Cleveland has always been an interesting labor town. There were the days before World War II when a very young Bill Presser rode down Euclid Avenue, heaving bricks through the windows of store owners who hadn’t thought they needed the services of (or hadn’t made payoffs to) the glass workers union. There was Alan Friedman, Presser’s brother-in-law, back from serving as a paratrooper in World War II, tossing a bakery owner down the steps to teach him not to go against the teamsters. (“The son of a bitch had a heart attack when he landed,” Alan complained when working with me on the book Power and Greed: Inside the Teamsters Empire of Corruption. He was seemingly upset by his victim’s weakness because “He died three days later. Who would have known?”) And there was the Irish teamsters leader who was introduced to a young lady of ill repute by Friedman, who didn’t mention that the girl, though a willing professional, was under age. The man was busted, which would have horrified his devout Catholic wife and his sister who was a nun — but Friedman again stepped in, providing the services of Presser who paid enough people that the incident disappeared. The payback introduced Presser and his mob associates into the Cleveland Teamsters’ leadership, paving the way for Jimmy Hoffa.
But nothing I have heard while occasionally covering union
activities over the years prepared me for the recent “bannering”
(“Don’t call it picketing!”) taking place downtown by the Carpenters
Union in front of the Cadillac Ranch Restaurant at 200 Euclid Avenue
and the Holiday Inn Express at East 6th and Euclid, a project of MRN
Ltd., which is responsible for most of the new development around East
4th Street.
Being pro-union (membership in Authors Guild, Writers Guild of
America and others over the years), I walked up to my brothers and
sisters, and asked in solidarity, “Why are you picketing?” The answers
were fairly consistent: “Because they’re paying me to be here.”
“But what’s the complaint?”
Most said they did not know. One said, “That must be proprietary
information or they would have told us.”
Since I came from Tower City, I first asked the members passing out
flyers in front of Cadillac Ranch why they were there after all
work was done and the restaurant had opened. One man just smiled.
“That’s a good question. You’ll have to take it up with the union.”
So I called the union. After leaving several unreturned messages, I
talked with Mark Kuzmik, director of organizing at Carpenters Local No.
21, who first made clear that no picketing was taking place. “We’re
bannering,” he explained. Based on what I had seen almost daily on
Euclid Avenue, this means two people holding an unfurled banner citing
a general complaint. The other men and women are passing out flyers
with information that tells the reader, well, nothing.
As I understand the playing field, the Carpenters Union is starting
a national campaign to assure that businesses hire union carpenters
and/or pay union rates and benefits. They are worried about
undocumented workers being bused in by labor contractors who pick them
up in designated spots, and Amish workers who are bused to job sites.
And they are also worried about qualified and unqualified carpenters
being hired at below-union rates. That is why there is an information
campaign to alert the public to the need to demand that businesses only
“use contractors that meet area standards on all the properties they
own or manage!”
During informational picketing (as opposed to bannering), the rank
and file holding the signs and passing out flyers are educated in the
concerns so that they can tell the public. Stop and talk with them the
next time you see a union picket line; their knowledge and passion will
likely convert you to their cause, or at least generate some empathy
for their concerns. But the Carpenters Union leadership apparently felt
this step was unnecessary, at least in downtown Cleveland.
How many carpenter jobs exist on how many job sites connected with
either Cadillac Ranch or MRN Ltd., and how many are not going to union
members? I asked. No one knew.
“We’re sending a message to the owner in case he builds anymore
restaurants,” one person suggested outside Cadillac Ranch.
“But this one is finished. Are there any others being built?”
“I don’t know.”
At MRN Ltd., the protest seems even more out of place. Rick Maron
and his sons are small-scale redevelopers who have been taking run-down
properties and turning them into lifestyle destinations. East 4th
Street now boasts a comedy club, upscale and affordable restaurants, a
coffee shop, House of Blues, a live theater and a stable base of 300
market-price apartments and condos, many of them just above the
businesses. They have become a role model for developer responsibility,
providing an unusual work model by keeping their skilled laborers on
payroll on a year-round basis — not laying off between projects
or in bad weather as others normally do.
Of course, the MRN laborers often handle more than one task —
a carpenter who has learned electrical work will handle such a job when
needed, for example. And the Carpenters Union rightfully says that a
man or woman who works full time in a single building trade should be
considered more trustworthy. To a point this is true, though the
statement would have had greater impact if not for two facts. The first
is that the man who told me this works full time for the union, yet he
is a cabinetmaker, a skill unrelated to his union work. Yet no one
would criticize his cabinet-making skills because of his union
leadership, nor would they criticize his union work because of his
craft skills.
The second is that all construction work is checked by trained
inspectors. (Yes, there are dishonest building inspectors. There are
dishonest contractors. And there are dishonest union leaders. But
disreputable characters are in the minority in all these fields). If a
skilled craftsman enjoys working in two or more of the building trades
and can do adequate work that can pass inspection, this is no different
than someone who enters medicine to become a general practitioner,
family practice specialist or general surgeon. Some specialize. Some
are generalists. If the work is competent and the compensation fair,
where is the problem?
Alan Friedman once lectured corporate CEOs on how to avoid unions.
He said that if they treated their employees fairly, no one would join
a union. That is still true today.
The carpenters have legitimate concerns, and bannering, work
stoppages and other tactics are certainly appropriate at times. But by
starting their campaign with a project that’s completed and a developer
who provides the type of year-round employment most skilled craftsmen
long for, the only thing it seems they’re accomplishing is what workers
truly appreciate in these tough times: With too few jobs requiring
their carpentry skills, the union is helping to put food on their
family’s table by paying them to pass out flyers. The money is a
blessing. Just don’t ask why the flyers make little sense.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.
Your article concludes by saying the carpenter’s have legitimate concerns but I couldn’t tell from the story what those legitimate concerns were. The margins on these sort of downtown infill projects are so small to begin with. The idea that one should be forced to use union carpenters is silly and archaic. Why a carpenter who chooses not to pay union dues should automatically be considered less qualified to do the job makes no sense to me?
If i was the construction unions I would be working on how to fix the fact that unless their use is mandated by the government they aren’t very price competitive anymore. And private sector investment in NEO isn’t lucrative enough to justify spending the extra money. If the Unions don’t begin to rethink their approach they’ll be doing a lot more “bannering” and a lot less banging nails.