).
The District Council refused to offer any pay givebacks, in large part because the Carpenters have already taken huge pay cuts in residential work.
Almost 3 years ago, the Carpenters imposed a 20% pay cut on carpenters working on most of the new commercially financed luxury housing developments in the city, a 40% pay cut on carpenters working on union built affordable housing developments and gave the right to non union General Contractors to run “double breasted” (part union, part scab) crews on some of their Harlem and Brooklyn jobs.
With all those money concessions already in effect, we really don’t have a lot to give.
The biggest non money giveback by far was “Full Mobility”, a proposal that would gut the Carpenters Out of Work List system.
At present, a minimum of 50% of each carpentry contractor’s crew on each site plus the shop steward have to be “local men” (part time casually employed carpenters who get dispatched to jobs through the union) while no more than 50% of the crew plus the foreman can be “company men” (carpenters who are full time employees of a particular contractor).
The contractors have historically preferred to use as many company men as they can.
Officially, this is because, supposedly, company men are better carpenters than local men, a slander against the skills of local men that’s openly promoted by both the union and the contractors.
Unofficially, this is because company men are far more likely to agree to work for less than union scale in return for stable employment with a company.
Also, the majority of company men, like the vast majority of the 557 union carpentry contractors, are White males. By contrast, the majority of local men are Black and Latino and almost all 200 women in the Carpenters are (so to speak) “local men”. Since contractors have a tendency to hire workers who look like them, this is possibly another reason why they want to hire as few local men as possible.
Another proposed concession is the “preapprentice” program.
For the past few years, the District Council has had a hard time getting apprentices to report to work. This is because apprentices work so sporadically these days, due to the economy, that most of them get low paying but steady permanent jobs and balk at leaving them to take high paying but short term jobs through the union.
The District Council’s “solution” to this is to create a new class of low paid material handlers. Unlike apprentices, they would receive no instruction in the carpentry trade and would be used as delivery truck unloading labor.
Essentially, this would be legalizing a bootleg practice carried out by Wall, Ceiling association affiliated furniture installation contractor Total Office Planning Systems (TOPS), which has used Teamsters local 814-represented commerical movers as material handlers on their jobsites.
This practice is in violation of the Carpenters – Wall, Ceiling union contract and the 1984 jurisdictional memorandum between the Carpenters and the Teamsters, which state that Teamster movers are allowed to unload furniture trucks at the loading dock and bring it upstairs, but are prohibited from handling and distributing product on the office floor.
This proposal would have workers who are basically commerical movers, paid at close to the low pay scale that Teamsters local 814 movers are compensated at, doing materials handling on the site floor, but they’d be Carpenters Union members.
The full mobility proposal is incredibly controversial among the roughly two thirds of the city’s 25,000 union carpenters who are local men. They depend on the out of work list for their economic survival. They also have had to deal with 17 years of the District Council and the contractors slowly chipping away at the list through the “request system” which allows contractors to put their company men on the list and hire them as if they were local men, thus denying those jobs to actual local men. Mobility would be a final nail in that coffin.
However, thanks to the 1994 federal racketeering consent decree, imposed on the District Council due to the fact that gangsters controlled the council and its affiliates for the previous 78 years, neither the District Council of Carpenters nor the Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry association get to have the last word on this or any other major issue.
The Carpenters and Wall, Ceiling are awaiting a ruling by a federal judge on the terms of the contract. The judge will have the last word on mobility, preapprentices and any pay and benefit cuts, and the judge-imposed contract will go into effect as soon as the leadership of the District Council and Wall, Ceiling agree to it (Carpenters don’t get to vote on our union contracts – we lost that right in 1916).
Painters District Council # 9 by far got the worst deal.
Ironically, due to the leftist legacy of the Communist business agents who ran the union in the 1940s, their contract expires on May Day, a full two months before all the other trades.
Since they negotiated first, their leadership was able to surrender before their members had a chance to mobilize against the givebacks.
Among the concessions that District Council # 9 made to the Association of Master Painters and Decorators and the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries were;
Contractor contributions into the DC # 9 welfare fund reduced to ZERO for 2 years and pension fund contributions cut to ZERO for 4 years.
On top of that, a $ 4.4 million cut to the health coverage received by painters and their families, basically by making union painters pay more money for less care.
A 67% reduction in the wages and benefits of painters working on residential jobs in Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, busting those painters down from $ 60/hr in wages and benefits to a measly $ 22/hr.
This brings DC # 9’s union scale down to close to the level paid by non union painting contractors, and may trigger wage cuts on the non union side as a result.
The abolition of the District Council # 9 hiring hall – from now on, union painters will only work at a contractor’s whim and will have no recourse to the union if they cannot find a job on their own.
The painting contractors also gained several new ways to blacklist union painters they don’t like from working in the industry, including security background checks, alcohol testing, drug testing and a so called “workplace performance plan”.
That “workplace performance plan” gives painting contractors the right to kick a painter out of the union if he or she gets only 3 bad evaluations from an employer.
There are no appeals from those evaluations – they are solely at the whim of a boss.
The painting contractors also now have the authority to fire shop stewards merely by giving the union 24 hours notice.
In addition to this special power to fire shop stewards, the stewards are also subject to the same menace that all other union painters now face of blacklisting based on security, alcohol, drug testing and contractor evaluations.
Contractors are now free to use low paid apprentices to do work normally done by journeylevel painters and the union can no longer prohibit employers from using methods or tools that endanger the work safety of painters.
On top of all this, the Association of Master Painters and District Council # 9 will enter into talks with the Real Estate Board of New York to impose even deeper givebacks on painters on commercial jobs. REBNY will be making similar demands on every construction union in the city.
To add insult to injury union painters will also be slapped with a one year wage freeze and now the bosses can start jobs at any time between 6 AM and 9 AM, giving up the customary 7 AM start time that has been the industry standard for over a century.
The Painters Union doesn’t allow its members to ratify contracts so the agreement was inflicted on them without a vote.
Basically, the painters unconditionally surrendered, a capitulation that angered other workers into independent activism outside of the union framework, which probably saved other trades from taking similar hits.
In the negotiations between the Cement League and their largest union, the Concrete Workers District Council, the city’s 32 unionized concrete contractors were seeking to impose a 3 year wage freeze on their 2,700 concrete laborers.
This is on top of the 20% pay cut they took on commercially financed luxury housing jobs and the 40% pay cut they took on publicly funded affordable housing work.
The sad thing is concrete laborers really don’t have a whole lot else to give back besides wages.
The concrete laborers job is harsh and brutal, with workers pushed to the outer limits of human endurance on a daily basis, a weak gangster-ridden union and no work rules of any consequence.
These men and women are also frequently ordered to do the work of higher paid carpenters, cement masons and metallic lathers in addition to their craft’s work (pouring concrete, helping carpenters to build and strip concrete formwork, helping lathers set rebar, helping cement masons to trowel and finish the surface of the poured concrete and, in the winter months, tending coal fired stoves all night long to keep the concrete warm).
Not surprisingly, the concrete laborers have the highest death rate in the industry, with some going out the fast way via falling off the side of the structure and others being slowly poisoned to death via carbon monoxide fumes from the coal stoves and the silica dust from the concrete.
At the moment, those talks are continuing with laborers working under the old contract indefinitely.
It’s not clear how the other unions’ talks went with the employers, as terms of the new agreements have not been disclosed yet.
What is known is that tentative settlements have been reached between the Mason Tenders and CAGNY, Teamsters construction drivers local 282 and the Demolition Contractors Association, and Steamfitters local 638 and the Mechanical Contractors Association. Neither unions nor associations have disclosed the terms of these pacts as of yet.
To date, no settlements have yet been reached between Teamsters private sanitation truck drivers local 813 and the Demolition Contractors, Bricklayers local 1 and the BCA, Roofers local 8 and the Roofing and Waterproofing Contractors Association and Cement Masons local 780 and the Cement League.
What really stands out is that the BTEA and REBNY backed down on their biggest demands, abolition of the so called “antiquated work rules” their bought and paid for Manhattan Institute propagandists howled loudest about in the media.
Specifically, they wanted to end the practice of union rules requiring that General Contractors supply toilets, electric light, heat and elevator service to the workers on the jobsites and that the GCs would have to pay plumbers, electricians, steamfitters and elevator operators to maintain those facilities.
The BTEA and REBNY wanted to allow GCs to not provide toilets, light, heat and elevators for workers on their sites, and to allow GCs who chose to provide those facilities to use mason tenders (unskilled laborers who clean up after the other trades) to repair and maintain them instead of skilled trades.
This demand really was a slap in the face for the trades – basically the billionaires wanted the men and women who put up their buildings to walk up 20 flights of stairs to work, to perform their jobs with no light or heat and to urinate on the floor or in a bucket – and BTEA and REBNY backed down rather than push this issue.
GCs will still have to provide bathrooms, electricity, heat and hoist service, they will still have to pay the plumbing, electric and heating contractors to service those facilities and the GCs will still have to hire elevator constructors to run passenger elevators and operating engineers to run freight hoists.
Also, despite all the bellyaching from the billionaires about how long it takes a construction worker to have a cup of coffee and a sweet roll, the break and lunch schedules remain unchanged.
There was also no movement on the prefabrication demand.
Developer Bruce Ratner, the builder of the Atlantic Yards luxury housing complex and the Barclay Center basketball arena, wanted the right to build his apartment houses with factory built modular components, rather than building them from the ground up.
This was quite plainly a money issue – the difference between paying construction carpenters $ 46 an hour to put up walls in the field rather than paying $ 28 an hour to shop carpenters to build modular sections in the shop that would be bolted together on site.
There was no movement on that demand and that proposal remains on the drawing board.
So why did the GCs and the billionaire real estate developers back down on these demands?
2. Billionaires’ war, millionaires’ fight
The bottom line was, this was a war that the specialty subcontractors did not want this fight.
For their own reasons, the city’s 1,500 union contractors (the folks who are the direct employers of about 90% of the city’s union tradespeople) would love to cut construction worker pay and benefits provided that they could hang on to the extra profits extracted by the wage cut.
If the pay and benefit cuts and the weakening of work rules is all going to have to be passed along to the GCs, developers and the banks that finance them, what’s in it for the subcontractors?
If an individual sub pays lower wages than her competitors, then she can underbid the competition but if they all pay lower wages then all the subs lose money.
It’s the job of the trade associations to look out for the interests of all the subs in a given trade. Based on the general interest of every boss in that particular field, the subcontractor associations had every reason to defy the BTEA’s ultimatum to the trades and make their own deal.
For the past 70 years, since the dawn of the modern subcontractor system after World War II, there has been a struggle between the various bosses in construction over the division of profits.
On the one side are the developers who own the buildings, the General Contractors who represent owner interests on the site during the life of the project and the banks who issue the loans that pay for the work to proceed.
On the other side are the various specialty subcontractors whose workers actually put up the building.
The reason cosa nostra and other organized crime groups were embedded in our industry for so long is directly related to this conflict. Basically, the wiseguys organized the subcontractors to fix prices and keep subcontractor profits high, with the unions serving as enforcers targeting contractors that would not go along with the scheme.
Since the fall of the cosa nostra-backed cartels in the 1980s, there has been an increasing push by the owners, bankers and GCs to reduce the profit share that goes to the subs and pocket it themselves.
That is why REBNY (which represents the developers), BTEA (representing the GCs) and the Wall Street banks pushed so hard for these attacks on the unions.
That’s also why the subcontractors did not want to go to war with the unions – they certainly wanted to extract concessions, but for their own benefit, not to be passed up the food chain to the owners!
They’d certainly appreciate a wage cut – as long as they didn’t have to pass it along to the GCs – and they’d welcome the gutting of the union hiring halls, so they could hire their cousins and nephews, or guys from the neighborhood who’d work off the books, and not have to hire women or Blacks, or pro union White men who wouldn’t work for cash.
However, they did not want to fight for the BTEA and REBNY’s demands – particularly the ones, like the ending of mandatory service contracts for temporary toilets, light, heat and elevators, which put money directly in their pockets.
This probably explains why the 716 contractors involved in these talks didn’t want to back up REBNY and the BTEA’s rhetoric with action.
Actually, it is very fortunate for this city’s 100,000 union tradespeople that the bosses were divided here – had they been on the same page, they could have easily defeated our unions.
3. Unequal Partnership
The NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and the 11 affiliated unions directly involved in this year’s talks had absolutely no plans to resist these attacks.
Actually, as late as last winter, the BCTC had serious plans to SUPPORT these givebacks and to sponsor a joint publicity campaign with BTEA to sell these concessions to the members!
The plan was to have a joint BTEA-BCTC rally at Madison Square Garden and a joint publicity campaign in the media, to promote the rancid idea that the only way to save our unions was to surrender to all of the developers and GCs demands.
That didn’t happen – probably because the building trades leaders realized just how deeply unpopular these givebacks were. In the Operating Engineers, the leadership also probably realized that that even the most privileged of their members – oilers and master mechanics - would have to take a hit as well as the less privileged crane, machine and hoist operators.
Be that as it may, the unions have totally embraced the rotten idea of “shared sacrifice”, the pathetic concept that somehow we as workers should take a hit in our standard of living to benefit real estate billionaires and millionaire contractors whose profits have dipped slightly in this current meltdown.
The New York construction unions have been in a full bore retreat ever since AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and the rest of the Wall Street greedheads brought us the meltdown back in 2007.
Within a year of the meltdown, the Building Trades agreed to major concessions in a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) covering jobs for the New York City School Construction Authority. Among other things, they got the right to use scab contractors on union jobsites (as long as the scab shops hired union foremen to supervise their non union workers).
Artimus Construction, the largest scab GC in Harlem, also won the right to use part union part scab crews on their jobs. They were allowed to use union electrical and hirise concrete contractors, side by side with scab masonry, drywall, plumbing and window contractors on their affordable housing jobs.
The SCA PLA and the Artimus deal were followed in 2009 with another PLA that made wage and work rule concessions on two dozen Manhattan hirise jobs, including wages that were 20% less than the regular union scale.
This was followed in 2010 with yet another PLA, allowing the handful of union contractors that work on NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development subsidized housing jobs to pay up to 40% less than union scale.
In addition to the wage cuts and the right to use scab labor, these PLAs also contained permanent no strike clauses.
Not only were the unions banned from striking during the term of their contracts, they were also barred from striking when their contracts expired!
These PLAs, once the exception in this market, soon became the norm.
By the spring of 2011, every major construction project in the city – over 120 jobs – was covered by one or another Project Labor Agreement.
PLAs restricted the unions on all 64 major construction projects in Manhattan below 96th St, including Ground Zero, the International Gem Tower, the Lincoln Center job, Basketball City, the Met Museum, 8 Columbus Circle, Carnegie Tower and the big hirise at Mt Sinai Hospital.
Most of these jobs were run by big outfits like Skanska USA, Tishman, Bovis Lend Lease, Turner, Plaza, KBF, RC Dolner, Pavarini, Gotham, F J Sciame, IBEX and Structure Tone, and most of them were for big clients who, to be blunt, neither needed nor deserved any givebacks from us.
Twelve outer boroughs jobs were also covered under this PLA, including the biggest job in Brooklyn, Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards/Barclay Center megadevelopment.
The biggest job in Queens, the Queens West residential development, was covered under the affordable housing PLA along with 3 big residential jobs in Brooklyn.
There were also “regular” PLAs covering the jobs at the United Nations, Madison Square Garden, the Sheraton New York, the old Con Edison power plant in Astoria, the Javits Center expansion, Aqueduct Racetrack Casino, three big CUNY jobs at City College, Brooklyn College and Queens College, the New York Hemsley Hotel and two privatized public schools in Harlem (plus a paper PLA with Wal-Mart that won’t go into effect until they get approval to build a store here).
The City of New York also had its own PLA covering work on 11 municipal jobs.
Another PLA, arguably the most dubious, covered 9 franchised Hilton Express hotel developments in Manhattan owned by developer Shan Leong “Sam” Chang’s McSam Hotel Group.
Unlike the Hilton New York, which is staffed by a 100% union workforce, Chang’s Hilton Express hotels have a 100% non union staff, paid far less than UNITE-HERE local 6 represented workers employed at other lodging establishments in the city.
Chang is also 50% owner of Tritel Construction, a scab GC notorious for underpaying its Chinese undocumented immigrant workers, among other labor law violations.
Prior to this PLA, Chang’s hotels were built by Tritel.
The 9 Hilton Express hotels under the PLA are built union (with concessions and a no strike clause) by CNY Builders – and only become 100% scab operations after they are completed.
Although the unionization of Sam Chang’s jobs was a gain, the question must be asked, did the Building Trades pay too high a price for that victory?
The upshot of this is that these PLAs are designed as a legal excuse for the leaders of the BCTC to make union construction workers stay on the job without a contract even after agreements have expired, and are also an excuse to order non striking trades to scab on their fellow workers.
Considering the fact that every major job in the city was a PLA job, where the bosses had the right to sue the unions in case of a strike, the PLAs basically sabotaged any possibility of unions fighting back on the picket lines.
As the contract deadlines got closer, District Council of Carpenters Supervisor Frank Spencer and Gary LaBarbera, the president of both the BCTC and Teamsters private sanitation drivers local 813, ordered union members to scab on other trades in the event of a strike.
LaBarbera explicitly said that if any trade went on strike, the BCTC would not support them and that they would do everything in their power to keep the jobs running – in other words, they’d break the strike on behalf of the bosses.
This sabotage of any possible efforts at resistance was motivated by the class partnership at any price ideology of the leaders of the BCTC and its affiliates.
Those leaders wanted to prevent a strike at all costs – these PLAs were the instrument for that.
The question is, why?
4. An injury to one is the concern of all?
To answer that question we have to take a look at the history of the building trades unions.
Contrary to their reputation for extreme conservativism and class partnership at all costs, the construction unions that were founded in the mid 19th century were actually very radical.
Their leaders were immigrants, mostly Irishmen, Germans, Jews, Italians, Russians, Finns, Poles, Greeks and Norwegians, but there were folks from just about every other ethnic group in Europe, along with a few English Canadian migrants and a handful of Black Americans.
Most of them believed in some form of radicalism (communism, anarchism, socialism), to a greater or lesser degree they saw unions as an instrument to build a future worker-run society (“the cooperative commonwealth”) and they had radical views on every issue (except for racial justice for Blacks – they tended to have the same blind spot on race as most White Americans of that era).
The earliest unions started among masonry trades, soon followed by carpenters, and their usual organizing tactic was the “trade movement” an areawide strike at the beginning of the building season in April, to force contractors to pay union wages and enforce union work rules.
These weren’t negotiations – the union scale and work rules were unilaterally promulgated by the union and imposed on the contractors by the “tramping committees” of volunteer worker activists that ran the strikes.
These unions eventually became strong enough to be the nuclei for national craft unions with locals in every major US and Canadian city. They were also able to win the 8 hour day and the 5 and a half day workweek, a major demand of unionists and workers in that age of sunup to sundown workdays and 6 to 7 day workweeks.
The contractors came to grudgingly accept the permanent presence of the unions in the industry.
Some bosses came to see the unions as a stabilizing force in the industry, taking labor costs out of competition. Many contractors also welcomed the union apprenticeship programs, at the time the only vocational training programs in the industry.
However, with that success came a political price.
The unions now had full time leaders – business agents – whose primary goal was to preserve the unions as institutions, and were consequently reluctant to carry out strikes.
The old part time delegates were revolutionaries who envisioned a post capitalist future without bosses.
By contrast, even the more socialist oriented of the business agents believed in the system and sought to reform capitalism through an alliance with the contractors (with the unions as the junior partners in that alliance). The more conservative business agents didn’t even want to reform the system, they were content with a world of social inequality as long as they personally prospered, and they saw the union as an instrument of their personal enrichment.
Those business agents had a social base within the union among the more privileged workers; the foremen and that minority of construction workers (often the relatives of contractors) who had full time year round jobs.
The majority of construction workers who were part time seasonal employees didn’t share this view, of course, and there was a long struggle within the unions between the minority of privileged pro boss business agents, foremen and full time workers and the militant seasonal worker majority.
The high water mark of that struggle was the May Day 1916 citywide carpenters strike. The strike was launched, and won, due to seasonal worker militancy. However, in the wake of that victory, there was a coup d’état in the union, carried out by right wing pro contractor business agents and Irish gangsters in league with the contractors.
The gangster regime in the District Council of Carpenters joined forces with right wing pro gangster pro boss regimes in the Teamsters, Bricklayers, Plasterers and Mason Tenders unions, and helped the contractors form a price fixing cartel that spent the next five years inflating construction prices and actively sabotaging every attempt by workers to fight to improve their pay and conditions.
They did hit a bump in the road in 1921. Resistance by real estate developers to the price fixing of the gangsters and the contractors lead to the gangster president of the District Council, Robert Brindell, going to prison for what we would now call labor racketeering.
That also touched off a brief attempt by New York real estate developers to force their contractors to go non union. That attempt failed, precisely because the pro gangster unions had come to be useful to the bosses and they didn’t want to dispense with them.
For the rest of the decade and into the 1930s that alliance between the privileged minority of full time construction workers, conservative business agents, contractors and organized crime prevailed in the construction unions.
The building trades unions totally abandoned solidarity with the rest of the labor movement. As for the interests of the majority of construction workers who were casual labor hired by the day, other than wage increases every so often, all of their other burning demands were casually ignored by the business agents.
The unions refused to fight for equal distribution of work opportunities, or an end to unsafe work practices, or to end favoritism and discrimination in employment by the contractors.
The unions also embraced the flat out Jim Crow segregation of Black construction workers by the contractors (only two unions in the whole city – Carpenters local 1788 in Harlem and Housewreckers local 95, a citywide demolition workers local affiliated to the Mason Tenders – let Black men join) and became active defenders of workplace discrimination in the building trades.
Depression-era mass unemployment, and the militant communist and socialist led struggles of jobless workers (many of whom in better times had been union tradespeople), forced the construction unions to act.
They abandoned their grotesquely offensive position that unemployed workers were “unmanly” and deserved no public aid, lobbied the government for Davis Bacon Act prevailing wages on jobsites and a minimum wage for all other types of work.
When the socialist led International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Building Service Employees International Union won the 7 hour day for garment district workers, the building trades unions got contractors to extend the 7 hour day and the five day week to our industry (which we still have to this very day).
In two unions – Painters District Council # 9 and a small independent elevator mechanics union – short lived communist led regimes displaced the pro gangster business agents for a time.
By World War II, the building trades drifted back towards their normal state. Authoritarian regimes of right wing business agents, with their social base in a narrow layer of full time workers and foremen, were the junior partner in labor-management-gangster alliances.
The only difference was, the Irish gangsters who had dominated labor racketeering for most of the early 20th century were displaced by a brutally efficient Italian American crime syndicate called cosa nostra (“this thing of ours”) ,with Irish and Jewish gangsters as junior partners of the Mafiosi.
The gangsters became increasingly important in a rapidly changing construction environment.
New power tools and building materials were rapidly changing the industry. Increasingly, the General Contractor ceased to be the firm that actually put up the building and instead became an onsite rep for the real estate developers who owned the building, supervising a network of subcontractors who actually built the building.
The wiseguys took on the role of coordinating the subcontractors, organizing them to fix prices and protecting the larger subs from upstarts who might try to underbid them. The subs welcomed the gangsters and took full advantage of their services (while simultaneously resenting the modest 2% “tribute” they had to pay in tax to the wiseguys for this assistance).
The conservative business agents had built up the New York construction unions up to be the strongest local unions in the world – 250,000 men in 17 unions and not a thing got constructed without their union labor.
However, thanks to their labor racketeering, the power of those unions was built on a foundation of sand – by the 1960s, the cracks started to show.
The de facto Jim Crow segregation regime was the first part of the edifice to crumble.
The nonviolent NAACP picketlines and token desegregation efforts by the City of New York of the early 1960s soon gave way to armed jobsite invasions by Coalitions (bands of communist-led jobless Black, Latino and Chinese immigrant construction workers traveling from site to site aboard old school busses).
The unions tried massive resistance, with the mechanical trades in the lead. However, lawsuits by Lathers local 46 and Steamfitters local 638 and a racist hate strike by Plumbers local 2 failed, and construction was forcibly desegregated, despite the best efforts of the union leaders to defend de facto segregation.
Within a few years, the publicly funded segment of the industry became subject to federal affirmative action rules, which led to women coming into the industry.
Contractors and conservative business agents alike were horrified by this!
For many of these guys, their whole sense of masculinity was tied into the idea that only men can do skilled trades work. It was quite undermining for them to see women doing the work as well (or in some cases better) than men.
Add to that the fact that, now that there were women on the sites, the unions actually had to make the contractors enforce the rules about having toilets on every jobsites! They couldn’t tell the women to go against the wall or in a bucket like they did the men - they had to make the bosses spend money and install temporary facilities.
Then, complete union control of the labor market was shattered as collateral damage to the real estate developers’ successful destruction of Rent Control.
New York tenants won Rent Control in the wake of communist-led tenant struggles in the 1930s and 40s. Along with Public Housing and the Mitchell Lama subsidized middle income housing program, Rent Control had made it possible for a generation of working class tenants to have decent low rent homes within reasonable commuting distance of their jobs.
Real estate developers really resented that.
They wanted the right to rent gouge and profiteer at the expense of their tenants, and to prioritize the housing needs of the upper classes while preying on the working class and the poor.
In 1971, they got their chance.
The City repealed Rent Control, and gave landlords the right to decontrol existing Rent Control apartments as tenants died or moved out.
The City also went out, borrowed $ 784 million dollars from the capital markets, short term at high interest and lent that capital out to developers, long term at low interest, to finance luxury housing construction by the developers.
In the wake of this massive defeat for tenants, New York landlords and developers launched what can best be described as a low intensity terrorist war against working class and poor tenants.
Working class White tenants in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights were driven out of their apartments by a mix of landlord thuggery and demolition of apartment houses, Black and Latino working class and poor tenants in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn and White working class tenants in Far Rockaway, Queens were outright burned out of their homes, outright destroyed by the landlords because they could not get upper class folks to move to those neighborhoods.
The building trades unions supported the destruction of Rent Control, because of the $ 784 million in subsidies to private construction, and utterly ignored the vast social damage the landlords inflicted on the rest of the city.
The loans ended up bankrupting the city, and when the Wall Street bankers came in and took the City’s finances under receivership, they directed the city to, in effect, make working class New Yorkers pay for the excesses of the developers.
[Just like they do now, they called it “shared sacrifice” too]
Alongside the massive service cuts and the layoffs of 25% of the municipal workforce, the bankers also made the City rebuild all the destroyed neighborhoods on the cheap.
Instead of requiring that the Community Based Organizations who were using public funds to rebuild those neighborhoods use contractors that paid prevailing wages, the City said that those were private jobs and they could pay whatever wages they wanted.
Initially, the Genovese crime family controlled Metropolitan Drywall Association and its affiliated employers positioned themselves to take this work.
They imposed pay cuts on their carpenters, legally through a concessionary “renovation agreement” signed with the District Council of Carpenters, and illegally by “lumping” (paying off the books union carpenters less than union scale).
The District Council offered the same substandard “renovation” wage to all the other carpentry employers associations as well, and many of those bosses also imposed illegal pay cuts to their carpenters who worked off the books on top of the legal wage cuts.
Drywall Tapers local 1974, a small Painters District Council # 9 local whose members worked side by side with carpenters on drywall and ceilings jobs balked at the concessions and went on strike. Local 1974 was dominated by a rival mafia family, the Luccheses, which wasn’t getting a piece of the action, which made it possible for local 1974’s leaders to listen to the anger of their members at this sellout deal and go on strike.
The Carpenters District Council and Metallic Lathers local 46 openly scabbed on the strike and the Plasterers Union openly recruited scabs for the Genoveses and their contractors, breaking the strike.
The breaking of the drywall tapers strike and the open scabbing by the leadership of the Carpenters, Lathers and Plasterers unions emboldened the Community Based Organizations to openly hire non union contractors.
By the mid 1980s, the government subsidized low income housing construction sector was virtually 100% non union, with wages at rock bottom levels, often close to (and sometimes below) minimum wage.
This led to a gradual erosion of union density – New York went from a 100% union construction market in 1970 to 25% non union by 1980 and over 50% non union today.
Union membership took a comparable nosedive – from 250,000 union members in a 250,000 worker labor force in 1968 to 150,000 union members out of 200,000 tradespeople by 1980 to 100,000 out of a 200,000 person workforce today.
These days, at least 50,000 of those non union workers aren’t even paid on the books – they work for cash and are lucky to get paid minimum wage.
The District Council of Carpenters, the largest construction union and the one with the most members working in residential construction, fell longest and hardest – from 40,000 union carpenters in 1968 to 25,000 in 1980 to 15,000 today, in a craft that’s remained stable at roughly 40,000 workers.
If that wasn’t enough, this was also the time when the big labor racketeering prosecutions began.
The developers and GCs were tired of having to pay the 2% tribute to the Genovese family – especially since they were basically paying the same people whose price fixing kept subcontractor profits high at their expense.
So, the developers and the Wall Street banks who stood behind them leaned on the feds and the New York County District Attorney, who launched a whole series of investigations.
Starting with Genovese family captains Vincent Di Napoli and Louis Moscatiello, Sr and their “wheel” racket in the Metropolitan Drywall Association and Genovese family underboss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and his “concrete club” racket in the Cement League, the feds and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau went trade by trade and union by union, targeting labor racketeers and union officials for prosecution and civil forfeiture.
The Genoveses were, by far, the dominant labor racketeers in the New York building trades, especially in drywall & ceilings work and hirise concrete, and they bore the brunt of the prosecutions.
The Gambinos, who were principally involved in waste hauling and concrete manufacturing, often working through their Irish allies, were also hard hit. Combined with the impact of the massive law enforcement campaign against their flamboyant boss John Gotti, they were crippled.
The other families had far more limited rackets – the Luccheses in waste hauling, window installation and concrete, the Bonnanos in office furniture installation, the Colombos in concrete – and they were largely driven out of their respective industries by the feds.
The gangsters were never totally driven out of the industry and there is still an organized crime presence to this very day.
However cosa nostra in general and the Genoveses in particular went from a regulating force that determined prices and contractor selection for vast segments of the industry in the 1970s to a minor force on the periphery of the industry these days.
Nobody regulates subcontractor prices anymore, so developers and GCs can push subcontractor prices down to rock bottom levels.
This has been seen most dramatically in residential construction, where falling subcontractor prices have led to $ 8/hr off the books wages for non union tradespeople, and union workers often being forced to work for less than union scale and no benefits in return for steady work.
The only counterweight to this downward pressure on wages was the fact that, as a byproduct of the federal and New York County racketeering investigations, a couple of the unions were forced by court order to start up union organizing programs.
The Mason Tenders District Council, the District Council of Carpenters, Painters District Council # 9 and Structural Ironworkers local 361 launched organizing campaigns.
The organizers they hired were dedicated and they did find a large pool of non union workers who wanted to go union.
There were also independent activist groups, like the Sikh Indian immigrant non union brickpointers group New York Construction Workers United, that also wanted to organize and resist.
There were also many union members who very much wanted to unionize the non union.
The latter was most dramatically seen on June 30, 1998, when 40,000 union members came out to a rally against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s use of a scab contractor to build a subway command center.
That protest (which came to be known as “the 40,000 man march”) essentially became a one day general strike as rebellious construction workers basically seized control of Midtown Manhattan.
However, those organizing departments were hampered by internal political pressures within those unions, coming from union leaders who were uncomfortable with waging struggles on the jobsites and organizing large numbers of Black, Latino, Chinese, Indian Sikh and European immigrant workers based on those struggles.
The 40,000 man march had been a wakeup call for the union leaders – in its wake, the leadership of the BCTC publicly apologized to the developers, the GCs and Wall Street and pledged to never let it happen again.
That foot dragging and sabotage of workers struggles from within by union leaders has been the main factor that has prevented construction unions from organizing the non union sector.
The wave of fatal crane failures and scaffolding collapses on New York jobsites in the mid 2000s was a low point, both for construction worker safety and for union leader servility to the bosses.
The unions refused to condemn the greed and recklessness of contractors that put workers and the pubic in danger, nor did they call for the imposition of safer work practices, nor did they demand that reckless contractors be sent to prison for manslaughter.
Instead, the unions groveled behind Louis Coletti and the BTEA, who were allowed to put themselves forward as ‘the spokesmen for the industry’ and to blame construction workers for the preventable hazards that killed them.
This was a low point for the construction unions.
When the meltdown came in 2007, ending the building boom, the GCs and developers, seeing how weak the unions were, and how timid and scared to fight their leaders were, were poised to attack.
5. Protest and survive
So how do we fight back?
If we were to believe folks like NYC Building and Construction Trades Council President Gary LaBarbera, then there is no way to resist.
We supposedly can’t strike, can’t fight back, can’t organize – basically, we have to kneel down before Louis Coletti and the real estate developers and let them have their way with us.
Unfortunately, a lot of union members believe that.
They are angry and they want to fight back, but they don’t think it’s possible, or they know that we can win, but they are afraid to wage the type of struggle we’d have to carry out to win, just because our leaders tell us it would be “illegal”.
There is also a section of our membership – the foremen and the company men who work every day – who are allied with the bosses and would cheerfully support the reduction of the rest of us to $ 8/hr minimum wage status, as long as THEY didn’t have to take a pay cut!
However, the pro-contractor element of construction union members are a minority – a privileged minority, who have dominated our unions for over a century, but a minority nonetheless.
It’s time for the silent majority of unionized construction workers – those of us who are essentially high priced day laborers – to take over our unions.
It won’t be easy but it has to be done, otherwise we will endure defeat after defeat after defeat and retreat after retreat after retreat until we’re reduced to the same pay level as our non union brothers and sisters.
Until we get to the point where we can take leadership of our unions away from the pro contractor element, we need to fight for an independent program, for a series of demands on behalf of building trades workers, both union and non union;
- Fight to unionize all building and construction workers in our city, starting with the grotesquely low paid minimum wage off the books construction workers on New York City subsidized housing jobs. We are not going to be able to do this by one-contractor-at-a-time NLRB elections, we need to organize areawide strikes against all of the scab contractors in a neighborhood to unionize them all at the same time. We also have to fight to force every contractor in the city, union or non union, to pay prevailing wages and, at the very least, to pay their workers on the books and carry workers comp insurance!
- Our unions have to renounce any and all Project Labor Agreements and any other instrument that keeps us from fighting back against injustice or unsafe conditions on the jobsites. Also, we need to respect each other’s picketlines – if one trade has a beef on a site with their employer, we ALL have beef with every employer on that site.
- Our unions need to speak out on all questions of workplace safety and health, on behalf of all trades workers, independent of and separate from the contractors. The reality is, the reason our industry is such a hazardous place to work is directly because of contractor negligence – our unions must clearly point that out to the general public. We also have to push to stop hazardous jobs to force the bosses to make those workplaces safe.
- Our unions have to fight for equal distribution of work opportunities. We should oppose all schemes that force workers to be dependent on the whim of contractors for steady employment. Instead, we should advocate that every union should set up a job referral system similar to Electricians local 3’s Joint Board system. That is, 90% of every union contractor’s workforce should be referred to work off of a joint labor-management job referral list, with the contractor only allowed to select a maximum of 10% of the workforce. Layoffs, if necessary, should be based on seniority – last in, first out – rather than the boss picking and choosing. This system should also be used to guarantee equal opportunity for women workers, as well as Blacks, Latinos, Chinese, Indians, European immigrants and workers over age 50.
- Our unions also have to stand up for our immigrant brothers and sisters. For the past two centuries our industry has been majority foreign born – the only thing that’s changed is the countries of origin. We need to demand that the many contractors who employ undocumented immigrants immediately take steps to regularize their status by sponsoring them for E-3A1 skilled worker, TN-1 work or H-2B seasonal worker visas, and for either the employer or their employers association cover most if not all of the attorney fees and other costs of those visas. In light of the Obama Administration’s campaign of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the most aggressive deportation program in over 60 years, this is an urgent question for immigrant tradespeople and we have to address it, and force the contractors to deal with it.
- We have to reach out to our brothers and sisters in the broader labor movement. First and foremost this means forging a strong alliance with other workers in the building service industry, specifically the Hotel Trades Council/UNITE-HERE local 6 and Service Employees International Union local 32bj, and with the unions that represent workers that make deliveries to our sites; Teamsters locals 282, 522, 553, 807, 813, 814 & 1205. We also have to unite with the New York City municipal workers unions; AFSCME District Council # 37, Teamsters locals 237 and 831, Transport Workers Union local 100 and SEIU locals 74 & 246, United Federation of Teachers, Professional Staff Congress and the New York state employee unions; the Public Employee Federation, the Civil Service Employees Association and the NYS United Teachers. All of us are under attack and we can either hang together or we’ll all get hung separately.
- We have to make common cause with others who are being victimized by the real estate developers. It’s not hard to find people like that in New York City, where 80% of the population are renters, most small businesses operate out of rented premises and landlord profiteering has victimized most of the city for the past 40 years. These people – the majority of our city’s population – are potential allies, and every time our unions champion some taxpayer subsidized megadevelopment, we are alienating them. We should embrace their demands instead (and not just because these demands will also help the majority of New York construction workers who are tenants in the city, but that alone would be a good reason). We should demand the restoration of the 1947 Rent Control Law, the extension of Rent Control to commercial tenants, increases in rent subsidies for low income tenants, the building of tens of thousands of units of low rent public housing apartments and a moratorium on evictions.
- Finally, we’re not going to win anything if we’re afraid to fight. Our leaders always like to claim to us that we can’t fight back because of how the labor laws are written. This is ironic, considering the fact that many of our leaders are quite comfortable with criminal activity when it puts money into their pockets (or the pockets of the gangsters they’re in league with) but they won’t risk fines or jail when it comes to fighting for us! That is not acceptable anymore!
- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER
FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
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“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”
Originally published on Monday, July 11, 2011
© 2011 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.
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