THE RETURN OF THE BUDDY BOY SYSTEM the crisis in New York's unionized construction trades

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THE RETURN OF THE BUDDY BOY SYSTEM

the crisis in New York’s unionized construction trades

 

On Thursday, April 25^th 2013, the New York City District Council of Carpenters gutted its union run job referral system, the Out of Work List.

 

Ironically enough, the man who presided over the destruction of the Out of Work List, NYCDCC Executive Secretary Treasurer Mike Bilello (a reformer who was elected to SAVE the Out of Work List) was himself ousted from office by the federal court monitors overseeing the union just four days later – because of the same kind of cronyism that abolishing the Out of Work list will impose on the entire union.

Bilello had ordered union business agents to let one of his friends work at the Javits Center, despite the fact that the man had not paid his union dues in over a year.

This new contractor controlled employment system will allow the same sort of favoritism, cronyism and nepotism to become just about the only way for a journeylevel union carpenter to get a union job in this city.

This is the culmination of a 14 year long attack on the union’s Out of Work List job referral system by the employers and the union’s own leadership , which in turn is part of a national attack on union run hiring systems throughout the entire United Brotherhood of Carpenters that’s gone on for the last 30 years.

The goal is to make the union “user friendly” for the contractors – basically, to reduce our working conditions as close as possible to those prevailing on non union construction sites, to attract scab contractors to sign up with the union.

Of the 36 District and Regional Councils of the Carpenters Union in the US, New York was the last one where union control of the hiring system still existed – and it was only preserved here due to the fact that the New York District Council has been under a federal racketeering consent decree for the past 20 years.

 

Now, some folks might think it’s perfectly reasonable for employers to have the final say in who they hire.

That’s actually a reasonable position – if we’re talking about permanent jobs where, after a probation period, a worker will be continuously employed unless he/she is fired for cause or laid off. It’s an even more reasonable position if we were referring to a regular union job, where workers cannot be fired unless the boss has good cause and where layoffs are governed by seniority (“last hired first fired”).

Construction isn’t like that, at all.

 

On both the union and the non union sides of the industry, most construction workers are hired by the day and can be laid off or fired at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all. Even on the union side most union contracts in construction do not have to have good cause to discharge a worker and economic layoffs do not have to be on the basis of seniority.

Having a permanent job in construction is a luxury, limited to a privileged few – often friends or relatives of the employer. However, even the most privileged or well connected construction worker is at risk of losing their job at any time at the whim of a boss.

There are some exceptions to this – we’ll get into that below – but that’s the general climate of job insecurity in our industry that, sadly, the construction unions have never really tried to fight against.

 

This would be a good place for a little background about how hiring used to take place in union carpentry, and of the two distinct groups of carpenters that exist in the union.

 

The new Full Mobility system abolishes the half century old 50/50 system, where at least 50% of the crew (the “local men”) on every union carpentry job were referred by the union and a maximum of 50% (the “company men”) were handpicked by the employer.

 

The contractors have been trying to get rid of that system for 25+ years, with the largest employers association, the Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, in the lead. Wall Ceiling is the trade association for the drywall and ceilings contractors who employ roughly half the membership of the Carpenters Union.

 

The Building Contractors Association (general contractors – companies that run the whole jobsite and supervise the subcontractors) and the Hoisting Trade Association (scaffold contractors) also recently got Full Mobility, the Manufacturing Woodworkers Association has already had it for a decade and the Cement League (hirise concrete contractors) and the Floor Coverers Association are also pushing for it.

It’s safe to assume that the Associated General Contractors (heavy and highway building contractors), the Contractors Association of Greater NY (another general contractors group, representing the five biggest GCs in the city), the  Architectural Metal and Storefront Contractors Association (metal and glass installation contractors), the Millwright Association (machinery installation contractors), and the NY Trade Show Contractors Association all might ask for, and get, the same deal

Why do they want Full Mobility so badly?

If you believe the trade associations and the leaders of the NYC District Council of Carpenters, it’s because the two thirds of the union’s membership who work off the out of work list are lazy, inept, unskilled good for nothings who don’t even deserve to be in the industry while the minority of the industry who are company men are all great carpenters being denied job opportunities by the lazy local men.

Oddly enough, local men are more likely to have completed the apprenticeship program, while company men tend to be the relatives, friend or drinking buddies of contractors. These company men are often hired as journeylevel carpenters without so much as one day of training, which makes the alleged skills gap somewhat odd.

The actual reason is that, over the past 40 years, the portion of carpentry – and of construction in general – that is done union in this city has fallen sharply. From a market that was virtually 100% union in 1968 we’ve fallen to less than 40% union.

These contractors are trying to “compete with the non union” by making union jobs as similar to scab jobs as possible – through lower wages, weakened work rules and the abolition of what little union protection we have, like being able to get a job from the union.

 

This attack on carpenters has, over the last three years, merged with a full court press against all the construction unions to make massive givebacks.

The attack is led by the Building Trades Employers Association, the group that has represented union contractors in New York City since 1890 and has been the umbrella group for contractor-union labor bargaining since 1903.

 

It also includes the New York Building Congress, the Real Estate Board of New York and the Realty Advisory Board on Labor Relations (all three of which represent the real estate developers), the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University (a nominally liberal institution which is a major player in Upper Manhattan real estate development), the Regional Plan Association (a liberal think tank funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Manhattan Institute (a far right anti union think tank funded by the Koch Brothers) and the New York City Association for Affordable Housing (a lobbying group for the low wage non union developers who build city and state subsidized housing in the city).

Liberals and Conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, Corporate America, academia and Not for Profit Community Based Organizations, all united in a common goal to force middle income building trades workers to pay for the real estate industry’s money problems out of our own pockets.

Call it a “Coalition of the Greedy”.

 

The plan is to weaken New York City’s construction unions, take away the employment rights and workrules those unions have won for building tradespeople over the past 140 years and push us as far as possible down to the wage, benefit and work rule levels of tradespeople in the non union segment of the industry.

Since some non union construction workers in this city make as little as $ 7/hr off the books (this is especially true of the workers on city financed projects run by members of the NYS Association for Affordable Housing), this group intends to push us down really far.

This is occurring in a climate where the majority of the construction work in the city is done non union – not only in home improvement and other traditionally non union market segments, but in hirise apartment house construction and hotel construction, which were once nearly 100% union but are now largely low wage non union markets.

The “Coalition of the Greedy” have already started trotting out the same kind of arguments that were used to demand pay cuts from union autoworkers at GM, Ford and Chrysler back in 2007 and have been used against civil service workers across the country since then.

The representatives of the billionaires claim that middle income union construction workers are “overpaid”,  our benefits and pensions are “excessive”, as our the work rules that protect our lives and bodies on the job.

We should be reduced to the same standard of poverty-line wages, no benefits and no safety on the job faced by the sub minimum wage non union workers.

 

The same “overpaid worker” arguments are made about the wages and benefits of hotel workers, building supers, janitors and security guards – most of whom make very low wages already!

No mention is made of who will benefit from the excess profits to be wrung out of us when our pay and benefits are cut (hint – the billionaires paying for this “Coalition of the Greedy” are the ones who’s pockets will be lined by our poverty)

 

The Full Mobility system is part of this attack – and union carpenters have been dealing with this for the past 14 years. The NYC District Council has actively aided the employers in attacking the union job referral system from within.

 Back in the 2000s, an earlier variant of Full Mobility, called the Request System, let contractors pick and choose who they would and wouldn’t hire.

 

Certain contractors, in particular firms in office furniture installation, venetian blinds, drywall & ceilings and hirise concrete, abused the Request System to get some of their company men to work for less than union scale (a practice that came to be known as “working for cash”).

In furniture installation, the biggest contractors in that market segment all but openly violated the union contract – in venetian blind installation, essentially every contractor in that market was in more or less continuous violation of union wages and benefit fund contributions, making non union pay and benefits the norm in that business.

This rapidly became so widespread that the federal monitors had no choice but to abolish the Request System – and to send the then leader of the Wall Ceiling Association, reputed Genovese mafia family soldier Joseph Olivieri, to prison.

Despite that experience the federal monitors have now allowed the Request System to be restored under another name, because it furthers this broader ruling class agenda.

Also, on the union side, abolishing union job referral systems and making the union “user friendly” to the bosses has been a national preoccupation of the Carpenters Union’s leadership for over 20 years.

Basically, the UBC’s leadership sees “competing with the non union” as the only way to save the union – and that “competition” is in the form of a race to the bottom.

Full Mobility was pioneered in what was then the Los Angeles District Council of Carpenters (since merged with the other district councils in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado to form the Southwestern Regional Council of Carpenters) in 1992, in the wake of a large and successful strike of 4,000 Mexican immigrant drywall carpenters in residential construction in the suburbs of Los Angeles and San Diego.

 

Abolishing union control of hiring was originally intended as an incentive for non union contractors to go union by letting them retain common non union labor practices like having minimum wage helpers working on their jobsites doing low skilled carpentry tasks and by allowing the contractor total control of who he/she chose to have working for his/her company and giving them the right to take that same crew from job to job.

The non union contractors would keep the benefit of having total control of the composition of their workforce but would gain the right to use the union’s hiring hall system when they needed extra labor for their jobs, instead of relying on Jefes (“chiefs” – labor brokers/leadmen who furnish contractors with often brutally underpaid immigrant day labor) for additional labor.

 

The then head of the Southwestern Council, Douglas McCarron, subsequently became General President of the UBC (his brother Mike still runs the Southwestern Council) and introduced Full Mobility union-wide, using the same argument.

 

In the subsequent years, every other council in the Carpenters Union besides NYC has adopted Full Mobility and no longer requires union contractors to hire part of their labor force from the union, except for shop stewards in some cases.

In some councils, like the Southwestern Regional Council, once a carpenter has worked a three day probationary period, he/she is considered a full time employee, with all the rights that would normally go with a full time job, including the right to only be discharged for good cause or in an economic layoff.

The strong (by construction standards) employee protection language in the Southwestern contracts is probably a legacy of that 1992 drywall carpenters strike, the biggest construction workers strike in the second half of the 20^th century.

In other councils, including the Metropolitan Philadelphia, Northeastern and New England councils that immediately border the New York City District Council, carpenters under Full Mobility are casual workers, subject to discharge at any time by the contractor, for any lawful reason and with no right to file a grievance if they were not fired for good cause.

The employer justification for demanding an end to mandatory hiring from union job referral systems is that if the contractor can pick his/her own crew, and take the same carpenters from job to job doing the same type of carpentry, they will be more productive than hiring half the crew from the union out of work list, workers who do different types of carpentry for different employers and aren’t going to be as efficient as those carpenters who do the same work for the same outfit all the time.

There actually is some truth to that – it’s actually a good argument for demanding steady jobs for all carpenters with some sort of job security and seniority system, and some sort of rotation system so we all get a chance to work.

There’s also a darker side to Full Mobility.

 

Workers who are dependent on a contractor for steady work and who are at will employees that can get fired at any time for any reason at all are less likely to report contract violations.

That was exactly the scenario we had with the Request System in New York City.

 

Ironically, at the dawn of building trades unionism in the early 20^th century, union leaders fought to break the contractor’s absolute power over who worked and who didn’t. “Equal Division of Work” was an early and often repeated demand of the early leaders of the construction unions

Of course, those leaders were far more radical than the construction union leaders of our day. Most of them were socialists, communists or anarchists, believers in a “cooperative commonwealth” – where workers ruled society instead of bankers and bosses.

 

The unions of that era fought the contractors for more control over the jobsites – the pace of work, job safety and, above all, control over hiring.

Unfortunately, that changed when the contractors and developers here decided to end their resistance to unionization in 1903.

The leaders of the building trades unions traded their militant demands for a democratic construction industry and their broader demands for a better society ruled by labor.

 

 In return they got “the New York Plan” which provided recognition of the unions by the contractors and made New York City a 100% union construction town for the next 75 years.

Worse yet, within a few years that arms-length bargaining relationship turned into a full fledged partnership, not only with the contractors but also with the gangsters who were just beginning to emerge as a major force in the building trades in New York at that time.

 

By the 1920s, that partnership with the contractors and the gangsters had turned into full scale subordination of the unions to the bosses and the wiseguys.

 

The union agenda took second place to helping the gangsters and the bosses control the market, limit competition between contractors and keep construction prices high through racketeering, price fixing and illegal restraint of trade. The unions also became junior partners in racist hiring practices by the contractors that barred Black (and, in later years, Latino) tradesmen from employment in much of the industry.

 

Members did get higher wages, some trades got strong safety rules (Electricians, Ironworkers, Elevator Constructors, Cement Workers) and, after WW II, all trades got pensions, family health coverage, biannual or quarterly vacation checks and 401(k)-like annuity plans.

However, those gains came with a high price for the workers and their unions.

 

When it came to hiring, some unions, like the Sheet Metal Workers, Roofers, Plumbers & Steamfitters, Operating Engineers, Teamsters and Elevator Constructors, left hiring largely under the control of the bosses.

In the case of the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers, the only union-controlled hiring was for non working shop stewards on large jobs.

 

Those stewards, unlike shop stewards in all the other trades, did no work for the boss and just hung out around the superintendant’s trailer all day.

On paper the Teamsters’ onsite shop stewards’ job was to check union cards, and the Operating Engineers master mechanics were to make sure that all of the cranes, hoists and bulldozers used by their members were in top mechanical condition.

 

In practice, they often served as “bagmen” for the gangsters, collecting the “tribute” (payoffs) the wiseguys got from contractors on the sites.

With the Teamsters, at a time when their non construction locals in the freight industry and at moving van lines were setting up seniority systems that enabled casual workers to, over time, become full time trucking company employees with rights on the job, their construction locals let the contractors control all of the jobs with no job security for members, as long as the union could control the onsite shop steward jobs.

 

In practice, the mafia’s Genovese family told the Teamsters who would be employed as shop stewards especially in hirise buildings where lots of payoffs could be extracted from contractors. In return, the union let bosses who made payoffs use non union drivers to make deliveries to jobsites.

 

The non working onsite Teamster stewards also could, and did, do all sorts of other criminal activity on the jobsites – trafficking in “mongo” (stolen scrap metal), drug dealing, gambling, loansharking, miscellaneous petty theft ect.

 

As long as they paid 2% tribute on everything they made to their bosses in the Genovese family, it was all OK.

 

The Operating Engineers union’s non working master mechanics  also did no work – they were also selected by the Genovese family, and were allowed to shake down contractors for bribes in return for use of freight elevators – provided they kicked back 2% to the mob bosses that got them their no work jobs.

The Operating Engineers let the employers have total control of the hiring of crane and bulldozer operators, which meant that much of their membership were friends or relatives of bosses who got their jobs – the highest paying in the industry - through nepotism, favoritism and cronyism.

In the Sheet Metal Workers and the Plumbers & Steamfitters, total employer control of hiring led to those unions being the most racially segregated unions in the NYC building trades.

From the turn of the century to the 1960s, the Carpenters had a shape up system, where companies could take workers from job to job and workers could directly go to jobs to see if contractors were hiring. In some cases large groups of carpenters would go to jobsites as they were coming out of the ground, seeking to be hired as a group for the duration of the job.

During the 1960s, the Carpenters adopted a hiring hall system. Contractors could have 50% of their crew be company men that they either took from job to job or hired off the street at the site, but they had to hire a steward and 50% of the crew from the union.

The Bricklayers, the Cement Workers, the Mason Tenders, the Heavy Construction and Road Paver locals of the Laborers, the Lathers, the Plasterers & Cement Masons, the Painters and the Boilermakers had similar hiring systems and went through a similar evolution from shaping to partially union run job referral systems.

The Electricians had the most elaborate union controlled job referral system. In 1943, the Electricians and the New York Electrical Contractors Association set up a joint labor-management controlled hiring hall, known as the Joint Industry Board.

Contractors could hire their foremen and 10% of their workforce – the “Basic Men” - directly.

 

Everybody else had to come from the Joint Board hiring hall. They would all be taken from job to job as long as there was work to be had.

Even the best of these hiring systems actively went along with employer discrimination against Black and Latino tradesmen, or at best, segregated tradesmen of color into the least desirable and lowest paying jobs.

 

When radical Black and Latino workers associations called Coalitions began to violently protest job discrimination in construction in the mid 1960s, the unions found themselves bearing the brunt of the protests.

 

The Lathers, Steamfitters and Sheet Metal Workers unions chose to aggressively defend employer racial discrimination, spending decades in court, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawsuits that were eventually defeated.

The Coalitions were able to take advantage of the shape up provisions in the contracts of the Carpenters, the Bricklayers and the Mason Tenders and those trades rapidly integrated in the face of the protests.

 

The Electricians, having the most control of hiring, also slowly opened up their trade to men of color – in large part because their leader, Harry Van Arsdale Jr, also ran the NYC Central Labor Council – the umbrella body that represents every union in the city – and he had to deal with the heavily Black and Latino civil service, retail, building service and garment trade unions, so he couldn’t openly practice racial segregation in his own trade..

 

Unfortunately, all those years of subordination to the bosses and the wiseguys had weakened the unions, so they weren’t able to deal with the first major attacks on union construction in this city in the 1970s.

 

In 1971, after 24 years of landlord lobbying, Mayor John Lindsay repealed the Rent Control Law, replacing it with the far more pro landlord Rent Stabilization Law.

 

The new law allowed landlords to raise their rents every year, as long as those rent increases were approved by the Rent Guidelines Board, a body appointed by the mayor and made up largely of landlord representatives.

 

Predictably, the RGB has authorized rent increases every two years from 1972 to date.

 

Tenants who were already living in their apartments in 1971 were allowed to keep their old Rent Control Law determined rents, as long as their or their heirs continued to live in the apartment.

If the tenants gave up the apartment for any reason, the landlord could raise the rents to the higher levels authorized by the Rent Stabilization Law.

 

This loophole was brutally exploited by landlords.

 

In large areas of Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, landlords began systematically denying services to tenants to force them to leave, so the apartments could be rented at the new higher rents.

 

Many of those landlords took advantage of a $ 784 million dollar long term low interest loan package offered by the City to landlords looking to renovate old law apartments into luxury apartments, or to tear down the old buildings and replace them with luxury hirise apartment houses.

 

On Manhattan’s West Side, landlords saw the prospect of driving out working class tenants and replacing them with the wealthy. Many waged a campaign of terror to drive out tenants – in some cases, landlords literally hired criminals to rob their tenants to force them to move out.

 

In many areas of Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens, areas far less suited to locating luxury housing because of racial composition or distance from Manhattan’s Downtown and Midtown central business districts, landlords went so far as to hire arsonists to burn their buildings down, removing the Rent Control tenants by outright destroying the buildings.

 

Over 200,000 tenants lost their homes to the fires.

 

None of the landlords went to prison for their crimes against the tenants of the city.

 

The NYC Building and Construction Trades Council supported the Rent Stabilization Law and the $ 784 million in subsidies for luxury housing construction, as did the building service workers unions, locals 32E and 32B-32J of the Service Employees International Union, and the rest of the labor movement.

 

As long as the new buildings were built union and had union supers and porters once they were built, it didn’t matter that this process of “gentrification” hurt the working class as a whole.

 

That labor support for this attack on the working class as a whole would turn around to bite labor in the ass in the summer of 1975.

 

The City’s $ 784 million in luxury housing subsidies, lent out long term at low interest to developers, had been borrowed short term at high interest from a consortium of Wall Street banks.

 

When the loans came due in the spring of 1975, the City didn’t have the money to pay off the loans.

 

So, the bankers appointed a junta, called the “Municipal Assistance Corporation” [MAC] led by Lazard Frères executive Felix Rohatyn, and seized control of the city’s finances in what amounted to a coup d’état.

 

The bankers demanded, and got, the City to lay off 25% of its workforce – 50,000+ workers - including many in essential services like police, fire, education, health care, garbage collection and mass transit, and to immediately cancel hundreds of construction jobs (literally leaving the buildings abandoned and open to the elements).

 

Resistance from the civil service unions was uncoordinated and sporadic.

 

Firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers and teachers briefly struck – and were sent back to work by their own union leaders.

 

 Unfortunately the Transport Workers Union stayed neutral – a strike by those workers would have literally shut this transit dependent city down and forced the City and the bankers to concede.

 

The other civil service unions returned the favor five years later in 1980 – when the transport workers were on strike, they stayed at work, assuring the TWU’s defeat.

 

Worse yet, Barry Feinstein and Victor Gotbaum, the leaders of the two largest municipal unions, Teamsters local 237 and American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees District Council 37, actively helped the bankers carry out their mass layoffs.

 

Meanwhile the leaders of the private sector unions, including the Building & Construction Trades Council, who did absolutely nothing and let these attacks on the working class of New York City go unresisted, even when union construction jobs were lost.

 

Three years later, in 1978, the newly elected Koch Administration had to make some concessions to the civil service unions – basically, they had to rehire the laid off workers, to keep the city livable.

 

Even then, the rehired city workers often came back to their jobs with lower salaries and pension benefits, with the full support of the municipal union leaders.

 

The Koch Administration also launched an attack directly on the building trades, knowing that they could get away with that because the labor leadership had so passively accepted the attacks of 1975.

 

The City had to rebuild the 50,000+ apartments that had been burned out by the landlords earlier in the decade. However, due to the financial restrictions imposed by the bankers junta MAC, they had to build these units as cheaply as possible.

 

The City’s answer was to have the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), the newly created city agency overseeing and funding the work, transfer all of the funding for these jobs to not for profit Community Based Organizations.

 

The City’s lawyers claimed that, since the CBOs were, technically, private corporations, they were not bound by city or state Davis Bacon prevailing wage laws.

 

This opened the door to the first large scale deunionization of a major construction market segment in New York City in 75 years.

 

Initially, many of the contractors that did this work were union…..kindasorta.

The then head of the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, Genovese family captain Vincent Di Napoli, helped many of these companies (including his own, Inner City Drywall, the biggest carpentry contractor in the city at the time) pay less than union wage and benefit scales with no interference from the Carpenters Union.

Some of these companies – including Di Napoli’s Inner City Drywall – also hired “lumpers” (non union carpenters paid off the books) to work on their jobsites side by side with union members.

When a Painters Union local representing drywall tapers didn’t go along with pay cuts and lumping and went on strike, Di Napoli, along with another Genovese family captain, Louis Moscatiello, Sr, got the Carpenters Union to keep its members working during the strike and got the Plasterers & Cement Masons Union to charter a local union to represent the scabs.

Unfortunately, all the other trades scabbed on the drywall tapers strike too – including other locals of the Painters Union!

Outright non union contractors began to come onto these HPD residential jobs. Unable to use the union hiring halls for extra labor, they relied on the Coalitions – and on union members who were desperate for work due to a recession in progress at the time.

 

This was a disaster for the unions, and opened the door for the wholesale deunionization of much of the New York construction industry.

 

From nearly 100% union market share in the 60s the unions declined to less than 40% today.

 

The unions had no response to this, since by this time most of the construction unions in the city were dominated by organized crime, in particular the Genovese crime family (although some local unions answered to smaller mafia crime families like the Bonnanos, Luccheses , Colombos, Gambinos and Di Cavalcantes)

However, the developers and the financers were getting sick and tired of paying 2% “tribute” (that is to say payoffs) to one gangster or another on every job they did in New York.

 

They leaned on the government and the authorities, city, state and federal, began a crackdown on racketeering in the building trades that continues to this day, over 30 years later.

 

The feds, the state and the city have greatly weakened the racketeers, and largely driven them from the industry, in particular from the unions.

The two biggest construction unions, the Carpenters and the Mason Tenders District Council of the Laborers Union, still operate under federal monitorship to this very day.

There was an upside to that – construction unions in New York are now more democratic than any time since before World War I and four of the unions - the Carpenters, Mason Tenders, Painters and Ironworkers - actually make serious attempts to do organizing.

However, the role that the gangsters used to pay in putting a floor under prices and labor costs no longer exists.

 

There is a race to the bottom, especially in residential construction, pushing construction worker wages to rock bottom levels.

The developers and the General Contractors who use union labor are anxious to cash in on this windfall, which is why the Building Trades Employers Association, the Real Estate Board, the Realty Advisory Board, the New York Building Congress, Columbia University, the Regional Plan Association, the Manhattan Institute and the New York State Association for Affordable Housing are all trying to gut our wages, benefits and union work rules.

 

In other words, this is a full court press attack.

You would think that the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council, with its 14 affiliated unions representing 100,000 workers, would be organizing a powerful fightback to this onslaught.

If you thought that, then you thought wrong.

 

For the past 14 years, the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council has been pushing its’ affiliates to give in to every demand from the contractors, to “help them compete with the non union”.

 

A good example would be the massive givebacks that the NYCBCTC has offered to Stephen Ross and Blake Hutcheson, two billionaires who are planning to build a $ 15 billion project called Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s far west site.

 

Gary La Barbera and Paul Fernandes, the two top leaders of the NYCBCTC, have been aggressively pushing for every construction union in New York to make deep concessions on the Hudson Yards job, despite the fact that Ross and Hutcheson do not have any financial need for those wage and benefit cuts.

Fernandes compared the givebacks to Costco charging less for groceries if you buy in volume.

 

Apparently New York union construction workers are a discounted commodity now, like ramen noodles or boxes of detergent in a 99 cent store.

 

This isn’t just an isolated incident – La Barbera and Fernandes have presided over an orgy of “Market Recovery” Project Labor Agreements, giving deep concessions on just about every major construction project in the city, and on every single city owned building that’s actually being built with union labor.

Initially, this was sold to union construction workers as a temporary response to the 2007 Wall Street meltdown. Supposedly it was only supposed to cover 11 buildings in Midtown Manhattan.

That was the camel’s nose in the tent.

By 2011 just about every major project in the city got a Market Recovery PLA – Columbia University’s Manhattanville project, the Lincoln Center renovation, the Barclays Center job, the Yankee Stadium and Citi Field jobs, the United Nations renovation, the Madison Square Garden renovation, the new World Trade Center  – you name it, it got a Market Recovery PLA no matter how deep the owners pockets were.

 

Even one of the scab developers got in on the Market Recovery act.

 

Sam Chang, a developer who runs  franchise operations of big name hotels built and staffed with cheap non union labor agreed to build some of his sweatshop labor hotels with union  workers if he got a Market Recovery PLA while continuing to build the rest of his hotels using non union labor.

 

Smelling the blood in the water, the next demand from the contractors was a Market Retention rate on government subsidized housing jobs. Depending on the job, the scale was between 20% and 40% less than union scale. Contractors were also allowed to use a heavily apprentice workforce – basically because apprentices make less money than journeypeople.

 

The developer of the Barclays Center, Bruce Ratner, was even given permission to build the residential portion of his development with modular apartment units. These will be built off site with Carpenters Union represented factory workers who make $ 21/hr, less than half of what unionized tradespeople in field installation make.

If Ratner is successful in building these 4,500 apartments like that, it might be the start of a trend of using prefab modular apartments, replacing higher paid construction workers with low paid factory workers – another aspect of the race to the bottom. This is especially true if future prefab buildings are built by non union factory workers and/or factory workers overseas.

 

Seeing how the unions rolled over on Market Recovery and Market Retention, the Building Trades Employers Association called for an overall 20% pay cut on top of all of these concessions.

Alongside the pay cuts, the BTEA also came out with a 26 point ultimatum calling for the elimination of many union work rules – including the requirement that General Contractors provide bathrooms for tradespeople on jobsites!

 

The 20% pay cut and the 26 point ultimatum were immediately embraced by the voice of the real estate developers, the Real Estate Board of New York.

 

Unfortunately, both the pay cut and the 26 point ultimatum were also embraced by the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council, despite the outrageous attacks on union wages and conditions.

The BTEA and the NYCBCTC made plans to aggressively promote the 20% pay cut and the 26 point work rule repeal ultimatum to the city’s 100,000 union tradespeople, through propaganda leaflets stapled to union construction workers paychecks, to subway and bus ads and pro pay cut propaganda stories planted in the newspapers.

 

To further the media propaganda campaign, the Regional Plan Association (a Rockefeller Foundation funded group that promotes the interests of New York real estate developers) had a report drafted to justify their greed-inspired wage cut demands.

 

The corporate liberals from the Regional Plan Association went to a far right Koch Brothers-funded think tank, the Manhattan institute, and hired two of its right wing anti union professional ideologues, Julia Vitullo-Martin and Hope Cohen.

 

The two academic propagandists drafted a “study” claiming the only road to economic recovery in the construction industry was massive pay and benefit cuts inflicted on union tradespeople.

 

The Regional Plan Association arranged for the report to be popularized in newspaper articles - for the educated middle class in the New York Times and for the blue collar and service sector working class in the New York Daily News.

 

The construction union leaders had already decided to give in to every one of the bosses demands, from the pay cuts to no longer requiring toilets on jobsites.

At least one union, Painters District Council # 9, completely rolled over to the BTEA and gave up massive concessions to the Association of Master Painters & Decorators, the Plate Glass Dealers Association and the Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries (yes, the very same Wall Ceiling association that is also attacking union carpenters).

 

DC 9 gave up its hiring hall system. From now on, journeylevel painters would be completely at the mercy of contractors when it came to getting work. The only exceptions were for apprentices and shop stewards, who would still be dispatched to jobs by the union.

However, DC # 9 abandoned rules that protected shop stewards from arbitrary discharge. Now, any steward can be fired for “incompetence” at any time (a rule Wall Ceiling got the Carpenters Union to agree to back in 2005, with a predictable chilling effect on carpenter shop stewards).

 

The union allowed contractors to blacklist shop stewards or any other union painter they don’t like. If a painter gets fired three times, he/she can be kicked out of the union, with no recourse to protest or appeal their expulsion.

 

The Painters Union leaders also left open the possibility of a pay cut for commercial painters on jobs in Manhattan at a future date and gave up massive pay cuts for residential painters – 20% on jobs in Manhattan and an astounding 67% pay cut for residential painters in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

 

They were the outlier – other unions couldn’t go that far, especially once word got around of how deep the DC 9 cutbacks were.

What little resistance there was to these attacks was strictly grassroots and unofficial.

Protests organized by union members acting independently of their unions (this writer was one of those members) made it difficult for union leaders to keep rolling over for the BTEA.

 

The leaders of the Cement Workers District Council, a Laborers Union affiliate representing cement workers on hirise construction jobs, found themselves actually having to lead a wildcat strike at the World Trade Center jobsite to block the pay cuts.

 

Unfortunately, despite scattered resistance, other unions have made major givebacks – including Lathers local 46, Plumbers local 1 and, most recently, the District Council of Carpenters.

 

Has all this bowing and scraping before the real estate billionaires and general contractors and their millionaire subcontractors reversed the deunionization of construction in New York City?

Not at all.

If anything, the non union developers have gotten more aggressive – with Flintlock Construction, the biggest non union General Contractor in the city (a formerly unionized company, by the way) using 100% non union crews to put up 30 story hotels in Midtown Manhattan for Sam Chang – a scab developer the unions tried and failed to woo over to the union side with Market Recovery PLAs!

Just about the only thing limiting the growth of the non union sector in the New York construction industry is market conditions.

Those developers – funded largely by federal, state and city housing subsidies nominally intended for low income housing but actually used to build apartments for the affluent – faced minimal resistance from the unions during the building boom of the early 2000s.

Some of those developers – like Sam Chang and Shaya Boymelgreen – even did jobs that were all or part union. Others used union contractors like On Par Construction and R & J Construction, who were flexible about not always paying union scale on certain jobs.

 

The only resistance they faced was a few picket lines from the Carpenters, Laborers, Ironworkers and Painters Unions.

Since Teamster delivery truck drivers routinely cross those picket lines, as do the non union workers on those sites,(many of whom are ex union members driven by unemployment and unfair distribution of work on the union side to work in the scab sector) that really didn’t matter very much.

 

The bottom line is, of New York City’s 200,000 construction workers, only 100,000 are union and at any given time between 25,000 and 30,000 of them are unemployed.

That unemployment isn’t evenly distributed – about 30,000 union tradespeople (disproportionately White and male, and often with family, ethnic and/or social ties to employers) work more or less full time, and the remaining 70,000 workers spend roughly half the year unemployed, even in good times.

 

The latter group is disproportionately Black and Latino, and also includes almost all 2,000 of the women in the trades and a high number of older men who can no longer work as fast as the young guys

The average income for the steadily employed minority during the building boom was around $ 100,000 a year – for the larger group of part time union tradespeople, the annual income ranged between $ 30,000 and $ 70,000 a year (with more folks closer to $ 30k than $ 70k)

On the non union side, about 50,000 workers are actually paid on the books. Unlike union members they usually work full time (because there are no non union hiring halls so scab contractors have to keep their workers employed or lose them). But hour for hour they make about half what a union tradesperson makes - $ 15/hr to 25/hr to a union member’s $ 30/hr to $ 50/hr and with no employer paid health insurance or pension.

 

The better paid non union workers are disproportionately White and US born. Their incomes averaged between $ 15,000 and $ 50,000 a year during the boom years, with most folks closer to $ 15k than to $ 50k

 

At least one on the books scab contractor, EMC Construction, had an explicitly racialized pay scale – White carpenters were paid $ 25/hr, Black carpenters $ 15/hr and Latino carpenters $ 11/hr.

The rock bottom of the non union sector is the 50,000 non union workers who are paid off the books.

They make anywhere from as little as $ 4/hr to $ 10/hr, with the average hovering around $ 7/hr – yes, those wages are below minimum wage, because contractors in this sector routinely and casually violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. They also do not get any kind of benefits and they don’t even get social security, disability or workers comp paid.

 

They are almost entirely Latino, Black or South Asian – the few White men you see in this side of the business are recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their average incomes were between $ 4,000 a year and $ 20,000, with most of them closer to $ 4k than to $ 20k.

 

Over the last 5 years, everybody’s taken a hit – even the $ 100k a year company men on the union side – with many tradespeople making less than half what they made in good times. The Market Retention and Market Recovery PLAs took a big hit on the incomes of the union members who were employed – and falling union wages had a drag effect on scab sector pay scales.

 

Now that construction is starting to come back, there’s every reason to expect the non union sector to expand.

Their potential labor force certainly will – lots of union members have been driven out of the unions by lack of work and the dismantling of the hiring hall systems in the Carpenters and the Painters will drive even more skilled tradespeople into the non union labor force (with the driven out workers, of course, disproportionately Black, Latino, immigrant, female, older workers and third and fourth year apprentices).

However, the leaders of the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and their affiliates will tell you that There Is No Alternative – we HAVE to bow down before the moneymen and take pay cuts to keep the billionaires and the millionaires rich.

Are they right?

Do we?

I would say HELL NO.

 

In this sixth year of the economic crisis, there is widespread anti capitalist sentiment among the poor, the working classes and wide sections of the middle class.

The Occupy Wall Street movement showed that very clearly.

 

Add to that the fact that New York City is a city of renters (80% of the population live in rented apartments) and the great majority of them have a seething hatred of landlord profiteering.

The construction unions, together with the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, the Hotel Trades Council, the public sector unions, the unions at Con Edison and the phone company, the fast food worker organizing campaign, the immigrant workers centers, the broader immigrants rights movement and Occupy Wall Street, can and should come together around a program of struggle and launch a full court press offensive against the real estate interests and the politicians – Republican and Democrat alike - beholden to them.

This can and should be a multi front war – with OWS, immigrant workers associations and other non labor groups involved with this taking advantage of the tactical flexibility that comes with not being bound by the Labor Management Relations Act and all the restrictions it puts on union free speech and picketing.

 

If such a movement were launched, there would be widespread public support – with opposition only coming from the very rich at the top.

Question – why aren’t the unions making moves in that direction?

Basically, 80 years of class partnership with racketeer influenced and institutionally racist contractors followed by 20 years of federal government racketeering consent decrees have left the building trades unions with a weak and spineless leadership far more comfortable with groveling before the powerful and bullying their members to accept lower and lower pay and worse and worse conditions than they are with actually struggling to improve the lot of their members and the working class as a whole.

 

This weakness of leadership is common throughout the labor movement (it’s the main reason that private sector union membership is down to 7% of the workforce) and the same forces that have led to givebacks in the auto, steel, airline, trucking and railroad industries nationally are also present in the leadership of the construction unions in this city.

The construction unions – and the labor movement as a whole – need a new leadership who are up to the challenge of fighting to preserve and advance the standard of living of the workforce and to the vital task of organizing the vast unorganized majority of the working class.

Until that happens, the race to the bottom will continue unabated.

 

commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER

FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE

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

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

http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com

“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”

               Originally published on Friday, May 10, 2013

               © 2013 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.