CRANE FAIL...

inside the wave of worker deaths in the New York City construction industry

I. "...young construction workers are falling out of the sky"

On the morning of Friday, May 30, 2008, local 14 operating engineer Donald Leo, a hirise crane operator for hirise concrete subcontractor Sorbara Construction, began his workday like any other.

The 30 year old Staten Islander climbed up the tower into the cab of his huge Kodiak kangaroo crane, high above East 91st St and 1st Av on Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side. Leo turned the engine on and turned the massive kangaroo crane on it's turntable, to prepare for the first pick of the day.

Far below, 27 year old Kosovar Albanian immigrant excavation laborer Ramadan "Dane" Kurtij began his day - digging the trench that was intended to bring a sewer line into The Azure, a 32 story mixed use middle school/luxury apartment building that he, Leo and several dozen other men and women were building.

Unbeknownst to Leo, Kurtij and their coworkers, the quarter century old crane had been severly damaged by a lightning strike it experienced on it's previous job, The Platinum, another luxury hirise apartment building on W 46th St and 8th Av.

The lighting had cracked the steel turntable that the crane pivoted on - a defect discovered by Michael Lifrieri, the operating engineer who was assigned as the oiler on that crane for that job.

But, instead of junking the dangerously defective but still functional crane, it's owners, New York Crane, Inc, patched up the surface of the crack with a weld and sent it to it's next job.

Unfortunately, the weld didn't repair the defect so much as conceal it from view - the metal was still dangerously weak, and vulnerable to catastrophic failure, and now was almost undetectable to the operators of the crane.

But why did New York Crane take that kind of risk?

Simple.

Due to the current boom in hirise luxury apartment house construction, there is a severe shortage of kangaroo cranes in the city - only 25 are available for use, and hirise concrete jobs are often scheduled around crane availibility.

Consequently, it's far more profitable to send out a defective crane, cross your fingers and hope nothing goes wrong than to either take it out of service and repair it or totally decommision it.

That day, luck ran out - the cracked turntable in Leo's crane finally failed.

To the horror of the carpenters, lathers, cement masons and concrete laborers watching from the deck of the building, the crane slowly pitched back on the steel tower it rested on, pulled backwards by the weight of the couterweight on the rear of the crane, until it reached the tipping point, at which point it snapped wildly back and wrenched itself off the tower.

It's massive boom crashed into the side of an occupied luxury apartment building across the street and ripped open the face of that building as it slid down the side.

Finally, the massive crane came to rest on the ground, where it's massive diesel fuel tanks burst into flames.

Leo rode down with his kangaroo, and died in the fall.

Kurtij was critically injured when part of the crane landed on top of him.

Despite great efforts by firefighters and paramedics to save Kurtij, he died in the emergency room at New York Presbyterian - Cornell Weil Medical Center later that afternoon.

Within a couple of days, Leo's body recieved a Mass of Christian Burial in the Staten Island parish he grew up in (and was supposed to be getting married in just a few days after the crash) while Kurtij's remains were flown home to Kosovo so his people could give him an Islamic funeral in the village he was born in.

Two hardworking young men, devoted to their families, who had came from opposite sides of the planet to the richest neighborhood in America to build fancy apartments for wealthy people were now taking that eternal sleep below the ground.

But this was no mere tragedy - not by a longshot .

This was a sadly predictable outcome.

This wasn't New York Crane's first kangaroo failure - far from it.

Just two months earlier, down on East 51st St, a crane that was being "jumped" (that is, having it's tower raised while the crane is still attached to it) came toppling down, killing the 4 operating engineers involved in jacking up the crane - along with two concrete laborers working on the building below, as well as a tourist from Florida staying in a building across the street from the site.

And in September 2007, another one of New York Crane's kangaroos lost it's boom as it was being jumped on 3rd Av and E 13th St. Nobody died in that crane wreck - but a cab driver was hospitalized when his vehicle was destroyed by the gigantic falling crane part.

New York Crane's wave of hirise accidents are far from an isolated incident.

In the past 3 years, 59 construction workers have died in this city.

The way construction workers die in the big apple remains the same - falls from high places, ususally due to workers being pushed to work too fast and too unsafe at extreme heights.

But the pace of fatalities has picked up - as of this writing, in early June 2008, 17 workers have died on the job in this city - as opposed to 12 all of last year.

And WHO has been dying has changed even more dramatically.

Up until this year, the typical worker who died was a recent immigrant on the non union side of the industry, working in the most marginal market segments in our business.

Typically, those workers were brick pointers.

Brick pointers are masons specializing in the waterproofing of the brick veneer walls of apartment buildings.

Since New York is a very rainy city, and water has a way of undermining brick veneer walls over time, Local Law 11 mandates that brick buildings get waterproofed every five years.

Those brick pointing and waterproofing contractors are almost all non union - due to pressure from landlords and real estate developers to charge low prices for their work, those companies pay their immigrant workers very poorly, and they rush their jobs through quick, cheap and dirty.

One of those workers died just a few hours after Leo and Kurtij passed - 50 year old Houssain Mosharrf, who was from Bangladesh by way of Bedford-Stuyvessant.

Mosharrf fell to his death while powerwashing the exterior wall of a Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment building.

His death was typical of how non union workers die - a grossly underpaid worker was sent out on a primitive rope and plank bosun's chair scaffold, with no safety harness (and not even a hardhat).

His employer was so marginal that his company wasn't even incorporated (let alone insured)! He literally worked for "some guy up the block", was paid in cash and had absolutely no employment benefits or protections whatsoever.

But now, alongside the superexploited non union immigrants, it's union workers doing much of the dying (and not just immigrants, but American born workers too).

And we have the elite of the industry - $ 60/hr operating engineers with Class B crane licenses - taking the place of $ 10/hr non union brick pointers as the main group among the dead and dying.

What's even more remarkable is the near total silence of the New York City Builidng and Construction Trades Council.

The NYCBCTC, representing over 100,000 workers (about half of NYC's construction industry workforce) is one of the strongest local building trades councils in the nation.

Yet they have had damned little to say about this horror.

Even Operating Engineers local 14 and the Laborers Union's Concrete Workers District Council - the unions that represented most of the union workers who've died this year - have had nothing to say in public.

Just about the only public reaction from the unions to this wave of industrial homicides was to hold a mass at St Patrick's Cathedral the day before May Day, in memory of the dead tradespeople.

The Building Trades Council is letting the Building Trades Employers Association do all of the talking.

And BTEA's official position is that THERE ARE TOO MANY SAFETY RULES and the current regulations need to be WEAKENED!!!!

BTEA, the voice of the General Contractors and the real estate developers, the dominant businesspeople in the construction industry, feels that it's very important that all of the luxury housing developments currently going on in the city get done as quickly as possible

The unspoken but very real reason for all this haste?

It's brutally simple - cold cash money.

The market for luxury housing is about to collapse, so the bankers and real estate developers want everything currently on the drawing board to be built and ready for sale and occupancy before the bottom drops out.

Every other priority is secondary.

And that includes worker safety - which, even in the best of times, is always the lowest priority. This is due to the simple fact that construction workers are a commodity that can be easily replaced - it's actually a lot harder to replace those cranes than it is to find other people to operate them!

The unions have totally bought into this logic - they can't say that in public, for fear of angering and disgusting their members (and perhaps provoking a worker revolt) but they still silently follow the developers line on safety.

The trades have done nothing to force contractors to run their jobs more safely - no work stoppages, no strikes, no slowdowns, no organized refusals to work unsafely, not a damned thing.

Unfortunately, there hasn't been any pressure from the workers on their leaders.

And that pressure does work - just look at Las Vegas.

They've had a similar building boom racing the clock before the downturn hits.

They've also had a similar epidemic of deaths - 11 workers in the past 18 months.

6 of those deaths happened on the MGM Mirage CityCenter job - a $ 10 billion mixed use casino/resort/office building/luxury residential complex jointly financed by the MGM Mirage casino and Sheikh Muhammad bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai, that is currently the biggest construction project on the face of the planet.

The prince and the casino bosses wanted the job done before the market tanked - and that led to 6 workers being killed on the job.

Initially, the Southern Nevada Building and Construction Trades Council - and in particular Las Vegas Ironworkers local 434, the local that had the most deaths - responded in the same pro-boss way as their New York counterparts, with the only exception that they were more openly pro contractor than their NYC counterparts.

Ironworkers local 434's president and business manager was the most vocally pro boss.

He openly condemned the 3 ironworkers who died - blaming their incompetence and failure to follow rules for their deaths (rather than the pressure from their bosses to work fast or get fired, and the absence of adequate fall protection and safety railings at MGM Mirage CityCenter - which, of course, was what actually killed them)

And they kept badmouthing the dead men in public and defending the bosses until the ironworkers at CityCenter called a wildcat strike.

This forced the Las Vegas building trades to call a one day sanctioned strike of all 6,000 workers at MGM Mirage CityCenter, as well as the workers at the nearby Cosmopolitan complex.

This shut those jobs down for 24 hours, cost MGM and His Royal Highness the Emir around $ 7 million dollars worth of lost production and forcing the General Contractor on those sites to agree to a union-initiated safety monitoring plan.

Ironically enough, that General Contractor, Perini Construction, has United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America General President Douglas J. "Cash" McCarron on it's board of directors!!!

But on this side of the country, the building trades unions, in the absence of wildcat strikes and other mass pressure from the workers, have done nothing.

The New York City Department of Buildings has been the only entity that's done anything for workers at all - and even they did their limited safety measures with a humble apology to the contractors and developers for slowing their jobs down!!!

Those familiar with the NYC construction scene will find DoB's newfound agressiveness odd in the extreme.

In normal times, DoB is known for it's complacent pro contractor attitude, as well as the legendary corruption of it's building inspectors.

Not a week after the E 91st St collapse, the agency's chief crane inspector was arrested for selling crane operator licenses to unqualified applicants for $ 500 a pop - and the whole crane operator written test for $ 3,000!!!!

The DoB's sudden interest in stopping these unsafe jobs doubtlessly comes from the fact that these last few crane collapses have been in wealthy areas. Dozens of rich people's homes were destroyed, and property losses are in the tens of millions.

In other words, dead construction workers really don't matter.

But the ruined persian rugs and ming vases of millionares do.

They matter a whole lot - enough to cost DoB Commissioner Patricia Lancaster her job after the March crane collapse, and to have current commish Robert LiMandri very much worried about his tenure after this one.

Why is this happening?

It's actually brutally simple.

Conditions for workers in the luxury housing construction sector have sharply declined over the last 30 years in this city.

Wages have fallen, working conditions have gotten harsher, unions have been dramatically weakened and the pace of production has gone up.

On hirise concrete jobs - like the jobs where these crane failures happened - New York contractors have what they call the "Two Day Cycle".

That is, the workers only have one day to strip out the forms from yesterday's pour, and erect the forms and put in the rebar for tomorrow's pour.

By contrast, in most other places, there is the "Five Day Cycle" - 4 days to strip the formwork from the last pour, and erect the forms from the next one, and then pouring on the 5th day.

But in New York (and other major markets like New York) there is just too much money at stake to let the workers get the job done at a reasonable pace!

So tradespeople here are forced to do 4 day's work in one incredibly hectic day, so buildings can fly up at the unheard of pace of one floor a week (nobody else in the world builds hirises that fast - and with good reason!!!)

New York hirise concrete outfits also pour concrete in the dead of winter to get jobs done on time.

Of course, if you pour concrete when the tempreture is below 32 degrees F, it won't cure right - so they use salamanders (big barbecue-grill looking smudge pots fueled with steel mill-grade coking coal) to keep the concrete warm.

The coal fumes also release arsenic and other deadly poisons into the air - and right into the lungs of the firewatch crew - the workers who stand guard over the pots overnight to keep them from setting the wooden concrete formwork on fire.

Pouring concrete in mid winter has other hazards - it's not an accident that the first fatal accident of the year, back on January 14, involved a hirise concrete job doing a cold weather pour (and putting workers lives at risk - since concrete does not pour as well in winter, and is more unstable and vulnerable to air pockets and formwork blow outs).

The concrete laborers and cement masons for DiFama Concrete were pouring the 42nd floor of the Trump Soho hotel/luxury apartment house complex when one of the column forms blew out, causing the formwork for that whole corner of the building to catastrophically fail.

This sent one of the concrete laborers hurtling to his death on the street 500 ft below, and sent three other laborers crashing to the deck below, hospitalizing them with severe career-jeapordizing (if not career-ending) injuries.

This utter disregard for worker safety has not only led to the high profile collapses which attract the headlines, but to a silent epidemic of lost time injuries for workers on these jobs.

One of Ramadan Kurtij's roomates had suffered a career ending knee injury on a hirise job just last year.

And Dane Kurtij's friend was just one of thousands of workers crippled or maimed to build the gleaming luxury towers of this city.

Beyond the injuries, there is also a silent epidemic of chronic musculorskeletal injuries among construction workers.

Anybody who's been in the trades for a decade or more (including this writer) has some kind of chronic construction-related physical damage - elbows, knees, ankles, backs, shoulders ect ect ect.

Along with the permanent injuries (and the economic reality of having to work hurt) comes widespread painkiller addictions - percoset, vicodin, oxycotin - and all the human misery that goes along with that.

But does it have to be like that?

Can beautiful high quality structures be taken from blueprint to reality without having to have construction workers' blood spattered on the sidewalks in front of them?

We have to ask ourselves a couple of questions here.

One - how did things get this bad?

And two - what can we do about it?

II. "...to develop, improve and enforce the program and standards of occupational safety and health..."

On the how part, a brief history lesson is in order.

I've covered this story in greater detail in my book, DISUNITED BROTHERHOODS ..race, racketeering and the fall of the New York construction unions (iUniverse, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2006 - available for $ 22.95 at amazon.com) but I will give a short version of the story here.

Construction workers in New York City were among the first in the world to unionize - the earliest carpenters unions here date back to the 1790's and most of the trades were fully unionized by the 1890's.

Those labor organizations were far different from modern day construction unions.

They were typically led by committees of workers who combined full time work in the trade with part time labor activism - unlike today's unions, which are run by full time Business Agents and officers, who often earn far more than the tradespeople in the field do.

These "tramping committees" (so called because they walked from jobsite to jobsite organizing workers) were often quite radical - most of the worker-activists had far left political beliefs - usually utopian socialist, communist or anarchist - a far cry from the Republicans and conservative Democrats who run today's building trades unions.

And, unlike today's unions, who almost always put the needs of the contractors ahead of the interests of the majority of tradespeople, these union leaders envisioned a time when there would be no bosses - what they called a "cooperative commonwealth", a society where productive industry was run by the workers instead of businesspeople.

These unions were very militant on the jobsites too.

Typically, they organized non union jobs through a tactic known as a "trade movement" - the tramping committees would lead workers marches around the city from scab jobsite to scab jobsite, often accompanied by a brass band.

Those parades would stop at each scab job, go onto the site and force the non union workers to either join the movement or at the very least take their tools and go home.

Once organized, they used unilaterally imposed Bylaws and Working Rules on the contractors to regulate wages, hours and working conditions - and they would strike any job that did not follow union rules.

They also had strict prohibitions on production quotas and what they called "grading of men" (that's 19th century speak for firing people for not working fast enough).

Naturally, a job where the crew work at a reasonable pace is, all other things being equal, going to be a much safer jobsite.

Unfortunately, that militancy didn't last.

Contractors, real estate developers and the government ferociously repressed these unions.

As a result much of the union's very limited financial resources were tied up with economically supporting union leaders who had been fired and blacklisted and who could no longer get contractors to hire them (in that pre-welfare and unemployment insurance era, blacklisted union militants had no other way of paying their bills than direct financial support from the union).

This led to the development of full time union officials - originally called "walking delegates" they are the direct ancestors of today's Business Agents.

Although the rise of full time union officials who were paid by workers union dues protected the leadership of the unions from direct retaliation from the bosses, it also pushed the unions sharply to the right.

The walking delegates had a stake in preserving the union's finances (since that's what paid their salaries) so their natural orientation was towards maintaining labor peace with the contractors - no matter what the bosses were doing to the workers on the jobs.

This desire for labor peace at any price also pulled the unions away from fighting for the interests of the casually employed tradespeople, who were hired at the begining of the season and laid off in late fall, (and who were most likely to have conflicts with the contractors) and oriented the unions towards the workers who had the most friendly relationship with the bosses - the foremen and other full time employees who worked for the contractors year round (in the field from early spring to late fall, and in the shop through the winter, when the casual workers were laid off).

There were still radical elements of the union leadership who were oriented towards fighting the contractors and defending the interests of the casually employed workers.

But they were rapidly being driven out of the unions by the more conservative company man and contractor oriented forces.

III. "...we didn't want price wars and chaos in the industry. we didn't think that would protect the public..."

The left wing of the leadership of the NYC building trades were decisively defeated on May Day 1916 - which also marked the rise to power of the organized crime element in the unions.

The Carpenters Union had successfully waged a strike - and the contractors went over the District Council leadership's heads, to Carpenters General President William "Big Bill" Hutcheson.

He stepped in, ousted the New York carpenters socialist leaders, replaced them with Irish Canadian labor racketeer and professional union buster Robert Brindell, who in turn unilaterally imposed the bosses terms on the workers (and stripped the New York carpenters of their right to vote on contracts and District Council officers)

Brindell, and his allies in Teamsters Joint Council 16, basically pioneered modern labor racketeering.

He and his confederates were filling a market niche in the industry.

By the early 20th century, New York's construction industry was filled with many many many contractors (both native born and immigrant) and fierce dog eat dog competition drove contractor prices (and construction worker wages) to rock bottom levels.

This was great for the real estate developers and the banks - and it really sucked for the contractors, especially the more successful ones who didn't want their businesses ruined by price cutting.

Some of these contractors figured out that it was in their interest to put a brake on cutthroat competition, keep construction prices high and drive their more marginal competitors out of the business.

The most practical way to achieve those goals was to have some kind of cartel, that would regulate which bosses got to bid on what jobs and for what price.

Of course, that cartel would have to have the power to punish bosses who didn't go along with the program.

Brindell was perfectly positioned to help the contractors cartelize residential construction.

He controlled the Carpenters Union, so he could call strikes at companies who didn't go along with the cartel - as well as preventing labor disputes with companies that were under his protection.

Brindell's allies who ran the lumber delivery wagon driver locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and the owners of the lumber yards also helped, by cutting off building material deliveries to contractors who tried to compete with the companies he was protecting.

Brindell and his associates divided up the construction projects in New York, decided which contractors would bid on which jobs and predetermined the price they would charge the clients.

And if anybody tried to underbid the preselected companies, they would get hit by a Carpenters strike and would be unable to get Teamsters to deliver material to their jobsites.

Brindell's cartel only lasted for 3 years - he got locked up in 1921 and made history as the first person in America to go to jail for racketeering .

But the racket pioneered by the former drug store clerk from Nova Scotia continued without him.

The Irish gangsters who had helped him run the construction rackets took them over in his's absence, and the cartel continued.

Within a decade, those gangsters were displaced by Jewish racketeers - who'd risen to prominence in the underworld due to their control of the illegal liquor business.

By the 1940's those gangsters were in turn elbowed out of the picture by a better organized, much more sophisticated and far more brutal Sicilian immigrant criminal organization called "cosa nostra" ("this thing of ours" - in other words, "the mafia").

By the 1960's the cosa nostra's five New York based "families" (Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, Bonanno and Lucchese) along with New Jersey's De Cavalcante family, ran the construction industry in New York.

They had a committee, called "the commission", which ajudicated any disputes between the families over their protection rackets.

And those rackets came to expand far beyond construction - they also included air freight forwarding, sea freight stevedoring, trucking, garment manufacturing, trade show services, garbage hauling, commercial moving and the wholesaling of produce, fresh fish and cigarettes, among other industries.

In all those industries the pattern was the same - the dominant companies in those businesses would pay "tribute" (protection money) to a particular gangster or mafia family.

In return for the tribute, cosa nostra would have the unions keep their competitors out of that business (either through strikes or by having union members violently attack the other company's business).

The gangsters would also help the dominant companies engage in price fixing, to make sure that everybody that was in the cartel made a healthy profit.

The gangsters also used their control over the unions to keep workers from resisting labor abuses committed by the companies that were under mob protection.

Nowhere in New York City in this era was this market control more extensive than in construction, and within construction nowhere was the cartelization more total than in the carpentry business - particularly in hirise concrete construction and interior drywall partition work, where the Genovese crime family decided which contractors would bid on which jobs, and how much they would charge the clients..

The Genovese family dominated the "concrete club" which ran the hirise concrete industry. They decided in advance which contractors would do the concrete work on every job in the city worth more than $ 2 million dollars.

If the job was worth more than $ 15 million, only one contractor was allowed to win the bid to do the work - S & A Concrete, which just happened to be owned by Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the Genovese family's underboss and head of the Commission.

A contractor who was foolish enough to try and underbid a company in the "club" would find themselves having labor problems with the Colombo family dominated Concrete Laborers Union or the Gambino ruled Teamsters local 282 or the Genovese family controlled District Council of Carpenters.

The Genoveses also controlled drywall work, through "the wheel", which was run by drywall contractor and Genovese family captain Vincent DiNapoli, under the cover of his Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, which was nominally a legitimate employers association.

DiNapoli's wheel had a rotation system, where every drywall contractor under mob protection would take turns getting major jobs. When a company's turn came up, all the other contractors would put in higher bids, so that company would win the job. Each one of those companies would get a turn to be the low bidder (with the "low bids" set high enough so the winning contractor would make a very healthy profit, of course).

Contractors who tried to go around the wheel would find they suddenly had serious problems with the Genovese family-dominated Carpenters Union. They might just get a visit from a union controlled "wrecking crew" in the daytime, or their jobsite might suffer a mysterious middle of the night bombing or arson.

The wheel and the club worked out very well for connected contractors - they had a stable and profitable business, and had no fear of competitors or labor disputes.

It wasn't so great for the clients - since prices stayed up, thanks to the anti competitive actions of the wiseguys. And it also locked out smaller contractors trying to break into doing major jobs.

For a time, it kinda worked out for the unions too... but in the end, the mobsters would turn on the workers, in an attempt to protect their rackets.

But even at the height of the club and the wheel, the unions were at best junior partners in the racket - and the workers of connected companies were totally screwed, since mobbed up contractors had virtually total immunity from labor disputes.

The club and the wheel were able to push through major labor saving innovations without any union resistance.

It was under their watch that drywall replaced lath and plaster.

This meant that interior construction could get done faster and with a lot less workers.

And lower paid workers at that - since the higher wage lathers and plasters who built plaster walls were displaced by lower paid carpenters who hung drywall.

Along with drywall came the gypsum dust created when the boards are cut as well as the fibers from the fiberglass insulation used to insulate the walls. And the dust and fibers elevated the risk of skin diseases, cancer and lung diseases for construction workers (disorders that, conveniently enough, come so long after exposure that it's almost impossible to get comp for them).

The 4 ft x 8 ft x 5/8 inch size of the standard drywall board also brought along with it chronic repetitive stress injuries to the joints and backs of carpenters (again, injures that show up so long after the fact that they are not covered by workers comp).

It was also during these years that, on the concrete side of the industry, derricks mounted to the interior core of the building with their engines in the basement of the structure were replaced by the exterior kangaroo crane, on the edge of the building with it's huge powerful diesel engine mounted high in the sky atop the tower.

Kangaroos are far more top heavy than the old derricks - and, unlike the derricks, which are securely mounted to the structure and cannot fall unless the building fails the cranes can tip over quite easily if they are not secured properly.

But the kangaroo cranes can be erected, jumped and dismantled a lot faster than the derricks can - which means the job can go faster.

Drywall on the inside of the buildings, and the kangaroos on the outside, meant that jobs could get done faster - and people working faster are more likely to get hurt, both in the form of accidents in the short run and longterm occupational injuries over the course of their careers.

But, none of the unions were going to dare stand up to cosa nostra, so no attempt was made to deal with the safety hazards of either one of these innovations.

IV. "....ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning...."

The early 1970's were the peak of the power of the club and the wheel - and that decade also marked the beginning of the end.

There was a taxpayer financed building boom in progress - the City of New York went $ 786 million dollars in debt to underwrite the financing of the construction of luxury apartment buildings.

With all that money floating around the real estate industry, the wiseguys got greedy, and their graft grew beyond the tolerable level of bribes long accepted by the industry.

But, around this time, the goose began to stop laying the golden eggs.

The problem began when landlords began literally burning the city down.

Since the city was practically giving money away to developers who were building luxury housing, a lot of landlords rushed to get on the gravy train - even if it meant evicting their present tenants.

Liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay made matters worse when, in 1971, he introduced a bill that repealed the 1948 Rent Control Law.

The way the new Rent Stabilization Law was written, pre 1971 tenants still had low Rent Control rents - and they would keep those rents unless they moved out of their apartments.

Post 1971 tenants would have much higher Rent Stabilization rents - and a new City commission, the Rent Guidelines Board, would pretty much guarantee annual rent increases for the landlords.

So, landlords rushed to drive out their pre 1971 tenants.

In some communities, in particular areas of Lower Manhattan that were largely White and were close to Midtown and the Financial District, working class tenants were forced to leave their homes through landlord neglect (firing supers, refusing to give heat and hot water ect) and through outright terrorism (thugs breaking into apartments and robbing and beating tenants ect).

Once they were driven out, the apartment houses were either renovated into high rent apartments or torn down and replaced by hirise luxury apartment buildings.

In areas that were either too heavily Black and Latino to attract wealthy White tenants and/or were too far from Midtown and the Financial District for easy commuting, the landlords simply struck a match.

They hired "torches" (professional arsonists) to burn down their buildings for the insurance. If those units couldn't be turned into luxury housing, it was more profitable for them to be destroyed.

Between 1972 and 1976, vast areas of Harlem, the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvessant, East New York, Brownsville, South Jamaica and Far Rockaway were put to the torch.

Mysteriously, despite the deaths of dozens of firemen and several hundred tenants, the injury of several thousand and over one hundred thousand people being driven from their homes, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance fraud, nobody ever went to jail for this (other than a few low level torches).

The newspapers invented a racist slander about "crazy Puerto Ricans burning down their own houses" to cover up the landlord terrorism and that was that.

There was another problem besides the human tragedy - the City was going broke subsidizing the landlords.

The luxury developers had been given loans on amazingly easy terms - long term and low interest. But, the City had borrowed that $ 786 million to make those loans short term, at high interest.

Obviously, that couldn't last - and it didn't.

In June 1975, the loans came due, the City didn't have the money to pay (since the landlords loan repayments wouldn't be due for several more years) and the City of New York basically went bankrupt.

The bankers who held the City's debt made damned sure they would get their money - they appointed a committee, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, headed by Lazard Freres' chief Felix Rohatyn, who's function was to force the City to repay them.

And MAC set about agressively collecting the debts.

Two years and 50,000 city worker layoffs later, the City paid off the bankers, but Rohatyn and MAC stuck around to make sure that the city paid off it's creditors in a timely fashion - and spent as few tax dollars as possible on public services.

V. "...I'm not going to pay no niggers $ 600 dollars a day!!!"

MAC's extortinate claims on city finances created something of a problem for conservative Democratic Mayor Ed Koch when he took office in 1978.

He had been elected to restore order to a city in chaos - not only did the city have a bankrupt government and large areas burnt to the ground, but there was a massive crime wave too, thanks to a flood of cheap heroin and 330,000 jobless factory workers (10% of the city's labor force) who had been rendered unemployed when their bosses moved the plants out of town.

The city worker layoffs and all the service cutbacks only added to the misery in the city's working class neighborhoods (with the Black and Latino communties getting far far far more than their fair share of the suffering).

One of Koch's most urgent tasks was rebuilding the vast urban wastelands created by the orgy of landlord arson.

And he had to rebuild those neighborhoods as cheaply as possible, because Koch still had to answer to MAC (and the bankers MAC represented had first dibs on all of the city's tax revenue).

The newly created NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development was given the task of rebuilding the city on the cheap.

They came up with a very simple idea of how to do that - they decided to use workers who were paid less than union scale to rebuild those burnt out apartment buildings.

That violated the Federal, City and State Davis Bacon Laws, which required that prevailing wages be paid on all municipal construction jobs, but the clever folks at HPD came up with an ingenious idea to get around that.

The City itself wouldn't rebuild the tenements, instead they would hand over the funds for the renovation work to Community Based Organizations who would do the work for the city.

Even though almost all their funding came from the taxpayer, these CBO's were private corporations - and they were under no legal requirement to use union labor, or to pay non union workers prevailing wages, on construction projects that they ran.

Now, you would think that the construction unions would be up in arms at this scheme, and would fight it tooth and nail.

That didn't happen.

The reason was simple.

The biggest unions were so weakened by decades of organized crime infiltration that they were totally incapable of waging the kind of struggle that needed to be carried out.

Those unions still had some capacity to send wrecking crews or firebombers to scab jobs in Lower Manhattan but they would not realistically be able to do that to inner city jobsites.

That was because of "the Coalitions".

About a decade earlier, a group of Black maoist construction workers had organized "Harlem Fightback" an organization that led protests to demand the integration of the construction trades.

Fightback's protests really struck a chord in the Black and Latino communities - who had tired of seeling all White crews on jobsites in the ghettoes.

In particular, they galvanized Black and Latino construction workers, who were locked out of most of the unions, no matter how skilled they were.

These groups (eventually there would be over 60 of these organizations - some all Black, some all Latino, some mixed Black and Latino and one that was all Chinese) came to be collectively known as the Coalition.

The Coalition regularly sent school busses loaded with jobless minority construction workers roaming around the inner city, and occasionally making forays onto jobsites in Midtown and Downtown Manhattan as well, raiding segregated jobsites and forcing the contractors to integrate.

But, by the late 1970's, many of the Coalitions had decayed far from their 1960's radical roots.

Many of their "site coordinators" (the Coalitions version of Business Agents) had become conservative and pro contractor - due to their need for stable relationships with the contractors to guarantee a steady supply of jobs for coalition members and a steady source of coalition funds. (Basically, the same thing that happend to the unions back in the early 20th century)

Many of the Coalitions also began supplying guards to jobsites where their members worked - to keep out the other Coalitions.

Therefore it would be impossible for the unions to use their wrecking crews on all minority scab jobs in the ghettoes - since they'd have to fight off the coalitions and they might not come out on the winning side of those fights.

Also many Black and Latino union members would be reluctant to attack the coalitions - since many of then wouldn't even be in the union if it wasn't for the coalition and many of them were still active coalition members too.

Not only would the unions have had to take on the Coalitions, they would also have to fight cosa nostra, which was trying to accomidate itself to HPD by paying substandard wages on jobsites in the inner city.

Vincent DiNapoli himself led the way - one of his drywall companies, Inner City Drywall, began employing what came to be known as "lumpers" (carpenters who were in the union, but who were illegally paid less than union scale) on their jobsites in the ghettoes.

Despite DiNapoli's efforts, openly scab contractors could and did underbid nominally union contractors, who still had higher labor costs no matter how many lumpers they used.

DiNapoli tried to bring the union scale down, by negotiating a "renovation" agreement - covering both the HPD jobs and the abandoned city public works projects that were now being restarted by the Koch administration.

He also set up a low wage Genovese family-dominated company union for drywall tapers, when their union (run by mobsters from the Colombo family) wouldn't go along with his pay cuts.

Among other givebacks, DiNapoli's puppet drywall tapers union allowed the use of stilts, a dangerous work practice outlawed by the legitimate tapers union, who's members had to be supplied with stepladders, bakers scaffolds and/or pipe scaffolds for high work.

Sweetheart contract or not, the HPD and it's CBO frontmen still prefered to use scab contractors since their labor costs were still lower.

Also, DiNapoli and the Genoveses had another problem.

Commercial real estate developers - and the bankers who paid for their projects - could no longer profitably afford to absorb the costs of cosa nostra tribute.

The end of the city's massive giveaway to the developers had put a halt to the luxury apartment house building boom and the opening of the World Trade Center (and the 15 million square feet of vacant office space it dropped into an already glutted real estate market) had brought commercial development to a halt.

It didn't help matters that the country as a whole had plunged into the deepest recession in 30 years - a recession that would turn out to be the begining of a permanent economic crisis for American capitalism.

Those factors combined to make it impossible for the owners and the bankers to continue tolerating the price fixing of cosa nostra and the contractors.

The financiers leaned on the government to break the cartels, and the feds launched the LILREX (Long Island Labor Racketeering and Extortion) investigation.

The investigators soon discovered the extent of the drywall protection racket run by the Genovese family, DiNapoli and the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association.

This led to an indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970.

As would come to be customary in these RICO indictments, the main focus was on the unions, rather than on the contractors who were the main beneficiaries of the conspiracy.

DiNapoli was a defendant in the case, along with the Genovese family-installed Carpenters District Council President, Teddy Maritas.

Maritas (who may have been suspected of planning to cop a plea and become a witness for the feds) never lived to stand trial - he was lured to a meeting under the Throgs Neck Bridge and was never seen again.

Maritas' assassination didn't help DiNapoli or the Genoveses - they lost the case and the wheel was smashed.

The Metropolitan New York Drywall Association no longer regulated who got to bid on what jobs.

They weren't even the main sheetrock trade association anymore - they were eclipsed in that arena by the Association of Wall-Ceiling and Carpentry Industries.

Cosa nostra control of the concrete industry was under attack too - the Genovese-controlled hirise concrete club hadn't yet been directly targeted, but the Gambino family rackets in the readi mix concerete trucking business were, with the indictment of Gambino-installed Teamsters Construction Drivers local 282 chief John Cody.

Thanks to this all sided attack, and the rapid deunionization of outer borough residential construction, the unions were in a state of crisis.

Membership had rapidly deflated, from over 250,000 in the 1960's to barely 150,000 (with a large and growing army of 50,000 formerly union workers on the scab side of the business- and another 50,000 totally driven from the trades).

The fall of cosa nostra in interior partition work had made it possible for companies that had previously been locked out of the business to move in.

These contractors had to legitimately underbid their competitors to get the work (since there was no longer any organized cartel keeping prices up and organizing the bids so nobody pushed the prices down too low).

Once they won the jobs through "lowballing" (putting in bids far lower than their competitors - often too low to profitably complete the job) he only way for these companies to make a profit was to get it out of the hides of their workers.

This is when concrete contractors again started pushing the envelope of production, by doing midwinter pours.

This not only added the hazard of coal fumes and arsenic poisioning to jobs, but also put crews at higher risks of blow outs, due to the way concrete handles during low tempreture pours.

This is also the time when production quotas begin reappearing - and all of the abuses and unsafe practices that go along with them.

This was only a taste of the labor abuses to come.

VI. "..I think a lot of contractors see that there's a high-skilled labor pool, that there's high unemployment--it's cheaper to hire someone and not pay them properly..."

The unions made no effort to fight against these violations - if somebody got laid off because the foreman thought he/she was "too slow" the union invariably agreed with the contractor that the worker was "a fuckup" and merely sent another guy to replace that worker.

As the unions allowed the restoration of sweatshop labor practices on the jobsites to go unresisted, cosa nostra's power in construction continued to crumble.

The contractors who had been under the protection of the wiseguys hated the end of the cartels - but their competitors were grateful for the opportunity to break into the business.

As for the clients, and the bankers who financed their projects, they were overjoyed at the end of what they called the "mob tax" - and they were looking forward to the government going even further.

The real estate interests were on the cusp of another building boom - both in luxury apartment buildings and in commercial construction.

This would be one of the biggest building booms in New York City history, and the developers and the bankers wanted to maximize their profits (and minimize those of the contractors).

They'd already won a major victory with the breaking of the cartel in the drywall business - they wanted to have the government extend and consolidate that victory for them.

And the financiers got their wish.

The two prosecutors representing Manhattan - DA Robert Morgenthau and US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani - continued their offensive against cosa nostra's contractor cartels.

With the success of the attacks on the drywall wheel, the focus shifted to concrete.

The Colombo family-installed chief of the Concrete Laborers District Council, Ralph Scopo, got indicted.

Just 4 years later, the head of the club, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and his company S & A Concrete were charged with racketeering.

Among other crimes, Fat Tony, the head of the Commission that regulated all of the price fixing cartels run by cosa nostra in New York City, and the underboss of the Genovese crime family, overcharged the State of New York about $ 25 million on the concrete work for the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center - and he delivered that job 4 years late.

Scopo was ousted from his union, and Salerno got sentenced to 100 years in prison.

Despite the building boom of the 80's the unions were a lot weaker - in a city where the construction industry had been almost 100% union for decades, there was now a vast army of non union workers, and over a third of the work in the city was done by scab contractors.

The unions had no clue as to how to stop this.

The leaders of the trades had toyed with mass action.

They had succeeded in getting 20,000 workers to a rally at the Brooklyn Bridge in the dead of winter in January 1990 (to a rally that didn't take on the scab issue head on, but instead called for a federally funded municipal construction program), but they shied away from following through on that mass action - let alone taking on the non union contractors head on.

This timidity on the part of the union leaders was possibly because they feared mobilizing the mass of local men into activity within the unions.

The union leaders likely had an even deeper fear of unleashing a massive strike wave among the mass of non union tradespeople.

This fear would have been especially intense regarding the growing Black and Latino workforce, many of whom had long experience with mass struggles in the Coalitions -it's doubtful the union leaders would welcome any kind of struggle that would involve bringing those militant workers into the unions.

Many of the BAs were preoccupied with a far more personal problem - their years of cosa nostra ties were making many building trades union officers exchange their suits and ties for Department of Corrections jumpsuits!

Even those who didn't get locked up often faced ouster from office.

With their freedom (and the perks of union office) at stake, stopping the deunionization of the industry was a very low priority for the BAs.

The recession of the early 1990's continued to chip away at the unions - not only did members experience long periods of joblessness, but the segment of the construction market under union control continued to shrink.

And law einforcement intervention in the unions continued.

Two of the largest (and most racketeer dominated) unions - the District Council of Carpenters and the Laborers Union's Mason Tenders District Council - were put under federal racketeering consent decrees, which allowed wideranging goverment intervention into the internal affairs of those unions.

Unfortunately, a lot of carpenters and laborers, seeing that their unions were in decay and, correctly, blaming the gangsters and the gangster dominated union leaders for the collapse of union standards, had illusions that the feds were going after the bosses of the unions because they wanted to help the workers.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The feds aim was simple.

They knew that, by the early 1990's, the unions were letting cosa nostra connected contractors violate collective bargaining agreements pretty much at will.

Not only were union work rules going out the window, but in many cases mobbed up contractors were allowed to pay less than union scale and evade paying union benefit fund contributions for their workers.

This not only gave these contractors an unfair competitive advantage over other, non mob connected, firms, it also cheated the bankers and the developers.

The financiers were paying union scale prices, but the wiseguy contractors were paying scab wages - and pocketing the difference.

The financiers wanted to make the unions reduce their pay and benefits for all of their contractors.

With the pay and benefit cuts legal and open, the developers and bankers could make their contractors charge them less, so they could enjoy the extra profits from reduced construction worker wages.

That's why the feds came after the carpenters and laborers unions - instead of secret pay cuts for some contractors, they wanted open pay cuts for all of the contractors.

The feds goal was to install leaders in those unions who would go along with the goals of the owners and the mortgage bankers.

But those leaders had to present themselves as a militant alternative to the old wiseguy-dominated regime, otherwise they would not be able to impose the pay cuts and benefit reductions the clients demanded.

The unions also had to rebuild themselves from their sharp decline in membership to survive.

Those factors forced the carpenters and the mason tenders to set up very elaborate organizing departments (something most construction unions in NYC had not had in more than a century).

This is when you start seeing Scabby the inflatable rat, and union picketlines (and even a militant mass rally - the "40,000 man march" against Roy Kay, a scab GC running a big job for the Transit Authority in Midtown Manhattan).

The Laborers also were able to re unionize several thousand workers, most of whom were Latino or Eastern European undocumented immigrants, in two of the most dangerous trades - demolition work and asbestos abatement.

However it was at a price - substandard pay scales and weakened union hiring rules which, among other things, pretty much guaranteed that there would be widespread off the books work - and continued unsafe work practices - in those industries.

Those victories didn't stop the bleeding - even with the picketlines and the rat, the deunionization - and all the low wages and dangerous working conditions that go with it, spread in residential construction.

In another dangerous market segment, building facade maintenance, scaffold contractors either ripped up their contracts with the Carpenters or openly violated them, while low paying brick pointing & waterproofing contractors sent their masons and laborers out on some of the most dangerous scaffolds in the city.

They weren't the only workers hanging off the sides of buildings on unsafe scaffolds.

With the collapse and disbanding of the window washers union, Service Employees International Union local 1 (the remnants of that local were folded into a much larger janitors union, local 32bj), window washing scaffolds got more and more unsafe, as contractors became able to get away with stuff they'd never have been able to do in the union window washing era.

Back inside the buildings, there was the begining of a trend by union shops to pay their company men less than union wages and no benefits in return for steady employment.

Often, these wages were paid off the books (a practice soon dubbed "working for cash")

The way these cash company men looked on it, it was a good deal - they got a steady job, they didn't have to pay taxes, and they could use their wife's health insurance to cover themselves and their kids. It beat sitting in the union hall waiting for a job!!!

This trend of working for cash spread like wildfire in commercial sectors like office furniture installation and venitian blind installation - where contractors came on the site at the end of the job, or into occupied office buildings where there were no other contractors.

This meant that their might not be any carpenter shop stewards on site, so the union didn't even know a lot of these jobs were happening.

Also, those installation jobs are very quick - so by the time the Carpenters Union found out, they'd be gone.

But nowhere would cash become more common than in that dwindling corner of residential construction that was still union - the luxury hirise sector.

Hirise concrete contractors began making deals with their company man carpenters and laborers - work for cash and you'll be on the job from foundation hole to topping off, demand union scale and you'll get cut on the second floor and they'll get another guy who'll take the deal. Drywall contractors made similar deals with their company man carpenters and drywall tapers.

The unions helped this happen - by weakening their hiring hall rules. They began to allow contractors to hire a smaller portion of their workforce from the union (in some cases, only the shop steward had to come from the out of work list).

This made workers even more dependent on staying in the boss' good graces to keep working - which in many cases meant being forced to work for less than union scale.

The developers had a problem with this setup.

One, not all of the contractors did this - some still paid union scale and benefits, since on paper these workers got the same pay and benefits as commercial construction workers.

Two, the ones that did pay cash usualy had arraingments with cosa nostra that allowed them to do that.

Some of those contractors passed on their labor cost savings to the owners in the form of lower bids - but others didn't.

They charged the same prices as if they were paying union scale, and pocketed the difference. They also tended to pass along the cost of the "tribute" they paid to whatever mob family they were under the protection of.

And that just wouldn't do.

The developers (and the bankers who financed their projects) had become accustomed to the state of affairs in the non union segment of residential construction - where all the labor cost savings were passed along to the owners in the form of lower prices.

Naturally, they wanted to bring this to the last remaining pockets of union construction in the residential sector - luxury hirises.

They wanted to have ALL of their contractors openly and legally paying lower wages and benefits, and to have those savings passed on to them - and the government was ready, willing and able to assist them in doing just that.

On the other hand, the union leaders, while willing to make economic concessions at the expense of their members, were very reluctant to attack the cash activities of connected contractors.

VII. "...When you get paid under the books, you can't really count on nothing.."

The decay of conditions on the union side of the industry opened the door even wider for openly non union contractors to become even more of a dominant element of the industry.

During these years, the non union workforce expanded to over 100,000 - the same size as the union labor force!

And the non union folks worked alot more than their organized counterparts did - since they were doing 2/3rds of the city's construction.

Meanwhile, as the unions continued their slow motion collapse, HPD was close to finishing Mayor Koch's old goal of rebuilding the inner cities - with a twist.

Despite the fact that these buildings were supposed to be low income housing, the developers the agency were using planned to make these apartment houses into luxury coops, selling for $ 450,000 an apartment or more.

Despite the high pricetags on these homes, the wages of the workers who built them were very low - subminimum in many cases ($ 4/hr was not unheard of), and even the guys making just over minimum at $ 7/hr were paid off the books in cash (when they got paid at all - missed paydays for weeks at a time were not unheard of).

Safety conditions on these jobs were horrendous - between the fast pace of work and the old worn out scaffolding and equipment they had to use, injuries were common.

And when workers got hurt, some bosses would put them in a livery cab to go to the hospital.

This was to prevent the Fire Department from having a written record of an ambulance call - so the contractor could deny that person was ever an employee when they tried to file a workers comp claim!

Without pay stubs, W 2 forms or even a record of a 911 call from that site, the worker would be hard pressed to prove his/her employee status and that he/she got hurt on that site - so the worker would be stuck with the medical bill!

Scaffolding and brick pointing & waterproofing contractors were the worst of the worse here - their workers were the lowest paid, the most vulnerable (due to the fact that most were undocumented immigrants), had the worst equipment and did the most dangerous work - hanging off the side of the building.

This is when the bodycount starts to skyrocket - a trend that continues to this day.

And alongside the deaths, the much larger toll of uncompensated lost time injuries - and the misery of unpaid medical bills, necessary care delayed or cancelled due to inability to pay, and families back home suffering (and in some cases literally starving) because the breadwinner could not work anymore.

Some union contractors actually had a foot on both sides - union in Manhattan below 96th St, scab uptown and in the outer boroughs - billing as if they paid union wages on all their jobs, but actually paying scab wages on many of hem..

You also began to see scab GC's using union hirise concrete and electrical contractors when the jobs came out of the ground, but when the shell of the building was built then bringing in scab drywall, masonry, steel, windows, hardware, cabinet and plumbing outfits to finish the job.

The logic of this was simple - they could bid the job as if they were using $ 40/hr all union labor and then reap the cost savings of using $ 10/hr off the books non union workers to do the bulk of the work.

In other words, the same thing the mobbed up contractors used to do back in the day - profit illegally by billing union but paying non union wages.

Things wern't that much better in the one little island of residential construction that had stayed union - new construction of luxury hirise apartment houses in Manhattan below 96th St.

In particular, drywall contractors and hirise concrete outfits were the dirtiest.

Some of the more horrendous safety problems were dealt with.

This is around the time that union concrete contractors introduced safety harnesses, which had previously been unknown. Window installation contractors soon followed suit.

But, workers were still being pushed to get the job done quick, cheap and dirty - and they knew that if they didn't stay on the bosses good side, they'd get laid off, and they would be spending a lot of time waiting for another job from the out of work list due to the greatly weakened hiring hall rules.

Commercial construction, or at least the 80% of the sector that was still unionized, remained a relatively safe sector to work in (although it still has a lot of accidents - although rarely fatal and almost always covered by comp), as it remains to this day.

The Davis Bacon public works sector began to decline - due to the rising use of scab contractors by public agencies (in particular the School Construction Authority) and due to the longer work day and weakened work rules that SCA had extracted from the unions on the work that was still organized.

VIII. "...I've seen guys pick themselves up, put their finger in their shirt pocket, and get in the car and drive to the hospital..."

Thanks to the collapse of the unions, and the massive weakening of those that remain, building collapses are common these days and scaffold failures are even more frequent - during the construction season, it's common to have two construction accidents a week now. And we now see crane failures on union jobs on a regular basis.

Many of these accidents lead to construction workers getting killed or suffering career ending injuries - and often not getting a penny in compensation.

Even for those who get comp, former Governor Eliot Spitzer, during his brief time in office, actually cut off long term disability benefits for construction workers with career ending injuries - now it's 525 weeks and no more compensation, even if you can never work again in your trade.

Beyond that wages are sharply down - as I mentioned at the top of this article, it's common to see skilled non union workers getting paid $ 10/hr and laborers and helpers $ 5/hr, off the books with no taxes withheld.

This wholesale collapse of construction worker wages, working conditions and living standards has happened at a time when housing costs in New York City are at an all time high.

Landlords and real estate developers are charging top dollar for sweatshop labor-built apartments.

Something needs to be done about this!

IX. "...The Fire Next Time..."

New York construction workers - the most skilled construction workers on the face of the earth - need and deserve a high standard of living.

At the very least, we need to have a safe workplace - nobody should die or end up in a wheelchair for life just to waterproof a wall or dig a trench!

And we have to make it clear that our safety issues aren't just the narrow problems of construction workers.

As 200,000 workers out of a total city labor force of 4 million, (and as 100,000 union tradespeople out of a citywide union membership of 1.5 million) we make up a sizeable portion of New York City's working class.

Also, the same real estate financiers who put our lives at risk are also responsible for the skyrocketing rents in this city (even in the poorest ghettoes, it's very hard to find a decent family-sized apartment for less than $ 1,300 a month!).

Bottom line, the entire New York-area working class has beef with the real estate capitalists, not just us.

First and foremost, residential construction workers urgently need to be unionized!

It is appaling and unconscionable that building trades professionals in one of the wealthiest cities in the world get poverty level wages.

It's downright uncivilized that some are actually paid less than the minimum wage!

And that growing pool of blood on the sidewalks in front of these gleaming towers should be absolutely unacceptable!!

The present union leaders need to be challenged on this - and that means both the two construction unions that actually bother to do organizing here (the Carpenters and the Building Laborers) and all the other ones that don't even go through the motions!

And these same union leaders need to be challenged to lead a struggle against the carnage that has begun to sweep the union jobsites as well - and no, masses at St Patrick's Cathedral just are not good enough!!!!

But we should have no illusions about the leadership of the construction unions and their actual willingness and ability to fight.

Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the present union leaders are not going to make serious efforts to make our industry a decent place to work.

Remember, this betrayal would not happen because construction union leaders are bad people!

Far from it - almost all of them of them genuinely believe that they are looking out for the interests of construction workers, and in reality many of them do actually fight for the workers WITHIN THE LIMITS IMPOSED BY THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM.

The problem is, under capitalism, unions have to accomidate themselves to the system, which usually means that they can get a good deal for some of the workers (usually the most priviliged, well off and pro boss oriented layer of the workers), but those gains can only come at the expense of the rest of the workforce (usually the underpriviliged, poorer and less pro boss sections of the workforce).

As it happens, all of the different segments of bosses in construction - from the bankers who finance the jobs through the developers who own the buildings down through the general contractors that run the sites down to the subcontractors who actually put up the building at the bottom - have been in a deep and unresolvable crisis for the last 35 years.

Consequently the unions are, at best, only able to provide a decent standard of living and safe and healthy working conditions for an ever shrinking segment of construction workers, and have had to preside over a crisis of downward mobility for the rest of the construction trades workforce.

There was a time when the unions were able to guarantee some level of worksite safety and economic security for almost all union construction workers (and really excellent incomes and working conditions for the privilged few company men at the top).

Now, since the financiers and the contractors can no longer profitably afford to provide any of that, only a handfull of construction workers are protected, while more and more of us are right out there on the edge

The unions do not have an answer for this - since any serious fight for a better life for all construction workers would run head on into this harsh economic reality, and would pose a direct threat to real estate industry profitability if it succeded.

That's why even the "organizing unions" are unable to lead the type of struggle necessary to achieve the burning urgent needs of non union tradespeople.

So, in light of all of these odds stacked against construction workers, how in the blue hell would it even be possible for us to actually win?

We have to take the battle beyond the jobsites.

As important as labor struggles at the point of production are (and any real struggle by workers always has to start at the jobsite), they are always going to be limited to what concessions the bosses can give within the limits of their profitability.

We need to take the battle to the next level.

In part that means linking up with workers from other industries - starting out with workers who are also exploited by the real estate capitalists (building supers, janitors ect ect ect) and radiating outwards to the entire class (and in this city where 80% of the population rent their homes, EVERY New York worker has a fundamental conflict with the landlords).

The point of linking up with other segments of our class is to take the struggle in a political direction.

And no, I don't mean voting for Democratic Party politicians (or Republicans.. or Greens.. or Indepence Party or anybody else).

I mean a political struggle by the working class against the capitalist system, that is the ultimate root cause of all of our problems.

Yes, folks, I'm talking about revolution.

I'm talking about overturning the capitalist system, removing the bosses and bankers from power, and placing control over the society in the hands of those of us who do the actual productive labor that makes the world go round.

And yes, that's a tall order!!

Especially considering how hopelessly divided the American far left are - and how insignifigantly tiny and isolated those groups are - and how utterly and totally divorced almost all of those left wing organizations are from the living and breathing reality of the working class in this country - and how none of these groups have any serious plan to even try and organize workers to fight for our class' urgent and burning demands.

But I didn't lie and say it was going to be easy, now did I???


- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, local 608 carpenter
for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/
 http://groups.google.com/group/gangbox/
 http://gangbox.wordpress.com
 http://www.clnews.org
"UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER"
originally published on Thursday, June 12, 2008