RACE TO THE BOTTOM....gentrification, deunionization and construction worker superexploitation in Northern Manhattan's luxury housing sector By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter On April 30, 2004, the Rosa Parks had it's ribbon cutting ceremony. The beautiful luxury co op apartments at 163 Fredrick Douglass Boulevard and 118th St in Upper Manhattan's Central Harlem neighborhood was built by private developers with public funds...that, ironically enough, were originally intended to build middle income housing for the working class... The mortgage that paid for the construction of this high class apartment house came from JP Morgan Chase Bank, but that loan was subsidized by the New York City Housing Development Corporation, (NYCHDC) a state authority that issues bonds used to pay for the construction of moderate income housing. In other words....if the developer can't pay that loan off...you and I will... There was a small detachment of New York County Democratic Party bigshots at the event (Borough President C. Virginia Fields and City Councilman Bill Perkins being the most prominent) along with city officials like New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Shaun Donovan. Of course, there were folks from the not for profit community....representing those corporate and government grant-financed "community organizations" that operate much of the privitized social and community service programs here in NYC - and also double as the backbone of the local Democratic Party machine... in this case, it was Executive Director Anita Peek and Elaine Easson Steele from the Raymond & Rosa Parks Institute for Self Development. But the real VIP's at the ribbon cutting ceremony were the corporate moneymen...JP Morgan Chase Senior Vice President Joseph Reilly, and Robert Ezrapour, the Iranian Jewish immigrant who founded Artimus Construction, along with Artimus executives Eytan Benjamin and Ken Haron, and Vardo Construction owner Loranzo Vardo. Artimus was the scab General Contractor that built the development, Vardo was one of the subs on the job..and JP Morgan Chase handled the NYCHDC bond-guaranteed loans that paid for it.... Supposedly, the Rosa Parks is "moderate income" housing..... Of course, HPD and the HDC have a really funny definition of what constitutes "moderate income"....a one bedroom apartment at the Rosa Parks costs $ 185,000...and the building's 3 bedroom penthouse goes for $ 825,000....with most of the development's 64 units going for around $ 450k. That's a hell of a lot of money for Central Harlem....a deeply poor community populated by low wage city clerical workers, janitors, hospital employees, garment workers, hairstylists, cab drivers, warehouse workers, truck drivers and retail cashiers, where the average family income is only $ 26,000/yr, and 89% of the population live in rented apartments. But, none of those folks can even dream about living in the Rosa Parks, cause you have to make at least 100% of the "median income" for New York County for the developers to even THINK about letting you live there.... Now, since the lower portion of Manhattan is populated by many very very rich people (including literally thousands of milionaires and even a couple dozen billionaires), "median" income statistics for New York County are really distorted... Consequently the "median income" for Manhattan as a whole is a lot higher than the median for the upper portion of the borough, and the "New York County median income" is set at $ 42,000 bucks a year....or about twice the income of the average working class Harlem family.... Basically, despite it's name, the Rosa Parks is NOT intended as housing for working class Blacks or Latinos. Instead, the co-op apartmetns are intended for affluent White professionals and businesspeople, who want to own a Manhattan co-op, but do not want to pay the $ 1 or 2 Million dollars they'd have to pay a couple of miles south in the largely White and overwhelmingly affluent Upper East Side or Upper West Side.... This is a form of corporate-sponsored ethnic cleansing for profit that folks in New York City have come to call "Gentrification".... The Rosa Parks isn't the only luxury development being built in Harlem for non-Harlemites... Far from it...from 110th St all the way up to 149th, and across 145th St almost all the way to the Harlem River, formerly abandoned tenement buildings are either being renovated or torn down to be replaced by apartment houses....and those new housing units are either high cost rental apartments or expensive co-ops... All told, around 40,000 apartments have been built, at a total cost to the taxpayer of around $ 300 Million... The developments between Fredrick Douglass, St Nicholas Avenue, 116th St and 122nd St are known as "Triangle I" "Triangle II" and "Triangle III" (because Fredrick Douglass and St Nicholas intersect at 122 st, and then St Nick goes off diagonally to the Southeast towards 110th St...thus forming a large right triangle)...and, like the Rosa Parks, they are intended for rich people who do not currently live in the community...and who come from a different ethnic background than the neighborhood's current residents... Ironically enough, another recently built Triangle building is also named after a famous Black heroine, Harriet Tubman Village, just up the block at 121 and Fredrick Douglass.... And this is just the begining.... Over in West Harlem, (the neighborhood where this writer resides), in an area located between Old Broadway, 12th Avenue, W. 125th St and W. 135th St, Columbia University is about to build a huge complex including it's new School of the Arts building, a research center, dormatories and faculty and graduate student residences. The famous Ivy League institution of higher learning (which also happens to be the 3rd largest landlord in New York County, after the City itself and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York) is going to tear down the factories, warehouses, auto repair shops and meat wholesalers that currently stand on that site, as well as a C Town supermarket, several discount stores, a NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation child health clinic, and several apartment buildings.. This will lead to considerable job loss for workers in the area, including the several hundred Dominican immigrant women who work at the Alexander Doll Co. factory (the largest unionized industrial employer in Harlem) as well as quite a few Black and Dominican males, including several dozen UFCW-represented meatpacking workers, and a few dozen movers at a half dozen moving company storage warehouses in the area, as well as a half dozen Electricians local 3 members at Midway Electrical Supply, and a number of other warehouse workers in the area.. And they're not the only workers who jobs will be lost; this project also will cause unemployment for several dozen non union auto mechanics who work in the auto repair shops in that area, around 100 retail workers, mostly Dominican or Black American women, employed in the supermarket, the discount juvenile furniture store and the El Mundo discount store, about a dozen Indian immigrant men employed by the two gas stations in the area, a couple dozen Dominican women hairstylists at two salons in the area and several dozen restaurant workers, mostly Black and Dominican women, employed at McDonalds, Taco Bell/KFC and La Floridita Restaurant... Considering the massive unemployment in Upper Manhattan, the last thing we need is to lose anymore of the handfull of unionized private sector jobs in the community...and, for that matter, we don't need to lose any of the non union ones either.... Beyond the job loss, this development will drive up rents in the surrounding private housing...which will worsen the already intense gentrification pressure on the residents of this community...and could cause widespread displacement of the community's residents... The displacement will start with the approximately 440 families who will lose their apartments when Columbia begins doing demolition for this development West Harlem's residents, mostly Dominican, Mexican or Ecuadorian immigrants, as well as a small but substantial number of American Blacks, are actually poorer than the folks over in Central Harlem. Many West Harlemites don't have jobs, or are marginally employed off the books in the underground economy. Those with legit jobs are mainly garment workers, taxi drivers, hairstylists, hotel workers, restaurant workers or cashiers...and most of them earn poverty level wages... For the last few years, a growing number of affluent White professionals have been settling in the neighbhorood... driving up rents, and driving out a small but substantial number of the community's current working class resideints.. Many of the upscale new residents are affiliated in some way with Columbia, and, if the university's expansion program goes through, there will be even more widespread displacement... As I pointed out above, working class taxpayers get to pay for all of these beautiful and well-built apartments, through the NYCHDC's state tax revenue-guaranteed bonds, and through outright grants to developers from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)...but we sure as hell don't get to live in them. Beyond that, the creation of so many luxury housing units in Harlem has forced up rents for the tenants who live in existing housing...and, in many cases, landlords have tried to force out existing residents, to move in wealthy folks from other parts of the city who can pay much higher rents... Getting back to the luxury housing developments themselves, despite building names like Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, just about the only Blacks involved with these apartments are the hack Democratic Party politicians who approve the loans..and the superexploited Black carpenters, plasterers, painters, laborers, bricklayers, plumbers and electricians who build the units for miserably low scab wages...in some cases as low as $ 8/hr.. Now, of course, wages that low are a flat out violation of the federal Davis Bacon Act, and New York State and New York City's Little Davis Bacon laws...which require prevailing wages be paid to laborers and mechanics on publicly financed construction work.. And, in New York City, prevailing wages are usually pegged dollar for dollar with union scale.... But, thanks to the fact that the Davis Bacon funds were passed through (or, to be more accurate, laundered) through not for profit organizations and mortgage banks, they magically became private money, which negated the Davis Bacon wage requirements And, needless to say..the reason that the contractors who built these apartment houses can get away with paying $ 8/hr wages is because these jobs, like almost all of the residential construction in New York City these days, are almost all non union.... Now, admittedly, these jobsites have provided lots of job opportunites to the many Black and Latin carpenters, laborers, bricklayers, drywall tapers, painters, plumbers and electricians who make their homes in the neighborhood.. That's a really great thing, considering the fact that tradespeople of color have long been denied our fair share of jobs in the New York building trades...and that we're far more likely to be unemployed than our White counterparts.. And, in general, workers of color have far less job opportunities than White workers....in fact, an absolute majority of Black men in New York City, over 51%, do not have jobs, and are basically locked out of the workforce.... And that 51% does NOT include the approximately 35,000 Black males from New York City who's chronic joblessness drove them to petty crime and who consequently ended up locked up in one of New York State's 68 correctional facilities for men.. So, creating jobs in Harlem is a good thing.....kindasorta.... However, once we look at what kind of jobs that have been created by these luxury housing projects, those job opportunities don't look quite so good.... Those construction jobs were non unionized, and the workers on those jobs labored under sweatshop conditions...making as little as $ 8 bucks an hour.. Many of these workers are paid under the medieval "piecework" system, where they get a flat per apartment rate, (usually between $ 280 to $ 380 for a completely sheetrocked apartment) rather than an hourly wage.. Sometimes, they don't even get paid those meager wages, since many contractors in this part of town have an ugly habit of stiffing workers out of their wages after the job is done.... Also, most of these workers are paid off the books as "lumpers" (NYC construction slang for a tradesperson paid off the books as a so called "independent contractor") Of course, the lumpers do NOT get paid workers comp, social security, Unemployment Insurance, disability or any other kind of social benefits....nor are federal, state or local taxes deducted from their wages... To make matters worse, some of these workers, in particular some of the carpenters and laborers, are actually UNION MEMBERS, who have to work for scab wages because of the unequal distribution of work in the construction unions...that is, many workers, in particular Black and Latin tradespeople, have to wait months to get a job...and have to work as scabs to keep the bills paid in the meantime... Some of the carpenters on these jobs actually are company men (steady employees - as opposed to local men who are hired temporarily by the day out of the union hall) of UNIONIZED drywall contractors....who are sent uptown by their employers to work on scab jobs with the promise that they might get an opportunity to work on union jobs at a later date.... Because of those all too common labor abuses, some building trades union organizers refer to the Upper Manhattan residential construction market as the "Dodge City" of the construction industry in the city.... But, sad as it is to say, the unions had a lot to do with how the contractors in this part of town came to behave like the Wild Wild West outlaws of the construction industry.... A lot of that has to do with the racial hierarcy in the building trades here.... Here in New York City, in particular, in the inner city communities, sometimes you can tell if a construction site is union or not just by looking at the color of the workers on the site.... I hate to say it, but, if there are a lot of White guys on the job..it's probably a union job... And, of course..if there's a lot of Black, Latino, Chinese or Indian workers...then it's probably a scab job. Sad but true... And, even sadder, as I pointed out above, if the site is heavily Black...then a lot of those "non union" carpenters might actually have union cards...but have to work scab while waiting for a job from the list. Or, worse yet...as I pointed out above, these luckless Black carpenters might be company men for contractors who are, allegedly, union below 110th St, and scab Uptown. Reportedly, some of these firms have made a pratice of transferring workers laid off from their downtown union jobs to scab sites in Harlem...with the promise that, if they work non union for a few months on the Uptown sites, they will eventually be requested to come back downtown to work union. Sadly, the Latino workers actually have it worse off...they usually don't even have union cards, so they have to be full time scabs...and, they typically are the lowest paid workers in the industry....paid even less than White or Black non union tradespeople are. How did things get so bad in New York City housing construction???? How did we get to a place where half of the city's 200,000 construction workers are non union..and many nominally unionized tradespeople work under objectively scab conditions?? Why do we have a situation where the city is in the middle of a housing boom...but so many union tradespeople sit home out of work..or are forced to work under non union conditions to get a job???? More importantly, what can be done about it?? And, even more importantly, what can costruction workers do to join hands with the rest of the low income New York City workforce, and fight to force the landlords and the city to provide us with high quality low income housing??? Let's take a look.... As recently as the late 1960's, almost all residential construction and renovation work in New York City was done with union labor... The vast "urban renewal" programs of the 1950's and 1960's were largely built by union labor. Unionized tradespeople were used to demolish working class communities in Manhattan's Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and replace them with hirise luxury housing for the wealthy..and to demolish tenements in Harlem, East Harlem and the Lower East Side, and replace them with hirise public housing projects... Union labor was also used to build the "Mitchel Lama" housing developments - publicly subsidized housing for middle income (and predominantly White) workers built by private developers. Some Mitchell Lama developments were located in Lower Manhattan (and a couple were even in Upper Manhattan), but most were in the outer boroughs....like Queens' Big 6 Houses (Typographers local 6 acted as the developer on that complex), Elechester (Electricians local 3 built that one) and LeFrak City, Brooklyn's Starrett City and the Bronx's huge Co-Op City, the largest Mitchel Lama development of them all.. Now, those union jobs were largely segregated by race... Only a handfull of Black and Puerto Rican carpenters, laborers and bricklayers were permitted to work on those jobs..and all the other trades were lily White... This incensed people of color in Upper Manhattan..especially those folks who had previously worked in the trades down south or in Puerto Rico before migrating to New York City... Revolutionary communist activists in Harlem were able to tap that resentment to build a movement that forced the partial desegregation of the building trades. A group called Harlem Fightback was organized, which began protests at these segregated jobs in 1965... Within a few years, other minority construction worker groups were formed (they came to be collectively known as "The Coalition"..even though all 60 or so of these groups for the most part operated seperately).. These groups would send schoolbusloads of unemployed Black construction workers to enter these jobsites, often armed with baseball bats, pipes or chains, (in later years, Latino and even Chinese workers would form their own Coalitions, which also use the same tactics)... These workers would stop work, by any means necessary, and would keep the job shut down until the site was integrated... By the 1970's, all the trades were forced to allow Black and Latin workers to join the unions....with the largest number of workers of color going into the carpenters, laborers and bricklayers unions.... I've written about the struggles of The Coalition on GANGBOX before, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954 However, big changes were coming into the trades, and the real estate industry as a whole.... As I mentioned above, by the 1970's, the City of New York had been carrying on a vast "urban renewal" program for many years... There had been a gradual shift in the program...the city continued demolishing tenement buildings populated by low income workers, but had largely stopped building public housing projects to house the folks displaced by the "slum clearance"... The excuse for this was that public housing had been a "failure"..but, in actual fact, the real problem was that the projects of the New York City Housing Authority had been all too successful.... The NYCHA's 300 developments provided high quality low rent housing to about 300,000 low income New Yorkers..and many of the projects rapidly developed into stable communities.. This was in contrast to the ghetto tenements, where rents were high, builidng services were few, and there was a constant turnover of tenants, due to people being evicted for being unable to pay the excessive rents demanded by the landlords.... The projects competed head to head with the tenement landlords for tenants..and, since the expansion of the projects threatened the continuing profatiblity of these landlords...and, more importantly, threatened the profitablity of the major Wall Street bankers who held the mortgages on these tenements, the construction of new public housing projects had to cease.... But, "urban renewal" continued....at least in areas such as Brooklyn Heights, the East Village, Chelsea, the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side that were suitable for "gentrification"...that is, the driving out of the existing working class residents, and their replacement with wealthy people.... In some cases, this took the form of forcing tenants out of their tenement apartments, renovating the buildings and moving in rich people... More commonly, it involved the demolition of tenements, and in some cases whole neighborhoods, and then replacing those buildings with hirise luxury apartment buildings... The City of New York even went so far as to borrow almost $ 800 million dollars to finance this gentrification program, by getting short term high interest loans from the major banks on Wall Street...and then lending out that same money in low interest long term loans to the developers who were building these luxury apartment buildings.... That 'corporate welfare' program could not be sustained, and caused three closely related problems that soon caused much misery and distress for working class New Yorkers.. One, the gentrificaiton of much of Lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn sucked in lots of investment capital that otherwise could have been invested in renovating the tenement apartments that low income working class New Yorkers lived in.... The problem was, investing in tenements had no guarantee of a profit...whereas the government financed construction of luxury housing was a no-lose situation...even if the development didn't make money, the government would bail out the investors... The new developments also forced up rents in surrounding tenement apartments, forcing out their longtime residents... This process was aided immesurably by the 1969 repeal of the city's Rent Control law.... In 1946, in response to militant, and frequently communist-led, organizing and protests by tenants against wartime rent gouging by landlords, the City of New York imposed Rent Control. This law froze rents, and prevented landlords from raising the rent on an apartment for as long as that tenant lived there...the landlord could only raise the rent when the tenant moved out and another person moved in.. In 1969, the city replaced Rent Control with Rent Stabilization. Rent Stabilization allowed landlords to raise their tenant's rent when the tenants renewed their 1 or 2 year leases, and when a tenant moved out and was replaced by another person. The amount of the rent increase was determined by the Rent Stabilization Board, a tripartate committee composed of landlord, tenant and "public" representatives appointed by the mayor..typically, RSB rent increases went up faster than the general rate of inflation... Apartments rented befire 1969 would keep their Rent Control status for as long as the current tenant lived there....but, if that person moved out, the new tenant would now have a Rent Stabilized apartment, with a much higher rent, and guaranteed rent increases at least once every two years.... This created a strong financial incentive for landlords to get their Rent Controlled tenants to move out, and to move in Rent Stabilized tenants....by any means necessary.... And I do mean BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.... In many cases, the landlords of the tenements used thugs to forcibly drive out their Rent Control protected tenants, so the rents could be jacked up to Rent Stabilized levels... In many cases, the buildings were renovated into luxury housing once their Rent Controlled tenants were cleared out....... And, in areas that could not be gentrified..because they were in largely Black and Latino areas of the city, and rich White people wouldn't move there even if the tenement tenants were driven from their homes, this Rent Stabilization Law-inspired wave of gentrification caused landlords to abandon, and in many cases physically destroy, their buildings so as to free themselves to invest in more profitable investment opportunities in the areas that were gentrifying... Yes, I said DESTROY their properties....in an orgy of corporate-sponsored terrorism by arson that I refer to as The Burning of New York.... I've written about The Burning of New York on GANGBOX before, at : http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770 Typically, landlords who were seeking to "cash out" on their properties would hire "torches", professional crimnals specializing in arson. The torches would then firebomb the property..sometimes for a direct cash fee, other times in return for the right to strip the burnt-out builiding for copper wire and pipes and whatever other resalable scrap materials they could find... Some landlords were so blatant about their firebombing that they would actually slip anonymous notes under their tenants doors informing them that their homes would be burnt down that night...offering the tenants a brief time window to remove whatever belongings and furniture they could carry... Vast areas of the city were thus laid waste... Much of the southern half of the borough of The Bronx was destroyed... Most of the housing in that borough to the south of Tremont Av and to the west of the Bronx River and the Bruckner Expressway was put to the torch... That borough had the worst of it, with over 160,000 Bronxites (about 50% of the population of the South Bronx) displaced from their homes... In Queens, the firebombing was concentrated on the Far Rockaway penensula in the far south of the borough, below Kennedy Airport and Jamaica Bay with a huge belt of small rental homes between the Rockaway Beach boardwalk and Beach Channel Drive from Beach 36th St to Beach 90th St put to the arsonist's torch...(this writer grew up just a few blocks away from that area) Intrestingly enough, the Far Rockaway tenants were the only large group of White New Yorkers displaced by the Burning of New York...since Far Rock is about 1 1/2 hours by subway from Manhattan, their community was too far from the city center to be effectively gentrified... In Brooklyn, there were two main belts of destruction..along Broadway in Williamsburg and Bushwick, and along Atlantic Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant and Brownsville... And, in Manhattan, although there was some arson activity in the East Village, the Lower East Side and East Harlem, the bulk of the firebombing was concentrated in Central Harlem, with much of the burnt out buildings located in an upside down L shaped pattern running up Fredrick Douglass Boulevard from 114th St to 149th St, and across 145th St to the Harlem River... Staten Island was the only borough that was largely spared the arsonist's torch.... Along with the serveral hundred thousand New Yorkers driven from their homes, often with all their belongings and vital documents destroyed, thousands of tenants and hundreds of NYC firefighters were hospitalized with burns and smoke inhallation...and hundreds of tenants and dozens of firemen died in the flames... Now, despite the fact that, by the Fire Department's own very conservative estimates, at least 80% of these fires were set by torches in the pay of the landlords, almost all of the landlords were able to cash out on their insurance policies, and to take their capital elswhere with no civil or criminal penalties of any kind... For a while, the FDNY responded to mass pressure from the residents of the burnt out neighborhoods, and the national scandal created by having half of the city burned down, by actually trying to investigate these arsons for hire..... The department created a special unit of city fire marshalls, called the Red Caps, that was based in The Bronx and specialized in arson investigations... But, by 1980, the Red Caps had proved a little too effective in stopping arsons for hire..so the unit was tranferred to Brooklyn, and then disbanded... But, by that time, the wave of arsons was over...and the city was deep in another crisis created by gentrification... The Fiscal Crisis.... In 1975, the City of New York essentially went bankrupt... The underlying cause was all those low interest long term loans to the landlords... The city had borrowed almost $ 800 million dollars, short term, at high interest, but was getting paid by the developers long term, at low interest, creating a scissor effect.. And those financial scissors closed on the city in the spring of 1975, when all the high interest short term loans came due and the city didn't have the money to pay the bankers back.... The bankers responded by taking over the city's finances, with an unelected junta of Wall Street financiers called the "Municipal Assistance Corporation" taking over financial governance of the city...and having veto power over any decisions of the mayor or the city council...a power that they retain to this day... By the early 1980's, the landlords had stopped burning their inner city properties, and the Wall Street bankers's Municipal Assistance Corporation had managed to balance the city's books... At this point, the city began to tackle the task of rebuilding the vast areas of the city that had been burned down by the landlords during the 1970's... The city set up the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to channel federal, city and state funds to rebuild the huge areas that had been destroyed.... Now, of course, since these were public funds to be used for public works construction, the Davis Bacon Act rules should have applied, and everybody should have gotten union scale wages... Problem is, that didn't happen.... The bankers wanted revenue generating properties built on those vacant lots in the inner city, but they wanted it done on the cheap.... And, unlike the "slum clearance" projects of the 1950's and 1960's, the new buildings would not be public housing projects.... The high quality low rent apartments in those buildings had caused a lot of grief for the landlords, by sucessfully competing with the slumlords for low income working class tenants... Instead, the new buildings built on the ruins of the inner city would be under private control, with much higher rents than the NYCHA's project apartments.... The public funds used to construct these buildings would be laundered through the Community Based Organizations (CBOs)....that dense network of not for profit social services agencies that had been spawned by President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and President Richard Nixon's "Black Capitalism" programs..and had become the backbone of the Democratic Party in New York's inner city neighborhoods As private corporations, the not for profit CBO's were not covered by Davis Bacon..and the contractors they hired to renovate buildings could pay the lowest wages they could get away with... Now, you'd think that the construction unions would have tried to stop this.... If you thought that, then you thought wrong, cause that's exactly what DIDN'T happen... Initially, union contractors did bid on these jobs...but, they wern't exactly paying union scale... Some of this was perfectly legal..since some building trades unions, in particular the New York District Council of Carpenters (NYDCofC) had agreed to lower wages on "renovation" work.... And one union that wasn't as inclined to cut it's member's wages, Drywall Tapers local 1974 of the Painters Union, was actually replaced by another, cheaper, and more compliant union, Drywall Tapers and Plasterers local 530 of the Plasterers Union.... And some if it wasn't so legal.... As I've pointed out elswhere on GANGBOX, there had been a longstanding pattern of racketeer influence and organizational corruption in the building trades here in New York : http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/831 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2920 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2987 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/3024 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4096 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7378 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7408 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7582 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8985 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583 and http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16200 One form of racketeering activity in construction involved contractors who were either owned by members of and/or under the protection of < cosa nostra > paying less than union scale on nominally union jobs, and using the cost savings to underbid union contractors who actually paid union scale, and who therefore couldn't afford to do those jobs as cheaply.. In the field of inner city interior renovation, one of the contractors who, allegedly, engaged in this pratice on a number of jobs was a firm called Inner City Drywall..a "union" sheetrock and ceilings contractor owned by one Vinny Di Napoli.... The pratice was called "lumping" (remember, I mentioned that term earlier in this article), and it involved carpenters being paid a lump sum, in cash, off the books, to put up a certain amount of sheetrock. That amount was far less than full union wages and benefits, needless to say... Di Napoli allegedly opened the door to this pratice..but he wasn't the only alleged offender.... Other companies soon followed suit, so they could stay in the inner city renovation game. And, since these "union" contractors were paying what amounted to non union wages, the openly non union contractors soon followed suit..and, by the late 1980's non union contractors dominated the inner city renovation field... Now, much of the housing that was built was NOT intended to house the low income workers who's homes had been destroyed in The Burining of New York.... Initially, much of the housing that was built was intended for middle income people, folks who might otherwise move to the suburbs... In many cases, single family homes were built on lots that had once housed apartment buildings, with a 1 or 2 family unit replacing 30 or 40 apartments.... In 1993, the City of New York accelerated this gentrification process by greatly weakening the Rent Stabilization Law. Landlords now had something called "luxury decontrol"...this meant that, if the rent for an apartment reached $ 2,000 a month, thanks to the rent increases every time the 1 or 2 year leases are renewed and every time an apartment changes hands, then that unit was released from the Rent Stabilization program forever, and the landlord could charge whatever he/she felt like for that apartment... Thanks in large part to the gutting of Rent Stabilization, some of the new housing units, in particular those in or close to Manhattan were now openly being marketed as luxury housing, with no pretense that they were intended for low income people (even though the ostensable point of their HUD financing was to provide homes for those who could otherwise not afford a decent place to live)... Nowhere was this more true than in Harlem, a neighborhood which is actually in Manhattan, and less than 20 minutes by subway from the office towers of Midtown, and less than 40 minutes from Wall Street... Also, the influx of government-guaranteed real estate development had begun to pull private capital in it's wake...non-subsidized builders began developing housing all over the city. Many of the private developments in Brooklyn and Queens were marketed to recent immigrants..Russian, Ukranian and Bukharian Jews in Williamsburg and Southern Brooklyn, Chinese in Sunset Park and Flushing, Ecuadorians, Mexicans and other Latinos in Corona, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst and Koreans in Flushing and Corona... And, as working class Whites moved out of many neighborhoods that were now largely populated by immigrants of color, private developers also began building lots of private homes and 2, 3 and 4 family townhouses in Staten Island and the Northern Bronx... And, of course, the same developers who'd gentrified much of Lower Manhattan in the 1980's continued building luxury hirises in those areas for the affluent... After September 11th, many of the developments in Downtown Manhattan had an extra added government subsidy from the Liberty Bond program, which were supposedly intended to rebuild the buildings destroyed in the al-Qaeda air raid... With the exception of most of the luxury hirises in Manhattan, damn near all of these buildings were built with non union labor.. The city itself got into the non union construction game...with 100% of the maintenance and renovation work on the 300 NYCHA public housing projects directly owned by the city being done with non union labor, in open and blatant defiance of the Davis Bacon Act.... And, even on those luxury hirises, the jobs were often "union" in name only, with concrete and drywall contractors allegedly paying less than union scale and no benefits to many of their nominally union carpenters, concrete laborers, cement masons and drywall tapers. A large segment of the nominally "unionized" contractors in those sectors have allegedly participated in paying cash to their union workers. Theis pratice, commonly known in the trade as "paying cash", has reportedly included unionized hirise concrete contractors Rivara, Peter Scalamandre & Sons, Inc, North Side, Inc [formerly North Berry, Inc], LaQuilla Pinnacle, Marmer Brothers, Atlas and Manhattan Concrete. It has also been alleged that cash was paid to unionized carpenters and tapers by unionized drywall contractors On Par Contracting, R & J Construction, Frank's Home Improvement, S & S Construction, S & F Carpentry, Eurotech, Target Construction, DANCO, Crown Partition, Arrowstar, New York City Accoustical, Chelsea Interiors, Prince Carpentry, Ace Drywall, Universal Drywall, Manhattan Interior Group, Turbo Interiors, Luna Carpentry, Sunrise Systems, W & J Industries, Basic Drywall, OKay Drywall, Verdico Industries and Elite Interiors. The pratice of paying substandard cash wages to union drywall tapers has also allegedly been carried out by unionized drywall taping contractors Improved Drywall, J & El Associates, Cadet Taping, Pride Taping, Wal-tone, A & L Construction, I.G.I. Finishing and F & M Taping That alleged pratice of paying scab wages on supposedly "union" jobs has opened the door to openly non union contractors doing work in the once all union luxury residential construction sector, including scab drywall outfits Centre Interior, Luna Limited (non union alter ego of Luna Carpentry), M.N. Industries, Roman Industries, Basic Associates (non union sister firm of Basic Drywall) and Hudson Associates. One scab concrete outfit, IBK, actually went so far as to get a bogus "union" contract with bogus Brooklyn-based company union "local 98, National Organization of Industrial Trade Unions".. NOITU's $ 10/hr contract was imposed on IBK's Russian, Ukranian and Georgian immigrant carpenters, masons and concrete laborers. The agreement has no shop steward system, no trade rules and also requires them to pay upwards of $ 50 bucks a week for a very weak benefit package... IBK has done concrete work in Harlem, for BFC at a luxury apartment house called The Washington on W. 148th St and Fredrick Douglass Boulevard, and the firm is currently building 6 hirise hotels for the Hampton Inn chain all around Lower Manhattan Basically, non union wages and conditions had become the norm in almost all of the residential construction sector in New York City..and those who wouldn't work under scab conditions would remain jobless... Even on the union residential jobs, the workers who get to be "company men" (regular employees of the contractors who are taken from job to job), are often those who agree to "work for cash"... Those who choose to work for union scale may find themselves the first to be laid off..and might end up sitting home for a very long time, since there are so many other guys on the list...and, thanks to the "request" system, companies can pick and choose who they hire from the union.... That's why we currently have the seemingly very odd situation of a massive building boom in residential construction side by side with extremely high unemployment for unionized construction workers... The unions remain strong in commercial construction, in particular in new construction of office buildings....but, thanks to globalization, outsourcing, corporate mergers, the aftermath of the 9/11 bombing and a general reduction in white collar employment in the corporate sector, there's a lot less demand for office space...and some of those same scab labor pratices that have become the norm in residential construction have even begun to bleed into office renovation work, in particular in office furniture installation and interior demolition.. Some of the same drywall outfits that allegedly pay cash in the residential sector also operate in office interior renovation..and it's safe to say that they use similar business methods in that sector... Union contractors allegedly paying scab wages off the books to union teamsters and carepnters has also been allegedly going on in the office furniture installation industry. Reportedly, this has included companies like G & M Installers, Trinity Carpentry & Systems Installation, T.O.P.S., CMI, J.A.D., J & E Enterprises, Al-Lee Installations, Arrow Discount Office Furniture D/B/A E G Sales, L & D Installers, DFB Sales and Vintage Corporate Services. As horrible as these labor abuses are, it actually gets worse.... There's a racial angle too..... The great majority of the construction workers on the non union jobs are men of color..(just about the only White workers you see in this side of the industry are immigrants from Europe)... As I pointed out above, many of the Black workers in this sector are actually former or current union members, who got tired of waiting on the list for a job, and went out and shaped up a scab job... The immigrant workers are generally non union members...in particular the workers from Mexico, Ecuador, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and China... But, even some of these workers are nominally union members too....but they have to work scab to survive... On those luxury renovation jobs in Harlem, the bulk of the workforce are African American or West Indian, and many of them have roots on the union side of the industry... In some cases, union contractors, in particular R & J Construction and Frank's Home Improvement, have allegedly supplied union carpenters to work for non union pay on these jobs...sometimes for as little as $ 8/hr... and in some cases for a piecerate of between $ 280 and $ 380 per apartment, rather than an hourly wage.... Beyond reputedly dirty union contractors who allegedly operate "double breasted" (part union, part non union) like R & J and Frank's Home Improvement, and companies with scab conditions sanctioned by bogus contracts with company unions, like IBK, the bulk of the contractors building luxury housing in Harlem are openly non union. That sector is dominated by openly scab firms like Gaetano Construction, Strategic Construction, Artimus Construction, Vertex Restoration, L & M Builders, Central Development Corp., Pythagoras, BFC, King Raja Construction, Soho Restoration Co., Lally & B Construction, Transcorp, Vardo Construction, Nativo, Novalex, Mega Contracting and J.F. Contracting... Now, what have the unions done about this??? Well, the New York District Council of Carpenters (NYDCofC) does have a very active organizing department... That organizing department is a legacy of the trusteeship that the NYDCofC's parent international union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA) imposed on the District Council in 1996 (which was allegedly prompted by an imminent federal racketeering investigation).. They actually won an NLRB representation election at Gaetano Construction..and are currently circulating authorization cards at Artimus Construction.... The Laborers Union's Laborers Eastern Regional Organizing Fund (LEROF) also has a small army of organizers fanning across the city..some of whom are also active in the Harlem area... Like the Carpenters Union, the Laborers Union's newfound interest in organizing was sparked by massive federal, state and local anti racketeering investigations.... Now, the brothers involved with these organizing drives are very dedicated people...and they have a lot of support from many of the workers on the jobs. However, their is a problem..the NLRB petition method itself... Union recognition through NLRB elections is difficult enough to win with employers who have permanent places of business and permanent employees... Typically, 75% of NLRB-style organizing drives fail..and every year, 20,000 workers get fired for participating in those drives... In construction, it's worse...organizing one company at a time in a situation where many companies are competing for the same work in the same market area has even deeper pitfalls... First of all, the NLRB process takes years...Gaetano still has the NYDCofC Organizing Department tied up in court a year after the union's NLRB election victory..and that case will drag on for a lot longer... And, even if the union wins, a contractor who pays union scale and benefits (which, in the Carpenters Union's case, add up to just under $ 65 bucks an hour) is at a strong competitive disadvantage when it's bidding against firms that pay $ 8 bucks an hour off the books.. In an environment when many longtime unionized firms all but openly pay scab wages to their company men, it's very possible that companies might, on paper, sign union agreements..and keep on paying scab wages to their steady employees, in return for regular work... There's also the risk that, to get these contractors signed up, the unions might legalize these substandard wage pratices, by signing some kind of special agreement mandating that workers on residential construction get lower pay and inferior benefits.... The Carpenters Union in particular has done just that all over North America, in Nevada, Pennsylvania, California, Maryland, British Columbia, Canada and many other places.. Here in New York City, the NYDCofC has made moves in that direction as well.... A few years ago, scaffolding contractors were allowed to sign a special agreement, reducing their carpenters wages and benefits, and removing shop stewards from their jobsites, in an unsuccessful bid to get formerly unionized scaffolding outfits Rockledge and Colgate to re sign with the unions... At that same time, the NYDCofC also offered a substandard wage and benefit package, set at 30% lower than union carpenter pay, to the scab contractors in Upper Manhattan... The Carpenters Union was turned down..but the NYDCofC did reach an "experimental" agreement under those same terms with the Fifth Avenue Committee, a not for profit social services agency in Brooklyn, covering the $ 13 million dollar Red Hook Homes development in South Brooklyn. Under that concessionary pact, the Carpenters Union, along with the Laborers Union's Mason Tenders District Council, Bricklayers local 1, Painters District Council 9 and Plumbers local 1 agreed to let the FAC's contractors pay their workers a substandard pay and benefit scale that was set 30% lower than regular union scale.... That opens the door to a "seperate but equal" pay scale for the largely minority and immigrant workers on these jobs.... Also, to make matters worse, the Coalitions no longer act as a counterweight forcing the construction unions to open up racially.... By the early 1990's, most of the Coalitions had gone very far from the communist-influenced radical nationalism of the 1960's... Harlem Fightback and the Chinese Construction Workers Association openly advocated class collaberation between minority workers and minority contractors, and a joint campaign by workers and bosses of color against White contractors and construction workers... It was ironic that Fightback and CCWA would adopt narrow nationalist positions like that, since both these groups were originally founded by people affiliated with Maoist revolutionary communist groups (the Progressive Labor Party in Fightback's case, and the Communist Workers Party in CCWA's).. The leaders of the remaining Coalitions, who lacked Fightback and CCWA's radical pedigrees, degenerated into the same kind of gangster-influenced business unionism that has so long dominated the mainstream construction unions... Some Coalition "site coordinators" (their version of shop stewards) even degenerated so far as to start running what amounted to protection rackets, taking money from racist contractors to supply goon squads who would keep other Coalitions from forcibly integrating their jobsites.. As if that didn't weaken the Coalitions enough, the New York Police Department and the FBI also began a crackdown on the Coalitions and, by the mid 1990's, the busses stopped rolling, and jobsites stopped being forcibly integrated... That law enforcement crackdown on the Coalitions was but a small part of a general police war on gangster unionism in the building trades, which, along with the catastrophic erosion of union density, has led to a general crisis for the construction unions here in NYC... NYC, Chicago and a few other major cities are the last bastions of construction unionism in America.. An industry that, as late as the 1950's was over 70% union is now close to 85% non union... That decline in unionization was true even here in New York, where, thanks to years of racketeering and lumping, the industry is 50% non union.... Also, the bankers and developers have, for the last 30 years, strived to rid themselves of the tremendous cost that < cosa nostra > payoffs and graft add to the cost of construction in this market.... Since those leading financiers happen to also be the same folks who, ultimately, control the government, this has meant 3 consecutive decades of federal, state and local racketeering investigations...with the bulk of the law enforcement activity focused on cleaning out racketeer influence in the unions... Just about every major construction union in the city, with the exception of Electricians local 3, has faced investigations... Currently, the NYDCofC's Executive Secretary Treasurer, Mike Forde, and Westside Carpenters local 608 Business Agent Martin Deaveraux have been convicted of labor racketeering charges by the New York County Supreme Court, and face sentensing on June 30.... They're not the only labor leaders in the hot seat...Plasterers local 530 founder Louis Moscatiello, Sr and current local 530 President Carmine Mingoia were arrested on April 20, 2004, on similar charges The government has an agenda here..and it's NOT making the unions stronger... The New York State Organized Crime Task Force spelled out this point quite clearly in a report they wrote 14 years ago; "Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry", by Ronald Goldstock, Martin Marcus, Thomas D. Thatcher II and James B. Jacobs (New York, NYU Press, 1990). The State Task Force report envisioned a brave new world of construction where there were no union hiring halls, no work rules, lower wages, and a construction workforce that were totally loyal to the boss, rather than to a union. The feds and the city (and the bankers they take their orders from) have a similar vision of what they want our industry to be like Attacking the gangsters who dominate the unions is merely a means to achieving that goal. Also, as I pointed out above, the gangsters extract a quite costly "mob tax" of payoffs and kickbacks from employers and/or developers who desire to have substandard wages and working conditions on their jobs ....and they make sure that those contractors who DON'T pay the so called "mob tax" are compelled to live up to the full wages and working conditions spelled out in the union contracts. Although some contractors pass on the labor cost savings to the developers in the form of lower bids, there have also been many instances where contractors colluded with < cosa nostra > to rig bids, and artificially inflate the price of the jobs, thus enabling them to charge union scale prices while actually paing scab wages to their workers. What happend was, folks like Donald Trump, Larry Silverstein and Bruce Ratner (and Citicorp, JP Morgan Chase, Fleet Northstar and the other financial corporations who actually bankroll those dudes) simply got sick and tired of paying the ultimate costs of the mob payoffs..and frequently not even getting to benefit economically from the gangster-depressed wages... Bottom line, the big boys thought that these small time gangsters and contractors were ripping them off.. And, when rich people get robbed (or even THINK they're getting robbed)....then ya know that somebody has got to go to jail.... Beyond that, the financial titans of the construction industry would like to see a general reduction of wages and benefits, and weakening of union work rules, in our industry...and they want the law enforcement community to enforce that. Needless to say, that has created a crisis in the construction unions...and will no doubt lead to even more non union residential construction..and a continuing decline in the wages and conditions of those workers on union jobs...... This crisis hit tradespeople of color the hardest...especially since the main group that had fought for Black, Latin and Chinese construction workers for the last 30 years, the Coalition, had basically ceased to exist as a positive force in the business... But, beyond the labor abuses, we also need to take a look at the housing conditions of the working class, in particular, those poor Black and Latino workers in neighborhoods like Central Harlem... As I pointed out above, Harlem is rapidly being gentrified. Beyond the co-ops going up along Fredrick Douglass Boulevard and W. 145th St, housing prices have soared for existing units. 2 bedroom apartment rents START at $ 1,200 a month, and 3 story brownstone houses are selling for $ 1 million and up... This is happening all over the city, especially in neighborhoods that are within a short commuting distance of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan... Worse yet, government subsidies intended to build LOW INCOME housing are subsidizing much of this wave of gentrification.... The city is building a few hundred public housing apartments, which is just about the only housing currently being built for low income workers. There is certainly no large-scale construction of projects for the working poor like there was in the 1940's, 50's and 60's... The city isn't even paying developers to build subsidized middle income Mitchel Lama developments anymore..and the owners of the existing Mitchel Lama developments are being allowed to jack up their rents with a view to forcing out their current middle income working class tenants and replacing them with rich people... Bottom line, the bulk of the housing currently being builtin this city is intended for the wealthy... This natrually leads to a situation where the city has tens of thousands of folks living on the streets..and hundreds of thousands more living doubled or tripled up in apartments intended for only one family, pooling their incomes to pay the inflated rents... These two problems, superexploitation of low paid construction workers and gentrification-caused displacement and rent gouging of working class tenants, are closely related...but, unfortunately, the leaders of the construction unions don't even bother to deal with those issues...not even the unions like the Carpenters and Laborers, a majority of who's members actually live in the city, as well as working here.. Instead of taking an independent position on behalf of the working class, the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council and it's affiliates echo the developers. Instead of demanding more housing for the working class, the construction unions loudly and uncritically support multi billion dollar government subsidies of mega developments like the new $ 5 billion stadium for the New York Jets on the Westside of Manhattan, or former Deputy Mayor Bruce Ratner's $ 4 billion dollar luxury housing development to be built around the new New York Nets stadium in Downtown Brooklyn or Larry Silverstein's $ 5 billion dollar office complex that's being built on the ruins of the old World Trade Center... Unlike the $ 800 million dollars in long term low interest loans to developers in the 1970's, these $ 14 billion dollars in subsidies aren't really even loans...they're more like giveaways... The developers won't even have to make payments on these so-called "loans"...instead, their property tax payments will be counted as if they were loan payments.... Think about it...imagine if you tried to tell your bank that, instead of repaying your mortgage, you wanted them to count your property tax payments as if they were also mortgage payments!!!! You're home would be forclosed on, and you'd be sent to jail for fraud, in a heartbeat!!!! Those developments will be great for the developers and the bankers who finance them, and for the securities firms who will underwrite the bond issues.... It's a no lose deal for the moneymen.... Especially in Silverstein's case. In a city where there's a declining demand for office space, there's no guarantee that he'll be able to rent out the office space in his new World Trade Center And, considering that there's a war on (and the destruction of the old World Trade Center was the Pearl Harbor that triggered that war) there's no guarantee that companies seeking office space will want to tempt fate and locate there, knowing the likely risk of a future terrorist attack on the new WTC.. But, between the government subsidies, and the minimum of $ 3.6 billion dollars in insurance settlements that he's going to collect on the old WTC, Larry Silverstein is guaranteed to make billions of dollars one way or the other... But what about the working class??? Even looking at it narrowly from the perspective of construction workers...stadium construction simply doesn't generate as many hours of work as apartment building construction does... Now, there will be substantial numbers of work hours generated by the office towers and luxury apartment houses..but, just as many hours could be generated by building housing for the working class.... Beyond that, there will be several thousand working class people who will be directly displaced by both of the Jets and Nets stadiums....and tens of thousands more who'll be forced out by the gentrification effect caused by these developments, which will force up rents all over Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan and Prospect Heights and Park Slope, Brooklyn... There's also a very real risk of a 1975-style city bankruptcy...remember, back then, the city went broke over $ 800 million dollars in subsidies to real estate developers.... The current deals with Ratner, Silverstein and the owners of the New York Jets add up to around $ 14 billion dollars....almost 18 times the debt load that destroyed the City of New York's finances 29 years ago.... And that doesn't include the massive subsidies for the Moinian Group's luxury housing developments downtown, and the Durst Organization's office buildings in the Times Square area.... If those guys can't repay their loans..(and considering the saturation of the city's luxury housing market, and the declining demand for 1st class office space, that's a real possibility..not to mention the fact that, due to that property tax scheme, they won't really even be repaying the loans anyway) the city is screwed..... Another Fiscal Crisis would no doubt lead to thousands of layoffs for the City of New York's 300,000 unionized employees...and massive service cuts for the city's 8 million residents... So, what's the answer??? I think that there needs to be a two-front struggle...on one hand, to re unionize New York City's construction workforce..and, on the other hand, to force the city to build decent low cost housing for the working class, and to stop rent gouging by the landlords, rather than subsidizing luxury housing and gentrification... But how do we do that??? First, we have to understand how it is that the construction unions came to have such a pro-developer world view, and how they came to stand by and let the building trades be deunionized..and also how it came to be that the building trades unions have failed for so long to advocate housing for working class New Yorkers, and have instead become,in effect, uncritical supporters of gentrification.... Now, these problems don't exist just because of union corruption...although that's part of the problem.. Nor is it just a question of union racism...although that's a HUGE part of the problem... Nor is it simply because some union leaders are bad people...not at all... The reason is because of something called business unionism... What's that?? Business unionism is the theory that workers and bosses have common interests, and that the job of unions is to promote partnership or class collaberation between employees and their employers. In construction unions, this has concretely meant that a lot of employer abuses get defended by the unions. For instance, the construction unions have long tolerated, and even openly supported, a state of affairs where building trades union members are employees at will, who can be fired at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all...and, there is a grossly unequal distribution of work, where a tiny priviliged minority of union construction workers work every day, while the great majority are, essentially, high paid day laborers, scrambling from job to job, and spending much of the year home out of work.. Also, business unionism has led to the domination of most of New York's construction unions by the gangsters of < cosa nostra > and other organized crime groups....this was a natural development, since the contractors the unions collaborated with were themselves heavily influenced by organized crime...and in many cases the firms were actually owned by gangsters... Also, construction unions have long allowed a grotesquely high level of racial and sex-based employment discrimination to continue in our industry....it actually took an armed mass movement of Black, Latin and Chinese workers, called The Coalition, to force the NYC construction unions to integrate.. I've written about that movement on GANGBOX before, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954 Beyond permitting those on the job abuses, on the broader political front, construction unions have also slavishly followed the political line of the developers...no matter how they affected the housing conditions of the working class as a whole... The construction unions in this town have never fought to defend and expand rent control, or to fight for an expansion of public housing, or to defend working class neighborhoods from gentrification.... In fact, they've done the opposite, by supporting, and demanding government subsidies for, the luxury housing developments of the real estate developers... Business unions are also deliberately structured in an undemocratic way, so as to make sure that the actual needs and demands of the workers don't get in the way of these deals with the contractors... Construction unions are dominated by powerful officers and BA's, who control access to jobs for much of the membership... This control over employment opportunities, and the capacity to reward supporters with relatively good jobs, as well as gaining support from the company men by preserving their special priviliges and their control over a disproportionate share of work opportunities, is the basis for the political machines that control the construction unions... Well....if business unionism is the root of the problem, what's the solution??? Something called revolutionary unionism... What's that??? I've explained the ideology of revolutionary unionism on the GANGBOX website before, at : http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html and on the GANGBOX listserv, at: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/ga http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16682 http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/