Disunited Brotherhoods: ...Race, Racketeering and the Fall of the New York Construction Unions

Copyright © 2006 by Gregory A Butler

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

BREAKING THE TRADES

BOOK ONE

..RESTRICTED TO CAUCASIANS… the fall of color line unionism

CHAPTER ONE

AFFIRMATIVEINACTION.theMayor’s Commission on Construction Opportunity’s bogus construction trades desegregation program

CHAPTER TWO

BROTHERS AGAINST THE BROTHERHOODS….the rise and fall ofthe minority construction worker Coalitions in New York City, 1969—1998

CHAPTER THREE

THE JAVITS CENTER SHUFFLE…discrimination, unequal distribution of work and the pitfalls of seeking workplace justice in the court system at New York City s convention center

BOOK TWO

THIS THING OF OURS…the fall ofgangster unionism

CHAPTER FOUR

DECREED CONSENT…labor racketeering, government supervision and union decay in the New York District Council of Carpenters

CHAPTER FIVE

ROUGH CONCRETE….racketeering, reform and the crisis in the New York City Laborers Union…

CONCLUSION

BUILDING OUR OWN FUTURE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve been writing in cyberspace for a couple of years, but this is my first book, (and I’m officially a Published Author now) so I have a whole lot of people to thank for helping me get to the point where I was ready to put my ideas down in paper and ink.

First of all, I’d like to thank my parents, Peggy A. Butler and the late Ronald C. Butler. Besides the fact that they brought me onto this planet, dad and ma also introduced me, at a young and impressionable age, to the revolutionary idea that, just because life is unfair doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way. They set me on the path to trying to make the world a better place.

Thanks also are due to the folks that introduced me to the good and the bad of political activism—Kevin Mercadel, Carlos R. Dufflar, Dr. Ed Johnson, Angel Martinez, Kazembe Balagoon, Kwame Madhi, Kenny Chessney and Ebony La Brew. I learned so much from all of you—even though sometimes it was not always what you were trying to teach.

Special thanks are also due to Kenny Chessney for his willingness to share his truly awesome typesetting and computer skills, and his constant encouragement. Kenny also helped bring my internet listserv, Gangbox: Construction Workers News Service, into existance.

Kenny helped me with the tech stuff, was and is a constant source of information from the structural side of the construction industry (Kenny is a cement mason—I work in interior systems carpentry—so he’s my eyes and ears on that side of the business) and constantly plugs the site to the brothers and sisters on the jobsites.

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to write about construction if I hadn’t been able to break into the industry, so I have to pay tribute to the folks who helped me become a carpenter.

I’d like to thank my instructors at the NYC District Council of Carpenters Labor Technical College apprenticeship program, in particular Marilyn P. Marty Smalls and Jim McGuire.

Thanks are also due to the foremen and journeymen/journeywomen who taught me in the field, especially LaVerne Byners, Harvey Shulman, Doreen Gay, Mike Daly, Tommy Higgins, Cynthia Torie Aldrich, Kevin Spillane, Karol Lobb, Bob Del Rossi, Bob Cadet and Walter Marano.

Extra extra special thanks are due to all the folks who fed me inside information—the angry and brave men and women behind the euphamism anonymous Gangbox sources that I use in the articles. Since people still do get blacklisted from work in the construction industry, you all shall forever remain name- less—but, I shall also forever remain grateful for your help.

You chose to be part of the solution rather than just gripe about the prob- lem—when this industry becomes a better place to work in, it will in large part be do to folks just like you.

It almost goes without saying that I wouldn’t be able to write about construction if I hadn’t learned how to be a writer. So I have to thank the people who taught me journalism—Tim Wheeler, the late Fred Gaboury (a/k/a Hy Clymer), Jason Rabinowitz and Bob Fitch. I’d also like to thank Noble Bratton, for introducing me to the inside of the world of publishing.

Of course, a book isn’t a book until it’s author finishes writing it.

So, I’d like to give extra extra special thanks to Taiisha Herrera, for all of her encouragement, support and suggestions. Taiisha helped give me the extra push that motivated me to get this manuscript completed and published several months ahead of schedule. Thanks to a suggestion from Taiisha, I decided to go the self-publishing route—the cheapest, most practical and author friendly way to get into print.

Bottom line, Taiisha’s suggestion helped put my book in your hands right now…

Finally, I’d like to thank publishing consultant Phil Whitmarsh, publishing services associate Ron Amack and all the other good people at iUniverse books in Lincoln, Nebraska. They typeset, printed and distributed this book for me—they

made my idea into a tangible reality—an actual physical commodity you can buy online or at a book retailer near you.

All of these folks helped make Disunited Brotherhoods into a reality—but it’s my name on the byline and the copyright, so I take full personal responsiblity for this work.

INTRODUCTION

BREAKING THE TRADES

Forty years ago, the New York City construction unions were some of the most powerful labor organizations in the world.

Back then, those 18 unions, with a combined membership of 250,000 men, supplied the labor force for every single construction job in the city—from skyscrapers to the corner bodega.

However, that power was built on a foundation of sand. Those unions were almost jaw droppingly discriminatory.

Women were totally and utterly excluded from the industry (when I say their membership was 250,000 MEN I mean it literally!!!)

And they were particular about what color of men were allowed to join.

The Carpenters, Laborers and Ironworkers unions were among the few to allow even token numbers of Black, Latino and/or American Indian men to join (and the Carpenters segregated most of their Black and Latino members into their Harlem local—effectively blocking them from working in the rest of the city).

As for the rest…..it was even worse.

The Plumbers Union was the most extreme—their constitution explicity restricted membership to caucasians.

But other unions weren’t far behind, with various elaborate rules that effectively prohibited men of color from membership.

Beyond endemic sexism and in-your-face Jim Crow racism, the construction unions were heavily infiltrated by, and largely subordinate to, a criminal syndicate known to it’s members as cosa nostra (Italian for this thing of ours) and commonly referred to as the Mafia by most Americans.

Some local unions were openly run by gangsters—more commonly, union officials were subordinated to particular mob bosses and had to follow their dictates.

This culture of racism, sexism and gangsterism didn’t come out of thin air. As I’ll show below, the ultimate root of those interlocking cancers was the subordination of the unions to the contractors.

Rather than acting as fully independent agents of the workers, the unions systematically cooperated with, and subordinated themselves to, the economic needs and demands of the contractors.

Unions were sexist and racist because the bosses wanted it that way.

Unions were under gangster domination because the bosses preferred to deal with gangster dominated and corrupted unions (and, in fact, many construction bosses were themselves racketeers).

The construction industry has changed—for good and for ill—in the subsequent decades.

A business that was once nearly all White and 100% male is now majority workers of color and now employs over 4,000 women.

And, organized crime, while still a major factor in the business, is nowhere near as dominant a power as it used to be.

On the other hand, an industry where almost every worker was represented by a labor organization is now 70% non union, and the construction trades workforce has shrunk by close to 50,000 workers. The scabification of the industry led to a catastrophic decline in incomes for most construction workers—with some tradespeople actually making less than the minimum wage.

And, the federal law enforcement agencies that cripped cosa nostra have come to dominate many of the unions.

In the articles below, (all of which were originally published online on the GANGBOX listserv), I will tell the story of how and why all of these things hap- pened—and I will put forth my ideas on what construction workers should do to make our industry a decent place to work..

BOOK ONE

..RESTRICTED TO CAUCASIANS… the fall of color line unionism

CHAPTER ONE

AFFIRMATIVEINACTION.theMayor’s Commission on Construction Opportunity’s bogus construction trades desegregation program

We’re Looking for a Few Good Women

That was the headline of a curious advertisement that began showing up in bus shelters around New York City’s poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in January, 2006.

Below the slogan, there was a picture of a muscular Latina metallic lather. The woman ironworker was clad in a hardhat, wraparound sunglasses and a sleeveless t-shirt, and she was using a 4 foot crobar to set rebar in a tall column while suspended from a safety belt.

Below, the poster claimed that the average salary of construction workers in New York City is $ 53,000 a year, and invited women workers to enroll in construction union apprenticeship programs.

As I’ll show below, the $ 53,000/yr income figure is grossly inflated…and, in actual fact, the vast majority of construction workers in this city make far less than that.

In the real world, some construction workers in this town make as little as $ 10,000 a year.

Beyond the overstated income claims, the reference to salaries for construction workers was an open, naked, bold faced lie.

As all construction workers know, there are no salaries in our industry for regular workers…only our bosses have a guaranteed annual income..

Union and non union alike, construction workers are hired by the day, and paid by the hour—how much, or how little, you make in the course of a year is a function of how many hours of work you get..

The word salary implies steady regular employment with job security…things that simply do not exist for non supervisory workers in the construction industry.

This dangerously misleading ad was first pointed out to GANGBOX by two Black women carpenters.

Both of these sisters are veterans of the business (27 years and 17 years in the trade, respectively), and neither one of them has ever made anywhere near $ 53k a year. (for the record, this writer, a Black male with 13 years in the game, has never had a $ 53k year either)

Or, as one sister put it, Where is that $ 53,000 a year construction job??? I want to apply for it!!

In other words, the ad was blatantly dishonest, and did NOT reflect the reality that a Black or Latina woman would face if she got in the construction trades..

They leave out the sex & race discrimination, the sexual harassment, the limited work opportunities for those who don’t have a patronage connection with a contractor…and the frustration of investing time and money in learning a trade—and not being able to support yourself and your kids in that occupation..

The sad reality is, there will be women of color with low paying but steady jobs who don’t have any first hand knowledge of construction who will, upon seeing that ad, actually believe that there are construction jobs with $ 53,000/yr salaries and will spend years of their time and hundreds of their hard earned dollars to try and get in our industry—only to discover at the end that they should have kept their pink collar jobs..

This piece of bus shelter propaganda was put out by folks who, quite frankly, must have known of it’s blatant lies and rank innacuracy.

The ad was jointly produced by Non-Traditional Employment for Women—NYC (NEW-NYC) [a foundation grant-financed not for profit that offers training programs for women who want to get into the construction trades] and the City of New York’s Mayor’s Commission on Construction Opportunity, as part of a program to recruit minority and female workers to the unionized construction trades.

The webpage of the Mayor’s Commission on Construction Opportunity (located at the city’s official nyc.gov website, in the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s section) is, if anything, even more out of touch with the reality of the construction business.

The page, which consists of a year and a half old press release, claims that the construction industry can provide good permanent jobs to minorities, women, returning veterans and high school graduates.

Of course, there are NO PERMANENT JOBS IN CONSTRUCTION, a fact that every one of this city’s 200,000 construction workers knows very well.

Union or non union, we’re hired by the day, and can be laid off by the contractor at a moment’s notice, at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

Even if you’re in one of the unions, you are still subject to these casual labor conditions.

The commission is surely aware of this fact, since the 34 member mayorally appointed body includes 6 union officials and 11 contractors and/or employers association representatives.

Again, it is a flat out lie to say the construction offers permanent jobs…since the industry is based on temporary, casual, day labor-style employment relations

As for good jobs, the fact is, roughly 50% of New York’s 200,000 construction workers are non union.

They work more steadily than their unionized counterparts, since around 70% of the construction work in the city is done non union (including almost all of the residential construction carried out by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the NYC Housing Authority).

However, their pay is almost unbelieveably low.

Some non union workers in the industry’s largest craft, carpenters, make as little as $ 8/hr for a 10 hour day (with all hours paid at straight time rates, even the overtime hours).

Many of these carpenters, in particular those who install sheetrock, are actually paid by piecework—they get paid based on how many boards of drywall they install, rather than by the hour, a form of construction worker wage payment that is a relic of the middle ages.

Non union workers in the second largest craft, laborers, have it even worse. Some make as little as $ 4/hr for a 10 hour straight time day. Yes, I said FOUR DOLLARS AN HOUR. In New York City. In the year 2006.

And yes, that is flat out ILLEGAL, since the minimum wage in this state is currently $ 6.75 an hour.

But, then again, many illegal things happen in non union construction.

Such as paying workers off the books, with no taxes withheld, and no unemployment insurance, workers comp, social security or disability paid (an almost universal practice among scab contractors in this city these days)

Incidentally, the vast majority of these non union workers are minorities—Black, Latino, Khalistani Sikh or Chinese, and many of the White workers are recent immigrants from Europe. Many of these workers are in fact illegal immigrants—which makes it that much easier for the bosses to superexploit them.

The great majority of these workers are males, but there are a few women on the non union side. Most of them are in the lowest paid and most dangerous sege- ments of the laborers trade, asbestos removal and demolition work, and most of them are Latina or Polish immigrants.

Things are somewhat better on the union side of the industry.

Nominally, wages are much higher—with the lowest paid trade, laborers, making $ 27/hr at full scale and the largest trade, carpenters, making $ 40/hr.

But, since the union sector is composed of 50% of the industry’s workers doing only 30% of the work, there is chronic underemployment for most of us.

The job opportunities are NOT equally distributed.

In the two largest unions, Carpenters and Laborers, contractors are allowed to maintain a pool of full time workers, known as company men, who are hand- picked by the boss.

Technically, contractors are capped at having no more than 50% company men per crew, with the balance hired from the union out of work list.

However, in the largest union, the Carpenters, a union rule called the request system lets contractors have crews composed entirely of company men, except for a shop steward dispatched from the union..

There are no official figures on the number of company men, but, according to GANGBOX’s calculations, they make up about 20% of the membership of the largest construction union in the city, the New York District Council of Carpenters—and get about 60% of the work hours.

Many of those company men live quite well, with some earning over $ 100,000 a year.

However, not all company men are so fortunate. Many exchange steady work for substandard wages, usually paid off the books.

Reportedly, the pay range for off the books wages for union carpenters can be anywhere from $ 25 to $ 30 an hour, with no union benefit fund contributions paid.

That’s far less than the $ 40.25/hr in wages and $ 30.62/hr in benefits that union carpenters are supposed to get paid. But, some company men figure, better to get paid $ 30/hr and no benefits than to sit home jobless and make nothing.

Among union carpenters, this problem is endemic, in particular among contractors in the drywall & ceilings, hirise concrete, scaffolding and office furniture installation sectors.

The problem is seen at it’s most dramatic in that small segment of residential construction that is still unionized—new construction of luxury hirise apartment buildings.

Those bosses compete head to head with non union contractors, and pay cash to their carpenters to enable themselves to charge lower prices to the developers who are putting up those apartment houses so they can get the work.

Some of these companies are blatantly double breasted—a construction term for contractors who run some jobs with union labor, and others with non union workers. In the case of some contractors, particuarly in the drywall sector, the workers on both their union and scab jobs are all union members, so they can be sent onto union jobs whenever necessary.

For the majority of unionized construction workers who are NOT company men, this makes staying employed very difficult.

For most of these workers, known as local men (who, according to GANGBOX calculations, make up 80% of the union workforce, but only get 40% of the jobs), spending most of the year jobless is a way of life.

They nominally make the same hourly wage that the company men do, but have lower annual incomes than their company man counterparts due to less hours of work.

Many local man carpenters make less than $ 30,000 a year (including what they get from unemployment insurance)

Some local men are forced by circumstances to go over to the non union side, just to keep the rent paid and the kids fed until they get a union job.

Unlike the non union side, which is overwhelmingly immigrant and/or minority, the union side is still about 2/3rds White.

Many of the White workers are immigrants from Europe (with Poland, Croatia, Ireland, Italy and Russia the major countries of origin).

As for the minority workers, they are roughly equally divided between US-born Blacks and Latinos and immigrants from the Carribbean and Latin America.

The minority workforce is not equally distributed across the trades.

The lower paid Carpenters and Laborers have the bulk of the Black and Latino workers, while the better paid Electricians, Plumbers, Sheet Metal Workers and Operating Engineers are still predominantly White.

The heavy Black and Latin presence in the Carpenters Union and the Laborers Union did NOT happen because of any kind of altruism on the part of the leaders of those unions.

Far from it.back in the 1960‘s, militant Black and Latino workers, led by revolutionary communist-influenced radicals, had to actually wage a small scale civil war to integrate the industry.

Armed minority construction worker organizations, collectively known as „the Coalition", carried out organized raids on all-White jobsites, to force bosses to integrate..

The minority workers, armed with bats, chains (and the occasional attack dog or firearm), drove around the city on old schoolbusses from jobsite to jobsite.. They would carry out raids on all-White jobsites and stop production until the contractors agreed to desegregate.

This militant armed struggle went on for many many many years (from 1969—1998), and forced the doors of the unions open to minority workers..

The Carpenters and the Laborers, traditionally the largest and weakest of the unions, happened to be the unions that were easiest to get in to (due to their practice of letting contractors control the majority of the jobs, and enrolling anybody selected by the bosses into their unions).

Also, the Carpenters and Laborers, alone among New York construction unions, already had a handfull of Black and Latin members (in the Carpenters Union‘s case, almost all of the carpenters of color were Jim Crow segregated into one local union, Local 1788 in Harlem—in the Laborers Union, most of their minority members were in Housewreckers Local 95, a demolition workers union)

Because of those two factors, that‘s why the bulk of workers of color ended up in the Carpenters and the Laborers.

Today, even though most of the coalitions are out of business (thanks to heavy repression by the NYPD and FBI), there are still substantial numbers of minority males in those two unions, and sizeable minorities of men of color in just about every craft.

As for women, the bulk are in the Carpenters and the Laborers, and a high proportion of them are Black or Latina,—and they are concentrated in the lowest paying sectors..

The largest group of women carpenters work in the trade show industry, setting up and taking down events and conventions at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center and other venues around the city..

That work is sporadic, and, except for a chosen few who are hand picked by the contractors and work virtually every day, most trade show carpenters spend most of the year jobless

Among the Laborers, the bulk of women are concentrated among asbestos abatement workers—a job that is not only the lowest paid laborer job, but is also the most deadly (work around asbestos long enough and you WILL get cancer)

Of course, we‘re not talking about a LOT of women here.no trade has more than 2% women journeypeople

That figure is as low as it is because of the rank sexism of the contractors in our industry..

Many women come into our industry (the Carpenters Union apprenticeship is currently 10% women), but many of them drop out.

Basically, those women vote with their feet against the industry because of discrimination.

Some of it is crassly sexist—from foremen demanding sex in return for work to jobsites that do not have bathrooms for women to pornographic pictures of women taped to the wall of the shanty.

But a lot of it is economic sex discrimination—unless you have a patronage hookup with a contractor, (that is, if you‘re somebody‘s sister—or somebody‘s mistress) the average tradeswoman will spend much of the year jobless, with few work opportunities.

And, when you do get work, you will only have short notice of when you get a job (like you get called 6PM today for a job at 7AM tomorrow.. or you get called at 7AM today and are told to report to the job ASAP) it can be very difficult for single moms to rapidly cobble together day care arraingements for their kids.

No wonder 80% of women apprentice carpenters drop out of the business before they make journeywoman..

Despite the still prevailing discrimination, our industry is still far less institutionally racist and sexist than it once was.

Back in 1968, the city’s 250,000 man construction workforce (and I do mean 250,000 MAN—there wasn’t a tradeswoman in the city back then) was overwhelmingly White.

There were a few Black and Latin workers in the Carpenters and the Laborers, but that was it.

Some trades were 100% White (the Plumbers Union actually called a strike in 1968 to prevent Black and Puerto Rican workers from joining their union!!!)

Today, the majority of the roughly 196,000 men—and approximately 4,000 women—in our industry are Black, Latin or Asian.

Unlike 40 years ago, these days, US-born Whites are actually a MINORITY of the business.

Part of this is because of the efforts of the Coalition…and part of this is because of the collapse of the construction unions in the 1970’s and 80’s.

After the City of New York went bankrupt in the 1976 Fiscal Crisis, real estate developers (including the City of New York’s housing development agencies, HPD and the NYC Housing Authority) began to rapidly and agressively move to use non union labor to build and renovate their buildings.

This led to the almost complete deunionization of residential construction by the late 1980’s.with only new construction of luxury hirises staying union..

The unions collapsed in residential construction in an era when residential construction was becoming the largest segment of construction in the city.

Commercial construction (at least in Manhattan south of 96th St and in Downtown Brooklyn) stayed union—but that sector was shrinking, as corporations were putting up less and less offices in Manhattan and were moving their headquarters out of New York and/or shrinking their office floorspace here..

Modern trends towards telecommuting and outsourcing of white collar work to India have led to an even more rapid decline of commercial office building construction in the city, with many existing office buildings actually being converted to apartment houses, and few new office buildings being put up.

The unions had long worked to keep Black, Latin and Asian men (and women of any color) out—as they fell apart (and were forced to end segregation of their own shrinking ranks), minority workers were able to get in

Of course, we came in with a catch-22…

We got the work.. but, for most of us, it was with far lower incomes than the White men we replaced…..

So, at this late date, why are the unions and the City suddenly talking about opening up the trades to minority males and women????

Simple—the contractors who have remained union want cheap labor (because their clients—the big corporations they build for—are demanding lower prices) and the City and the unions are prepared to give them cheap labor.

And, that cheap union labor will be in the form of minority males, women, recent high school grads and returning Iraq war veterans being funneled into greatly enlarged union apprenticeship programs.

Apprentices make a lot less money than journeylevel workers as an incentive for contractors to hire them and train them on the jobsites.. But, there are strict caps on the number of apprentices, to prevent bosses from using them as cheap labor in place of journeymen.

However, in recent years, apprentice to journeyperson ratios have been weakened.

In the Carpenters Union, the ratio was reduced from 1 apprentice to every 6 journeypeople to 1 apprentice to every 5 journeypeople on outside construction jobs.. That means that on a crew of 30 carpenters, under the old rules there could have only been 5 apprentices.. now there can be 6.In other words, one less higher paid journeylevel carpenter per jobsite.

In the Javits Center, (which is run by a New York State-owned corporation and is the largest single union carpenter employer in the city) there is no ratio at all, they can use an unlimited number of apprentices.

The Carpenters Union, like all the other construction unions, has a direct money stake in enlarging the apprenticeship programs. The unions get money from the contractors and the government to run the program—and, every new apprentice has to pay an initiation fee to join the union, along with monthly or quarterly union dues.

The Carpenters Union also runs a government-financed minority pre apprenticeship program, called the Minority Worker Traning program, where Black and Latin teenagers are brought in and trained to do lead removal (which is actually the work of hazardous material abatement laborers, not carpenters)..

These pre apprentices, 100% of whom are minority do not have the same status as their counterparts who are allowed to directly join the regular apprenticeship (47% of whom are White)

The regular apprentices also aren’t being trained to do unskilled and highly dangerous laborer work.

Instead, they learn actual carpentry skills from day one of their apprenticeship, rather than wasting time learning how to perform work that members of our union aren’t even supposed to do.

The Laborers Union itself actually created an apprenticeship program for the sole reason of supplying their contractors with cheap labor.

Laborers do miscellaneous unskilled work in and around jobsites (sweeping, taking out the garbage, snow shovelling in wintertime, cleaning the temporary bathrooms, mixing mortar, pouring cement, demolition ect), so their work is basically unapprenticable (let’s be honest—do you REALLY need to go to school to learn how to sweep a floor???)

But, now, with a Laborer apprenticeship, contractors have a pool of union laborers who are paid far below union scale.On demolition jobs, the MAJOR-

ITY OF THE CREW, except for the foreman and the shop steward, can be apprentices (or B Men