Organized Labor

She talked about the loss of skill.

Under Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain from 1979-1990, trade apprenticeships had been decertified, she said. Cross-craft work and “flexibility” had been encouraged. The trades had begun to look at each other’s work and think, “I can do that, too.” A race to the bottom in wages had resulted.

Now, she said, Great Britain was beginning to recognize and bemoan its lack of skilled trades workers. This recognition was coming too late, she believed; those skills were lost for at least a generation.

In this country we have felt forces push us toward the degraded state of skill Ms. Holt described. The Bush administration has moved to derecognize California’s very effective certification of apprenticeships. The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) has called for a “new model” of apprenticeship, one that apparently doesn’t require actual graduation of apprentices, as Arnold Schwarzenegger recently at the ABC’s behest vetoed a bill that would have required an apprenticeship program to graduate an apprentice from time to time to retain its certification.

A top manager for a major union bridge company told me, not so much in complaint as in resignation, that his company was limited to bidding in certain regions. In others, he could not hope to underbid non-union competitors. Without touching on the question of whether or not there were prevailing wages in those other regions that limited wage and benefit differentials, he ascribed the dominance of non-union companies there to the “flexibility” of their workforce. He contrasted this with the jurisdictional conflicts his company had often suffered.

And we have all heard that a major trade has established a huge training facility that instructs apprentices not only in the trade’s traditional skills, but in those of various other trades — this in the name of answering the needs of the modern construction industry with a “flexible” workforce.

As an apprentice I was taught that I would need ten years of work both as an apprentice and as a journeyman to become a “mechanic” adept at my trade. I was good at my work, but I did not feel after ten years of it that I had mastered the trade. I did not feel that I had mastered it years later, even after much success in it, when I left the field to work for the union. It seemed to me then and seems to me now that unless I accepted a very narrow specialization I could spend a lifetime with the tools and still find lessons to learn about the work. I expect that this is true for all trades.

How well, then, could an apprentice learn more than one trade in the span of an apprenticeship? How well could he or she learn more than one trade in ten years?

In many ways, though, business holds these questions inconsequential. In the early nineties I worked for a small unionized miscellaneous steel company. Small non-union general contractors commonly subcontracted work to this company on residential and commercial projects. I had frequent opportunities to observe the work of non-union workers with little or no formal training in their trades. Sometimes they would tell me what they were paid. I arrived at a maxim: Working non-union is a way for a contractor to redo work and sometimes redo it again and still make a profit. The non-union contractor’s final product often did not have to be of good quality; it had only to be good enough to outlast any warranties when a developer sold it or good enough to last through a tenancy that an owner did not expect to be lengthy.

Even at larger scales, businesses and contractors often have no interest in building for the long term. They expect that properties will turn over. They expect that industries will come and go. They expect that the public’s tastes will be lured from one thing to another. Skill can deliver them a project faster. It cannot necessarily deliver them a project cheaper. Often enough they will endure inefficiency and inferior quality and follow the spreadsheet.

Some apprenticeships teach that our trades are descendents of the medieval guilds. At times our pride in our trades and our skills can seem as antique as that. We should be no less insistent on their continuation. We should never allow this country to bemoan their loss. We cannot take the risk that the demand for quality and efficiency of construction will always be high enough and widespread enough to support them. We cannot take the risk that we will be able to continue them in regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area while they fade away in others – especially since some of the challenge to them comes from the national government.

What can we do, then, to continue our skills?

Clearly we are obliged to fight politically for them. We need to block the decertification of our apprenticeship programs and to secure support for them. The trades are only a small part of the electorate and a relatively small player in the money game of politics. Even in issues as specific to the trades as apprenticeships, we need a general growth in unions; more members, more votes, more potential friends for our causes. We can hope that the national organizing efforts of both the AFL-CIO and “Change to Win” succeed, and we can help them wherever possible.

Perhaps counterintuitively, we can answer the demand for “flexibility” of the workforce by better defining and accepting our jurisdictions, and by then adapting a spirit of cooperation. Complete “flexibility” takes an ax to skill; but by better understanding our jurisdictions we may better understand their areas of overlap and the possibilities for cooperation. Little help from our national and international organizations seems likely in this effort. We should contemplate regional structures for jurisdictional determination.

Perhaps counterintuitively again, we can counter the effect of less-skilled non-union workers on our trades by taking them into our trades whenever possible. If as a non-union worker develops some skills he may be taken from his employer into the union, his employer can accept this setback and begin the time-consuming job of developing those skills in another worker, or he can try to compete for the worker with better wages and benefits, or he can retain that worker and others by becoming a union contractor. In the first case the employer may miss deadlines and lose work and money, and so become less competitive with our contractors. In the second he may become less and less a cheap alternative to union contractors. The third is the ideal for which we strive. We give ourselves two tasks in this. The first is to bring the level of skill of the organized worker up to that of our other workers, whether by slotting into an appropriate level of our apprenticeship or through journey-level retraining. The second is to help ensure employment for new workers by reentering areas of work we have lost to the non-union sector and by entering new areas as yet completely non-union.

All these efforts come with myriad possible complications and setbacks. Many of our complications and setbacks will come from each other. None of us, though, can deny the value of skill to the self-worth of the workers our unions represent. None of us would deny our own pride in skill.

And if Giovanna Holt was right, and if Great Britain is an example, the alternative is a race to the bottom.