Organized Labor

Reading the pink section of the Chronicle one Sunday morning, I saw it. Months later, after a meeting in the offices of an architectural firm, just before punching the button to call the elevator to the reception area, I picked up a coffee table book and, flipping through the pages, saw it again, the same drawing in the same careful but wandering hand of the same subject: The rail.

Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee appears weekly in the Sunday Chronicle "Datebook." In a single panel it pairs a cryptic text with a drawing often of some detail of local architecture. In this instance the text consisted of individual words set off in rectangular boxes and alluding to Easter. The drawing was of a part of the sky bridge in the turret of Mario Botta's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and included some of a stair below, some of the interior wall of the turret, and a stretch of one of the bridge's guardrails. A view from above, it showed so limited a piece of the bridge as to be unrecognizable to almost anyone.

I recognized it because the rail was mine. Not yet a foreman for my employer at the time of the museum's construction, Romak Iron, I had nonetheless been given responsibility for installation of the guardrails. Given their prominent location, I had taken great care in this. All Over Coffee showed some of this care; the drawing contrasted the smooth-ground welds of the rail's round stock supports with the "stack of dimes" finish of the unground welds on the structural pipe truss of the bridge itself. Madonna's wandering line didn't do justice to some of the other cares I had taken. It didn't show how I had carefully cut and then ground each individual round stock support to move from the wider side-to-side tolerances of the bridge trusses to the tolerances of less than a sixteenth of an inch I wanted for the rail. It didn't show my instrument work in making the elevations of the rail meet the same tolerances. It didn't show the heating and cooling I had done to work out the distortions introduced into the rail by welding it together. Even so, it gave me pride. Someone had noted my craftsmanship.

We who have been through union apprenticeships chafe when someone in the press or public refers to us as "construction workers." We are glaziers, sheet metal workers, tile setters. We are cement masons, pipe fitters, elevator constructors, tapers. We are ironworkers. The generic term "construction worker" doesn't honor our knowledge of our trades and our care in our work. High productivity is of course one of our goals and is one of the primary means by which we sustain our wages and benefits against our non-union competition; but we take pride also in our crafts and value the opportunity to employ them to their fullest expression.

For some trades, particularly the traditional "finish" trades, our craftsmanship is there to be noted by anyone who will slow down enough to look. For others, it is more often to be noted in an absence of perception; the elevator runs smoothly, the pipes are quiet, the temperature of the room is neither too hot nor too cold, the wind and downpour knock at roof and wall and window but gain no entry. Once in a while, in accord with a trend begun by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the mechanical trades have their day, and ducts, pipes, and conduits are themselves architectural finishes. This was so locally, for example, at the campus built in Mountain View for Silicon Graphics and now belonging to Google, where the architects may have wanted software development to have an industrial feel.

Some trades never have their work on public display. A rodbuster friend of mine once told me, "I build this beautiful cage out of rebar, and I stand back and admire it, and the next day they bury it in mud." Or consider the pile driver, most of whose best work disappears into literal mud. The real pride in craft of such trades has a subtler acknowledgement, through basic public faith in the dependability of the built world.

And some must wait a long while for their work to come fully into view. High on the walls of many an older San Francisco high rise are details in stone or terracotta hardly visible from the street, like gargoyles high up on a gothic cathedral. Only as other buildings have risen next to them and as first building trades workers, then office workers have begun to look out at them from new vantage points have these details become clear. One is obliged to wonder if this wasn't a part of the architects' intentions all along, to prepare for a towering San Francisco; and one is obliged to admire the care of workers whose craftsmanship might have to wait nearly a century to be fully appreciated.

When we revived our interviews with Building Trades workers in Organized Labor as the "On the Job Site" feature, I insisted that they focus not on politics, as they had so often in the past, but on their work. I was sure that our members would relish opportunities to talk about something in which they took so much pride. I hope that other readers who are not our members have begun to see in these interviews the craftsmanship at the heart of our unions, that they convey this to others still, and that the number of those who look closely at and appreciate our work multiplies. We do appreciate the attention, be it is manifested in a bit of newspaper art or in a photo in an architectural article or journal or book – or simply in seeing some member of the public stand and admire.