Read Part 1 in case you missed it. 

The basic mission of the union–protecting carpenters’ rights on the job–remained the same. With the onset of World War I, the union faced a new challenge. Wartime needs for temporary military housing, shipbuilding, and ammunition factories pushed the federal government into a massive construction spending program. When President Woodrow Wilson allowed open shop contractors on federal construction sites, Hutcheson refused to participate in the government’s oversight boards. “While we have every desire to assist the government in the crisis we are now passing through,” he said, “we have no intention of waiving our rights to maintain for ourselves the conditions we have established.”

Despite extraordinary pressures, the union leadership held firm. On November 7, 1917, 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts participated in a general strike on all military work in the area to protest the use of open-shop builders. The strike persisted in the face of threats from the U.S. War Department. Influential preacher Billy Sunday whipped anti-union hysteria to a higher plane, invoking the name of God to denounce Hutcheson’s treason. While that strike was settled within a week, the larger issue remained unresolved until April, 1918 when the federal government approved a new system that guaranteed closed shops in those areas that had them before the war.

Hutcheson’s firmness preserved union standards for carpenters. As the war became a memory, attacks on the patriotism of unionists gave way to a closer examination and subsequent recognition of wartime profiteering by employers. Secretary of War Newton Baker (who had been a vocal critic of the UBC) confirmed many unionists’ suspicions when he admitted that labor had been “more willing to keep in step that capital.”

Peace brought a new and different kind of battle. Employer associations of all kinds initiated a furious assault on union labor under the label of the “American Plan.” Building employers, supported by large industrialists and local Chambers of Commerce, pitched in. They took on construction unions in Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.

Contractors in Chicago insisted on a wage cut in January 1921 and locked out workers after the unions rejected their demand. In June, all the crafts except the Carpenters and Painters agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration by federal judge Kenesaw Landis. The judge’s drastic decision slashed wages beyond the initial contractor proposals and weakened long-standing union work rules. The UBC refused to recognize the judgment and let the fight against the “Citizens Committee to Enforce the Landis Award” for five years until union shop conditions finally returned to Chicago.

In San Francisco, the Industrial Association broke the 20-year reign of one of the country’s mightiest union shops in the building trades. Financed to the tune of $1.25 million and in control of the building materials’ suppliers, the Builders’ Exchange refused to call off a lockout even after the city’s Building Trades Council meekly accepted the contractors’ original wage cut demand. Determined to crush the unions, the employers of San Francisco settled for nothing less than open shop and an end to mandatory collective bargaining in the building industry.

While the American Plan did take its toll, the San Francisco experience was unusually severe. The Brotherhood survived the 1920s. The number of union carpenters declined from 400,000 in 1920 to 345,000 in 1928, but this drop in membership compared favorably to the losses of other labor unions in the prevailing anti-labor climate. Wages in the building trades actually rose by roughly five percent a year. The fury of the anti-union campaigns subsided by the end of the decade. 

During the twenty-one years of McGuire’s stewardship, the UBC succeeded in setting union standards for most carpenters on most construction sites in the U.S. The struggle to achieve these goals was long and difficult. Building contractors used all the tools that employers have typically adopted to drive away unionism—strikebreakers, blacklisting, yellow-dog contracts, and violence. Long after the UBC had established a firm foothold in the industry, contractor associations continued to attempt to undermine the union’s power.

In the first decade of the 20th century, an aggressive nation-wide open-shop attack was mounted against the carpenters’ union. Employers locked out union carpenters in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Houston, Milwaukee, and a number of other cities. Frank Duffy, the General Secretary who succeeded McGuire, wrote in a 1904 issue of the Carpenter that building employers had “organized, combined and affiliated with one another, with the avowed purpose and firm determination of putting our local unions out of existence altogether.”

Yet, despite the bitterness of the conflict, the peculiar characteristics of the construction industry made organizing turn-of-the-century carpenters a possibility at a time when many other sectors of the workforce were unable to break through the barriers of anti-unionism.

In 1900, as the Brotherhood was rapidly expanding, no more than 6 percent of the manufacturing workforce was organized—and that group consisted almost exclusively of the small number of highly skilled operatives whose craft had not been diminished by the factory system. The difference between the organizing potential of factory vs. building trades workers is illustrated by the comments of employers in each field. In an era when a U.S. Steel executive could boast: “I have always had one rule–if a workman sticks up his head, hit it.” Otto Eidlitz, one of the nation’s most powerful builders, proclaimed, “It is without question not only the right but the duty of labor to thoroughly organize itself and it. . . is a power of good in the trade.”

The differences in viewpoints were not due to the benevolence of construction employers. Rather, the economics of the industry encouraged fair-minded builders to reach an accommodation with the unions. Short on capital and dependent on monthly progress payments, small and medium-sized contractors were unable to stockpile resources to withstand the financial strain of a long strike. Furthermore, the highly skilled nature of the work made it difficult for anti-union employers to quickly replace competent carpenters with capable strikebreakers. As a result, builders who were faced with the power of a militant and popular union ultimately chose to forego endless battles and instead accepted agreements with local unions.

Additionally, many building employers recognized the potential benefits that unions could provide in terms of apprenticeship training and hiring hall. In a highly volatile industry with boom-and-bust cycles, employers had difficulty making long-range plans with regard to labor requirements. To the extent that unions willingly accepted the responsibility of training and supplying labor, contractors were relieved of a difficult burden. From their perspective, the positive role of the unions often outweighed the added costs of union recognition and above-average wages in the construction field.

The conditions in the industry thus laid the groundwork for McGuire’s brand of democratic and activist unionism to flourish in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Despite the intensive efforts of open shop employers, membership in the Carpenters’ Union reached 200,000 by 1910. A union card became as crucial to a self-respecting carpenter as a complete set of tools. For those who knew the industry, it was a matter of common wisdom that, “the craftsman without a card is a man without a trade.”

McGuire’s successors–Frank Duffy and William Hutcheson (who, as General President, presided over the Brotherhood from 1915 to 1951)–altered the union’s orientation. Less intent on carrying out McGuire’s motto of “organize, agitate, educate,” they emphasized the smooth administration of the union operation. 

Less interested in McGuire’s philosophies of social change, the UBC under Hutcheson took on a more conservative political cast. More skeptical of broad working-class movements, Hutcheson’s Brotherhood staked out a tougher position in a relation to other labor unions in and out of the building trades. Conflicts over jurisdictional assignments became one of the primary methods of extending working carpenters’ interests.

Read more in Part 2

The Chicago convention was the brainchild of Peter J. McGuire, a 29-year-old carpenter who was to become one of the great labor leaders of the 19th century. A product of the tenements of New York City’s lower East Side, McGuire decided to devote his life to the cause of labor at an early age.

McGuire recognized that the turmoil in the construction industry made conditions ripe for the organization of carpenters. If the carpenter’s trade was under attack, there was only one appropriate response—protect and defend the trade through the collective action of its members. The delegates who gathered in Chicago acknowledged his leadership as a crucial element of the union’s potential for success. While they could not resolve all the debates over the issue raised at the convention, there was no disagreement over who would fill the one full-time position. McGuire was unanimously elected to the post of General Secretary.

The union grew gradually, from a membership of 2,042 in 1881 to 5,789 in 1885. Some cities were well organized while others remained entirely non-union. McGuire worked 18 hours a day to keep the union alive. However, in 1882, both McGuire and the union were penniless. McGuire was forced to borrow $30 from a friend just to print “Carpenter”, the union’s official monthly. McGuire, writing to Gabriel Edmonston, the first UBC General President, for advice and support, vowed to devote his life and wages to keeping the union alive. “I will work at my trade, give up my salary, and kill myself at night to keep things going, if necessary.”

McGuire’s sacrifices eased as the fortunes of the UBC rose with escalating militancy of the American workforce in the 1880s. A general strike initiated and led by the carpenters’ union for the eight-hour work day on May 1, 1886, began what proved to be one of the key political events of 1886, a year that historians refer to as “the great uprising of labor.”

During the spring, McGuire temporarily suspended the regular business of the UBC as he criss-crossed the country speaking to countless audiences about the shorter hours movement. His efforts paid handsome dividends. More than 340,000 workers demonstrated for the reduced working day on May 1. In almost every city, carpenters led striking marchers. As a result, union carpenters won higher wages and/or decreased hours in 53 cities in 1886. Unorganized carpenters flocked to the activist organization as the Brotherhood’s membership swelled to 21,423 by the end of the summer.

The militancy of American workers in 1886 stunned the business world and surprised cautious labor leaders. The hundreds of rallies, walkouts, and strikes demonstrated the appeal of the eight-hour day and prompted the American Federation of Labor to plan a follow-up series of actions for May 1, 1890, under the banner of the nation’s single most effective labor organization. The AFL selected the Carpenters Union because, in the words of President Samuel Gompers, it was the “best disciplined, prepared and determined” force in the labor movement. The UBC lived up to its reputation. As part of a massive national and international effort in 1890, over 23,000 American carpenters in 36 cities won the eight-hour day and 32,000 more gained a nine-hour workday. At the end of the campaign, McGuire was able to describe the 55,000-member UBC as “the largest and most powerful organization, numerically, of any special trade in the whole civilized world.”

A carpenter’s average wage at the time of the union’s birth was $2 a day. Twenty years later it had doubled, and it was as high as $5 in the larger cities. By 1903, union membership had climbed to 167,200. Four years later, eight hours was the standard length of the carpenter’s work day across the country, at a time when ten- and twelve-hour days were still common in many other industries.

Success rarely comes without cost, however. And McGuire’s years of maintaining a grinding schedule took their toll. By the turn of the century, his body was wracked with disease. McGuire resigned at the union’s 1902 convention, looking considerably older than his 50 years. The now-frail leader told the assembled delegates that he could not and would not continue as their leader. “A man wears out like a piece of machinery,” he concluded. The man who founded the Brotherhood and presided over its meteoric growth died four years later at his home in Camden, New Jersey.

In August 1881, 36 carpenters from eleven cities met in a Chicago warehouse to form a national union. Four days of heated discussion produced a constitution, a structure, and a new organization with two thousand members—the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

The founding of the union was a response to changing conditions in the construction industry in the second half of the 19th century. The old ways of building were disappearing as a new “modern” system emerged.

Shifts in the larger economic order transformed the daily life of the working carpenter. Facing turbulent times and an uncertain future, carpenters turned to unionism to serve their collective interests.

The carpenter in colonial America had been a man with considerable bargaining power. As one of a small number of skilled artisans in a young society eager for new houses, commercial buildings, and wooden ships, he often earned more than twice as much as his English counterpart.

The carpenter who carried his tools across the Atlantic also brought with him the European “guild system” in which the categories of workers encompassed masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Each handled the tools of the trade in a centuries-old division of work responsibilities. The rules were unwritten, but tradition held that masters looked out for the long-term welfare of journeymen and the training of apprentices, as they passed on the “art” and “mystery” of the craft to the next generation. The division between the groups was not one of permanent status, but of age, years of experience, and levels of skill. 

Barring unforeseen circumstances, an apprentice who stayed with the trade could expect, in time, to become a master. To the extent that masters, journeymen, and apprentices shared a common work experience and vision of the industry, their economic interests tended to coincide. Early efforts at organization focused on stabilizing prices and reducing competition between carpenters, not employer/employee conflicts. In the 1700s, master and journeymen carpenters united in most American cities to establish “books of prices,” volumes that standardized the costs of every aspect of the carpentry trade.

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded in the United States, the guild system gave way to a capitalist set of relations in the building industry. The dramatic increase in post-Civil War construction activity outpaced the ability of the masters to meet the labor demands. The volume of building activity shot up 250 percent between 1866 and 1906, an upsurge that included wild swings of phenomenal expansion and terrifying crashes. The dizzying pace of new construction was part of a nation in change. Railroads connected once remote towns and villages. Technological innovations wiped out entire handicrafts and introduced the factory system to growing numbers of industries. The United States emerged from a sea of self-contained communities to a unified country linked by communication and transportation systems.

Mechanical inventions and new building materials altered the carpenter’s work. Factories with new machines—cut-off saws, mortising and tenoning machines, borers, compound carvers, and power sanders—enabled the mass production of items such as blinds, doors, flooring, and stairs that had been fashioned by hand. Cast-iron replaced wood beams as early as 1852 and, by the end of the century, the introduction of structural steel reinforced concrete, and the elevator laid the groundwork for the modern skyscraper.

But the industry changed in other ways as well. The opportunities for profit generated by economic growth attracted speculators and middle men with little or no attachment to the traditions of the industry. These men seized the opportunities created by escalating construction demand but remained ignorant of the issues of craft pride and quality that characterized the guild system. “Jerry” building and “botch” work were frequently the by-products of the new breed of builders who emphasized speed, productivity, and profitability.

The emergence of the contractor/businessman strained the personal connections that had existed between masters, journeymen, and apprentices. At one time, a carpenter might have worked for a single master for twenty years; by the late 1800s, he might have as many as twenty employers in one year.

At the turn of the century, Connecticut carpenter J.W. Brown looked back at the five decades of his trade. He recalled the times when his employer “felt himself under a moral obligation” to the working carpenter and his steady employment. Now, reported Brown, the carpenter had become “accustomed to look upon himself not only as a wage worker for life, but as an appendage to a monstrous machine for the production and distribution of wealth.”

In response to the News 8 series, the Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) issued a press release on its anti-payroll fraud efforts related to unemployment contributions. The LWC is expecting a record year. So far in 2015, auditors have found 12,782 misclassified employees and $83 million in underreported wages, resulting in collecting an additional $923,000 in unemployment taxes. The numbers don’t show how much of that was in the construction industry. In 2010 they found fewer than 300 misclassified employees. The LWC efforts are aided by anti-fraud software.