building trades

  • Women in the Trades: They've Got Stories

    It was a day like today—60s and sunny, decades ago—when I swung from the top of a telephone pole and thought I had the best job in the world. A few months earlier, in the Detroit winter, not so much. I remember phoning a customer from the pole behind her house and hearing her tell me she could see a man working on the pole back there. When I visited another customer’s home, climbing boots and tool belt and all, she called me “operator.”

  • Sisters in the Brotherhoods

    Book Review: Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City, by Jane LaTour. As a journeyman electrician in Portland, Oregon, I hadn’t thought of my choice to enter the trades as a political act. It was eye-opening to learn from Jane LaTour’s book that for some of the pioneers this was their aim.

  • Laborers Join with Worker Centers, Aiming To Organize Residential Construction
    by Tiffany Ten Eyck
    Jan 13 2009 - 5:07am

    East Coast Laborers and worker centers are creating locals of mostly immigrant members, promising union presence in residential construction—at lower wages.

  • Bronx Battle Line: Development on City's Dime Must Push Up Wages
    by Mischa Gaus
    Jan 7 2010 - 5:49pm

    Refusing to promise a living wage, a New York retail developer lost out on about $60 million in subsidies. Campaigns nationally are tying public money used in mega-projects to decent wage and working standards.

  • Building Delusions at the Carpenters

    Carpenters President Douglas McCarron is delusional indeed. He’s dismissed the AFL-CIO’s newly chartered carpenters organizing committee and placed faith in his “corporate unionism” approach and a repressive, self-serving regime that destroys the democratic rights of rank and file members.

  • Who Gets the Green Jobs, and Are They Any Good?
    Tiffany Ten Eyck
    Jul 15 2009 - 11:38am

    Just because a job’s green doesn’t mean it’s good. With everything going green—if it really is—what does that mean for our workplaces? A union-backed report by Good Jobs First cautioned that job creation in the new “green economy” often means more low-wage, low-benefit work with companies hostile to unions.

  • Carpenters Launch International Organization for Democratic Reform

    Matt Noyes

    On March 4 in Boston, 100 rank and file carpenters from across the country formed the Carpenters for a Democratic Union International. It is the first national rank and file reform organization in the history of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

    The group's founding conference was sponsored by the Boston carpenters' reform group, Carpenters for a Democratic Union, and the Association for Union Democracy. The conference included carpenters from reform groups in Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Tacoma, New York, and other cities.


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