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Dozens of unionists and trades workers gathered with light refreshments of Modelos, Budweisers and Cheetos on Saturday, Oct. 17 at the Woodbine in Manhattan for “Crafts at a Crossroads: The Future of the Building Trades,” the latest in a series of public assemblies hosted by the New York City chapter of the Independent Labor Club.
The club describes itself as “pre-political base for building class consciousness and the capacity to act within civil society.”
Panelists included Gregory Butler, a longtime New York City labor activist, author and retired member of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 211; Transport Workers Union Local 100 member Tom Cowperthwaite of Transit Workers for a Fighting Union; and members from Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers (CREW) and Carpenters Rank and File Together (CRAFT).
The discussion was guided by a member of the Independent Labor Club who identified himself only as Sean K.B.
“The trades have a pretty well-earned reputation for being closed, conservative, some might even say reactionary," K.B. said. “We're going to explore this together. I think the trades are a very interesting part of the working class in this country.”
Cowperthwaite, a bus mechanic in Brooklyn, spoke with The Chief after the panel concluded about his union’s stalled contract talks.
He said that tradesworkers in the MTA make roughly half of what other, non-transit construction tradesworkers earn. He pointed out that the MTA budgeted only 2 percent wage increases per year for the upcoming contract, a claim that Local 100 leadership has echoed.
“It’s absurd. We're going backwards given the very high levels of inflation,” he said. “We can’t afford to live in the city that we serve.”
Cowperthwaite also cited increased disciplinary scrutiny on workers and safety issues as chief bargaining concerns, specifically noting the recent on-the-job death of TWU member Moet McCullum, a construction flagger who died after being struck by a subway train.
“Today we were talking about amalgamation and getting together," he said. "These things are deeply felt. We're seeing conditions rapidly getting worse, so people know that we have to band together."
Butler, the retired IUOE member, spoke on the panel about the trades’ labor history, pointing out that before the 1935 National Labor Relations Act created the modern system of relations between management and employees, organizing was less formal but more militant. The competitive nature of the construction business at the time made organizing one company at a time impossible, given that unionized companies would simply shut down or go out of business.
Butler said this created a need to organize the entire sector at once.
“They would march from job site to job site… they shut it down, make everybody go on a strike. That was what union organizing looked like at that time,” he said. “Union organizing wasn't asking permission from the government to be in a union.”
Butler said that the unions’ dominance carried seeds of decline, and by the first half of the 20th century socialist trade labor leaders had been pushed out for leaders willing to collaborate with bosses and city government. This opened the door for mafia labor racketeering, he said, and that initially diverse immigrant unions became segregated.
He added that municipal fiscal troubles accelerated the decline driven in part by the fight between landlords and tenants over rent control.
As the city faced financial insolvency and bankers took over operations, he said, the city refused to pay union rates to rebuild recently destroyed housing and used an anti-union loophole by routing development projects through non-profits.
“Instead of the city directly hiring the contractors to renovate these buildings... they would give the money to not-for-profits,” Butler said. “What did [the unions] do about it? Not a goddamn thing.”
A Staten Island carpenter with Local 20 and member of CRAFT, who identified himself only as Joe, said during the panel that dissent at union meetings has largely disappeared, with every local in the New York City District Council being run by council employees,
Leadership, he said, cheered the boroughs-based jails program because of the need for concrete and drywall work.
"As a working-class movement, as a labor union. Why are we getting excited over these things?" he questioned.
Butler noted during the panel that many countries have a single construction union representing all workers, and that craft boundaries don’t exist on job sites.
The panelists, including Joe, argued that one solution to stagnant unions could be amalgamation, or merging individual craft unions into one industrial union.
"I feel like the end goal of trade unionization should have been to achieve an amalgamated industrial union," he said. "I feel like the division of labor just kind of hit a dead end. That's where we wound up and that's, you know, the conditions of today."
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