A-Infos (en) US, NAF* Firebrand Issue #3 - Carpenters For A Democratic Union And Fighting For Rank And File Power

Carpenters For A Democratic Union And Fighting For Rank And
File Power Members of the Firebrand Collective met with Ken
Little to discuss the fight for rank and file power within
the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Firebrand: Ken, can you
explain your job, how you got involved in the Carpenters
Union and your back round?
> Ken: My back round is as a residential carpenter. I joined
the carpenter's union in 1969 and I was a laborer before
that with Chuck Tendor on the Eisenhower Tunnel (which
means I got to actually stuff dynamite down holes which
was a great thing after just getting out of high
school,,blowing things up). I became an iron worker
before I became a carpenter. I tried to get into the IBW, the
electrician's union, but I had shoulder length hair, a ban-
dana, and an attitude to boot (Irregardless, of my second
highest scoring they'd ever seen). My dad didn't raise no
dummies. I wasn't allowed to become an electrician's
apprentice, so I became a carpenter. I worked in 12 differ-
ent states as a carpenter. I was a boomer (a boomer is a
journeyman carpenter who travels to cities where con-
struction booms are happening). I finally got married, had
kids, and settled down. Tacoma was where we ended up.
In 1991 we moved here. That's when I became involved in
the organizing. After moving to the Tacoma area back in
1991 I became involved in organizing inside the
Brotherhood. It was very new. They had a program called
COMET, Construction Organizing Membership
Education Training; god, it got you excited to be a union
member. Then we found out you could only do what the
top dogs wanted you to do and you had to wait in line
before you could bring these new progressive ideas out. A
lot of us said, 'well, fuck you', and we created an organiz-
ing committee. We created a thing called "To Live In
Dignity", in 1993, and this is after we had done a success-
ful campaign against Costco Wholesale, Inc. We got them
to recognize the value of apprentice's and the value of
paying a worker a premium price for his labor. So we got
a 90 percent prevailed rate to recognize an apprentice pro-
gram and that pissed off the leaders. After the "To Live In
Dignity" rally, they kicked me out of the union for two
years. They brought me up on criminal charges, theft and
breaking and entering. It opened the eyes of a whole lot of
people to what we could be doing, and then Doug
McCarron got elected in 1995. We thought that organizing
would go forward and it was just going to be great for all
of us carpenters, an awakening if you will. Then in 1996
he came down with these mandated bylaws that took away
our rights.
  It wasn't until 1996 that I actually got a staff position, if
you will, but I was hired by rank and filers. I wasn't hired
by the staff, which, again it was this rogue group from
Montana who decided they wanted to have input into who
was working for them. It didn't pay much, I didn't need
much. I quit a $55,000 a year job to go take that. I wasn't
making the double pension; I was making 25,000 thou-
sand a year, because organizing was new. Today, the
organizers make anywhere from 80,000-130,000 thou-
sand a year, plus full benefits and two pensions. The atti-
tude that Doug put out was very top-down and against all
the principles I felt were necessary. I also was a salt at one
time. As an organizer, I understood what salting meant-
you had to get in there. And so, when I became an organ-
izer in Montana, I got a job working non-union as a car-
penter. I knew the job sites and I was able to take on
unfair labor practices, so we got ten different charges filed
in two different cities. I would take a couple of weeks off
and go to Billings and work non-union there. I got all
these charges filed against those companies and we were
able to get $12,000 in back pay for carpenters, but it did-
n't mean anything. But we were raising hell, doing the
right things, promoting community values, getting
people aware of their rights. We had radio talk
shows in the conservative state of Montana asking
us to come on to create some
   (Rank and File Power, Continued from Page One)
controversy. We went back to my old high school and
started doing COMET training there. When some of the
parents found out a union organizer was at the school, it
raised hell. I'm not even sure if my friend still works ther,e
at the high school. Why don't they want to challenge the
status quo? I think they're afraid. I think the labor move-
ment is absolutely afraid of where their membership
stands. We've become so used to being consumers, that to
challenge a local contractor you went to high school with
is not in your best interest, if you want to keep your job.
So, I think there is a level of fear that's been developed in
the minds of many of today's people involved in the labor
movement.
  We had lunches at the construction sites on the street to
talk about community values, and were really building
quite a movement of getting better wages for workers. We
got the workers form as many as five companies to sign
authorization cards that they wanted to be represented by
the Carpenters. I turned those cards over to a business
agent, and he didn't do a goddamned thing with them. We
had a movement going where you had 80 carpenters sign
cards all of a sudden. Well, the business agent didn't uti-
lize it and I, of course, spoke up. And that was one of the
reasons I was willing to get out of the carpenters and go
down to Las Vegas and be an
organizer for the National
Building Trades. I lasted thirty
days there; Doug McCarron made
sure that I got fired. I came back
home and got a job with the sheet
metal workers as an organizer,
and the membership decided that
"carpenters can't be teachin'
sheetmetal workers how to organ-
ize" Their main method of organ-
izing was funding market recov-
ery. (Market recovery is money
that comes out of the dues of the
sheetmetal worker's union, so when a non-union contrac-
tor is bidding on a job, and the union contractor is bid-
ding on it; the union gives market recovery money to the
union contractor, so they can underbid the non-union con-
tractor and win the bid on the project. So, basically, it is
buying our jobs. This is a practice of almost every build-
ing trades union, including the Carpenters.) It's where we
buy the jobs, it's anywhere from two to twenty dollars an
hour we pay union contractors; it comes out of members
pockets. It makes it so they can get a job over the un-rep-
resented or non-signatory contractors. It's a sham, that
method of organizing. We started a group called CDU,
Carpenters for a Democratic Union back in 1997, and we
were going great guns, and we were gearing up for the
2000 convention, and then the EST was a guy by the name
of John Steffon. Well, he hired fourteen of the CDU peo-
ple to his new staff.Tthat's the way you get rid of a move-
ment, you bring members into the fold, and then you
know what they're doing. So many of them are still busi-
ness agents and organizers today, and they have bought
into the system, and the system doesn't work. It absolute-
ly will not ever be able to organize anything but contrac-
tors, and that's what our union's good at: giving up our
members rights.
  The organizing that needs to happen has to come from
the ground up and those of us who are in the field work-
ing with these contractors; we have to make them abide by
the contracts, and who better to be a steward than each
and every member. Stewards in our union are all appoint-
ed because they don't want no trouble with the contractor.
My first job as a steward I found that laborers were doing
carpenters work. I reported it first off to the superinten-
dent, that this was not appropriate behavior and he says
"well, I'll talk to John Stephons (the Executive Secretary
treasurer of the Northwest Regional Counel of
Carpenters)", and I was fired the next day. This left me
that much more frustrated as to what the hell to do. So we
started, in 1997, CDU. A lot of different groups
autonomously in every area started their own little group,
and called it whatever they wanted.
 So in 2000, I went around on a six month tour around the
U.S., and I started in March and ended up in Chicago in
August at the Carpenters Convention. My purpose was to
find an individual to run against Doug McCarron. Nobody
ever stepped up to the plate. I went to 37 major cities; I
talked to over 20,000 workers. But I never found that indi-
vidual, so I had to run against Doug McCarron. I got ten
percent of the vote on no campaign, just the short five
minute speech I did about empowering and mobilizing
our members. So to me, at leas,t we made our statement
known.
Firebrand: What's your take on the carpenters right now
in terms of organizing? Are they going to start kicking
some ass?
Ken: I don't think they know how to kick ass. I think they
have been so put down. They have the contractors thumb
of every worker out there. The slightest intimidation will
turn off an organizing campaign very quickly. Organizing
in the construction industry is harder than most, `cause it's
such a transient group. A carpenter has such an independ-
ent mind. Will the residential carpenters in this area
adhere to an organizing program? Well, in the Chicago
area there's only 50 cents an hour difference between
commercial and residential. Out here, it is $6.50 an hour
difference. Everybody is striving to get the most they can
make. We don't organize that market because we decided
to go after the bigger commercial con-
tractors, and just let residential go by the
wayside. It was the biggest mistake they
ever made. That is the training ground
for every commercial carpenter. I would
put a residential carpenter against a com-
mercial carpenter, as far as skills any
day. That residential guy is much
smarter. He takes it from the footer all
the way to shingles on the roof ,some-
times. On a crew you learn drywall. You
do it all. That is the basis for a career in
construction anyways.
Firebrand: I hear that folks who get
organized into the union get kind of
upset because they want residential
work, but they only get commer-
cial work. What about the diversi-
ty of your work, and enjoying
what you are doing everyday?
Ken: And I agree with that. I
think we have to take away the
stigma that you have to work out
of the union hall. You can still be
a union member and work non-
union, but you're out there and the
purpose is to spread the education
(maybe get others to come on
board). It only takes 50% plus 1 to
turn that company union. So
building that power in those residential guys is really
going to build power in a lot of other places of our com-
munity. I don't see that they have enough stamina to do it
right, now. Firebrand: What suggestions do you have for
organizing around everyday issues at work? For example,
at my job the foreman does not allow us to write down on
our time cards the half-hour it takes to roll up the tools.
Ken: Document everyday exactly what was said and cre-
ate yourself a daily log that goes over a time period of say
30 days, and then go up to the boss or the owner of the
company or whatever and say, "look- you guys have vio-
lated this many labor laws right here in America right
now.' Show 'em where it was violated, who did it, and get
him to admit it. It takes only two of you to walk up and do
that. One guy can' t do it. You gotta have some people
behind you. You've got to get them believing that they are
deserving of that half hour pay everyday. You do that
through explaining how much money you lost. You could
have bought your entire Christmas package with that. You
could have taken your wife on a cruise here. Just because
of that half hour a day ,your kids could have had better
shoes. Get the workers to realize what "the boss" is steal-
ing from them., and just document it. You don't have to be
a union person to
bring an unfair labor
practice to the NLRB.
You might need to
have somebody walk
you through the steps.
But that's what they
are there for at the
NLRB. I would say
that I would get a car-
penter organizer and
see where it goes.
Take pictures. Have a
camera with you on
the jobsite. There are
times that you can and
cannot speak about union on a jobsite. Okay, so usually
it's before work, lunch time, and after work. Those are
safe times you can talk union. So what we did was; we
started a conversation about basketball. Well if we can
talk about a non related work subject like basketball, then
we can talk about a union. And this was on a non-union
jobsite, but we just keep talking and they'll say you can't
talk about union on this job. Well why, you talk about your
basketball game? You talk about your son's graduation
from high school. Why can't we talk about our livelihood?
Just knowing your rights will intimidate them further. And
if you get two people doing the same thing, the boss is not
going to want to fire either one of you. You know, intimi-
dation works like a two- way street. And the more people
you have with you understanding their rights, and if you
get your members to sign authorization cards, and be right
out in the open that we want to join a union. We want our
rights. We want a good pension. Show how his being non-
signatory is devaluing the community standards. Appeal
to him one-on-one sometimes, rather than confrontation.
I've used tape recorders in the past. Legal or non-legal, it
really doesn't matter. You can use it as documentation as
to what was said as long as it's transcribed rather than just
that tape being submitted. State laws are different. I don't
know what all the state laws are that pertain to a number
of workers rights in that state, but you have them.
Dewey Dagrod, a rank and file member of Carpenters
247 helped edit this interview.
------------------------------------
The organizing
 that needs to
happen has to
come from the
  ground up.
---------------------------
All I'm trying to
do here is sell a
little democracy
guys, you know,
don't-cha get it?

FIREBRAND - A VOICE FOR PORTLANDS RANK AND FILE WORKERS
ISSUE 3 Spring/Summer 2005 by NAF (Northwest Anarchist
Federation)
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