Organized Labor

By Doug Perry
'Organized Labor'

The Labor Archives and Research Center celebrated its 20th Anniversary last month on February 24th with music and festivities at the Plumbers Hall in San Francisco. Hosts Susan Sherwood, the Acting Director, and Jeff Rosen, Archivist, introduced special guests, including Judy Goff President of the Labor Archives Advisory Board and Jan Gregory of the California Faculty Association of San Francisco State University. The Archives also presented a service award to retired Director, Lynn Bonfield. The construction trades unions have been strong supporters of the Labor Archives and many have served on the Advisory Board. Current advisory board members include Stanley M. Smith former Secretary-Treasurer of the San Francisco Building Trades, Tim Paulson, Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council and former bricklayer, Archie Green of the Shipwrights, Joiners and Boatbuilders, and Mike Munoz of the Northern California Carpenters.

Acting Director Susan Sherwood gave a brief history of the archives’ activities since opening in a temporary structure in 1986, providing a safe place for union records. She acknowledged several members of the local labor community for their help in setting up the Archives including Jack Crowley, Dick Groulx, Jim McLoughlin, Chuck Mack, David Jenkins, and David Selvin. She mentioned that two new board members were added in 2005 including Mike Munoz of the Carpenters and arbitrator Joseph Freitas.

Author Grace Palladino, the keynote speaker was introduced by the Secretary Treasurer of the San Francisco Building Trades, Michael Theriault. Grace has just published a well-researched history of the National Building Trades unions, ‘Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits-A Century of Building Trades History.’

Her book reviews the challenges facing the construction unions over the last 100 years and addresses what it means to be a union worker. In her own words, “The book follows the evolution of the Building and Construction Trades Department from a loose federation of contentious unions at the turn of the (century), to the recognized voice of the building trades in the 1930s and 1940s; to the leading protector of prevailing wage laws, apprenticeship training, health and safety provisions, and collective bargaining in the second half of the 20th Century.”

For those of us on the West Coast the book fills in some of the holes in the history of the construction trades on the national level in recent times. The book by Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor, is certainly still the best local history for San Francisco construction unions covering the period from the 1880s to the 1920s.

In her remarks at the labor archives celebration Grace presented a short overview of the history of the building trades in California, by looking at the effects on the movement of three leaders from the building trades, P.H. McCarthy, Neil Haggerty and Con O’Shea.

Many of our readers know that Patrick Henry McCarthy was one of the founders of the San Francisco Building Trades Council and a political power in the early part of the early 1900s. McCarthy’s major contribution to the construction trades was probably his use of labor political activism. Palladino points out however, that the base for political action was provided by solidarity on the job, decent wages, and reasonable working conditions.

Palladino also reviewed the contributions of Cornelius J. Haggerty, who was active in Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s and later became head of the California Labor Federation and then the National Building Trades Department. Neil was a lather by trade with Local 42 and in the 1930s traveled up and down the state as an organizer during the Great Depression. He practiced bottom- up organizing targeting the non-union workers and pushing things like the 8-hour day. According to Palladino he was adept at, “crafting compromises and building coalitions to get thing done.” And, “As leader of California’s League for Political Education, he organized a grass roots campaign to elect labor’s friends and defeat their enemies.” As the leader of the Building Trades Department in the 1960s Haggerty worked to promote civil rights by opening up the apprenticeship programs to all people. Palladino comments that because of solidarity, “jobs tended to move from father to son.” As a measure of progress it must be said that the San Francisco Building Trades has conducted studies of minority membership in the construction unions, looking at our apprenticeship programs. We found that more than half of all the new recruits were in fact from minority groups.

Con O’Shea rose to power in the period between 1950 and 1980 and became the leader of the San Bernardino Riverside Building Trades Council. According to Palladino, “O’Shea ...strongly believed that a multi-craft agreement negotiated through the local building trades Council, was the key to dominating the labor market.” The multi-craft agreements were a way to minimize jurisdictional disputes and are similar to the more limited project labor agreements in widespread use today, which deal only with one developer and one project. Grace pointed out that organizing fell off in the 1980’s and 1990’s in California with the construction boom. She notes that, “it would be another 20 years before the building trades tried a multi-craft organizing campaign again (with) the ambitious, but controversial Las Vegas BTOP effort in the late 1990s.”

It’s interesting that all three men were strong organizers, promoted inter-craft harmony and worked with the political establishment. In her summary Grace comments on the issue of local autonomy that, “can cut both ways. It can be the key to militant action and economic power, as it was in P.H. McCarthy’s day, or an obstacle to union growth as we saw in Haggerty’s civil rights fight, or O’Shea’s campaign in Los Angeles.” She concludes, that for the moment, “It’s the building trades that have what contractors need: skilled and efficient workers who can do a job right the first time.”