Organized Labor

We win no popularity contests among the general public. They count on us to do our jobs well, to be well-trained and productive, when a replacement bridge section slides into place ahead of schedule, when the water or power come back on after a storm or earthquake or maintenance shutdown, when a freeway collapsed in a tanker fire opens in days rather than the expected weeks. Even then, the public more often sees the shine of accomplishment from the faces of our employers than from those of us whose skill has been indispensible to that accomplishment. The employers’ faces are before the cameras, not ours.

The public sees even less that our skill and productivity are developed and maintained every day on less prominent jobs. It is inclined to believe instead that we are overpaid and underworked there.

Nor does it see that a full year of work gets us in some trades into the upper reaches of “lower income,” by San Francisco standards, and in other trades into the “median income” range. That is, a full year of work gets us into what passes here for the lower middle class or middle class. Something much less than a full year of work is common now, and many of us are seeing how short is the path to poverty. In what sense, then, are we overpaid?

And while the public sees what our work costs, it does not see what our work costs us. It grinds down our joints and teaches our backs to betray us. My wife and sons know that I came home many days with burns up and down my arms and deep bruises on my shoulders and elsewhere. Our wives and children may know such things, but even many of our other relatives and closest friends do not. And my job as an Iron Worker almost killed me on several occasions. This is mere fact; I exaggerate not at all. Many among us can say the same thing in the same matter-of-fact way. We usually see no need to proclaim it loudly.

We can’t be surprised that in this era of knowledge industries and service industries, as most of the public becomes ever more remote from anyone wearing a blue collar, it will not understand even the mere facts of our existence.

Even so, the ugliness of the reaction by many who commented on our recent opposition to a project that the developer refused to commit to build all union went beyond incomprehension and crossed instead into the kind of bitter anti-unionism hardly to be expected in a supposed “union town.”

We had fought the project through the environmental impact process. The developer had gone on record in the press as calling this “extortion.” The Board of Supervisors had sided with the developer and rejected our appeal unanimously.

The Chronicle reported all this on its website, sfgate.com. The website allows comment by readers. A very few defended us. Most were wildly critical of us. The website also lets readers tally support for comments. The tally for our critics far exceeded the tally for our defenders.

One commenter called us “peddlers of laziness, corruption, mediocrity, delay, waste, and stupidity.” Some spoke of “union thugs” or “thuggery.”

One claimed to have seen union construction workers take hour-and-a-half or two-hour lunches.

We all see that this is an outright lie. Lunch is one-half hour. Breaks are ten minutes; maybe they get stretched to fifteen.

Another commenter said that our “contract allows them [us] to work light.”

The Carpenters and Plumbers contracts have identical language on the subject: “No rules, customs, or practices shall be permitted that limit production or increase the time required to do any work.”

The Iron Workers agreement says, “There shall be no limitation placed on the amount of work to be performed by any workman during working hours.”

These are just three examples found in a quick glance at three agreements. Any Building Trades agreement that does not include like language will be an exception to the rule.

And the project labor agreement we had proposed to the developer read, “…the Unions pledge to work and cooperate with the management of the Project to produce the most efficient utilization of labor and equipment in accordance with this Agreement.”

Some commenters blamed housing costs in the City on our wages. Certainly high housing costs are a problem, and our wages are part of those costs.

If our wages just achieve a middle-class living for us, however, those wages are not part of the problem, unless the commenters contend that affordable housing must be built at poverty wages.

Maybe the prevalence of comments against us in the website says more about the kind of readers it attracts than about the broader public. Even so, such views can’t be confined to sfgate.com readers.

The temporary nature of our employment and the mobility of the construction workforce make “bottom-up” organizing, in which unions organize workers to demand that their employer unionize, a virtual impossibility in construction. All an employer has to do to defeat a bottom-up organizing drive is to insist on the election that is its right under current federal law and then scale back its work and its workforce in subsequent months so that the workers most supportive of a union are laid off by the time the election is held. This may change if Congress passes an Employee Free Choice Act with adequate “card check” provisions, but in the meantime we are obliged to organize “top-down” rather than “bottom-up,” as we have been for the last sixty years at least.

To organize “top-down” generally means convincing employers to sign commitments to follow our master agreements, which are “pre-hire” agreements under which they agree to hire exclusively from our halls. Some sfgate.com commenters said that we should convince employers to use us by offering superior productivity and quality. We do. We are among the most productive workers on the face of the earth. Our apprenticeships are superior. The higher quality of our work is usually easy to discern for anyone with a trained eye. Many employers recognize these facts and sign with us.

Nonetheless it will frequently be possible for a private-sector employer or owner to perform the work at a lower price non-union, especially in desperate times like the present. Of what use is it to approach such an employer or owner and politely ask that he build union? “Please, sir, I want more gruel” has never been a strategy that achieves worker advancement, or even that protects what advances workers have made. We must instead apply pressure by all legal means.

It is this pressure that leads to charges of “thuggery” and “extortion.” These are charges as old as our movement. The San Francisco Building Trades early in the last century were accused of “tyranny” and of constituting a “labor trust,” of subverting the American free market system by conspiracy and collusion. The comments on sfgate,com were in some cases almost identical to comments in the press of a hundred years ago.

The developers of the Residential Builders Association and others like them have portrayed themselves in a way that exploits this perception of us. Even as they have moved from two-flat boxy “Richmond specials” to multi-unit live-work lofts in the “Eastern Neighborhoods” and now to small high rises in the heart of the City, they have claimed to be the “little guy.” They have laid claim so to the traditional American admiration for the doughty entrepreneur scratching out by his wits and gumption a stake in the economic life of the country. They have sheltered in the traditional American suspicion of collective action. Politicians have found it harder to oppose the “little guy” whom they see at breakfast or the bar than the interstate corporations whose work in the City has generally been all union. Supervisor Chris Daly’s use of the reactionary term “Big Labor” for us can only have helped the cause of these developers.

But as their work in the City continues to grow, their refusal to build all union is at least as harmful to Building Trades workers and those who would be Building Trades workers as would be the invasion of an anti-union interstate corporation.

Just as we cannot secure the work without securing the workforce, we cannot secure the workforce without securing the work. These are interdependent efforts that have long served millions of Building Trades workers across the country, many thousands of them in San Francisco alone.

An Iron Worker once came up to me with his family at a union picnic when I was an organizer. I had helped him into the union from a non-union company in the Fresno area. He had been working, as is typical in the non-union sector, at low pay with no benefits. “This is the man,” he told his wife in introducing us, “that changed our lives.”

This is the powerful effect that our interdependent efforts have long had and will continue to have. Many an organizer or business representative has similar stories to tell.

Our continued success in lifting from poverty to the middle class women and men with no background at all in our work by giving them training and careers also depends on securing the work.

If this is what it means to be a “union thug” – if it means transforming the lives of individuals and families into something far, far better – then we should accept that label with pride. I do.