[gregory...@aol.com]

C CLASS WAGES FOR C CLASS BUILDINGS

two tier wages, the death of the Out of Work list and the downward mobility

of union tradespeople in the New York City District Council of Carpenters

 

Since the current economic depression began 6 years ago, New York City’s union contractors have been demanding wage and benefit cuts and attempting to destroy union work rules and job referral systems.

They’ve been able to have their way with the trades in large part because many of the city’s developers have been aggressively deunionizing the labor force on their projects – basically it’s economic blackmail at the highest level, with the rich men who run the industry forcing the 100,000 unionized tradespeople in the city to reduce our standard of living, or have our work done by the 100,000 workers of the impoverished $ 10/hr no benefits non union trades workforce in this city.

 

The New York City District Council of Carpenters, with 14,000 working members the biggest union in the NYC building trades, has been taking the lead in giving up decades of gains to “our good union contractors” – including giving up the democratic control of hiring by the union’s Out of Work List and forcing carpenters to be totally dependent on the contractors for employment.

The concessionary bargaining would be even more extreme if our District Council hadn’t been under a federal court-imposed racketeering consent decree for the past 20 years. Presently, the giveback ridden contracts are held up in Judge Berman’s court, which has delayed them from implementation and will probably keep them from being enforced until at least summer at the earliest.

 

The Building Contractors Association has jumped on the downward mobility train, joining several other trade associations (the Hoisting Trade Association, the Greater New York Floorcoverers Association, the Manufacturing Woodworkers Association and the biggest trade association, the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, which bargains for half the contractors in the industry) who’ve also been able to extract concessions from their carpenter workforces.

 

The BCA represents General Contractors – the companies that manage the jobsites for the owners and hire the subcontractors whose workers actually put up the buildings.

BCA, like the other associations, abolished the Out of Work List and replaced it with Full Mobility, a system that allows them to staff their jobs entirely with a handpicked workforce, with only the shop steward supplied by the union.

The associations say they need this Full Mobility system because the majority of union carpenters who work out of the union’s Out of Work List (the “local men”) are lazy and incompetent, unlike their handpicked “company men” (the minority of union carpenters who are full time employees), all of whom are the greatest carpenters since St Joseph the Worker (even the ones that never spent a day in Carpenter School and only have their jobs because they are the cousin/brother-in-law/drinking buddy of the contractor).

In actual fact, the contractors want to use an all company man workforce so they can force their carpenters to work under substandard conditions prohibited by our contract – including working for less than union scale.

Our union found this out the hard way in the 2000s, when we had an earlier version of Full Mobility called the Request System

Also, having an all company man workforce makes it easier for them to discriminate against Black men, Latinos, women of all colors, older carpenters and 3^rd and 4^th year apprentices, all groups that have historically faced job discrimination at the hands of union contractors in our trade.

Of course, Full Mobility will drive a significant number of carpenters out of the union.

 

That’s been the experience as the Full Mobility system was imposed in our union, starting in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and across the United Brotherhood since then.

Out of the union =/= out of carpentry, so basically we’ll be pushing these highly trained and skilled carpenters into the non union side of the industry, which will be more than happy to hire them (at $ 10/hr to do a $ 46/hr job).

 

They’ll join about 2,000 carpenters who went non union in the past 6 years (15% of the DC’s membership), because of dwindling job opportunities on the union side

 

The BCA also extracted 20% pay and benefit cuts on “Class C buildings” (older low rent office and commerical buildings), apartment houses and hotels in Upper Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs and an 8.9% pay cut for residential, hotel and Class C commerical in Manhattan below 96^th St.

This is making permanent supposedly ”temporary” concessions that BCA and the Building Trades Employers Association in a series of 150 Project Labor Agreements that our union and the rest of the trades have signed up to over the past 6 years.

Our leaders justify this to us on the grounds that we’ve already lost Class C, residential and hotels in the Outer Boros and Uptown and we’re close to losing those jobs in Manhattan below 96^th St as well.

That happens to be 100% true – we have lost that work (that’s why our membership – once 40,000 strong back in 1968 when we had 100% market share, has dwindled to 25,000 in 1992, 16,000 in 2007 and only 14,000 today, while our craft’s workforce holds steady at 40,000)

 

We were a city that built 100% union from 1903 to 1978.

We lost that work because the City of New York, in the wake of its mid 1970’s bankruptcy, began to aggressively deunionize municipally subsidized apartment building renovation work in 1978.

Our unions, weakened by 80 years of being under the thumb of gangsters who used our labor organizations to help contractors fix construction prices, were unable to resist this attack.

 

In fact, many of the gangsters who controlled our unions and the contractors they were allied with actively went along with the deunionization.

It’s not an accident that the biggest non union general contractor in the city today – the Weiss brothers’ Flintlock Construction – was a unionized company back in that era.

 

 

 

 

The Weiss Brothers overseeing their low wage immigrant workers

That’s how our share of apartment house new construction went from 100% in the 1970s to barely 20% today.

 

That’s how we lost new construction of hotels and renovation and alteration work in Class C office buildings

 

 The question is, will we get that work back through givebacks?

 

I would have to say NO.

 

Even at 80% of scale, we still make $ 36/hr plus benefits, while our non union peers make between $ 10 and $ 25/hr with no benefits (in some cases not even workers comp or social security).

To get that work back, we’d have to do what Painters Union District Council 9 did on their residential jobs in the outer boroughs – reduce union scale to $ 14/hr!

 

At the rate we’re going, we’ll catch up with that Race To The Bottom sooner rather than later.

It also won’t help that

 

Of course, that’s not the only possible way out of this fix.

 

We could actually try to organize the non union carpenters, and the other non union tradespeople in the unorganized sector of the industry.

 

There are a lot of them – 100,000 in total, about 26,000 of them carpenters (or almost 65% of the carpenters working in this city). They do 80% of the work in residential and hotels and a fifth of the commerical work in the city.

Also a hell of a lot of them are former union members – some in the unions in their trade in this city, others in the unions back home in Mexico, the UK, Ireland, Poland, Russia, India or the Ukraine. 

 

Lots of them end up coming to the unions as individuals on their own, because we make so much more than they do.

 

We can and should organize them.

The three main unions with jurisdiction over residential construction – Carpenters, Laborers and Painters – all have organizing departments, staffed by militants who are very dedicated to re unionizing our industry.

 

Unfortunately their skill and militance have been largely wasted on tactics that don’t get the job done. Informational picketing has a place in organizing, but at the end of the day if you don’t stop production the owners, developers and scab contractors will just keep on running their jobs behind our picketlines.

 

We need to organize area-wide union recognition strikes of all the contractors in a market segment.

 

The hirise hotels being built 100% non union for billionaire non union luxury hotel developer Sam Chang by Flintlock and Cava Construction would be a good target. We could also link up with the New York Hotel Motel Trades Council, since these hotels are going to be staffed non union once they’re built.

 

Sam Chang and his low wage hotels

These are big jobs, many of them in Midtown within walking distance of union jobsites and, as I pointed out above, a certain portion of the workers are former or current union members

We could supplement striking these jobs with having midday stop work mass rallies in front of the bigger sites – kind of like the “40,000 Man March” we had on Roy Kay Construction’s big Metropolitan Transportation Authority Command Center job back in 1998.

That rally turned Roy Kay and stopped the MTA from using scab contractors.

We can do it again – with the Carpenters, Laborers and Painters working together with the Hotel Trades Council, we can turn Sam Chang, make Flintlock and Cava sign union General Contractor agreements that bind them to use all union subs, force Chang to unionize his hotel workers and make a start on unionizing the residential and hospitality sector.

 

We can also aggressively publicize the fact that a billionaire like Sam Chang is enriching himself by paying his workers $ 10 an hour.

This is a city where 80% of the population are renters, so four fifths of New Yorkers have a passionate hatred for landlords and real estate developers. We should tap into that – make Sam Chang and the Weiss Brothers into household names (and not in a good way) that every New Yorker despises.

This could be used as a stepping stone to launching areawide strikes against the luxury apartment house developers -  especially the ones in Harlem, Downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

We could also coordinate that with the Service Employees International Union, to force them to use unionize supers, porters and doormen once the buildings are built.

We could also make people like billionaire Brooklyn real estate developer Dave Walentas into household names too – known and despised by their neighbors for their profiteering at the expense of this city’s workers and tenants.

 

 

David Walentas, a man who got very rich driving up Brooklyn rents and driving down Brooklyn building worker wages

 

We need to fight to make the billionaires pay us what they owe us, and we have to enlist the entire city on our side in this struggle.

 

We can do it – if the leaders of the NYC District Council of Carpenters, the Laborers Union’s Mason Tenders District Council and the Painters Union’s District Council 9 had the political will to do so.

So far, all those leaders have had to offer is pay cut after pay cut, and gutting the job referral system which weakens our union on the jobsites.

That’s not going to lead us in the direction we need to go in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Saturday, March 30, 2013

               © 2013 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.

[gregory...@aol.com]

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