GANGBOX: Construction Workers News Service

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY instructor at NYC District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College

2012-01-21T20:24:00.002-05:00

Employment Opportunities at Labor Technical College

NEW YORK CITY DISTRICT COUNCIL LABOR TECHNICAL COLLEGE

INSTRUCTOR

The New York City District Council Labor Technical College is seeking a fulltime instructor with a minimum of 15 years’ work experience with knowledge of means and materials used by commercial carpenters in New York City.

Job Responsibilities:

Instruct students in subject areas such as tool and equipment maintenance, codes and regulations and safety precautions related to carpentry.
Maintain inventory and equipment records.
Plan and supervise work of students, individually or in small groups and in shop; Observe trainees and answer trainee questions.
Assure that all students abide by the guidelines, policies and process as set by the Labor Technical College.
Test and evaluate achievement of student in technical knowledge and trade skills.
Maintain a daily log of activities, classroom instruction and progress of projects. Schedule, and update a list of projects to be completed.
Maintain attendance records.
Organize program of practical and technical instruction, including demonstrations of skills required in trade, and lectures on theory, techniques, and terminology.
Recommend or suggest changes for the improvement of the training program.
Willing and able to be cross trained in all areas in commercial building and health and safety certifications.

Requirements:

Knowledge of training theory and its practical application.
Skilled in prioritizing and assigning work; preparing reports; adapting instruction to meet individual needs.
Strong ability to speak in public.
Instructing journey level members, implementing course material, and maintaining cohesive multi-level group dynamics.
Prior trade instruction is a plus.
Must be willing to attend UBC training classes in Las Vegas.

The Funds are an affirmative action employer and encourage applications from all qualified candidates regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, or disability. To apply, please e-mail your resume and cover letter to resume@nyccarpenter.com

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY college nd mentor program coordinator NYC Carpenters Labor Technical College

2012-01-18T06:49:00.002-05:00

NEW YORK CITY DISTRICT COUNCIL LABOR TECHNICAL COLLEGE
COLLEGE AND MENTOR PROGRAM COORDINATOR

The New York City District Council Labor Technical College is seeking an individual for the newly created position of College and Mentor Program Coordinator.

This position will have a diverse set of responsibilities which will all come together to provide comprehensive coordination of training for our apprentices The coordination, growth and expansion of our college program will be a major responsibility of this position. In addition, the creation and maintenance of an apprenticeship wide mentoring program is a goal and responsibility that will be a priority. The Coordinator will be responsible for developing, planning and implementing a mentorship program for apprentices which will involve the journey level members as mentors. To aid in the consistency and thorough indoctrination of the apprentices, the Coordinator will also be primarily responsible for scheduling the approximately six week orientation process that all applicants must go through until the acceptance into the program is completed. This will include the scheduling of the names to be selected, sending letters of notification, scheduling of the orientation sessions, processing of the applications, scheduling interview appointments and tracking and scheduling the drug testing and math test. After the final acceptance of the apprentices, the Coordinator will be responsible for routing them to various locals and releasing the apprentices to the Job Referral List. In addition, the interviewing process will be developed by the Coordinator in conjunction with the Director to include employers from our signatory associations.

Requirements:

An Associate’s degree or higher.

Five to seven years of administrative experience preferably in an educational setting.

Must be familiar with college course systems.

Superior organizational skills.

Solid oral and written skills.

Good coordination skills and working with a diverse group of people as well as superior skills at working independently.

Must be able to effectively represent the college and the LTC Director when dealing with external organizations.

Proficiency with Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Experience working on a New York City construction project a plus.

The LTC is an affirmative action employer and encourage applications from all qualified candidates regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, or disability.

To apply, please e-mail your resume and a cover letter stating why you would be an ideal candidate for this position to resume@nyccarpenter.org

LABOR RALLY FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET, FOLEY SQ, Thursday 11/17 5PM

2011-11-15T08:44:00.002-05:00

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17 - 5:00 PM
Two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street!
Labor Rally and National Day of Action
LABOR RALLY AT FOLEY SQUARE, MANHATTAN
(Worth St. between Lafayette St. & Centre St.)

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES at the NYC District Council of Carpenters

2011-11-12T02:41:00.000-05:00

Labor Technical College Employment Opportunities

DIRECTOR OF THE LABOR TECHNICAL COLLEGE

NEW YORK CITY DISTRICT COUNCIL OF CARPENTERS LABOR TECHNICAL COLLEGE

The Director of the Labor Technical College, reporting to the Executive Director of the New York District Council of Carpenters Benefits Funds is responsible for overseeing the operation of the Labor Technical College. He or she is responsible for ensuring that the school meets the requirements for training as established by the National Joint Carpenters Apprenticeship & Training Committee, the United States Department of Labor, the New York State Department of Labor Bureau of Apprenticeship, the New York City Department of Buildings, the New York State Department of Transportation and all other government agencies. The Director is also responsible for the oversight of the Grants Department to secure and administer funds received to be used to further the training of pre-apprentices, apprentices and journeymen.

Responsibilities:

Manage the College staff which includes instructors and support personnel.
Oversee the development of the school syllabus to ensure that a wide range of training and educational classes, such as Health and Safety is available to the apprentices and journeymen.
Oversee the implementation and continued certification of the College program.
Work with other Union apprenticeship programs to explore and develop opportunities to enhance the training curriculum.
Prepare and administer an annual budget for the Technical College.
Review and approve all expenses relating to the operation of the school and Grants Department..
Work with various community organizations to develop and enhance community relationships.
Solicit grant money from various Federal, State, Municipal agencies and private foundation resources that support the training programs.
Represent the Technical College at various conferences, events, boards, related industry associations and in the media.
Remain current on various Federal, State or Local laws that may impact workplace health, safety, training or educational issues that might impact the College.

Qualifications:

Have a general knowledge of the construction trade and a general understanding of the Union’s rules and operating procedures.
Must have a minimum of five (5) years of training experience in an educational or industrial environment. A Bachelor of Arts degree or higher is preferred.
Must be well organized, experienced in managing staff and be able to work independently.
Must have good communication skills both orally and written.
Must have the ability to work with the various departments of the District Council representing the interests of the apprentices and contractors.

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF TRAINING

The New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College is seeking a motivated craftsperson for the position of Assistant Director of Training. The Assistant Director, reporting to the Director of Training, is responsible for assisting and coordinating the day-to-day apprentice and journey level training operations of the Labor Technical College. The Assistant Director of Training must be able to behave in a professional manner with both apprentices and journey members, be able to communicate, write, reason, solve problems and make decisions with a high level of competency.

Responsibilities include:

Supervision of apprentice and journey level class scheduling and daily operations.
Coordination of apprentice curriculum scheduling.
Creating and coordinating apprentice and journey person skills refresher notification training mailings.
Developing lesson plans and outlines for new journey level and apprenticeship courses.
Overseeing equipment and materials ordering for skills courses.
Conducting interviews with applicants for apprenticeship and potential instructors.
Preparation of skills and certification written tests.
Transporting tools, equipment and students for off-site training and events as needed.
Scheduling Millwright apprentices for Steam/Gas Turbine training at the Carpenters International training Center in Las Vegas.
Ordering text books for apprentices and journey level classes.
Coordinating construction requests from the building and other offices as necessary.
Co-supervision of the Labor Technical College’s full-time and per-diem instructional staff.

Qualifications:

15+ years of documented trade experience.
Valid driver’s license
Member in good standing of a United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local Union.
Good interpersonal skills, especially patience, flexibility and the ability to listen.
Exceptional organizational and prioritization skills with the ability to multi-task.
- Proficiency in Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel.
- Ability to attend UBC instructor certification qualification training at the UBC International Training Center.
- Flexibility with work hours to train members in the evenings and on Saturdays as necessary.
- Ability to become skilled in TRAIN, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters training management software.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.A. and pass a criminal background check and substance abuse screening test.

To apply, please e-mail your resume, references, salary requirements and a cover letter stating why you would be an ideal candidate for this position to resume@nyccarpenter.com

CARPENTER APPRENTICE OPPORTUNITY at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center

2011-10-21T22:01:00.001-04:00

Carpenter Apprentice
The Javits Center is seeking resumes for first year entry-level carpenter apprentices.
Attendance/Availability
The position is “part-time call-in” and based upon our Show Schedule. The employee does not get a
schedule in advance. Your work assignment varies and when our calendar is extremely busy we move
shows in and out around the clock. There is no way of determining how long the assignment will be.
Sometimes it is a 4-hour assignment and sometimes it is a 12-hour assignment. It may be one day and it
may be several days. Once you are assigned to a contractor, we expect you to stay as long as the
contractor needs you. Your day(s) off are when the show is open. You will be instructed to return to
work at the close of the show. The shows almost always close in the afternoons. The work calls for the
break of the shows are usually between 2 and 6 pm.
Apprentice Program
This is a union job. If you are hired you would be part of the apprenticeship program administered by the
District Council of Carpenters. You are required to attend 4 weeks of training per year at the District
Council. They schedule you for one-week each quarter. At the completion of 4 weeks training over the
course of a year you will be upgraded to Apprentice Level 2. Along with this upgrade is a salary
increase. As an “AP2” you begin another year of training and continue this throughout the 4-year
program until you become a journeyman carpenter.
Requirements
 Must have a high school diploma or GED equivalency and be able to produce it.
 Must have a social security card and be able to produce it.
 Must pass a drug screening test
 Must complete 40-hour orientation and join the union within 30 days.
Pay scale
API 17.61
APII 22.01
APIII 28.61
APIV 35.22
If you are interested, please forward your cover letter and resume to HR@javitscenter.com Subject Line
must read as Carpenter Apprentice Opportunity.

NYC CENTRAL LABOR COUNCIL VOTES FOR A MASSIVE MARCH ON WALL STREET Saturday Nov 5

2011-10-20T22:56:00.001-04:00

October 20, 2011

NYC Central Labor Council Votes for Massive March on Wall Street

On October 19, the Delegates Meeting of the New York Central Labor Council (CLC) voted unanimously for New York’s unions to mobilize for a massive march on Wall Street on November 5. The power to act on the delegates’ vote now lies with the CLC Executive Board, which is composed of the city’s local union presidents.

The CLC brings together delegates from the AFL-CIO and other unions in New York City. If its major unions make a serious effort to mobilize their members, we could see a truly massive march on Wall Street that challenges the ongoing efforts to make working-class and poor people pay the price for the economic crisis.

Moved by AFM Local 802 Recording Vice President John O’Connor and seconded by TWU Local 100 Vice President for RTO Kevin Harrington as well as other delegates, the motion concluded:

This body call on its member unions as well as all other unions and community organizations to build a massive march on Wall Street of hundreds of thousands, mobilizing organized and unorganized workers, on November 5, the first Saturday of next month;
That this protest raise demands that can unite all workers, poor people and all those facing the brunt of the crisis:
Working People Shouldn’t Pay for a Crisis That They Didn’t Make!
No to Layoffs, Budget and Service Cuts!
Create Jobs, Build Infrastructure with a Federal Program of Public Works!
Stop Police Harassment of the Wall Street Occupation!
And to this end, we appeal to other union bodies, council and federations around the country to organize similar protest actions across the country on November 5.

The idea for the march and motion to the CLC was initiated by transit, janitorial, city and college worker union members and young Wall Street protesters who are supporters of the League for the Revolutionary Party. A big boost for the motion came when an LRP supporter raised the motion at a meeting of the City College Chapter of the PSC union and it was overwhelmingly approved. A petition backing the motion quickly gained the support of other trade unionists and a large number of Wall Street occupiers and protesters, a good number of whom attended the CLC meeting to distribute the motion and speak in favor of it.

The challenge now is to make sure that the union leaders respect the CLC delegates’ vote and really build the march. That won’t be easy.

Since the economic crisis broke out on Wall Street in 2008, this country’s union leaders have barely lifted a finger in opposition to the wasting of trillions of taxpayers’ dollars on bailing out the banks and the terrible wave of layoffs and budget cuts that have followed. Comfortable in their positions of privilege, the union leaders have mostly been concerned with holding onto their power and channeling workers’ anger into the trap of voting for the Democratic Party.

In the CLC Delegates Meeting itself, there were already signs of backsliding. No sooner was the vote being taken than CLC President Vincent Alvarez, while promising to respect the decision, seemed to suggest that the CLC Executive Board might need to be flexible about some of the details of the protest.

Any union leader who takes a real step toward organizing struggles by workers against the attacks on the jobs and living standards will find us and many militant workers ready to join them in that effort. But in our experience, the pro-capitalist, pro-Democratic Party union leaders can be expected to use an inch of “flexibility” to avoid organizing a real fightback against the anti-worker attacks.

In fact the way today’s union leaders avoid organizing struggles by their own members, let alone in conjunction with militant young people like those participating in the Wall Street occupation, came through in the discussion of other topics of the meeting. For example, regarding the struggle going to vote down Ohio Governor Kasich’s vicious union-busting laws, a report was given describing the unions’ almost total reliance on phone-banking and door-knocking and very little on mass worker rallies, let alone strikes. But all experience teaches that to defend their rights, jobs and living standards, workers can only afford to rely on their own power to unite in struggle. In Wisconsin an occupation of the Capitol Building and massive protests against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation led to growing calls for a general strike. But union leaders wasted that momentum and channeled the struggle into a passive election campaign that was predictably defeated.

So we must make every effort to build further support for the march and to make sure that the city’s union leaders make it happen. Union members should take every opportunity to challenge their representatives, from Shop Stewards to elected office holders, to make sure their union does everything it can build for the march. Motions in support of the march should be raised in every possible union meeting. Organizations and individuals who haven’t already endorsed the march should be encouraged to do so by writing to Workers.March.Against.Wall.Street@gmail.com .

Importantly, we must watch out for and denounce any tokenism or lip-service from the union leaders. The unions can send organizers all over to rally support for the march, they can print and distribute leaflets, record and broadcast video and radio messages, send e-mails and phone messages to all their members to build a mighty protest. That’s the sort of real mobilization we need.

The widespread support for the Wall Street protests shows that workers’ bitter sense of injustice is turning toward a recognition of the need for action. This is an important chance to take forward the fightback against the capitalists’ attacks that is so long overdue.

CALL FOR A LABOR MARCH IN SOLIDARITY WITH OCCUPY WALL STREET, November 5, 2011

2011-10-17T21:48:00.002-04:00

An opportunity for action: an open letter

We, the undersigned Wall Street protesters and union members, think the response to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has shown that broad layers of working people are ready to support a movement that stands up to the ongoing attempt to solve the economic crisis on the backs of working-class and poor people. Union solidarity has contributed a growing momentum of protest that we should build on and not let fade away.

To that end, we have endorsed the attached motion that calls on the NYC Central Labor Council and other union organizations to build for a march of hundreds of thousands on Saturday, November 5, with the following slogans and demands:

Working People Shouldn’t Pay for a Crisis That They Didn’t Make!
No to Layoffs, Budget and Service Cuts!
Create Jobs, Build Infrastructure with a Federal Program of Public Works!
Stop Police Harassment of the Wall Street Occupation!

We will be leafleting the next CLC delegates meeting on Wednesday, October 19, starting at 5:30pm at:
IBT Local 237 First Floor Meeting Room
216 West 14th Street (between 8^th and 7^th avenue)

We hope to draw attention to the opportunity for and need for broader action, and to provide an opportunity and focus for those in and outside the unions to agitate for the unions and other organizations to commit themselves to broader action.

We ask activists and organizations who see the need for this to:
• endorse this call;
• publicize this motion and letter on websites and through other means;
• raise similar motions in unions and other organizations; and
• help build for the leafleting of the CLC meeting.

We wish there was more time to circulate this proposal more broadly than we already have to allow for more discussion and improvement, but the next CLC meeting where we can push for action is just days away on October 19. We trust that activists understand our sense of urgency and support this initiative in the spirit of solidarity that inspires it.

For more information or to be listed as endorsing, please e-mail us atWorkers.March.Against.Wall.Street@gmail.com.

Also, when this and related motions are voted on in other unions or organizations, please let us know!

Whereas, the response to ‘Occupy Wall Street’ (OWS) has shown that broad layers of working people are ready to support a movement that stands up to the ongoing attempt to solve the economic crisis on working and poor people’s backs;
Whereas, unions can best defend their members’ jobs, wages and working conditions by standing up in defense of all working people;

Whereas, OWS and trade unions’ solidarity with the protests have created momentum toward a fight-back in defense of working people’s living standards against layoffs and budget cutbacks that should be built on and not allowed to fade;

Whereas, it is necessary for our struggles to go forward to bring into action much larger numbers of workers and other people facing the brunt of this economic crisis,

We move that:
1. This body call on its member unions as well as all other unions and community organizations to build a massive march on Wall Street of hundreds of thousands, mobilizing organized and unorganized workers, on November 5, the first Saturday of next month,
2. That this protest raise demands that can unite all workers, poor people and all those facing the brunt of the crisis:
Working People Shouldn’t Pay for a Crisis That They Didn’t Make!
No to Layoffs, Budget and Service Cuts!
Create Jobs, Build Infrastructure with a Federal Program of Public Works!
Stop Police Harassment of the Wall Street Occupation!
3. And to this end, we appeal to other union bodies, council and federations around the country to organize similar protest actions across the country on November 5.

In Solidarity,
Juan A., SEIU Local 32BJ* and Wall Street protester
Wendy B., non-unionized worker and Wall Street protester
Stephen C., student
Ben D., restaurant worker and CUNY student
John Ferretti, Shop Steward, TWU Local 100* and Wall Street protester
Rusty Gilbert
Jason Hicks, TWU Local 100* and Wall Street protester
Eric Josephson, Shop Steward, TWU Local 100* and Wall Street protester
Seth Rosenberg, Shop Steward, TWU Local 100* and Wall Street protester
Michael S., City College student and Wall Street protester
Mark Turner, City College PSC* and Wall Street protester
Erik V., Wall Street protester
Gregory A. Butler, Shop Steward, Carpenters local 157*

* organizations listed for identification purposes only

“no nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”

2011-10-16T04:30:00.000-04:00

“no nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.” - Henry George, 1877

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES: Carpenter Apprentice at the Javits Center

2011-10-15T23:22:00.002-04:00

Job opportunity: the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is looking for 1st year apprentice carpenters. You don't have to be in the Carpenters Union (if you're not a member you'll join the union after they hire you). You don't need any previous carpentry experience at all - they will teach you everything you need to know.

Get the job application at the New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College, 395 Hudson St (corner of Clarkson - nearest subway is the 1 train to Houston), NY, NY 10014.

If you're interested, go there Monday morning (10/17) at 8 AM sharp - this opportunity won't last very long!

==============================

Attention Apprentices: Employment Opportunity

The Jacob Javits Convention Center will be taking on 25 new first year apprentices. This opportunity is being offered to all first year apprentices already in the union as well as anyone seeking employment in the NYC District Council Of Carpenters Apprenticeship Program.

Applications will be available to be picked up at the Labor Technical College between 8am and 3pm and must be filled out and returned to the Labor Technical College to be forwarded to the Javits Center on or before November 5, 2011.

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES at the NYC District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College

2011-09-14T19:03:00.002-04:00

Labor Technical College Employment Opportunities

EDUCATIONAL COORDINATOR

The New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College is seeking a highly motivated individual to administer our existing college degree programs and develop training programs to benefit our membership. The Educational Coordinator, reporting to the Director of Training, is responsible for identifying opportunities in higher education and technical education to expand employment opportunities and help members achieve their goals.

Responsibilities include:

Establish and expand college degree opportunities, including the maintenance of a college partnership with the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies at SUNY and the NYC College of Technology at CUNY.
Write and update apprenticeship and journey-level curricula; submit evaluations to a national college accrediting agency and maintain evaluations.
Write new curricula and work with subject matter experts writing trade related curricula.
Provide college counseling for members who are interested in a college degree.
Assist interested members in completing college applications and completing financial aid forms.
Create successful funding partnerships with external organizations to provide English as a Second Language instruction, mathematics instruction and other trainings as needed.

Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree or higher; Masters degree preferred
At least five years experience working in a college, university or other training program with experience in program administration and development.
Good interpersonal skills, especially patience, flexibility and the ability to listen.
Exceptional writing and copy editing abilities.
- Ability to work with external organizational partners to maintain good partnerships and establish and maintain working relationships with educational stake holders.
- Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office, especially Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.A. and pass a criminal background check and substance abuse screening test. Salary commensurate with experience.

Please submit your cover letter and resume as attachments via email to the attention of Martin Daly, Director of Training, at LTCRESUME@NYCCBF.ORG

Please indicate ‘Educational Coordinator Position’ in the subject line of your email.

MAINTENANCE PERSON

The New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College is seeking a highly motivated individual to work as part of the maintenance staff to maintain the Training Center.

Responsibilities include:

Maintaining restrooms, classrooms and common areas.
Sweeping, mopping, maintaining light fixtures, cleaning windows, painting and patching.
Unloading delivery trucks.
Refuse collection/disposal
Room set-up and break down and general maintenance.

Qualifications:

Minimum of 2 years experience in maintenance in a commercial building environment.
Ability to lift 60+ pounds.
Ability to climb and work off of ladders and bakers.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.A. and pass a criminal background check and substance abuse screening test. Salary commensurate with experience.

Please submit your cover letter and resume as attachments via email to the attention of Martin Daly, Director of Training, at LTCRESUME@NYCCBF.ORG

Please indicate ‘Maintenance Person’ in the subject line of your email.

FLOORCOVERING INSTRUCTOR

The New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College is seeking a motivated individual to conduct training for our membership in the trade of Floorcovering. This individual must be able to behave in a professional manner with both apprentices and journey members, be able to communicate, write, reason, solve problems and make decisions with a high level of competency.

Responsibilities include:

Conducting Floorcovering classes which include classroom and hands-on training in carpet, resilient, wood flooring and artificial turf installation.
Writing and updating training curricula.
Maintain training records.
Ordering materials
Creating a quality learning environment.

Qualifications:

Member in good standing of the New York City District Council of Carpenters with a minimum of 15 years experience in commercial Floorcovering applications.
UBC INSTALL certified.
National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) certified is a plus.
Supervisory experience is a plus.
Must be articulate and able to moderate classroom activities.
Completion of a college degree program and floorcovering related training programs is a plus.
Willing to attend UBC instructor certification qualification training at the UBC International Training Center.
Flexibility with work hours to train members in the evenings and on Saturdays.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.A. and pass a criminal background check and substance abuse screening test. Salary commensurate with experience.

Please submit your cover letter and resume as attachments via email to Martin Daly, Director of Training, at LTCRESUME@NYCCBF.ORG

Please indicate ‘Floorcovering Instructor’ in the subject line of your email.

MILLWRIGHT INSTRUCTOR

The New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College is seeking a motivated individual to conduct training for our membership in the trade of Millwright. This individual must be able to behave in a professional manner with both apprentices and journey members, be able to communicate, write, reason, solve problems and make decisions with a high level of competency.

Responsibilities include:

Conducting Millwright classes which include classroom and hands-on training in Millwright qualification curricula.
Writing and updating training curricula.
Maintain training records.
Ordering materials
Creating a quality learning environment.

Qualifications:

Member in good standing of the New York City District Council of Carpenters with a minimum of 15 years experience in the trade of Millwright.
Supervisory experience is a plus.
Must be articulate and able to moderate classroom activities.
Completion of a college degree program and Millwright certification/qualification training programs is a plus.
Willing to attend UBC instructor certification qualification training at the UBC International Training Center.
Flexibility with work hours to train members in the evenings and on Saturdays.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.A. and pass a criminal background check and substance abuse screening test. Salary commensurate with experience.

Please submit your cover letter and resume as attachments via email to Martin Daly, Director of Training, at LTCRESUME@NYCCBF.ORG

Please indicate ‘Millwright Instructor’ in the subject line of your email.

News archive

UNSHARED SACRIFICE

2011-07-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

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 96^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/

http://groups.google.com/group/gangbox/

http://myspace.com/gregory10031

http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com

http://clnews.org

“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”

Originally published on Monday, July 11, 2011

NYC DISTRICT COUNCIL OF CARPENTERS APPRENTICESHIP IS ACCEPTING APPLICANTS 7/11 - 7/22

2011-06-26T02:46:00.001-04:00

NOTICE
THE NEXT SCHEDULED APPLICATION PERIOD FOR THE TRADE OF CARPENTER IS:
MONDAY, JULY 11, 2011 TO FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2011.
Application cards will be available at the New York City District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College located at 395 Hudson Street (Clarkson Street Entrance), New York, NY 10014.
500 application cards will be available from 9:00AM to 11:00AM on the dates indicated. No person will be given an application card except during these hours. When the 500 application cards are completed, the recruitment will be completed.
Applicants must provide a picture ID to complete an application card. Application cards must be completed by the applicant.
At the conclusion of the application period, application cards will be drawn from the locked box for participation in a one-hour orientation. Applicants will be notified about the orientation by mail.
Applications that were not drawn will remain in the locked box for the next scheduled apprenticeship application drawing. This process will continue until the desired number of apprenticeship positions is obtained or until all apprenticeship cards are exhausted.
APPLICANTS MUST ATTEND THE ONE-HOUR ORIENTATION IN ORDER TO BE CONSIDERED FOR
APPRENTICESHIP.
MINIMUM APPRENTICESHIP STANDARDS
 High School Diploma or G.E.D. (original or stamped) upon acceptance
 Proof of Citizenship or have the legal right to work in the U.S. upon acceptance
 Social Security Card
 Be a minimum of 17 years of age
Individuals who can show that they meet the conditions listed above after completing an application for apprenticeship, will be afforded an oral interview by the Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee (J.A.T.C.). Once an applicant is interviewed and receives a passing grade on the evaluation procedures, the applicant shall remain active in the apprenticeship application record book, subject to selection, for a period of two (2) years from the date of the interview.
All applicants for apprenticeship are required to report to a collection site designated by the organization for a substance abuse screening.
Upon successful completion of the substance abuse screening, the applicant will be assigned to an N.Y.C.D.C. Local Union. All applicants who wish to receive consideration for military training must submit a DD-214 to verify military experience.
Applicants must present a photo I.D. for the substance abuse screening and upon acceptance into the apprenticeship program.
All apprentices who wish to enter the apprenticeship program as a 2nd, 3rd or 4th year apprentice must provide the J.A.T.C. with proper documentation that defined their experience in the construction industry. This documentation must be comprised of official documents such as payroll records, notarized letters of experience and/or confirmation and sworn statements. The J.A.T.C. will examine all documentation submitted before qualification is acknowledged. The J.A.T.C. will schedule a skill and knowledge evaluation interview with the applicant if it is deemed appropriate

SCUMBAG TIME the class war between NYC's developers and construction workers

2011-06-24T19:10:00.001-04:00

SCUMBAG TIME

the new class war between New York City’s billionaire real

estate developers and middle income construction workers

1. The one-sided class war:

This year’s long Independence Day weekend may be marked by a major labor battle in New York City’s construction industry, possibly the biggest labor dispute in the trades since 1921.

On one side we have the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and its affiliates representing Carpenters, Concrete Laborers, Mason Tenders, Bricklayers, Roofers, Cement Masons, Plumbers, Steamfitters, Operating Engineers and Teamsters and the 66,000 workers they represent.

That’s a pretty big chunk of our industry - two thirds of the city’s 100,000 union building trades workers and one sixth of the industry’s overall 200,000 person labor force.

They are facing off against the Building Trades Employers Association, its bellicose spokesman Louis Coletti, 11 employers trade associations and their 716 affiliated companies, one half of the city’s 1,500 unionized construction contractors.

Some of the most powerful forces in the city are pushing those 716 bosses into battle here.

Their anti labor offensive is being backed by Steven Spinola and the Real Estate Board of New York, representing the real estate developers those contractors build for.

Alongside of REBNY’s efforts, billionaire developers Stephen Ross and Bruce Ratner have been pushing the hardest for union givebacks.

The Building Trades expended enormous effort and alienated a lot of potential allies by fighting to get Ratner’s massively state subsidized Atlantic Yards development into production (against the will of the people of the surrounding Prospect Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood). Despite all those sacrifices on his behalf, he’s asked for site specific pay cuts and givebacks for that job on top of the citywide givebacks.

Ratner also is looking across the street at scab developers like Shaya Boymelgreen and David and Jed Walentas, who’ve made their fortunes using minimum wage labor to build their luxury apartment buildings.

Ross is also is on both sides of the industry; Related Companies builds union below 96^th St, Apollo Realty builds scab in Harlem. When he built out his own personal 4 story $ 40 million penthouse atop Time Warner Center, he tried to use non union labor too (and only stopped when he was faced with a one day walkout of all the union trades on that site).

They’re backed by the other billionaires who own New York’s skyline, guys like Larry Silverstein, Mort Zuckerman, Donald Trump, Stephen Green and Bernard Spitzer.

They also look to the rise of sweatshop billionaires like Boymelgreen and the Walentas brothers in Brooklyn and Ken Haron and Eytan Benyamin in Harlem, and they dream of building million dollar apartments with $ 8/hr labor like those guys do.

This handful of plutocrats have the most to gain here. They are the guys who’d pocket the bulk of the superprofits extracted by these givebacks by using the wage cuts as an excuse to demand lower construction prices from the contractors who build their buildings.

Basically, this 20% pay cut would involve 67,000 middle income workers handing about $ 6.7 billion per year (or $10,000/yr per person) over to two dozen billionaires.

Never have so many been forced to give so much to so few.

The attacks on the trades are also backed by the city’s Wall Street elite, firms like the Bank of New York Mellon Corp, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Capital One and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

These are the financiers whose lines of credit, construction loans and mortgages pay for the buildings owned by the billionaires. Since financing costs absorb about 50% of construction spending, these are the folks who take up most of the profits of construction.

Naturally, they want construction workers wages reduced to the minimum. That’s why they want the 20% pay cut for union labor and that’s also why they’re opposed to efforts by the BCTC to lobby the state legislature to pass the Espaillat-Lopez Bill and extend Davis Bacon prevailing wage laws to cover non union workers on publicly funded affordable housing jobs.

The city’s powerful not for profit sector, who have been deeply involved in unionbusting and sweatshop labor practices in publicly subsidized affordable housing construction in the city for the past 30 years, are also gunning for the construction unions.

The Rockefeller family’s Regional Plan Association is leading the charge here, having forged an unlikely alliance with the arch reactionary Manhattan Institute to generate scholarly anti union propaganda for the bosses.

They aren’t the only ones – the New York State Association for Affordable Housing and the Citizens Housing and Planning Council have also been attacking the unions, specifically for their support for higher wages for non union tradespeople.

Those officially sanctioned anti union lies are being regurgitated by the print media, including the Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Observer, Crain’s and the Wall Street Journal, who’ve been writing anti construction union screeds in their papers for the past 6 months.

The anti union war drums have been beaten the hardest by the Post (the flagship newspaper of fanatically right wing Fox News) and the Daily News (which happens to be owned by real estate billionaire Mort Zuckerman).

As the June 30 contract expiration date gets closer, the government of the City of New York has also weighed in on the side of the bosses.

The New York Police Department, the Department of Buildings and the Office of Emergency Management are already planning a campaign of repression against militant strikers on the picketlines – and leaking scare stories about “sabotage” to the press to justify the police abuse in advance.

Meanwhile, REBNY and the real estate developers have made serious plans to bring in scab crane operators and to get temporary New York crane operator licenses for them from the Department of Buildings

It seems like the bosses have rolled out the heavy artillery – who are they preparing to bombard with all these big guns?

The official propaganda version is that they are attacking “inefficient” union work rules, which, according to the Regional Plan Association propaganda articles churned out by far right wing Manhattan Institute ideologues Julia Vitullo-Martin and Hope Cohen, supposedly are the only reason that building union costs more than building scab.

There is much griping and whining from the bosses about workers taking too long to get a cup of coffee and the fact that a few very large megaprojects in the city have full time Operating Engineer and Teamster shop stewards (“master mechanics” and “working teamster foremen” respectively) who, as is common in many large unionized workplaces in many industries, are paid by the employer to handle union business on the jobsites full time.

Beyond the lies they print in the Daily News and the Post, the reality is a lot different.

The reason for the cost differential between union and non union construction workers boils down to one thing and one thing only – WAGES.

New York’s unionized trades make between $ 40 and $ 50 an hour in wages for journeylevel workers and on top of that wage there is another $ 30 to $ 40 an hour in contributions to the union benefit funds that provide these workers with health insurance and pensions.

This sounds like a lot of money until you realize just how much value these workers add to the buildings they work on. This is a city of $ 100 a square foot buildings erected atop billion dollar an acre land – there’s a lot of money on these projects and, even at $ 50/hr, only ten cents of every dollar spent on construction in this city goes to wages.

By contrast, the city’s non union construction workers make between $ 8 and $ 20 an hour, do not get any sort of employer benefits and about 50,000 of them, half the non union sector and a quarter of the total construction workforce, work off the books and don’t even get statutorily mandated social security and unemployment benefits.

Considering the value of the buildings those $ 8/hr tradespeople are working on, a whole lot of money is being funneled away from the folks who construct the buildings and being pocketed by the rich folks who own them.

As I mentioned above, many residential developers have a foot in both worlds – using $ 8/hr off the books scab labor on their publicly funded affordable housing jobs and $ 50/hr on the books union labor on their privately funded housing jobs.

It’s obvious why they’d want to reduce the $ 50/hr workforce down to $ 8/hr sweatshop levels!

It’s equally obvious why they would NOT want to admit that to the general public!

The 20% pay cut that the BTEA is making its primary demand in these contract talks is mute testimony to the fact that, despite all the propaganda about “inefficient” work rules, this really is all about the money.

Admittedly, there are some workrules that are at issue, specifically, the ones that pertain to construction workers having certain basic decent working conditions on the jobsites.

Union General Contractors are required to provide bathroom facilities on their larger jobs. If the job is big enough, they have to have a separate bathroom for the women workers and once the concrete and steel work are done and the building is sealed, these have to be actual flush toilet bathrooms.

GCs also have to provide temporary electric power and light to the jobsites so workers will be able to plug in their power tools and have light to see by while they work.

GCs are also required to provide at least a basic level of heat on the jobsites during the dead of winter (although to be brutally honest, that’s more about keeping the concrete warm while it sets than it is about the comfort of the workers).

GCs also have to provide elevator service for workers on hirise jobs, because a worker who just had to climb 20 stories with a 40 pound bag of tools isn’t going to be that efficient of a worker when they get to the floor they’re working on.

GCs have to pay the electrical subcontractor to have two electricians on each major job keep an eye on the temporary electrical system while also doing their regular jobs.

They have to make similar arrangements to pay the heating ventilation and air conditioning subcontractor to have two steamfitters periodically check in on the temporary heating system.

They also have to pay the plumbing contractor to have two plumbers build the temporary bathrooms and perform repair work on them as needed.

The temporary elevators are staffed by full time operators on the GCs payroll, with elevator constructors running the temporary passenger elevators and operating engineers running the freight cars.

This may all seem like basic stuff to those who don’t work in construction, but in this medieval industry, there actually are quite a few GCs who deeply resent having to provide basic human creature comforts to their workers!

Up until women began working in construction in the late 1970s, it was quite common to see jobsites with no toilets for the workers at all! On rough jobs male workers were expected to urinate against the wall, on finish work, they were expected to use an empty joint compound bucket as a toilet. In the Bronx, where this writer began his career in the trades, as late as the mid 1990s there were still jobsites in that borough with no toilet facilities for the workers.

One of the BTEA’s demands is the elimination of the temporary services requirement and to have temporary toilets, lights, heat and elevator service to be solely at the whim of the GC.

They also want to have mason tenders, the unskilled laborers who sweep up after the other trades, also be in charge of maintaining those temporary facilities where they continue to exist.

Mason tenders also happen to be the lowest paid trade in the entire unionized construction industry, conveniently enough.

The BTEA also want the right to bring scab subcontractors onto union jobs and to force union workers to work side by side with non union labor. This practice, known as “double breasting” or “the open shop” has been prohibited on union jobs here since 1921 and it’s an outrageous demand by the contractors.

The BTEA and the developers also want the unlimited right to use factory build modular components for the buildings we put up, including modular segments built in non union factories.

The reason for this is simple.

Workers in unionized modular factories only make $ 28/hr – their non union counterparts make as little as the federal minimum wage, $ 8.25/hr.

The BTEA have a laundry list of other demands (they sent a 26 point ultimatum to the BCTC back in January detailing them).

They want; an end to the 7 hour workday that the trades won back in 1936, the reduction of how much they have to pay for overtime, mandatory drug tests, Saturday as a straight time day, a so called “code of conduct” and a bunch of other petty demands down to and including they don’t even want to give us time to wash our hands before lunch.

It’s actually amazing that the real estate interests and the General Contractors think they can get away with this kind of massive attack.

They haven’t tried to pull a stunt like this in 90 years.

There only doing it now because they think they can get away with it.

The problem is, they might be right.

2. How to be for labor when it’s flat on its back:

The NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and its 16 affiliated unions have responded to the present economic crisis with remarkable passivity and inertia.

For the past 3 years, they have passively followed the lead of the BTEA and REBNY, letting them set the agenda (in the name of “the industry”) on every question, especially wages, work rules and job safety.

The BCTC takes for granted the BTEA and REBNY’s idea that unionized construction workers have to have a reduced standard of living and worsened working conditions to “compete with the non union”.

The very fact that the BCTC are dead silent about the fact that most of the city’s developers are themselves users of scab contractors on many of their jobs, and are thus on both sides of the so called “competition” is illustrative of just how servile New York’s construction union leaders are to the contractors and developers.

The narrow selfish demands of 1,500 contractors and a few dozen developers are always presented as “the needs of the industry” and as more important than the needs of the construction workforce.

The need of unionized construction workers to protect our wages and working conditions and the urgent need of the non union workers to have an end to sweatshop wages and to actually be paid on the books are NEVER presented as “the needs of the industry” even though they affect 200,000 workers and their families.

When the bottom dropped out of the construction market after the 2007 meltdown, inflicting mass unemployment on every trade, the real estate developers and their allies in government decided to go on the offensive.

The unions, not ideologically inclined to ever take an independent position from the bosses even in the best of times, were utterly unprepared to fight back and began making a series of concessions.

In 2008, the Building Trades agreed to major concessions in a Project Labor Agreement covering jobs for the New York City School Construction Authority.

Among other concessions, the SCA 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 carpenters, laborers, lathers, masons and crane operators on the concrete work, union electricians on the electrical work and non union carpenters, ironworkers, masons, plumbers and laborers on the rest of their buildings.

This was followed in 2009 with another Project Labor Agreement 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 another special deal, 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.

These concessions were sold to the workers by their leaders as the answer to “save union jobs” and “get us back to work”.

Even if the members didn’t believe that, (and a lot of members didn’t) the contracts were imposed on them anyway, because other than the electricians none of the New York trades allow their members to vote on contracts (and the Electricians Union’s leadership coerced its members to vote for the agreement even after they’d already rejected it).

In light of those deals, it’s not surprising that BTEA and REBNY expected the construction unions to roll over for this present deal, and permanently write those supposedly temporary givebacks into their collective bargaining agreements.

In fact, the BTEA and BCTC had planned to jointly rent out Madison Square Garden to announce to the members that the Building Trades unions had accepted the BTEA’s 26 point ultimatum.

Then the deal fell apart, so BTEA went with their Plan B – doing an end run around the unions by using subway ads, a website and leaflets stapled to workers paychecks to sell them on these concessions.

That backfired and actually succeeded in whipping up widespread resentment of the givebacks.

Workers had always resented those special deals, but had tolerated them as temporary deals made to keep jobs going in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years. However, they were not prepared to accept permanent rollbacks, no matter how bad the economy was.

There was also a split among the union leaders.

On the one side, the leadership of the New York District Council of Carpenters, the largest construction union, was the most aggressive in pushing for concessions.

They were backed by the Painters, Bricklayers, Mason Tenders, Concrete Laborers and the Plasterers & Cement Masons.

Those unions have long allowed contractors to treat workers in their crafts harshly and tolerate high levels of unemployment in their crafts even in normal economic times. They tend to take the lead in making concessions with the bosses at the expense of their members.

On the other side, the leadership of the Operating Engineers was most aggressive in opposing any kind of givebacks, in particular those that threatened to eliminate the jobs of the master mechanics.

Master mechanics tend to be drawn from the most privileged layer of union crane operators, the social base of the leadership of that union. There was no way that the Operating Engineers union leadership could sell them out by letting the BTEA eliminate their jobs.

They were backed by the Electricians, Plumbers, Steamfitters, Boilermakers, Sheet Metal Workers, Ironworkers and Lathers.

Those mechanical trades unions tend to demand the contractors in their trades provide their members with a bare minimum of decent treatment on the job (decent by the low standards of the construction industry) and they also tend to fight for some degree of job security for their members (again, job security by the low standards of the construction industry).

The leaders of the Operating Engineers and the mechanical trades, having a membership that expects a certain level of treatment, were not going to go along with the concession deal being pushed by the Carpenters, Painters and the masonry trades.

Meanwhile, as members began to find out what was in store for them, and to read the anti union diatribes in the Post and the Daily News, resentment began to build.

Painters District Council # 9’s agreement with the Association of Master Painters and the Wall Ceiling and Carpentry association was the test case for this concession campaign.

This was because the Painters contract expires on May Day (the only remaining legacy of the communists who ran the union during the 1940s) two months before the other contracts.

DC # 9’s leadership gave up the store in this contract.

In return for a very modest wage increase for commercial painters working in Manhattan below 96^th St, the contractors will not have to pay even one red cent into the DC # 9 welfare fund for 2 years and the pension fund for 4 years.

The union also agreed to a further $ 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.

There will also be an astonishing 67% reduction in the wages and benefits of painters working on residential jobs in Manhattan above 96^th St, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Those painters will be reduced from the $ 60/hr wage and benefit scale received by union painters to a measly $ 22/hr in pay and benefits.

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 Painters Union also abolished its hiring hall – from now on, all 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 ways to blacklist union painters they don’t like from working in the industry.

Union painters will now, at the whim of a boss, be subject to 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 the 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.

Also, the 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 negotiations 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.

The Painters Union doesn’t allow its members to ratify contracts so the agreement was inflicted on them without a vote.

This abominable agreement showed clearly what the BTEA wanted to impose on the rest of the union construction workforce.

As word of the Painters giveback ridden agreement filtered through the other trades, anger grew and the likelihood that similar contracts could be imposed on the other crafts without a fight diminished.

This created a problem for the construction union leaders.

The Building Trades union leadership have for over a century held to an ideology of “labor management partnership” and have historically been reluctant to lead strikes.

These leaders now found themselves in a position where they might just have to call a walkout on July 1, “partnership” be damned.

Despite that onrushing reality, none of the construction unions made any effort to prepare for a strike, not even the Operating Engineers, who would probably end up having to take the lead in any such walkout.

They didn’t even call any rallies, probably out of a well founded fear that they’d lose control of any such rally, just like they did during the “40,000 Man March” – the big rally in front of MTA headquarters on June 30, 1998.

That rally turned into what amounted to a one day general strike (which the leadership of the BCTC publicly apologized for on live TV!)

The last thing that the Building Trades leadership would want this time around would be a second edition of the 40,000 man march!

As a result, absolutely no effort was made to mobilize the membership – or at least no official mobilization was carried out!

A small group of activist union tradespeople (including this writer) organized an independent labor rally in front of the BTEA’s annual $ 750 a plate banquet at Cipriani’s Restaurant on Wall Street on May 24.

One union, Bridge Painters local 806, actually endorsed the rally and heavily mobilized their members to attend. Their contract comes up in September and they might be forced by the Structural Steel Painting Contractors Association and its 10 affiliated firms to follow the DC 9 Association of Master Painters pattern (which would very much NOT be acceptable to their members).

Local 806 mobilized about 150 of its members to attend the protest, joined by about 100 other union tradespeople.

The rally came as a surprise to the BTEA, and the contractors and developers were visibly shocked when they were pelted with chants of “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole” as they entered Cipriani’s.

Billionaire World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, the guest of honor at the event, actually went over to the demonstrators and professed his love of unions and his shock that union workers would ever protest against him.

For the record, Larry the allegedly labor loving billionaire happens to also be one of the folks pushing hardest for this package of givebacks. He’d gotten the unions to agree to a concession ridden Project Labor Agreement at Ground Zero way back in 2002 and now he wants to make us expand those concessions citywide.

In the wake of the Cipriani’s rally against the BTEA, the Building Trades leadership finally saw fit to call an officially sanctioned labor march and rally on June 15.

The rally was held at Cadman Plaza near the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the day, followed by a march across the Brooklyn Bridge and a second rally near City Hall.

Officially, this rally was called by the NYC Central Labor Council not the BCTC, so alongside the construction workers were small contingents from the New York State Nursing Association, the United Federation of Teachers and Service Employees International Union local 32bj.

The unions did little to mobilize for the rally and didn’t have workers leave their jobs at lunchtime. This kept attendance relatively light – only about 5,000 workers showed up.

Be that as it may, after the workers listened to the speeches at Cadman Plaza and marched across the bridge, the CLC and BCTC organizers quickly lost control of events.

The NYPD tried to pen the marchers in one lane of Broadway rather than letting them take up the whole street.

Some of the Ironworkers took exception to that and occupied both the street and the sidewalk bridge in front of a construction site at that corner. The police attacked them, made one arrest, the CLC and BCTC representatives were able to take back control of the rally from the workers and then the march continued without further incident.

However, in the days since the Brooklyn Bridge rally, there has been no further official effort to mobilize workers to resist the BTEA and REBNY.

Negotiations have continued, behind closed doors with minimal to nonexistent updates to the membership as to the progress of the talks.

From what little is known of the talks, the District Council of Carpenters is leading the way in proposing concessions, including the “full mobility” proposal which would gut the union hiring hall, and creation of a new very low wage carpenter job class: “preapprentices”.

These “preapprentices” would be paid close to minimum wage and would be used to unload trucks. Unlike apprentices they wouldn’t go to school or be taught craft skills on the job, they would only be used as materials handlers.

Worse yet, the Carpenters leadership is also proposing to abolish mandatory hiring from the union’s out of work list. Under the “full mobility” proposal, contractors would have the option to not hire any carpenters from the out of work list at all, as opposed to the present 50/50 rule that requires half the crew be hired from the list.

Since the majority of New York union carpenters work off the out of work list, this would be a disaster for these workers. It would also create an environment where contractors would be able to pressure desperate union carpenters to work for less than union scale just to get a job.

The Carpenters probably won’t take any wage cuts other than the ones they gave up in 2010, the 20% on privately funded luxury residential work and the 40% on HPD funded affordable housing work.

However, there may be significant benefit cuts and other givebacks beyond the preapprentice deal, also full mobility pretty much guarantees that lots of guys and gals will be forced to work for less than union scale in return for steady employment, which amounts to a de facto pay cut.

The only thing holding up approval of that and other concessions is approval by the federal judge who oversees the internal affairs of the District Council of Carpenters under a 1994 civil racketeering consent decree (like most NYC construction unions, the Carpenters have been subject to one racketeering investigation or another for the past 30 years)

This approval may delay a contract settlement between the Carpenters and the Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry association until a couple of days after the July 1 deadline (the other Carpenter agreements are all patterned on the Wall, Ceiling contract)

Very little of this information has been relayed to rank and file carpenters, who, as usual, are being kept in the dark on their new contracts.

Reportedly, there are also settlements close at hand between the Mason Tenders and the Contractors Association of Greater New York, the Steamfitters and the Mechanical Contractors Association and the Teamsters and the Demolition Contractors Association.

Of course, all those settlements were conducted behind closed doors with mason tenders, steamfitters and teamsters on the jobsites kept uninformed as to the progress of the talks.

Reportedly the only holdup is the Operating Engineers agreements with CAGNY, the Building Contractors Association, the Cement League and the Demolition Contractors Association (the last association have been working without contract with the Operating Engineers since last year).

As I said above, the issue here is a wholesale attack on the Operating Engineers shop steward system. Since the master mechanics (shop stewards) tend to be drawn from the core social base of the Operating Engineers union leadership, it is politically impossible for the leaders of that union to gut that system, leaving them no choice but to fight the givebacks.

However, considering the high likelihood that the Operating Engineers will have to strike on July 1, no serious strike preparations have been made.

That’s kind of a big deal, since the BTEA’s strategy here is to get all the other trades to scab on the Operating Engineers and leave them twisting slowly in the wind.

There’s also the question of will the other trades respect their picketlines.

Certainly it would be the natural instinct of the members to walk out in solidarity with the engineers, however building trades leaders have a long and pathetic tradition of ordering workers to scab on other trades.

It would be a God damned shame if that happened here – if it did it might be our industry’s PATCO moment and it would be a big defeat for us and the labor movement as a whole.

We’re the last strong island of private sector union strength in this country, if we fall, it will be a disaster for the entire labor movement.

3. An injury to one is the concern of all

How did we get to this place?

How did we get unions with such potential strength that were so submissive to the bosses?

Let’s take a look.

Our unions actually have quite militant origins.

The earliest construction local unions emerged in New York right after the American Revolution.

Worker organizing was kind of a big deal back then, since White construction workers had just been freed from indentured servitude and most Black tradesmen were still slaves. Strikes were considered slave rebellions and folks got whipped or burned at the stake for that.

Still, workers persevered under difficult circumstances and kept the unions alive underground scale, until the abolition of slavery in 1863 made building trades unions viable.

These early unions were very different from the building trades we know today.

They were led by committees of workers on their tools who did their labor activism in their spare time. They were all radicals of various stripes – socialists, communists, anarchists – and they saw unionism as an instrument of revolutionary social change.

There only real political blindspot was race; they thought that discrimination against Blacks was deplorable, but they weren’t particularly prepared to fight against it in the industry.

By the 1870s they’d built up strong craft unions among carpenters and in the masonry trades and were strong enough to dictate to employers the wage scale and the length of the workday.

This was done by areawide strikes (known as “trade movements”) carried out at the beginning of the building season every year.

By the 1890s the building trades unions in New York had grown strong enough to win the 8 hour day for part of the workforce, to build national unions in the trades and to build up an entire organized labor movement. They also had a cadre of full time leaders – business agents – and had built the unions up as permanent institutions which the bosses grudgingly accepted as a permanent part of the industry.

That acceptance came at a price.

The business agents were reluctant to call strikes (because strikes put the union treasury at risk – the same treasury that paid their salaries). So they had to have peace with the contractors at any price.

That price was class partnership – with the contractors, and with the gangsters who had come to be the intermediaries that regulated competition in the industry and kept construction prices and contractor profits high.

This didn’t go over very well with the workers – or with the more socialist or communist oriented business agents.

There was one last big wave of left led construction worker activism during World War I, which came to a head during the citywide Carpenters Union strike of May 1, 1916.

In the wake of that strike, which was won on the picketline and betrayed behind closed doors, right wing forces in the leadership of the construction unions, partnered with the contractors and Irish gangsters, decisively broke the back of the left in the New York building trades and imposed patronage driven authoritarian pro contractor regimes in the unions.

The gangsters, the contractors and the unions also set about imposing a widespread scheme of price fixing in the industry. The gangsters organized the contractors to rig the bidding on major jobs, and used the Carpenters and the Teamsters unions as enforcers against those bosses who didn’t want to go along with the cartel.

That triggered a short lived backlash in 1921, which led to the jailing of the Irish gangster who ran the District Council of Carpenters (he became the first labor racketeer to ever get sent to jail in this country) and triggered a short lived and ultimately failed drive by the clients to bust the construction unions.

The unions survived that attack, because the contractors found them a useful source of trained skilled labor and the gangsters found them a useful tool to enforce their protection rackets.

That worked out great for the business agents – for the members, it meant that they exchanged modest short term economic gains for the long term independence of their unions.

This dysfunctional marriage lasted for a very long time.

It survived the displacement of the Irish gangsters by Jewish bootleggers in the 1930s and their replacement by Italian American cosa nostra in the 1940s.

It survived the rise of power tools, sheetrock and the subcontractor system in the 1950s.

What finally brought that alliance to an end was something called the Business Roundtable, founded by Roger Blough, the CEO of US Steel, in 1969.

That was a movement among major corporations, led by the CEO of US Steel, to force their construction contractors to reduce the wages of construction workers and break the power of the Building Trades unions.

Outside of New York and a few other major cities the Roundtable triumphed over the Building Trades. By 1978 they had crippled the construction unions in most of the nation, reduced them to about 20% of the construction labor force largely confined to big highway and public sector jobs and remade construction as a low wage job largely done by poor Mexican immigrants.

In New York City, the alliance between contractors, cosa nostra and the unions made a direct attack impossible. So the developers here had to reach out to the FBI to do it for them.

That worked – in a series of federal racketeering cases between 1978 and 1994, just about every major cosa nostra labor racketeer was jailed and federal monitors were permanently stationed in two of the city’s biggest construction unions, the Mason Tenders and the District Council of Carpenters.

The construction unions had already been weakened by their failed policy of massive resistance to the desegregation of union membership.

Recalcitrant union racism spawned a movement of armed Maoist-led Black, Latino and Chinese-American construction workers groups called The Coalition which forced the contractors and the unions to integrate with organized raids on segregated jobsites.

However, the fall of de facto segregation and the collapse of labor racketeering wasn’t what deunionized the industry – the City of New York took care of that.

In the wake of the City ‘s repeal of Rent Control in 1971, New York landlords went on an orgy of driving out working class tenants, hiring arsonists to burn down low rent buildings in Black and Latino neighborhoods and using public funds to build high rent apartment buildings in White neighborhoods.

By 1975, that epidemic of real estate greed had literally bankrupted the City of New York and forced it into receivership by the Wall Street banks and had left many of the city’s ghettoes as bombed out wastelands.

The City of New York had to rebuild those buildings and the bankers wouldn’t allow them to use well paid union labor to do the work.

So, the City laundered the funds through the network of Democratic Party oriented Community Based Organizations that had sprung up in the inner cities during the inner city rebellions of the 1960s.

Those groups and their real estate developer partners were the client of record on these renovation jobs, not the City, so they were not bound by Davis Bacon wage requirements.

This enabled them to use low paying non union contractors and that’s exactly what they did.

Initially, some of those non union contractors were front companies for unionized firms and many of the workers were union members, desperate for work due to the deep recession that was going on at the time.

The District Council of Carpenters, the main union in residential construction, aided this process by letting contractors pay a substandard wage for renovation work.

When a small local of the Painters Union, Drywall Tapers local 1974, didn’t go along with those concessions and went on strike in 1978, the Carpenters Union openly scabbed on them and the Plasterers Union helped the Genovese crime family recruit scabs.

Within a few years, about 50,000 of the city’s 200,000 construction workers were non union.

By the building boom of the 2000s, fully half the industry, 100,000 workers, was non union.

At least 50,000 of those workers were being paid $ 7 or $ 8 hr off the books for their labor.

Even in the unions, there were certain contractors – particularly in hirise concrete, drywall and ceilings and scaffolding in the residential sector, office furniture installation and venetian blind installation in commerical and painting and paperhanging in both – that offered workers steady jobs if they would work for less than union scale.

This wholesale attack on union labor largely went uncontested for the first 15 years.

In the wake of the racketeering prosecutions in the early 1990s, the federal monitorships in the Mason Tenders District Council and the District Council of Carpenters actually began trying to organize non union workers.

The efforts initially involved trying to offer concessionary low wage contracts to attract scab contractors – which failed because those firms pay so poorly that any contract above minimum wage would be unacceptable to those bosses.

The Carpenters and Mason Tenders soon turned to picketing and the inflatable rubber rats that they used at their protests became a common site around the city.

The high point of that organizing campaign was the 1998 rally against Roy Kay, a scab GC being used by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to build a subway command center.

Much to the dismay of the BCTC leadership, the 40,000 construction workers at that rally turned it in to a de facto citywide construction workers strike, and occupied the Midtown Manhattan streets until the cops attacked them with pepper spray and horses.

After that, the handful of unions that did organizing dramatically toned town their activism, perhaps because they feared a second edition of the “40,000 Man March”.

Eventually, the two main organizing unions, the District Council of Carpenters and the Mason Tenders were joined by Painters District Council # 9 and Ironworkers local 361, but their limited efforts, though well intentioned, were not enough to reverse the tide of deunionization.

At least they did something – most construction unions did absolutely nothing about organizing.

By 2007, when the bottom fell out of the market, the stage had been set for the developers to launch an attack, emboldened by union weakness and filled with lust for the riches to be had by pauperizing the union tradespeople the way their crosstown competitors fleece the minimum wage non union workers.

4. To die on our feet, or live on our knees:

That’s where we stand now – what the hell can we do about it?

Obviously, we have to fight back, in a unified way.

We can’t leave one trade out there to be attacked – today it’s the Operating Engineers under the gun, tomorrow it could be our trade.

If the leaders of our unions aren’t prepared to resist (and there’s some reason to think that may be the case) then we as rank and file workers have to take matters into our own hands.

A good start would be a zero tolerance policy on scabbing.

That is, if one trade has to strike on June 30, then we all refuse to work behind their picket lines.

Our unions have no strike clauses in their agreements with the employers, but while they put restrictions on the conduct of our unions as institutions, those agreements are not binding on individual workers – we have a right to respect a picketline and we need to exercise that right.

We also have to go on the offensive here.

The billionaire real estate developers and the GCs have arrayed a powerful coalition of forces against us; the subcontractors, the corporate media, the not for profit sector, the Buildings Department and the NYPD.

They’ve also put an enormous amount of energy into the task of mudslinging against our unions and making us look like a bunch of lazy greedy bums in the eyes of the general public.

The best way to resist those attacks is to break with the isolated, insular, country club unionism which has been the dominant style of the Building Trades for most of the last century.

We can’t stand alone in this time of crisis – we need to reach out for allies just to survive, let alone to have any hopes of actually winning.

Our logical allies are people that, like us, are also victimized by the real estate developers.

That would include;

our 100,000 non union brothers and sisters on the non union side of the industry,

the 70,000 Service Employees International Union local 32bj janitors and security guards,

the 30,000 UNITE-HERE local 6 hotel workers,

the 100,000 non union janitors, supers and porters in this city,

the 4 million New Yorkers who rent apartments in privately owned apartment houses,

the tens of thousands of small businesses in rented storefronts.

To get the support of these folks, we have to broaden our demands.

Of course we have to fight to preserve our wages, benefits, work rules, our apprenticeship programs and every benefit and right we’ve won over 150 years of struggle.

However, we also have to demand that our non union brothers and sisters get the same wages and benefits we do.

To quote the slogan that the District Council of Carpenters uses on area standards pickets “Same Work! Same Pay!”

First and foremost we need to demand that the Espaillat-Lopez bill, which would extend Davis Bacon wage protection to HPD funded affordable housing construction jobs, be passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Cuomo

Also, as most of us in the industry know, much of the non union construction workforce are undocumented immigrants – particularly the 50,000 workers, a quarter of our industry, who are paid minimum wage off the books.

We need to demand that their employers not only pay these brothers and sisters what they are worth, but we should also demand that those employers sponsor their undocumented workers for green cards, or at the very least for H-2A nonimmigrant work visas!

After all, those bosses have profited so much by paying those workers so little – those sweatshop bosses really do owe it to their workforce.

This also would be a good time to push to organize the non union sector – not by picketing with the inflatable rat or one contractor at a time NLRB elections, but by going after all of the shops in a given market segment and organizing their workers to go out on simultaneous recognition strikes.

Yes, we’re in a bad economy – but remember, back in the Great Depression, when the economy was far worse than it is now, American unions carried out the greatest wave of union organizing in American history.

Especially in our case, when the main driving force behind BTEA and REBNY’s attacks on our wages is the huge wage differential between the $ 50/hr on the books construction workforce and the $ 8/hr off the books building labor force, it is in our enlightened self interest to fight to bring the $ 8/hr workers up to our wage scale before we get pushed down to theirs.

We also need to attack the real estate billionaires on a front where they are vulnerable – their rent gouging which has brought them so much wealth and has brought so much misery to so many New Yorkers.

This is a city where 80% of the population are renters and where most of the small businesses are located in rented premises.

The profiteering of New York landlords has plundered the population of this city, of all classes, for over 40 years.

They burned and bankrupted the city in the 1970s, with the Black and Latino parts of this city the hardest hit, they’ve been waging a decades long economic war of attrition against working class and poor New Yorkers (in particular Blacks, Latinos and immigrants) and they have driven many small manufacturers and merchants out of business due to their relentless rent gouging.

From 1947 to 1971 we had Rent Control in this city. Landlord profiteering was held in check, small businesses and manufacturers flourished and poor people and the working class had decent low cost apartments to live in.

We need to fight for a restoration of Rent Control, on both commercial properties and residential apartments.

Also, obviously, we need to unite with the civil service unions, who are being demonized by the same corporate media that attacks us and who are similarly threatened with destruction, and support their fight to preserve their wages and conditions.

We really need to mend fences with our 166,000 brothers and sisters who work for the State of New York, and with the leaders of the Civil Service Employees Union and the Public Employees Federation.

Last year, the leaders of the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and the New York State Building Trades Council joined forces with some of the same corporate labor haters who are targeting us now, to back then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign explicitly because he was going to attack the pensions and benefits of state employees.

That’s not the first time that our unions have betrayed our brothers and sisters in other industries – however, we can, and damned well should, make it the last time!

The idea here is simple – an injury to one is the concern of all (a very old trade union concept that most modern labor leaders never talk about).

The real estate developers, and the capitalist class as a whole, want to single us out, isolate us and defeat us.

The only way we can survive, let alone win, is to get as many allies as we can so we can isolate and defeat the billionaire real estate developers.

The leaders of the construction unions are still following their century old strategy of “class partnership” – a strategy which has decisively failed.

This is an absurdity in a situation where the contractors have made it obvious that they do not want to collaborate with us and our unions!

We and our unions can no longer stand alone, separate from the rest of labor – that never really worked in the past, and it certainly isn’t a viable strategy now!

If our union leaders aren’t willing to unite with the rest of labor and with the working class as a whole to fight the corporate power, we need to replace them with leaders who will.

Our choice is clear – stand and fight, or kneel and beg!

We didn’t break the economy – the greedheads on Wall Street did!

No way in hell we should have to pay for it!

- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER

FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/

http://groups.google.com/group/gangbox/

http://myspace.com/gregory10031

http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com

http://clnews.org

“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”

Originally published on Friday, June 24, 2011

NYC CONSTRUCTION WORKERS RALLY AGAINST THE 20% PAY CUT Friday June 17, 3:30PM W 40th St and Broadway, NYC

2011-06-11T13:52:00.000-04:00

For Immediate Release: Friday June 10, 2011
For More Information, Contact: Gregory A. Butler GREGORYABUTLER@aol.com (646) 372-6898

NYC Construction Workers Rank and File Organized has issued a call for a demonstration against Louis Coletti and the Building Trades Employers Association. We will be picketing the BTEA’s executive offices at 1430 Broadway (@ W 40th St), New York, NY on Friday, June 17, 2011 from 3:30PM to 5:30PM.

Coletti and the BTEA have used the present economic crisis as an excuse to demand a 20% cut in the middle income wages and benefits of New York City’s 100,000 unionized construction workers, to boost the profits of the contractors that Coletti and BTEA represent, and the real estate developers and other financial interests who’s buildings they put up.

If we give in, Coletti and his association will keep coming back, demanding giveback after giveback and pay cut after pay cut until we are reduced to the standard of living of this city’s 100,000 non union construction workers, some of whom toil off the books under sweatshop working conditions for as little as $ 8/hr.

The Association of Master Painters, an association allied with Coletti and BTEA, have already forced Painters District Council # 9 to agree to deep cuts, including the reduction of the wages and benefits for residential painters in the outer boroughs from $ 60/hr to $ 22/hr!

The NYC District Council of Carpenters have also given deep cuts to the Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, another BTEA/Coletti ally, including a 20% wage cut on market rate housing construction jobs and a 40% wage cut on affordable housing work.

New York City’s unionized tradespeople are the most productive, safest and highly skilled construction workers in the world. We are highly trained, with most of us having attended 3 to 4 years of employer funded and union run trade schools, and we have a century and a half long tradition of being early adopters of the most advanced building techniques in our trades.

We are also extremely hard working – the 7 hour days that Mr. Coletti and his association complain about are worked at full tilt speed, and many of us pay the price with on the job injuries and, at the end of our careers, a life expectancy of only 62 years, far shorter than the average American.

All we ask in return is decent pay in return for our very hard and very productive labor, and decent health coverage for ourselves and our families.

It’s actually a pretty good deal for the contractors – a lot of Mr. Coletti’s 200 members, as well as many other businesspeople in our industry, have become millionaires because of our hard work and many of the real estate tycoons we build for have become billionaires due to our strength and skills.

We didn’t cause the present economic crisis (the financiers did) and we sure as hell aren’t going to pay for it! We have been very reasonable about concessions and we’ve already made our fare share of sacrifices – enough is enough!

This is why NYC Construction Workers Rank and File Organized, a group of union tradespeople acting independently of our unions, have called this protest. We say NO to Mr. Coletti’s 20% pay cut!

NYC CONSTRUCTION WORKERS RALLY AGAINST THE 20% PAY CUT Friday, June 17th 3:30 PM W 40th St and Broadway

2011-06-08T20:15:00.001-04:00

STOP THE WAR ON UNION

CONSTRUCTION WORKERS!

Louis Coletti and the Building Trades Employers Association want us to take a

20% PAY CUT!

this is on top of the deep pay cuts that our unions have already given back:

the Painters Union agreed to a 67% pay cut on outer borough residential jobs

and massive cutbacks to their health insurance coverage

the Carpenters Union agreed to 20% pay cuts on market rate housing jobs

in Manhattan and 40% on outer boroughs affordable housing jobs

now the bosses want even deeper pay and benefits cuts from us; these millionaire contractors want to push

hard working highly skilled middle income union tradespeople into poverty, just to line their pockets with bigger profits

If Coletti and the BTEA get away with this, they won’t stop until

they’ve pushed us down to the $ 8/hr level of the non union contractors!

On FRIDAY, JUNE 17 at 3:30 PM, we’re going to have a rally

in front of the BTEA’s offices at 1430 BROADWAY (@ W 40^th St)

to tell them that we’re not going to give them their 20% pay cut!

Construction workers and our allies have to take a stand!

Please join us at our rally!

NYC CONSTRUCTION WORKERS

RANK AND FILE ORGANIZED

¡PARE LA GUERRA CONTRA LA UNIÓN

TRABAJADORES DE CONSTRUCCIÓN!

Louis Coletti y la Building Trades Employers Association a

¡REDUCCIÓN SALARIAL DEL 20%!

esto está encima de las reducciones salariales

profundas que nuestras uniones han dado ya detrás:

la unión de los pintores estuvo de acuerdo a una reducción salarial

del 67% con trabajos residenciales de las outer boroughs y

reducciones masivas a su cobertura del seguro medico

la unión de los carpinteros estuvo de acuerdo hasta las reducciones salariales

del 20% con trabajos de la cubierta del tipo de mercado en Manhattan y el

40% en trabajos comprables de la cubierta de las ciudades externas

ahora los jefes quieren incluso una paga más profunda y las ventajas

cortan de nosotros; estos contratistas del millonario quieren

empujar los trabajadores de construcción experto duro de la unión

de los ingresos medios del funcionamiento altamente - en pobreza,

apenas para alinear sus bolsillos con beneficios más grandes

¡Si Coletti y los BTEA consiguen lejos con esto, no pararán hasta nos han

empujado hacia abajo al nivel de $ 8/hr no de los contratistas inorganizado!

El viernes 17 de junio en el 3:30 P.M., vamos a tener una reunión delante

de las oficinas del BTEA en 1430 BROADWAY (@ calle de W 40.o) ¡para

decirles que no vamos a darles su reducción salarial del 20%! ¡Los trabajadores de construcción y nuestros aliados tienen que tomar un soporte!

¡Ensámblenos por favor en nuestra reunión!

NYC CONSTRUCTION WORKERS RANK AND FILE ORGANIZED