PREAPPRENTICED

discrimination and deunionization in the New York City construction industry


In May 2007, Swedish multinational heavy construction contractor Skanska AB was selected as the prime contractor for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection's $ 2.8 billion dollar Croton Water Filtration Plant under Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

Skanska was DEP's second choice - they had wanted Perini, an American firm with close ties to the Democratic Party and the leadership of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

But, since Perini is facing a federal grand jury probe into the company's alleged corrupt practices, that's simply not gonna happen - so DEP's just going to have to make do with Skanska.

DEP and it's new prime contractor Skanska did manage to salvage a special low wage labor deal that Perini had arrainged with the New York City Building & Construction Trades Council.

Building the Croton water plant is going to be a very labor intensive operation, due to it's unique design. The 100,000 square foot treatment plant is going to be underneath Van Cortlandt Park - building it involves excavating the park's golf course, building the plant, constructing walls and a roof around the installation, backfilling dirt over the plant and then rebuilding the golf course on top of it.

This elaborate project will require a lot more workers than a conventional water plant built above ground - at peak, there will be over 600 men and women on this job, which will take at least 4 years to complete - and probably longer than that, because jobs like this always go longer than planned, with lots of "extras" and "ticket work" to fix all of the fuckups that will inevitably happen along the way.

In any case, this job will need lots of labor, and reducing labor costs is a high priority.

Now, the City of New York does use non union labor on many of it's construction jobs, in particular housing construction and renovation. Many of these contractors pay their workers incredibly low wages (typically $ 7/hr for skilled workers and a subminimum wage of $ 4/hr for laborers and helpers) and no benefits, which saves the city a hell of a lot of money.

However, there are very few scab contractors in this part of the country that have the specialized heavy equipment and technical sophistication to successfully carry out a job of this magnitude.

Also, the city, state and federal Davis Bacon laws require that DEP pay prevailing wages to all the workers on their jobs ("prevailing wages" are based on the average wage for a given type of work in a particular community - in New York City, they are usually pegged to union scale).

The City can evade this requirement in it's housing renovation programs, through the simple but effective subterfuge of having Community Based Organizations (CBO's - privatized social service agencies, funded by Democratic Party patronage) assume ownership of the property and become the client of record.

Since the CBO's are private companies, not governmental entities, they are not bound by Davis Bacon wage requirements.

But, the City hasn't yet figured out a way to do that on jobs like the Croton plant.

Consequently, DEP had no choice but to use unionized contractors.

But union labor is not cheap, even though most of the workers on heavy construction jobs are laborers, the lowest paid trade.

Union heavy construction laborers earn $ 34 an hour, and have a benefit package that costs $ 16/hr - and they're the LOWEST paid workers on the site!

It's all uphill from there - union carpenters get $ 41/hr, union ironworkers earn $ 38/hr union lathers and union boilermakers both make $ 39/hr (and both of those trades also get paid holidays - the lathers even get paid lunch breaks!) union electricians are paid $ 49/hr and union operating engineers - the folks who operate the big cranes and earth moving equipment that are absolutely essential for a job like this - make up to $ 50/hr, depending on what kind of machine they are operating.

All of those workers get benefit packages that are worth at least $ 20/hr too.

Using these workers was going to cost DEP a whole lot of money - money that they basically don't have since they don't get any taxpayer dollars from the city budget (all of DEP's funding comes from the water bills charged to consumers).

But Perini, due to it's ties to the leadership of the construction unions, had an answer - a sweetheart deal with the Building Trades to allow low paid workers on the job.

Perini set up a "job training program" where 16% of the workforce - 96 of the 600 workers on the site - would be paid less than union scale.

Of course, the unions have their own apprenticeships, and apprentices are paid less than journeylevel scale (the lowest paid apprentices, 1st year apprentices, only get 40% of union scale).

But contractors are restricted as to how many apprentices they can have - usually they can only have 1 apprentice to every 5 or 6 journeylevel workers.

And apprentices get full union scale when they graduate, usually after 4 years.

However, these trainees would be so called "pre apprentices", recieving the lowest union pay scale. And the contractor would have a rotating pool of substandard paid "pre apprentices" for the life of the job.

Perini used it's ties to the Carpenters Union (Carpenters General President Douglas J. "Cash" McCarron is a member of their board of directors) to get that union on board.

Perini's ties to the Democratic Party (the husband of Senator Diane Feinstein [D - CA] is on their board too) also ensured that they would be able to get local CBO's, Bronx Community College and the New York City College of Technology to help.

The Carpenters Union and NYC College of Technology will be supplying 30 "pre apprentice" carpenters.

Bronx Community College's Project Hire will be supplying 66 more "pre apprentice" laborers.

How exactly one can be a "pre apprentice" unskilled laborer isn't quite clear - do you really need to get "training" to prepare you to learn how to use a broom and shovel?

Of course, that opens the question of how exactly a man or woman can be a "laborer apprentice" - do you really need to be "trained" to do unskilled custodial and pick and shovel work?

Considering the fact that the Laborers Union didn't even have an apprenticeship for the first 92 years of it's existance, and the fact that, during those years, all laborers got the same pay, irregardless of experince, it becomes obvious that programs to "train" laborers are motivated by something other than legitimate worker training needs.

This fact becomes more clear when we examine the fact that the Laborers Union's "apprenticeships" appear in the mid 1990's at the same time the union was seeking to stem it's deep decay by letting union contractors pay substandard wages to laborers who had recently joined the union.

COVE, a local CBO, will help to screen the unemployed young workers who are being sent into these "preapprenticeship" training programs - presumably to keep out the more militant youths.

Fortunately for DEP (and unfortunately for Bronx construction workers) Skanska will inherit Perini's low wage labor programs.

Now, on the face of it, this sounds like a cheap labor program, designed to undercut union wages and supply DEP and it's contractor Skanska with underpaid workers (and that's EXACTLY what it is).

But, the CBO's, the Democratic Party and the unions put a whole different face on this - they claim this is a "training" program to "help" unemployed Blacks and Latinos get high paying jobs.

But, they claim, these jobless minority workers are "unskilled" - so skill deficient in fact that they have to have special "training" even to use a broom and shovel!

The whole concept of "pre apprenticeship training" for minority workers is offensive.

Apprenticeship by definition is a training program, typically new apprentices have no construction background and spend most of their early days in the program unloading delivery trucks and getting coffee.

When this writer served my carpenter apprenticeship, I spent my first year and a big chunk of my second year getting the coffee order and unloading sheetrock trucks - on the rare occasions that I worked with my tools, I was doing simple tasks like caulking and insulating walls, which really require no training at all.

The proponents of "pre apprenticeship" take the position that minority youth are so stupid they have to be "trained" to go to the deli for the crew and to unload trucks!!!

Not only is this program a cheap labor program, it's a RACIST cheap labor program!

Worse yet, it's a racist program that hides it's racism behind a cover of "helping minorities" and actually has minorities administering it!

There are other racist low wage "pre apprenticeship" programs around the city too.

On the other end of the Bronx, the New York Yankees, Turner Construction and a local CBO have a "pre apprentice" program at the new Yankee Stadium job.

Citywide, the Carpenters Union has the "Minority Worker Training" (MWT) program that supplies low wage "pre apprentice" lead abatement workers (despite the fact that lead removal isn't even carpenter work - specially trained laborers do that work!).

And the City of New York has the Mayors Commission on Construction Opportunity, that coordinates the low wage "pre apprentice" programs of a number of CBO's and unions around the city.

All of these programs are based on a number of false pretenses.

They all claim that unemployment is caused by lack of skills - in reality, joblessness is (amazingly enough) caused by lack of jobs!!!

Far from a shortage of skilled labor, the construction industry has a chronic surplus of skilled workers.

A large proportion of the city's 200,000 tradespeople are chronically underemployed - especially the 100,000 union members in the construction business.

Also, while there was a time when the construction industry here was almost entirely White and minority workers were locked out, that is no longer true.

These days, Black, Latin, Chinese and Khalistani Sikh workers make up a majority of the construction workers in the city.

While minorities are underrepresented in the unionized side of the business - they're about a third of union members - workers of color make up the vast majority of the workforce on the scab side of the industry.

In other words, if the City really wanted to open up the unionized trades to minority workers, there is absolutely no need to "train" anybody, due to the tens of thousands of non union tradespeople with journeylevel skills (not to mention the thousands of minority union journeypeople - workers like this writer who graduated from union apprenticeships and are already in the trades).

Obviously, the real intent of these "pre apprenticeship" programs is clear - to batter down union wage and benefit scales.

The question is, why hasn't their been any organized resistance to the racist sham of "pre apprenticeship training"?

There was a time when minority construction workers in New York City were heavily organized, in minority worker organizations that led tradespeople of color in a militant struggle against Whites-only jobsites - and both the contractors and unions that kept workers of color out of the trades.

These groups were also in revolt against racist "training" programs run by the City and the CBO's of the day that proposed to "integrate" construction by giving a few low paid jobs to a handfull of minority workers (those programs were a LOT like what DEP and Skanska have at the Croton job!)

Those groups (collectively known as "The Coalition", even though they were actually 60 seperate organizations) are the reason that construction is a majority worker of color business in this town.

But what happend to them?

How did they go from armed mass organizations with thousands of members not that long ago to near irrelevancy today?

And how come the City has been able to get away with reverting to 1960's style racist tokenism in union construction - and subminimum wage labor on the scab jobs?

To really understand the reasons for all of that, we have to take a look at the rise and fall of The Coalitions.

Back in the 1960's, the city's 250,000 strong construction workforce was almost totally unionized, almost entirely White and exclusively male.

Most of these workers had been unionized in the 1870's - by unions that had been run by radicals (mostly utopian socialists but some communists and anarchists as well) who felt that unions were the first step to building a "cooperative commonwealth" - a world without bosses, where the power of bankers, real estate developers and contractors was overthrown, and the people who did the productive labor ran society.

Those unions were built by mass movements of workers, waging neighborhood wide and in some cases citywide strikes, to force contractors to accept union imposed wage scales and workrules on the jobsites.

At the time, New York City was a mostly White city, and the construction workforce was mostly White immigrant men (although there were some Black men who were carpenters, laborers or bricklayers - particularly in the city's small Black ghetto, then located in the West Side of Manhattan in the West 50's).

But, the unions were not themselves racist - at least against Black people. Most of these unions WERE flatly racist against Chinese workers, and called for the removal of Chinese in America and the exclusion of those who wanted to come here, but they viewed Blacks as fellow Americans who, at least on paper, deserved equal rights.

Despite their for-the-record egalitarianism towards African Americans, these unions didn't do much of anything to actually fight against the segregation of Black New Yorkers.

However, under pressure from the contractors firing and blacklisting jobsite activists, the unions had to develop a system of "walking delegates" - full time leadership paid from the union treasury - in place of the "tramping committees" composed of worker activists. This was a logical evolution - since the unions were using their treasuries to provide incomes for fired and blacklisted union activists, why not put those activists on the union's payroll outright?

The Walking Delegates (who soon came to be called "Business Agents") quickly became a force for conservatism in the unions.

They wanted to preserve the unions as institutions, to preserve their own newly achieved status, and to keep themselves from having to go back out on the jobsites.

The Walking Delegates also began to adapt to the attitudes of the most privilged of construction workers, the guys who worked for the contractors year round - from April to November in the field, and then all winter long in the shop.

They also began to differentiate themselves from the great mass of casually employed tradespeople, who got hired in early spring, laid off just before Thanksgiving and spent the winter jobless.

The Delegates began to orient themselves towards the contractors, in particular the big General Contractors who were the dominant employers in the industry.

The unions began to help the contractors regulate the labor market, supress price competition between contractors, help contractors fight against pressure from bankers and real estate developers to push bids downwards and preserve labor peace on the jobsites at any price.

The unions also were actively involved when contractors turned to organized crime to build price fixing cartels to regulate competition in the industry. The gangsters actually used the unions as instruments to punish contractors who tried to underbid connected firms - and the unions also allowed contractors who were under gangster protection to get away with violations of union rules.

They also politically adapted to the contractors - gone was the union's socialistic calls for workers power, to be replaced with unconditional support for the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine that ruled the City of New York (on those rare occasions when the unions criticized the Democrats, it was strictly from the right).

They also began to embrace the system of nepotism and favoritism that preserved the steady jobs for workers who had ties to the bosses - relatives, friends, people from the boss' neighborhood and people who were from the same ethnic group as the boss.

This also meant fully embracing the contractor racism that locked Black men totally out of most trades, and segregated Black carpenters, laborers and bricklayers to jobs in the ghetto.

By the 1960's, New York City's building trades unions, at least on the surface, appeared to be the strongest local unions in the world.

They united 250,000 men (and 0 women - not for nothing were most of these unions called "brotherhoods") in their ranks - a membership which included virtually every single construction worker in the Greater New York City area.

There were internal weaknesses - most of which were invisible to casual observers at the time, but which became quite glaring just a few years later.

The most notable issue was the fact that the leaders of most of these unions were utterly under the thumb of an Italian American criminal syndicate called cosa nostra ("this thing of ours").

The five families of cosa nostra were the dominant economic institution in the New York construction industry, and had been for the previous 40 years. They helped the larger contractors protect themselves from competition from smaller firms trying to break into the business by "lowballing" (charging exessively low prices to take work away from their stronger competitors), and they decided which of the major firms got to bid on which jobs.

The "wiseguys" - racketeers who were "made men" (full members) of the families - used the unions as an enforcement mechanism to punish those companies that tried to take work away from the connected firms, and also used their control of the unions to protect the major contractors from jobsite resistance by workers to labor abuses.

This at the time appeared to be the principle strength of the construction unions but in the end it's was the primary reason for their collapse.

More immediate and visible than the long term dryrot related to the gangsterism was the open syphillitic sore of these union's blatant in-your-face racism.

Some, like the Plumbers, actually had clauses in their constitutions barring all but White men from membership.

Others, like the Lathers and the Electricians, required that all new members be sponsored by a current member to be allowed to join the union and get a job in the industry (which, in practice, restricted applicants for membership to the relatives of current members).

Still others, like the Laborers and the Carpenters, Jim Crow segregated their Black membership.

The Carpenters Union confined almost all of their Black carpenters to one local, Harlem's local union 1788.

The Laborers Union confined most of their Black laborers to Housewreckers local 95, a demolition local who's members did the hardest, most dangerous and lowest paying job in their trade - tearing down apartment buildings brick by brick with crowbars and sledgehammers.

Since the New York City of the early 1960's was fast becoming a heavily Black and Puerto Rican town, having all White crews working in heavily minority neighborhoods began to cause considerable resentment.

As early as 1959, one construction union, Electricians local 3, had seen the potential for a problem here - due to the fact that the local's president, Harry Van Arsdale, also ran the New York City Central Labor Council, and was acutely aware of the growing labor unrest among workers of color.

The Electricians set up a token integration program - 200 out of the 1,200 1st year apprentices they admitted in 1959 would be selected from the general public.

The other 1,000 would be the sons or nephews of current members who had been sponsored by their relatives - as had been Electricians Union practice since the 1890's.

But, since those 200 spots were not reserved for Black and Puerto Rican workers, most of those positions were taken by White men who wanted to get in the trade, but who didn't have a relative in the union.

No provision was made for Black or Puerto Rican men who were experienced non union electricians who wanted to come in the union at the journeylevel.

Of course, no women were admitted to the electricians apprenticeship - not even White women. Nor was a single one of the several thousand women who worked at low wage electrical factory jobs in local 3's B division allowed to switch over to the much higher paying construction electricians jobs in the A division.

Even by the low standards of 1959, local 3's tokenism was nowhere near good enough.

By 1963, sporadic picketing of all White jobsites in Black neighborhoods began - in some cases, these protests were led by local NAACP chapters, but the biggest rallies, at Harlem Hospital and other Northern Manhattan jobsites, were led by members of a maoist communist group called the Progressive Labor Party.

The PLP had set up an organization called the Harlem Unemployed Committee, led by the party's vice chairman, an unemployed non union Black electrician named William (Bill) Epton. HUC was the entity that actually led the jobsite protests.

The HUC paved the way, but the movement to desegregate the construction industry really crystalized after the Harlem Rebellion of July 1964.

The rebellion was triggered by the murder of high school student James Powell by White police officer Lt Thomas Gilligan.

This wasn't the first racist police atrocity in Harlem - far from it - but it happened during a period of political ferment in the state's largest Black community.

The Civil Rights Movement was in it's 10th year - and, while the movement had won truly great victories against legal segregation in the South, it had proved unable to achieve even modest victories against economic racism in the North.

But, it had radicalized millions of working class Blacks, who were willing to fight against racism by any means necessary.

Among those millions of Black workers who were politically in motion, a few had become consciously revolutionary, and, suddenly, they had a receptive audience.

The police murder of Powell was merely the trigger that set off an explosion that had been building up for years.

The radicals were there to fan the flames - specifically, the PLP.

Their Vice Chairman Bill Epton converted the Harlem Unemployed Committee into the Harlem Defense Council, a united front organization led by PLP'ers but open to any Harlemite who was willing to fight the cops.

Within hours of the murder, the HDC quickly printed up wanted posters with Lt Gilligan's photo on them - and, once the street fighting began, they did their best to give leadership and direction to the revolt.

The revolt surged for 3 days - and spread across the city to Bedford Stuyvessant, the huge Black ghetto in Central Brooklyn.

The NYPD, initially driven off the streets by the revolt, responded with a wave of repression - killing 2 Black civilians, hospitalizing 36 and clubbing hundreds more.

The City of New York followed up by getting a court order declaring a "State of Emergency" in Manhattan from 110th St to 155th St, river to river. All civil liberties were suspended in this zone - in blatant violation of the state and US constitutions.

Black leaders in Harlem from all ends of the ideological spectrum - ranging from the liberal NAACP to Black nationalist groups like Malcolm X's Organization of African American Unity and Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam - formed a "Unity Council" in responce to the police repression.

But, rather than resist, the Unity Council did their best to support the State of Emergency and help the police peacefully end the rebellion.

However, the PLP/HDC had different ideas.

In the waning hours of the rebellion, while most other forces in Harlem were trying to negotiate a surrender to the NYPD (and most of New York's White left had abandoned Harlem to it's fate) they had attempted to organize Block Committees to fight the cops apartment building by apartment building.

Once the fighting stopped, they were the first group in Harlem to defy the State of Emergency, by calling a peaceful public rally 10 days after the revolt had ended.

The NYPD responded by sending 27,000 cops (basically every cop in the entire city) to stop the HDC - and, before the rally could even begin, Epton was arrested on charges of "criminal anarchy" (a law originally intended to stop anarchist and communist led strikes during World War I - after 5 years of legal battles, Epton would end up serving 1 year in jail on that charge).

But that wasn't the end of it - the Harlem Rebellion sent shock waves through every Black ghetto in America, and sparked a series of urban revolts throughout the rest of the decade.

Unlike the nonviolent protests in the South, which could be ignored, concessions had to be made to stop these uprisings.

To keep the ghettoes from burning, the federal government passed two laws - the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Executive Order 11246.

Only one section of the Civil Rights Act dealt with occupational discrimination, but EO 11246 was entirely devoted to barring hiring discrimination by federal contractors on jobs worth more than $ 10,000.

Of course, these concessions were on paper - and it took further struggles to get them carried out in the real world.

So, before the ink was even dry on the Civil Rights Act and EO 11246, revolts broke out in Newark and in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles - and those rebellions were far larger than the Harlem revolt, and took far greater force to supress.

The feds still dragged their feet, for another two years.

New York City authorities responded with more Van Arsdale-style tokenism.

The City and the Building Trades Council approached the Workers Defense League, a Socialist Party front organization, and had them set up a "training program" to select a few Black and Puerto Rican young men to be apprentices.

This program was based on the same racist tokenistic assumptions as Van Arsdale's plan.

For one thing, it didn't make any provision for Blacks and Puerto Ricans who already had trades experience.

Also, it was based on the racist assumption that workers of color were jobless because they were stupid, rather than because of systematic racism by unions and contractors.

And, of course, there was the matter-of-fact sexism that totally excluded women from the program.

The only difference here was that the Socialist Party had put famed civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, the architect of the 1963 March On Washington in charge of this racist program.

Despite the civil rights window dressing, the WDL's training program only found jobs for 100 Black and Latino apprentices - in an industry with over 250,000 workers!

The rulers' tokenism just wasn't cutting it, so, in July 1967, they faced their biggest uprising yet - the Detroit Rebellion.

Around 50,000 Black Detroiters participated in the revolt.

They overwhelmed the Detroit Police, Wayne County Sheriffs Department, Michigan State Police and even the Michigan National Guard - President Lyndon Johnson was forced to send in the US Army's 101st Airborne Division (an elite unit specially trained for irregular warfare against urban guerillas) to crush the rebellion.

In the wake of the Detroit Rebellion, a number of maoist communist influenced urban guerilla organizations sprung up in America's ghettoes.

By far the most famous was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense - organized in the Black ghetto of Oakland but soon spreading to just about every urban Black community in the country.

The Panthers wern't alone - there was also the United Slaves, the Young Lords Party (a Puerto Rican group), la Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, the Brown Berets (both of which were Mexican American organizations) and the American Indian Movement.

Corporate America and it's government had to make concessions, through something President Lyndon Johnson called the "War On Poverty".

This included the creation of Community Based Organizations - government funded privatized social services agencies run by middle class Blacks, Latinos, Asians or American Indians, who would try to calm urban unrest with job training and social programs.

It also included giving Black workers jobs in previously all White industries.

The automobile industry led the way here (since the fires of rebellion had been burning literally outside their plant gates) but Black workers also got jobs in steel, aerospace, shipbuilding, trucking and other industries - and, government agencies also stepped up minority hiring.

Unfortunately for the rulers, a lot of the young Black workers they hired had been veterans of the urban rebellions - and had come to be influenced by the maoist groups that had come out of the rebellion.

They brought their communistic politics with them when they came to the factories.

Soon, wildcat strikes broke out (aimed both at the companies for their abusive labor practices and at the unions for failing to fight back against the bosses) and organized dissident groups were set up by Black workers.

Black workers at Chrysler's Dodge Main plant in Detroit led the way here - they set up a group called DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) which soon set up similar organizations around Detroit, both among auto workers at other plants and also among teamsters at United Parcel Service, printers at the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press and workers in the city hospitals (these groups set up a federation called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers).

Detroit was only the most well organized area - there was similar Black worker resistance in factories around the country.

This massive resistance by Black workers forced the government to, finally, enforce the Civil Rights Act and EO 11246.

Here in New York City, Liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay, facing labor unrest from largely minority city, transit and hospital workers and fearing another 1964 in the streets, had to take action.

So, the City of New York set about trying to enforce EO 11246 without alienating the contractors, construction unions or White construction workers.

Basically, this meant yet another round of Van Arsdale-Rustin style tokenism.

The test case was the Hunts Point Terminal Market job. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had torn down the old Washington Street Market - to clear sites for the World Trade Center and the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The City had relocated the wholesale produce merchants from Washington Street to a vacant swamp area of the South Bronx called Hunts Point, where a brand new complex of stores and warehouses was to be built.

Since the residential area closest to the Hunts Point Market site was overwhelmingly Puerto Rican, and the site was very close to Harlem, this seemed like the perfect place to make a big public relations show of integrating the trades.

Every contractor on the site was required to hire at least one or two Black or Latin workers, to make it look like the job was integrated.

The plumbing and heating contractor was able to find 4 Puerto Ricans and a Black man , all of whom were experienced plumbers.

These guys were actually overqualified for the jobs they were offered - all five of the men were licensed plumbing contractors, and each one could have run the job, instead of just being a worker.

But, they were willing to take a step backwards, if it meant they'd get to join the Plumbers Union, and recieve the high pay and good benefits that union plumbers get.

But, having ANY plumbers of color on the site was too much for Manhattan/Bronx Plumbers local 2 (remember, local 2's parent union actually had a Jim Crow clause in it's constitution explicitly restricting union membership to caucasians).

Plumbers local 2 actually called a strike on every union jobsite in Manhattan and the Bronx just to drive those 5 men off the Hunts Point job - the first walkout the union had called in over 70 years.

The excuse was that they were non union.

But, they were employed by a union contractor, and were willing - in fact eager - to join the union. All the union had to do was to cash their initiation fee checks and let them in the local.

This strike had an impact far beyond Hunts Point - since local 2 just happend to be the home local of AFL-CIO President George Meany.

It also wasn't the only strike in New York called by a largely White union fighting against Black and Latino civil rights.

Just a few months later, the United Federation of Teachers shut down the city's public schools for over 3 months in a bid to block the Board of Education from allowing Black and Latin parents to have democratic control over their children's schools.

The walkout of the 40,000 union teachers far dwarfed the strike of the 2,500 plumbers - and the UFT, unlike the Plumbers, could at least hide it's racism behind the shield of colorblind liberalism

Unlike the conservative Democrats who ran the Plumbers, the Teachers Union leaders were mostly members of the Social Democratic Party, many of them had a history of supporting the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the union's second in command had a Black husband.

Consequently, the UFT leadership actually won it's demands (at the price of alienating the majority of Black and Latin parents in the city for the next quarter century).

The Plumbers Union leaders - who were unable to hide the open racism of their job action - were not able to stop tokenism.

Their hate strike mobilized the disgust that Black and Latino workers had long held against segregated unions.

This mass anger forced the leaders of unions with large minority memberships (Int'l Ladies Garment Workers, Teamsters, Transport Workers, RWDSU Local 1199, AFSCME District Council 37, United Auto Workers District 65 ect) to pressure the City to expand it's limited integration program in the trades - otherwise, those union chiefs might face a Detroit-style workplace revolt in their own labor organizations.

So, Lindsay had to expand the integration program.

He created something called "The New York Plan".

This was a sweeping declaration that required every contractor who did business with the City of New York set up an affirmative action plan, on pain of being barred from municipal contracting.

To help the contractors integrate, the City and an employers association called the Private Industry Council recruited a pool of 4,000 Black and Latino men who would become "trainees".

Trainees were apprentices....kindasorta.

They would recieve the same pay and benefits as regular union apprentices, but they were not union members, could be put in segregated all-minority trade schools rather than the regular union run apprentice schools, would only get work once all the union apprentices had jobs, could be subject to stricter graduation requirements than regular union apprentices and, even after graduation as journeylevel workers, they could be barred from joining the union in their craft.

Of course, if trainees who completed the program were barred from joining the union as a journeylevel worker, that would effectively block them from further employment in the industry (since, at that time, New York jobsites were still basically 100% union).

Also, all minority workers recruited into the New York Plan were to come in as trainees, even if they had journeylevel construction work experience.

And, on private sector jobs, the contractors didn't have to have a single trainee - they could keep those jobs lily-White if they wished.

As grossly inadequate as the New York Plan was, it was still too much for the bosses and the unions - so, in 1969, Lindsay cut the program from 4,000 trainees to 800, and the program ruled that unions who didn't let a single trainee program graduate join the union as a journeylevel worker were still in compliance!

This was still too much for some of the more openly racist unions.

The two main trades in the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) industry were the first to resist. Steamfitters local 638 (a sister local of Plumbers local 2) and Sheet Metal Workers local 28 filed suit to block the program - acting on behalf of the HVAC contractors, who wanted to keep their companies all White.

Lathers local 46 also filed suit (lathers are ironworkers who install black iron ceiling supports, metal mesh for plaster walls and ceilings and steel rebar inside of concrete structures - none of the contractors in those industries wanted to integrate either).

The Steamfitters, Sheet Metal Workers and Lathers lawsuits would literally drag on for decades (they're actually still filing motions to this very day - ironically, long after all 3 of those unions were forced to integrate).

While racist unions and contractors thought 800 trainees was too many, Black and Latin workers thought that wasn't nearly enough.

The Harlem Unemployed Committee, which had survived the repression after the 1964 uprising and the persecution and jailing of Bill Epton, stepped up at this point.

The HUC had broken it's ties with the PLP.

This was because the party had grown far from it's working class routes.

Originally founded in 1959 by a group of blue collar maoist oriented dissidents in the old pro-Moscow Communist Party USA, the PLP had been rooted in New York City's factories and railroad yards.

But, during the late 1960's, PLP's membership base had radically shifted.

The party had signed up several hundred young White college students who had been radicalized by the Vietnam War.

After a few years, a party that had been a largely working class racially integrated organization became an overwhelmingly White and middle class group.

To make matters worse, the now mostly White and middle class PLP had decided to end it's previous political support for the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

Unfortunately, PLP broke their ties with the Panthers and the Lords while they were facing a murderous assault from the NYPD here in New York and from the FBI and local law enforcement agencies all over America.

At the same time that PLP had abandoned the Panthers and the Lords while they were under fire, the party formed a bloc with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical White youth organization. It was a one sided alliance of unequal partners that was based on PLP's unconditional and uncritical support of SDS.

It seemed really insensitive, borderline racist and not particularly marxist for a party that claimed to be communist to turn it's back on fellow revolutionaries under armed attack by the capitalist state - and worse yet, to publicly attack those revolutionaries in the pages of Challenge, PLP's newspaper.

That racism seemed all the more glaring considering that, at the same time PLP was publicly criticising their embattled comrades in the Panthers and the Lords, it was dead silent on it's far greater differences with SDS.

The shift away from the industrial working class, and the abandonment of the Panthers and the Lords, alienated a lot of the party's original working class members, especially the Black workers.

This included the half dozen PLP'ers in the Harlem club, all but one of whom were either construction workers or the wives of construction workers.

The Harlem comrades - especially Epton and his close associate, PLP sympathizer Jim Haughton, a former aide to Sleeping Car Porters Union President A. Phillip Randolph - had also been heavily influenced by the Panthers and the Lords, and took the dropping of support for those groups while their members were being murdered in the streets by the cops very personally.

Consequently, the Harlem club, and the Harlem Unemployed Committee it controlled, seceded from the PLP. The former Harlem PLP club and the HUC also turned their backs on the idea of a multiracial revolutionary movement, and fully embraced Black nationalism.

The now independent group used the HUC as the foundation for a Black construction workers organization called Harlem Fightback, led by Epton and Haughton.

Fightback would recruit unemployed Black construction workers, and, instead of the old ineffective strategy of picketing the jobsites from the outside, they would have the workers enter the jobsites, usually with arms in hand (typicaly less than lethal weapons like baseball bats or chains), and force the workers to stop production until the bosses agreed to hire minority workers.

These "shapeups" (named after the common construction industry practice known as shaping up, that is, workers going to a jobsite or a union office to look for employment) were a novel tactic - and a very effective one, due to construction economics.

All buildings are constructed using borrowed money. The owners are paying interest every day the building is under construction, and they can't pay a penny of that money back until the building is completed and available to be rented.

That's why construction jobs are tightly scheduled, and the owners - and the General Contractors (GC's) who represent the owners interests on the site - are always in a rush to get the job done as quickly as possible.

The subcontractors - the firms that actually build the various elements that make up the building - have money problems of their own.

They have to compete with other companies to get the work (and, at that time, they usually had to pay 2% of their gross income on each job to the cosa nostra family they were under the protection of, since the gangsters decided which company got to bid on which job at what price), so they often have to sharply reduce their profit margins to win the bid to do the work.

The subs are also expected to comply with the production schedule set by the owner and the GC - and, if they fall behind, there are often financial penalties. Also, many GC's hold out on paying the subs for as long as possible.

On many construction jobs, even one day of lost production could cause substantial losses for the owners and GC's - and might even bankrupt some of the more marginal subcontractors.

So, when faced with a shut down jobsite occupied by angry, armed and unemployed Black workers, and the possibility that an entire day's production might be lost, the bosses would relent and hire some minority workers.

Usually, either the GC or the concrete or masonry sub would hire a Black laborer, or the concrete sub or one of the carpentry subs would hire a Black carpenter.

This was due to two reasons - the bulk of Black construction workers in Harlem were either carpenters or laborers (trades which were heavily Black in the South, and all Black in the English speaking Carribbean - the places where most Black New Yorkers had originally migrated from) and those unions had the least restictive rules about taking in new members.

The Carpenters, the construction union that was the oldest and, consequently, had the strongest vestiges of it's utopian socialist heritage still written into it's bylaws, had a rule that any carpenter who could get hired by a contractor had an automatic right to join the union immediately. It didn't matter what race they were, or if they had family in the union - get the job and they got the union book, all they had to do was pay the initiation fee.

The carpenters were also the least segregated of the New York construction unions - they actually had an all Black local in Harlem, as well as many Black members in the cabinet shops that fabricated custom woodwork for the jobsites. So, there was less of a barrier to Blacks joining this union than there were in just about any other union with the exception of the Laborers Union.

The Laborers, the youngest construction union, and the only one who had no socialist heritage whatsoever, since the union was founded by gangsters, had similar rules, but for different reasons. The laborers trade is the most dangerous and the lowest paying, so there had always been large numbers of Black laborers, particularly in demolition.

Fightback's tactic proved very effective - they were literally kicking down doors for Black workers, and, unlike the New York Plan, those workers would come in as union members at full journeylevel pay, rather than as rightless trainees barred from union membership and geting paid apprentice wages.

Fightback was very lucky timingwise - 1969 was an exceptionally good year for minority labor activism in this city.

The City of New York had just granted recognition to AFSCME's District Council 37 as the representative for 80,000 mayoral agency workers (the remaining 20,000 City agency workers were divided among several other unions - but most of them ended up in Teamsters local 237).

Just one year before that, the League of Voluntary Hospitals (the association for most of the city's not for profit hospitals) had been compelled to recognize Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union local 1199 as the union covering 50,000 nonprofessional hospital workers.

Around the same time, the owners of nursing homes and private hospitals had to recognize Service Employees International Union local 144 as the representative of 20,000 health care workers.

Allthough all four of those unions were autocratic institutions run by men who had never even worked in the industries they represented, (and, except for SEIU local 144, they had White dominated leaderships) their memberships were overwhelmingly Black and Latina women - which forever changed the complexion of New York City's labor movement.

As those victories were celebrated at the top, a wave of on the job resistance swept New York City's manufacturing workforce.

This wave of wildcat strikes and work slowdowns had it's epicenter in the electrical appliance and office equipment plants in Long Island City, Queens.

However, their was widespread worker resistance in all the major manufacturing districts in the city - the garment sweatshops in Chinatown and the Garment District, the newspaper printing plants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the commercial printing shops along Varick St in Lower Manhattan, the machine shops of the Northern Bronx and Long Island City, the knitting mills of Bushwick and Ridgewood, the breweries of East Harlem and Brooklyn ect.

The varous unions in these plants (ILGWU, United Auto Workers, Teamsters, United Steel Workers, Machinists, Electricians, Int'l Union of Electrical Workers, Brewery Workers, Meat Cutters, Clothing Workers, Fur & Leather Workers, Printing Trades Council ect) had proved absolutely unable to supress worker resistance in the plants.

There was another development that year, that, while seemingly unrelated at the time, would later have a major impact on the desegregation of the construction trades - the repeal of Rent Control.

Mayor Lindsay had launched a program to subsidize the city's real estate developers, and to finance large scale development of luxury housing across the city.

Part of that program involved the City borrowing $ 792 million dollars from the Wall Street banks short term at high interest, and lending it out to the developers at a loss - long term at low interest.

Another part of the program involved repealing the Rent Control Law - which had been passed in 1948 during a post war wave of labor strife. Rent Control greatly restricted rent increases, and gave most working class New Yorkers relatively low rents.

Lindsay replaced that with the Rent Stabilization Law.

Under Rent Stabilization, folks who had moved into their apartments when the Rent Control Law was still in effect would keep their old low rents permanently, as long as they kept their apartments. They would also be able to pass on the low rents to their decendents, as long as they stayed in the apartments.

But, if, for any reason, they gave up the apartment, the landlord could jack the rent up, and would be able to raise the rent every year. It didn't matter WHY the tenant moved out (a loophole which New York landlords would brutally take advantage of in the next few years).

But, the prospect of rising rents, along with that $ 792 million dollars of cheap credit that was guaranteed by the City caused a building boom, with luxury apartment houses rising all over the city.

The City even gave the developers a whole island - Welfare Island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, the home of the city TB asylum, an abandoned leper colony, a long term invalild care center and a city jail.

The developers, for obvious reasons, renamed the place "Roosevelt Island" and were building several dozen luxury hirise apartment buildings and a strip mall.

This boom was further accelerated by governmental construction projects. The Port Authority's World Trade Center project which was building 15 million square feet of office space in the heart of the Financial District.

The City of New York had several huge jobs ongoing as well - the North River Sewage Plant and City College's North Academic Complex in Harlem, the Boro of Manhattan Community College - as well as dozens of small jobs all over the city.

This building boom meant it was possible at that moment for the unions to take in new workers without significantly reducing job opportunities for the existing membership, which minimized White worker resistance to the minority shapeups.

As the industry expanded, so did Fightback, which now had a chapter in Brooklyn in addition to their original base in Harlem.

However, dark clouds were on the horizon - both for the construction unions and for working class Blacks and Latinos.

Mayor Lindsay's repeal of Rent Control had created turmoil in the city's working class neighborhoods.

Landlords who wanted to take advantage of the new, higher and annually increased rents had to remove their Rent Control-era tenants, who's rents were grandfathered under the old law.

They resorted to open terrorism to force those tenants out.

In predominantly White parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, these landlords began tosystematically neglect repair and maintenance on their buildings, fire supers and porters and allow criminals to prey on their tenants (in some cases, they hired the crooks as supers and/or let them stay in the vacant super's apartments).

In Black and Latino neigborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx and in White and minority neighborhoods in Queens, landlords outright destroyed their buildings by hiring "torches" (professional arsonists) to burn them down - usually with the tenants still inside!

The landlords one sided class war on working class apartment dwellers killed hundreds of tenants and several dozen firefighters, hospitalized several thousand tenants and a few hundred firefighers (with some being scarred for life by severe burns) and drove over 100,000 working class New Yorkers from their homes.

The buildings which had their working class tenants driven out were remodled or torn down and replaced to make them into housing for the affluent. This came to be called "gentrification" (a British term, coined to describe a similar war against working class tenants going on in England's major cities at the same time).

But these wern't the only problems facing the New York working class.

The wave of militancy in New York's factories had backfired on the factory workers.

The workers showed an admirable fighting spirit, and were quite creative in the tactics they used to fight the bosses on the factory floor. But, since they didn't have any kind of unified anti-capitalist leadership, their jobsite resistance never became a movement that could challenge their unions' pro-capitalist leaderships or could link up with other workers in struggle elsewhere.

They were strong enough to defy their bosses and the leaders of their unions, but they couldn't go past that.

And, since their unions couldn't control them, the bosses decided to move their plants to places where the unions could - or, better yet, where there were no unions at all.

The US Navy started this trend, which shut down NYC's oldest and largest factory, the 20,000 worker Brooklyn Navy Yard, in 1969 rather than deal with militant New York metal trades workers (they moved their warship building operations to privately owned yards in the South, Midwest, New England and the West Coast).

The garment bosses came next - and then the breweries, and the appliance plants, and the printing shops, and the commercial bakeries, and the knitting mills ect ect ect.

Between 1970 and 1975, 289,000 workers - one out of every three factory workers in the city - were permanently laid off.

This was not only an economic body blow to working class New Yorkers, it also taught them a political lesson - fight the bosses and they will crush you.

The unions reinforced that lesson with their utter refusal to in any way resist the mass layoffs - and their agressive efforts to sabotage any kind of worker resistance to the elimintion of so many union jobs.

Special dishonorable mention in this regard goes to the Socialist Party gangsters who ran the International Ladies Garment Workers Union - those union bosses used the mass layoffs as a pretext to extract what amounted to legalized payoffs (the lawyers called it "liquidated damages") from the garment bosses who were moving their plants out of town.

In 1975, things got even worse - the City of New York went bankrupt, due to the $ 792 milllion dollar low interest long term loans to the developers that I mentioned earlier.

Basically, the high interest short term loans that had financed them came due, the City couldn't pay the bankers, and the bankers had the State Legislature take the City into recievership, with a bankers junta called the Municipal Assistance Corporation as the recievers.

The bankers imposed mass layoffs on City workers, and the bankers enlisted the help of the leaders of the largest municipal workers unions - AFSCME DC 37, Teamsters local 237 and Transport Workers Union local 100 - to sabotage worker resistance.

Due to the treachery of the leaders of those unions, the few attempts of City workers to fight back were utterly defeated.

Besides the mass layoffs and the catastrophic loss of power by the city's unions that hurt the entire New York City working class, Black and Latino workers also had to deal with the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement.

The more radical wing of the civil rights movement - the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party - had been smashed by police repression.

A number of those activists had been murdered by the cops, others were in jail, still others in hiding, and the organizations they'd built had disintegrated.

And the more moderate wing of the movement had been brought off, through the Community Based Organizations (CBO's) created by President Johnson's War on Poverty.

These CBO's were run by Black or Latin (or, in the case of Chinatown, Asian) middle class professionals who had roots in the civil rights movement, but aspirations towards political respectability.

The role of these CBO's would be to channel the discontent of low income workers of color in the ghettoes away from resistance.

The CBO's would administer social service programs, and make people compete to get services (with assistance going only to those clients who were most submissive to the managers of the CBO's).

When necessary the CBO's would also infiltrate, sabotage from within and destroy any attempts by working class people of color to resist oppression.

In return, the CBO executives and board members would get high salaries and all of the perks that go with corporate management - and, a lower tier of middle class people of color would get patronage jobs as caseworkers, vocational instructors and program coordinators.

And, of course, any CBO bosses or social services staff who ever forgot that their job was to prevent working class minorities from fighting institutional racism would quickly get their agency defunded, and find themselves out of a job.

Between the dramatic destruction of groups like the Panthers - and the much larger scale but less visible buying off of the more moderate wing of the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement - systematic resistance to American racism pretty much died out.

Fightback was able to survive this collapse - it neither got destroyed nor bought off.

But it did end up being isolated, due to the destruction of the Civil Rights Movement, the collapse of workplace militancy and the end of mainstream union expansion.

Fightback also largely abandoned most of the vestiges of it's communist political heritage, and decayed into a type of armed labor union - willing to accomodate to the continued existance of capitalism, and the right of contractors to profitably function under that system, in return for racial desegregation on the jobsites.

On the surface, it seemed like, despite the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement, the movement Fightback started was stronger than ever.

The movement had even grown.

Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), a Chinatown CBO run by college student members of the maoist Communist Workers Party who had submerged themselves within the New York County Democratic Party machine, set up a group called the Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA).

CSWA was run by pro maoist neighborhood labor activist Wing Lam, and the bulk of that group's labor activism involved an independent restaurant workers union called the 318 Restaurant Workers Union.

But CSWA also operated the Chinese Construction Workers Association (CCWA).

The maoist sympathizer Wing and ex maoists Haughton and Epton had close ties and a similar left wing nationalist world outlook, consequently CCWA was basically modeled on Fightback.

In fact, CCWA's first big campaign, desegregating the crew on the Confucious Plaza job, was actually assisted by Fightback.

It was a big victory - 27 Chinese carpenters and laborers got union books due to that struggle - but even at it's birth, CCWA was already deteriorating politically.

Due to the heavy middle class influence from CCWA and CSWA's parent association, AAFE, the groups called for an alliance of Chinese contractors and Chinese workers, to jointly fight the White contractors and White led unions.

Of course, that concept totally ignored the fact that contractors and workers are class enemies, irregardless of race. This even applies if both boss and worker are members of oppressed ethnic groups, and if they both experence racism from other members of their respective classes.

Within a few years, CCWA's nationalistic calls for a popular front between minority workers and contractors would become the dominant ideology in minority construction workers organizations.

Another Fightback-type organization, United Third Bridge, sprang up among Puerto Rican electricians.

UTB didn't do shapeups, primarily because Electricians local 3's Joint Industry Board closed shop hiring hall system basically prohibited contractors from hiring electricians off the street.

Their main focus was on trying to desegregate the Joint Board's hiring system - and they looked to lawsuits rather than resistance by electricians as the way to get it.

UTB also sought recognition as an official ethnic caucus in the union, alongside the Irish, Italian and Jewish "clubs" that already existed.

Tommy Van Arsdale did not respond kindly to workers of color trying to challenge his union from within, no matter how timid or legalistic their methods were.

Many UTB members were denied Joint Board job referrals, some to the point where they were essentially blacklisted from the industry.

And two unfortunate UTB leaders, Manny Labido and John Rodriguez, were murdered by person or persons unknown under mysterious circumstances.

Meanwhile, Fightback's Brooklyn leader, Kelly Harrison, seceded from the group. His new organization was called (what else?) Brooklyn Fightback.

As these groups begin to spinter, ironically enough, they come to be collectively known among construction workers as "The Coalition".

The late 1970's become the golden years for the Coalitions, due in large part to a sudden sharp decline in the power of the Building Trades.

Nationally, the post World War II economic boom ended in 1973, marking the begining of the permanent economic crisis that we're still in to this day.

Due to that crisis the major banks and corporations (outfits like GM, Exxon, Ford, US Steel, Citibank, Chase Manhattan ect) - the folks who financed most of this country's major construction jobs, recognized that they desperately needed to reduce labor costs on their construction projects.

They also recognized that if they left this matter up to their contractors, it just would not happen - since those firms would not benefit from the labor cost reductions, they'd just have to pass it on to the big boys.

To that end, the CEO's of those prominent Fortune 500 corporations set up a junta called the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable (a name later simplified to "Business Roundtable").

The Business Roundtable's goal was to deunionize as much of the commerical construction sector as possible - and, with astonishing speed, they did.

By 1978, in most of America outside of the big Eastern, Midwestern and West Coast cities, the construction unions had been largely smashed.

These powerful clients had forced their contractors to end their ties with the unions or to "go double breasted" - that is, to set up non union subsidiaries, and transfer work from the unionized rump of their companies to the non union portion.

Even in those cities where the unions survived, they were hurt too - since the decline of the trades in most of the country had weakened the international unions that they, and the collapsed locals, were all affiliated to.

Here in New York City, the Building Trades had other problems.

The completion of the World Trade Center in 1972 dumped 15 million square feet of unrented office space in a market that already had a high vacancy rate.

Even with the City, state and the Port Authority taking up lots of office space they did not need, the opening of the towers glutted the market for office space, and caused that sector to basically shut down.

The worldwide recession of 1973 - triggered by the Middle East oil embargo and the end of the post WW II economic boom - made the crisis even deeper.

And, when the City of New York went bankrupt in 1975, publicly subsidized luxury residential work and public work for the City, Board of Education and the Transit Authority came to an immediate halt.

This plunged the NYC Building Trades into their deepest crisis since the late 1930's and the mass layoffs sent much of their membership plummeing from middle income prosperity to the ragged edge of poverty almost overnight.

Most of the city's quarter million unionized construction workers were plunged into chronic underemployment - with about 20% of the workers actually driven out of the trades by the unemployment and forced into other industries to get work.

This put those workers in an awful bind - since, as I pointed out above, there was widespread layoffs in every industry in the city at the time.

Nobody realized it at the time, but this was the begining of the end of the golden years of New York construction unionism. 35 years of privilige and prosperity had come to an end.

Initially, the Coalitions were hit very hard by this sudden economic collapse too - but, for these minority worker groups, this actually marked the begining of their short lived glory years.

In 1978, work began to pick up.

The City's new mayor, Conservative Democrat Ed Koch, had a mandate from the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Wall Street interests it represented.

Koch's task was to restore a sense of normalcy to a city in chaos.

New York City was in turmoil in the late 1970's.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were unemployed and many of them had also been displaced from their apartments by landlord terrorism.

Many of the more agressive young men among the jobless had resorted to robbery, burglary or drug dealing as ways of making a living, causing an unprecedented crime wave.

The city was on the verge of a social explosion - and any little spark could set it off.

The July 1977 rebellion showed this clearly. Negligence by Con Edison, the city's private utility company, had caused most of the city to lose power for 3 days - and as soon as the lights went off, a wave of looting spread through the city's ghettoes.

Wall Street needed somebody to restore order in New York City, and that was Ed Koch's first order of business.

One very major part of restoring order involved rebuilding the acres of burned out tenements in Harlem, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Southeast Queens.

Most of the fires had stopped when the city construction subsidies did, but the ruins left behind by landlord greed were a massive scar blighting the landscape - not to mention a fire hazard that threatened nearby occupied properties.

Koch created a new mayoral agency to resolve this problem, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

HPD would confiscate abandoned buildings from their owners (using their failure to pay property tax as a pretext) and then either renovate them into apartments or tear them down and replace them with single family homes or townhouses.

MAC felt this task was very important - the problem was, they wanted this job done as cheaply as possible. So, they directed the City to sharply reduce construction costs on these jobs.

Now, the City couldn't get the banks to charge them less interest on their construction loans, nor could they get the lumberyards to sell them building materials more cheaply.

Even if they could have done that, they didn't want to - since that would involve making rich people lose money.

However, they could reduce labor costs - since it would be workers, rather than the wealthy, who'd be losing money and that was ideologically acceptable.

Of course, reducing public works wages was illegal, thanks to the federal Davis Bacon Act of 1930 and the "little Davis Bacon Acts" in New York City and New York State, which set a wage floor (called "prevailing wages") on public sector construction.

The very clever folks at HPD came up with a simple yet brilliant idea.

They would give the abandoned buildings to the CBO's, and let the CBO's be the developer of record.

Since CBO's were private companies (and not for profit private companies at that), they were exempt from Davis Bacon prevailing wage requirements.

Since these renovation projects were now private sector jobs (at least on paper) the City had a legal way to pay substandard wages, and get the jobs done for rock bottom prices.

There was suprisingly little resistance to this from the Building Trades.

In part this was due to the body blows that these unions had suffered during the recession - some of the mechanical trades had 80% unemployment and even the carpenters and laborers typically had a majority of their members out of work.

But there was another, deeper, structural problem.

For many years, cosa nostra had ruled the industry through the unions. The wiseguys had decided which companies got which jobs, at which price, then made sure that the firms who lost out on a job this month got another job next month and protected all the connected contractors from competition from outside firms.

Control of the unions ensured that mob connected firms were granted immunity from all but the most severe labor problems and upstarts who tried to muscle into the trade were kept out by agressive, and often extremely violent, union picketing.

These cartels covered just about every branch of the construction business, with different families running different trades.

The construction rackets had existed in one form or another since World War I, when Irish Canadian racketeer Robert Brindell broke a carpenters strike and introduced modern labor racketeering to the building trades. His gang was displaced by Jewish hoodlums during the 1920's - they in turn were driven off by cosa nostra in the 30's.

62 years of gangster domination had greatly degraded the capacity of the building trades to fight off attacks by the bosses or their clients, so they were unprepared for this blatant union busting by HPD.

Worse yet, the Genovese family gangsters who dominated interior wall and ceiling carpentry work had decided to make a deal with the city, at the expense of union carpenters.

Genovese family captain, drywall contractor and Metropolitan New York Drywall Association director Vincent Di Napoli signed a special "renovation" agreement with the union in 1978.

This reduced the pay scale of carpenters on renovation jobs, and defined the term renovation so broadly that most of the jobs in the city came under the substandard agreement. A similar agreement was imposed on the lathers - ironworkers who work with carpenters on drywall jobs.

The drywall tapers union objected to this deal (their union, affiliated with the Painters, was under the control of the Lucchese family, who had their own reasons for objecting to the Genovese's arrangement).

The Genoveses broke the strike by setting up a drywall tapers company union that was affiliated to the Genovese-controlled Plasterers Union, and run by a made member of their family.

But, despite the wiseguys' best efforts, union pay scales weren't quite low enough.

So, the Genovese-linked contractors began using "lumpers" - union carpenters who were paid by how much drywall they installed, rather than by the hour. They got a lot less than union scale, so the contractors could make lower bids.

It wasn't hard to find carpenters who could be forced to work for less than union scale, since so many carpenters were unemployed and desperate for work at any wage.

But that still wasn't good enough - so some of these contractors began to use openly non union workers.

But the Genoveses didn't regulate prices here - HPD controlled the bidding, which meant that anybody could come in and "lowball" (underbid) the union contractors - even those who were paying substandard wages.

And within less than half a decade, the Genoveses wern't in a position to control any segment of the drywall industry. Di Napoli and the contractors and union officiers who worked with him were under investigation by the FBI for labor racketeering.

That probe was the first of many, and it led to the destruction of organized control of construction in New York City - and to government supervision for most of the building trades unions in the city.

This sudden rush of non union contractors into HPD work created a huge opening for the Coalitions.

These companies couldn't get extra labor from the union hall when they needed a lot of people on their jobs, since they wern't signed up with the unions.

But the Coalitions could supply them with lots and lots of labor.

As the amount of non union work grew, so to did the supply of non union workers - including lots of ex union members who could no longer get union jobs.

This expanded role in the industry led to a rapid political decay in the Coalitions.

Contractors who hired Coalition labor would pay Coalition "site coordinators" (the Coalition equivilant of union Business Agents) labor foreman pay to represent their members on the sites.

Soon, many site coordinators were running 9 or 10 jobs - and getting $ 1,000 a week in site coordinator pay from each job.

This created a direct economic tie between the Coalition leaders and the bosses, and led many site coordinators to adopt a pro contractor world outlook.

It also led to a huge lifestyle gap developing between Coalition members who only made $ 30 or $ 40,000 a year and site coordinators who were pulling in $ 500,000 a year or better.

The money rushing in led to the birth of dozens of new Coalitions, eventually over 60 would be organized.

The leaders of these groups didn't have the maoist influenced nationalist politics of Fightback or CCWA, in fact, many of the folks behind these new groups were drug gang leaders, who saw the Coalition as just another racket that, with the advent of the site coordinator system, had suddenly become a whole lot more lucrative.

The gang leaders brought gangster principles of organization with them.

Alongside the classic Coalition tactic of sending armed shapeup crews of jobless workers in old schoolbusses from site to site to confront racist contractors, some Coalitions began to use professional arsonists and hoodlums.

The Coalitions also began to demonstrate union-style favoritism in giving out the jobs that were won through the shapeups.

Instead of giving the first shot at work to the worker who'd been shaping up in the busses for the longest, some Coalitions start giving out the best jobs to the thugs and torches who's influence was rapidly rising in these groups.

Next in line were the family members and mistresses of site coordinators (yes, I said mistresses - the collapse of construction union power in the late 1970's led to the end of sex segregation in the trades - now that these were no longer solidly middle income jobs, they were finally open to women - and even then the jobs were given out in a very sexist way).

And the brothers and sisters on the busses, who risked life and freedom confronting foremen, security guards and cops, were last in line for job opportunities.

These Coalitions began fighting over control of jobs - especially once contractors began hiring squads of Coalition thugs to keep other Coalitions off their jobsites.

There was one positive effect - since it was minority worker organizations that were supplying the labor to most of these jobsites, this led to the rapid racial integration of residential construction, which overnight became a largely Black and Latin field.

Of course, as I noted above about the women, race desegregation only became possible once these jobs had ceased to be decently paying middle income jobs.

The Coalitions also shaped up on union jobsites - especially schools, hospitals and other facilities that were in largely minority residential neighborhoods. This led to a great increase in minority union membership - particularly in the two biggest trades, carpenters and laborers.

But the unions these workers joined were a lot weaker.

The total construction workforce had fallen from an all union force of 250,000 to only 200,000 workers - a quarter of whom were were non union.

Beyond the net loss of 40% of their members, the unions were also bearing the brunt of the FBI probes into organized crime.

The feds had spread beyond drywall, to hirise concrete, painting, window replacement, plumbing, construction delivery trucks ect.

The bankers and GC's had grown tired of years of paying 2% "tribute" to the mob - and, now that the unions were begining to be weakened, the owners wanted to make the unions impose pay and benefit cuts on the workers.

Now, it's not like the wiseguys wern't willing to cut construction worker's pay, but if the mob did it, they, and the contractors they were allied to, would pocket the bulk of the wage cuts.

The owners wanted all that extra profit all to themselves, they didn't want to share it with the subcontractors or the gangsters.

That's why they leaned on the feds, the state and the City to drive out the wiseguys.

As the power of the gangsters crumbled, so did the unions' power.

Sadly, if it wasn't for union decay, the trades would have probably stayed segregated.

But workers of color were entering an industry with a rapidly falling standard of living.

There was still a priviliged, aristocratic layer of full time tradespeople (usually known as "company men") and they still lived very well. But, the great bulk of union workers, the "local men", now faced even deeper economic uncertainty.

Gone were the days whem most local men got a job in April and stayed working til November - now, they were sporadically employed during the season and totally jobless during the winter.

The decline of the unions was momentarily arrested by the commercial building boom of the mid 1980's. Real estate speculators, encouraged by Koch's stabilizing of New York City and by the increasing construction profits that came from falling wages, had begun to put up office buildings all over Manhattan. During the course of the decade, they would double the amount of office building floor space in the city.

These buildings were still built 100% union - so the union members displaced by the deunionization of residential flooded onto these jobs.

There was still room for even more labor on these jobs - some of the workers who came to fill those gaps were displaced union members from areas where the unions had been destroyed by the Business Rountable and others were the relatives or friends of current union members, but a lot of those workers came from the Coalitions, who had become so emboldened as to start sending shapeup busses to downtown jobsites.

The great commercial building boom of the 1980's temporarily stopped the decay of the New York Building Trades unions - and also allowed them to ignore their loss of most of the residential construction market.

Problem was, the boom itself was built on a foundation of sand.

Corporate America no longer needed all that downtown office space - due to a number of factors including - the rise of the desktop computer and other labor saving office automation devices, the mergers that were eliminating many white collar corporate headquarters jobs and the shifting of back office operations away from high priced 1st class office space in central business districts to much cheaper suburban office parks.

So, by 1989, a lot of those new office towers in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn were built but vacant - and that led to another sharp downturn in construction, and mass joblessness for tradespeople.

This downturn wasn't as catastrophic as the 1973 recession, but it was still very severe - especially since the unions had done nothing in the previous decade to reunionize the residential market segment.

And the unions were even less prepared to actually do anything to deal with this crisis.

The Building Trades did have an all trades march across the Brooklyn Bridge and rally in front of City Hall in the dead of winter in 1990.

The Building Trades had as the main slogan of the rally a vague demand that the city, state and federal governments should create construction worker jobs by putting up new public buildings.

Despite the fuzziness of the platform, 20,000 workers did turn out in the dead of winter, and that scared the union chiefs.

Normally, they're only comfortable when the most conservative, aristocratic and pro contractor section of the membership are active in the union - mobilizing the local men is always dangerous, since the union might be forced to fight the contractors on their behalf.

The construction union leaders had other, more personal, problems to deal with too.

The city, state and federal racketeering probes were accelerating, and the feds were making moves towards taking the two largest unions, Carpenters and Laborers, under some form of government recievership. Criminal proceedings were continuing too, and many union leaders faced a very real prospect of both losing their union staff jobs and having to go to prison.

Meanwhile, the site coordinators of the Coalitions had problems of their own.

They had greatly expanded during the boom years, when there were always lots of jobs for their members to be sent to.

Now, work was very slow, and they didn't have enough jobs to go around, but they still had thousands of members, many of whom were armed, looking to them for work, and if they couldn't find jobs for these workers, they would face a sharp crisis within their organizations.

This led the Coalitions to be more agressive about the shapeups (not to mention the activities of their crews of professional thugs). Shapeups at jobsites far outside of the ghettoes became routine - with the busses roaming far into Midtown and Downtown.

This also led to more fights between Coalitions over jobs - especially when two or more Coalitions tried to shape up the same job at the same time.

This also led to more and more Coalitions hiring out their thugs as security goons for contractors, to keep other Coalitions from shaping their jobsites.

And, tragically, this led to Coalitions raiding integrated jobsites, and demanding that non Coalition minority workers be replaced by Coalition members (this writer once lost a job because of that).

It also attracted law enforcement harassment.

The bankers, developers and GCs found all of these shapeups to be very expensive.

Every shapeup cost at least 2 hours worth of production (the shapeups always began wiht somebody screaming "Stop Working!" and everbody knew to put down their tools or they might get hurt), plus there was the cost of paying Coalition site coordinators, and the cost of hiring either legitimate security guards or Coalition goon squads to protect their jobsites - not to mention occasional incidents of vandalism and/or beatings of management personnel - it was really adding up.

The real estate interests knew they didn't have to put up with this - after all, they had gotten the government to drive out cosa nostra, which was a far stronger organization that had been at the center of the industry for 60 years. So, why couldn't they get the government to drive out the Coalitions too?

The same city, state and federal investigators who'd broken the back of the mafia now set their sights on the Coalitions.

But they weren't the only cops with their eyes on the Coalitions.

There was also the NYPD's "quality of life" program.

That was a pretty euphamism for locking up large numbers of poor Black and Latino men for whatever legal-sounding excuse the cops could come up with.

"Quality of life enforcement" began under the administration of machine Liberal Democrat David Dinkins (who, ironically enough, was the city's first, and to date only, Black mayor).

It accelerated under Liberal Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Under his watch, the cops began a campaign of police terror in the ghettoes.

Cops stopped and frisked over 1 million poor Black and Latino men a year (in a city which only had a total population of 7 million) and arresting 250,000 of those men on whatever bogus charges the cops could invent.

Incidentally, the NYPD have continued that level of police harassment down to this very day - and there isn't a police department in a democratic country anywhere in the world that comes anywhere near that level of repression (you'd have to look back to the practices of the Italian Carbineri, German Gestapo or Russian NKVD in the 1930's to see that level of routine mass abuse of working class citizens by the cops).

The neighborhoods which were the heartland of the Coalitions were also ground zero for this unprecedented wave of police repression - and it became common for the shapeup busses to be caught up in the NYPD's dragnet. Many Coalition thugs got caught up in the sweep arrests too - sometimes for their Coalition activity, but often just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got rounded up.

Between deliberate, pre-planned raids by the FBI and NYPD Organized Crime Control Bureau detectives and incidental arrests by the cops on the beat, the Coalitions were under siege.

Just about the only Coalitions that were immune from this wave of police persecution were the two "respectable" groups, Harlem Fightback and CCWA. They had ties with the academic community, the CBO's, the White left and the Democratic Party (CCWA actually had foundation grant funding and White college interns volunteering in their office!!).

But they flat out refused to support their brothers and sisters in the other Coalitions who were under police attack.

Fightback went so far as to openly ENDORSE the FBI/NYPD repression against the other groups!!!

Sadly, this wasn't that suprising - Fightback and CCWA aspired to be official, City funded, non union labor suppliers for all HPD renovation jobs.

This "community hiring hall" scheme was part of a broader pattern of pro minority contractor/pro government political decay in Fightback and CCWA.

CCWA had launched a campaign to force New York University - the largest private landowner in Lower Manhattan - to use Chinese contractors on their dormitory jobs - on the assumption that jobs would "trickle down" to Chinese workers.

Fightback made similar demands on behalf of Black contractors on jobs in Upper Manhattan.

Unfortunately, neither Wing nor Haughton understood that the very reason that they got foundation grants and respectability was because they were the right wing of an armed workers movement - in other words, without the workers with baseball bats on the busses, neither the goverment nor the bosses would even bother to buy them off.

Fightback and CCWA's leaders had abandoned some basic marxist principles - that any serious working class activist should always oppose government intervention in the workers movement (even if the workers organizations in question were run by gangsters) and that working class activists should always defend militant workers who were being persecuted by the government for engaging in class struggle - even if those militants were corrupt.

Thanks to the repression, Coalition shapeups had largely ceased by 1994.

The Coalitions weren't the only construction workers organizations facing government repression - by the mid 1990's, City and federal authorities had imposed government monitorships on the Carpenters, Building Laborers, Concrete Laborers, Construction Teamsters, Plumbers, Plasterers, Roofers and Operating Engineers.

In the case of the Building Laborers, the government had actually came in, overthrew their leaders and appointed a whole new set of officers and Business Agents.

The feds didn't face much opposition from the workers, in particular from the local men, since their needs had been neglected for so long by their leaders.

Also, the feds had used union reformers as a cover for these takeovers, and both promised the workers that the new, "cleaned up" unions would actually unionize the growing scab segment of the industry and make sure that work on union jobs was distributed among union members fairly.

The feds lied through their teeth.

The real reason for government intervention was to end the cosa nostra-initiated system where certain mob connected contractors were allowed to secretly violate union wage and benefit scales (while billing the clients as if they were paying union scale).

In it's place, the feds (acting on behalf of the bankers, developers and GC's) wanted to put in a system where all contractors could legally and openly pay reduced wages - and the labor cost savings would be passed directly on to the owners.

Of course, the government couldn't openly say that, otherwise the workers would not have supported the takeovers - so they had to hide their true intentions behind false promises of new organizing and fair distribution of work.

This was no more dramtically seen than in Construction Teamsters local 282.

That local primarily represented readi mix concrete truck drivers and other building material delivery workers - but it also had "working teamster foremen", the 400 odd shop stewards who's job was to keep scab trucks off union jobsites.

They had no other duties other than checking delivery drivers union cards (and not letting them unload if they didn't have one) - and the GC's had to pay them a lot of money to enforce union rules on company time.

For years, the Gambino family had used their control over this local to take payoffs from contractors that wanted to use non union delivery trucks.

The feds had promised that they wanted to clean up the teamster foreman system.

But instead of reforming it, they gutted it.

The federally installed local 282 administration let GC's get rid of teamster foremen on all but the largest jobsites - enabling them to use non union delivery trucks without having to bribe the Gambinos.

Of course, eliminating the teamster foremen positions got rid of several hundred jobs - not only the foremen themselves, but the union drivers laid off because their firms lost business to scab trucking companies.

Although the Teamsters case was the most dramatic, more representative was the case of the Carpenters and the Building Laborers.

Elaborate organizing departments were built, and many rallies held - but the organizers always stopped short of calling areawide strikes of non union workers.

Instead, they held one-contractor-at-a-time, one-jobsite-at-a-time NLRB elections - which pretty much guaranteed that pro union workers would get fired, scab firms would transfer their other jobs to d/b/a's owned by relatives or spouses and the sites would never get unionized.

Even when multiemployer agreements were signed, like the ones the Laborers got in interior demolition and asbestos abatement, it was at the cost of the workers getting paid substandard wages and benefits.

As for distribution of work on union jobs - elaborate hiring hall rules were put in place - which, on paper, gave the appearance that jobs were being given out in a fair and impartial manner.

But, those rules also let contractors run all company man crews, with only a steward dispatched from the union.

This was called "the request system"and it allowed companies to only hire from the union if they felt like it - usually, because all their company men were working, and they needed extra manpower.

This was a massive giveback - considering that both the Carpenters and Laborers had once required that half the crew at every contractor on every job be hired from the union.

Of course, even that rule was imbalanced - since typically local men made up about 80% of the membership, but only got 50% of the jobs.

Now, it was far worse - company men, a small minority of the membership, got job security (as long as they stayed on the boss' good side) and local men had their chances to work sharply reduced.

This made becoming a company man a high priority - and created yet another problem - "working for cash".

That is, contractors making company men work for less than union scale, in return for steady work. With the growing scarcity of local man jobs, this became more and more common among union carpenters and laborers.

The request system sharply undercut union conditions in the luxury hirise apartment building sector - the only segment of residential that had stayed union. Contractors in the hirise concrete and drywall & ceilings industries became notorious for paying cash to company men.

The request system also chipped away at union conditions in office interior work, the last island of union strength in the city (which remained 80% union).

In particular, office furniture installation contractors, who come on the site last, and are often the last contractors on the site at the very end, began to use the request system to force their company man carpenters to work for cash.

But at least most of commercial stayed union (at least in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn) - the residential sector became almost completely scabified.

Single family home construction in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, and lowrise apartment house building in all 5 boroughs, became almost totally non union. This included the many HPD-subsidized luxury housing construction jobs in Harlem - who became some of the worst offenders as far as subminimum wages are concerned.

Thanks to the efforts of the Coalitions to force the industry to provide jobs for Blacks and Puerto Ricans, the non union side was almost entirely workers of color, from many different nationalities - West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Khalistani Sikhs, Chinese - along with a sizable contingent of White immigrants from Eastern Europe - Russians, Poles, Croatians, Ukranians, Uzbeks, Georgians.

But, by 1998, the Coalitions themselves were basically dead. Harlem Fightback and CCWA still limped along (although their dreams of running government subsidized non union hiring halls had died on the vine) and there were a few of the other coalitions still in existance, but the days of large scale shapeups were over, and many Coalition site coordinators were sitting in prison cells.

Worse yet, the remaining Coalitions have absolutely no answer to the urgent problems bedevling minority workers today - other than Fightback's narrow nationalist call for Black workers to ally with Black bosses and CCWA's trickle down economics inspired public relations campaign to get more work for Chinatown bosses.

Basically, the Coalition movement is at a dead end.

The absence of the Coalitions as an organized force (and, to some degree they were the closest thing to a union on the scab side of the business) contributed to the free fall in non union wages and the rapid decay of safety conditions on scab jobs.

Scab contractors began to pay their carpenters, masons and other skilled workers as little as $ 7/hr - and unskilled laborers and helpers began to get as little as $ 4/hr (with some contractors buying them free sandwiches - since, at that pay scale, they couldn't afford to buy lunch at the bodega).

Accidents became commonplace on these jobs, as routine safety precautions were ignored to get the job done as quickly as possible.

It became common to for workers to die in scaffold collapses - almost one a month by the mid 2000's.

And for those who had non life threatening injuries, their foreman would give them cab fare and put them in a taxi bound for the nearest emergency room.

Cabs were used so the contractor could later deny that the worker even worked for them - and the luckless worker wouldn't even have a record of a 911 call and FDNY ambulance run to prove he/she had been hurt on that jobsite!

Ironically enough, some of the lowest paying and most abusive scab subcontractors were - former Coalition site coordinators!

Worse yet, with the independent voices of construction workers of color silenced by the nightsticks of the NYPD and the indictments of the Justice Department, the City, the unions and the CBO's were able to go back to early 1960's style tokenism.

Oddly enough, these "training programs" are still promoted with the same kind of propaganda that was used in the 1960's - that they're integrating the industry, and giving opportunities to minorities (and, these days, to women as well) to get middle income jobs.

Of course, in the real world, the desegregation question in construction has been basically solved - on a sweatshop basis.

That is, construction workers of color (along with White immigrants from Europe and the former Soviet Union) are a cheap labor force used to build luxury housing - with all the labor cost savings from subminimum wages and abusive working conditions passed right on up the line to the developers and bankers.

On the union side, workers of color are still a minority - but they are a third of the union side of industry overall. Within a decade, Latinos and Blacks will be a majority in the Laborers Union, and the Carpenters Union will be majority workers of color by the end of the next decade, if present trends continue.

But, workers of color have come into the unions at a time when the unions are in decay - with chronic underemployment for the majority of local men and constant givebacks to the contractors that get worse and worse with every new union contract.

Union workers of color have borne the brunt of these givebacks - with largely Mexican groups of union workers (scaffold carpenters, asbestos abatement laborers, demolition workers ect) having taken the worst hits.

The minority worker training programs themselves are a low wage giveback to the contractors and the developers - allowing substandard wages to be paid on union jobs.

It's obvious that all the City, the unions and the Community Based Organizations have to offer Black, Latino and Asian tradespeople is low wage sweatshop labor.

But what should minority workers (and their White brothers and sisters) do about this?

First and foremost, there is a need to unionize the scab side of the industry - and not the NLRB way, but by taking the fight to the jobsites, and out into the streets.

The great bulk of these non union residential construction workers are carpenters or laborers - and, as luck would have it, the Carpenters Union and the Building Laborers Union both are, at least publicly, very committed to organizing.

Both the New York District Council of Carpenters and the Mason Tenders District Council are "Organize Unions" - with large organizing departments, elaborate picketing programs and regular rallies outside scab jobs.

Why not make them put up or shut up?

Large groups of non union tradespeople should approach those unions, and demand to be organized - and not in a timid, legalistic, time consuming and ultimately doomed to failure one contractor at at time NLRB petition, but by areawide strikes at all the scab contractors in a given market area.

Now, it's questionable as to weather those unions would welcome several thousand workers of color flooding into their organizations - particularly if they came in in an organized fashion, with their own leaders, during the course of a recognition strike.

And it's absolutely certain that the federal monitors who supervise every action of the Carpenters and the Laborers unions would totally NOT welcome a mass movement of non union construction workers - particularly if that mass movement forced up labor costs.

The whole point of the federal monitorships over the unions (and the crushing of the Coalitions) was to force down labor costs, and to pass those labor cost savings up to the top of the capitalist food chain - the developers and bankers.

Anything that would undermine that would draw the wrath of all three levels of government - since it would jeapordize the profitability of the construction financiers.

Since we're presently at or near the end of a luxury housing building boom, those bosses are in a very vulnerable situation - and the government would do whatever it had to do to protect their profits from an upsurge by their superexploited minority construction workers.

While non union minority construction workers have the worst of it, workers of color in the unions (and their White local man brothers and sisters) have issues of their own.

Like the request system, which allows contractors to pick and choose who they will hire from the union - and creates a situation where workers are forced to accept below union scale wages to get steady employment.

Or all the substandard wage deals that the unions have been making.

Like the Market Retention program, that allows substandard wages and benefits, a longer work day and weakened work rules on residential jobs in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

And Market Retention's unofficial but very real companion policy of unions tolerating scab contractors working side by side with union outfits on these jobsites.

Or the Project Labor Agreement with the School Construction Authority which, like Market Retention, has a longer work day (in this case, a 10 HOUR DAY, giving up the 8 hour day we won in 1886 and the 7 hour day we won in 1936), substandard pay and benefits and scab contractors working side by side with union shops.

Local men, both White and minority, need to be organized to struggle within the unions to fight those givebacks, and the general decay of our wages, working conditions and the growing inequality in distribution of work hours.

Of course, for both of these tasks (organizing the non union majority, and fighting to defend the conditions of the local men on the declining union side of our business), we need a new leadership, to lead us in a struggle against the contractors, the government and our own union leaderships.

It might turn out that our current unions are not up to the task, and we need to build entirely new unions in our industry - only time will tell.

In any case, we will need cross-racial unity, since none of us can win our demands alone - the Coalition experience proves that. As necessary and vital as they were to kick open the doors for Black, Latin and Asian workers, they were never able to overcome the fundamental problems that came from organizing monoracially, so they ended up decaying and collapsing.

And, of course, the unions themselves had proved the flaw of embracing White job priviliges - that was one of the reasons that the construction unions fell so far, from their enormous power before the 1970's to their dramatically weakened government supervised status now.

Beyond that, we also need to reach out to our brothers and sisters in the rest of the working class - the janitors and hotel workers, who are employed by the same real estate developers who profit from our labor, the unemployed youth in the ghettoes, who need and deserve decently paying job opportunites, the working class tenants who desperately need high quality low rent public housing, and a freeze and rollback on the extortinately high rents that bleed their wallets dry.

Now, I know that's a tall order - and it's not at all clear if construction workers will be able, or even willing, to accomplish any of this.

But it's pretty damned clear what will happen if we don't try.

Falling construction worker incomes, with the union sector rapidly being pushed down to the subminimum pay scale of the scab side and with the government using so called "training programs" and desperate out of work minority youths as a battering ram to push our pay even lower, more and more deaths and injuries on the scabified jobs, side by side with skyrocketing rents and profits for the real estate developers.

That's our future, if we don't start making moves now.

-commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, local 608 carpenter
for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/
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"UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER"
originally published on Sunday, July 15, 2007