Rank-and-File Carpenters Wildcat For Democracy
by Charles Walker
For at least two days in mid-May, angry wildcatting carpenters shut down several major Bay Area construction sites. Newspapers reported that 2,000 sympathetic building trades workers shut down San Francisco’s $2.4 billion airport expansion project, while others walked off the job at Kaiser Medical and PacBell projects.
“Everyone went: carpenters, drywall [workers], electricians, sheetmetal workers, you name it,” a boss told the Oakland Tribune. “Cranes and bulldozers stood empty and silent Thursday,” the paper wrote, “giving many of the airport’s construction areas the feel of a concrete-and-steel ghost town.”
The pickets, reported the San Francisco Chronicle, were “angry with their own union officials, whom they say sold them out last Saturday by voting on a weak four-year contract. For the first time, only a delegation of representatives, rather than all the carpenters, voted on the contract. A union mandate 18 months ago ordered the change in voting. That erosion of internal democracy is at the core of the controversy, carpenters say….Carpenters have urged their union leadership to have a new vote. They argued that the delegation, which voted 127 to 107 for the contract, didn’t represent the 16,000 working members. Some jeered at their union officers, pointing to their suits, leather chairs, and six-figure salaries in contrast to the earnings of the rank and file…In his 25 years as a union official, [Northern California Carpenters Regional Council] President Carey Martin said, this is only the second time he knows when union members protested against their own leadership.”
While the furious working carpenters received militant support from other workers, they immediately came under fire: An arbitrator ordered the union to tell their members to get back to work. If the union refuses, the officials will be fined. If the workers continue to honor the wildcat picket lines, they “will be subject to discharge or ordered to pay damages.” A boss told the press that the airport shutdown was costing a million dollars a day. The carpenters’ president said, “he believes the carpenters deserve more money and a chance to sip coffee a couple of times a day on the job. But he was firm that there would be no new contract vote. ‘That would be like taking a second bite of the apple,’ he said.”
The threats seemed to work, for the next day some work resumed, despite continued protests.
“About 70 carpenters marched past the new baseball stadium in China Basin yesterday afternoon, waving signs that said: ‘One member, one vote’ and ‘Renegotiate.’ ‘We want to get rid of the existing contract,’ said Guillermo Banuelos of Modesto, one of the organizers of the walkout.”
“The craftsmen here just want to be able to vote on their own contract…All we want is a revote,” Banuelos said. “If a majority says keep the contract, everyone goes back to work.”
The problems of the Bay Area carpenters are not unique, unintentional, or brand new. For years, their international union has been “restructuring” local unions into larger regional bodies, further insulating the officialdom from the ranks. Carpenters have been “delegated” out of their right to directly ratify contracts, and have lost their right to elect business agents.
“The response of the officialdom to shrinking membership rolls has been to tighten the clamp of bureaucratic control. The international office merges locals and subjects them to domination by district councils. Council officers are removed from direct control by the membership. Power is taken out of the hands of the locals and the local membership and turned over to district council officers who negotiate contracts and impose them without membership ratification.” (Union Democracy Review, December 1993.)
May 23, 1999
Carpenters National Day of Protest for Union Democracy
NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST
JULY 1st 1999
CARPENTERS RALLY
On Thursday, July 1 at 1:00 pm, all United Brotherhood of Carpenters members will be meeting at the foot of the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge to march in protest of International President Doug McCarron’s restructuring-trusteeship denying the members’ right to vote.
We will be marching over the Brooklyn Bridge to the Federal Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. The protest will be held from 1:00 pm until 5:00 pm.
Please support this protest by leaving all job sites by 11:30 am and proceeding to the rally’s starting point.
THE TIME IS NOW FOR ALL CARPENTER UNION MEMBERS TO LEAD THE WAY OF THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT IN DEMANDING THE MEMBERS RIGHT OF
ONE MEMBER – ONE VOTE
Farm Workers Fight For Clean Milk and Respect
Nevertheless, the farmworkers union is fighting to ensure that the cream atop the sweet fresh fruit is free of the contaminants the dairy workers daily are forced to endure.
Bakersfield dairy workers recently turned to the farmworkers union to help them fight for decent and sanitary working conditions, as well as respect from the bosses. The union investigated and found that “disgusting cockroaches infest the grimy, foul-smelling employee kitchen…The bathroom is filthy…The sink is broken…The toilet clogged. And there’s no wash water or soap.”
One worker reported, “They [the dairy owners] keep samples of milk from new and sick cows in the refrigerator where workers store their food. Sometimes the milk in the samples is mixed with blood, yellowish, watery, or sometimes it curdles.” The owner has been convicted of pumping cow manure into a creek.
When the dairy increased the workday to nine hours from eight, with no increase in pay, the workers protested. The boss said, Quit, if you don’t like it. Then four workers were fired for speaking up and helping organize the other workers.
The farmworkers union is asking for money to help win the fight. Solidarity donations should be sent to United Farm Workers, PO Box 62, Keene, CA 93531-9989.
May 28, 1999
Judge Raises Stakes for Labor
— U.S. District Judge Joe Kendall
A federal judge reached into his judicial arsenal, pulled out the financial equivalent of a howitzer, and took cold-blooded aim at the Allied Pilots Association. Bulls-eye!
The judge ruled that the union must now fork over $46 million to the Dallas Federal Court, reportedly a sum greater than the small union’s net worth.
The New York Times reported that the penalty “amounted to one of the largest assessments ever made against a union.” A labor-relations specialist told the Times, “This fine is really unprecedented in American labor history and represents a level of accountability for unions that’s never really been applied.” The judge gave the union four days to deposit $10 million in escrow, then the judge will decide if the fine will be paid in full by the union or shared by the union’s leaders.
In February, American Airlines asked the judge to order the union to pay a “coercive fine” and to hold the union in contempt of his injunction ordering the pilots to end their sick-out. Over a period of ten days, as many as 2,000 pilots had called in sick for at least one day, when American Airlines refused to follow the contract and raise the pay of 300 pilots from a newly bought airline. Since they don’t have the right to strike, and talks with the company got nowhere, the frustrated pilots started calling in sick, which the contract permitted.
“Many pilots [were] also worried,” the New York Times reported in February, “that if the union does not take a stand now, it will have set a dangerous precedent if American acquires an even larger airline in the future.”
Judging by the press, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney is keeping mum about the humongous fine. At least, he’s not sharing his thoughts with the nation’s 17 million unionists, who clearly have as much at stake in the injurious fine against the pilots as they did in the defeat of the 1981 strike by PATCO (the air traffic controllers union). Sweeney’s had since February to get to the media, and raise hell about a political set-up that runs interference for an industry Goliath at workers’ expense.
Sweeney and the AFL-CIO Executive Council have had plenty of time to come up with a game plan that would get the pilots the protection and solidarity of a unified labor movement and maybe turn this fresh escalation of the bosses’ war against workers and their unions into something good…like lemons into lemonade.
Of course it’s a bit daffy to even dream that the head of the AFL-CIO might take militant action. That would be unprecedented — at least in the lifetime of most of today’s workers.
But remember, back in 1995 Sweeney proclaimed: “The crisis facing American workers and their families requires an unprecedented response from America’s unions.” Surely the judge’s unprecedented confiscation of members’ dues money warrants an unprecedented action led by organized labor’s top leadership. And as union militants said during the PATCO tragedy, if not now, when?
April 17, 1999