NY/NJ Council augurs badly for NYC Carpenters

As the New York City District Council of Carpenters considers various alternative proposals for the union's future, its 22,000 members are right to be wary. While, for the time being, the council is still under Federal monitorship and subject to the unusually vigorous supervision and reform program of court appointed Review Officer Dennis Walsh, Douglas McCarron, the Carpenters union [UBC] international president, is asking the judge to authorize the kind of system that he, McCarron, has imposed on the union everywhere except in New York City where he is still blocked by the court. 

 

Throughout the country, McCarron has consolidated his own power, centralized decision making, imposed an authoritarian regional structure of union governance, and rendered newly enlarged locals politically impotent. New York City carpenters can see this familiar scenario as it has been enacted once again, recently and just outside the city limits. They are provided with a portent of things to come if the authority of Walsh, the Federal monitor, is replaced by the power of McCarron, the international president. 

 

Early this spring, without prior warning, UBC rank and filers in thirty-five locals in up-state New York and New Jersey were informed that the Empire State Regional Council of Carpenters had been merged with the New Jersey Regional Council of Carpenters into the new Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters. In the new organizational structure, those thirty five locals serving some thirty thousand carpenters were instantly dissolved and supplanted by eight geographically circumscribed locals and five specialty skill locals with region wide jurisdiction; Former New Jersey Executive Secretary Treasurer Michael Capelli gains dominion over the consolidated NRCC and enjoys defacto plenary power over its operations.

 

The carpenter will find the sheer size of the new council and the new locals to be a nearly insurmountable impediment to meaningful membership participation. Local 255 covers a region the size of Death Valley national park. Local 291 is larger than the state of Maryland. The 21 counties of Local 271 are nearly the size of the entire state of West Virginia. In a specious expression of its commitment to rank-and-file participation, the UBC noted that it will post advance notice of regular meetings of the new “locals.” (Presumably so one can book flights and hotel reservations at reasonable rates.)

 

If prospects for emergent participatory democracy seem remote to the rank and filer, it is not merely because union meetings will be held many miles and many counties away, but because power in this union is ultimately derived from the power to determine whether a carpenter works or starves. Under the new job referral system, only the President's man, Executive Secretary Treasurer Michael Capelli, ultimately holds that power.

 

The management of the NRCC’s out of work list, or “OWL,” will be governed by a single centralized dispatch system. From there, all job referrals will be ordered throughout the two-state area. The new system will purportedly assign work to journeymen carpenters first by individually reported skills, then by reported amount of time laid off, next by reported geographical preference within the vast new local, and then finally, by State. The process is then repeated for apprentices. If you are perplexed by precisely how the system will negotiate all of these factors on a single list, it would seem that you are not alone. 

 

With little explanation, thirty thousand members of the 13 locals of the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters were sent skills sheets which require that they select their county preferences, qualifications, skills and abilities from a series of bewildering lists. In how many of these umpteen counties are you willing to work? For which of these separately defined skills are you fitted?  Shortly thereafter, the NRCC sent out a second version of the skill sheet belying their own confusion. In its second iteration, the NRCC asks that county preference only be indicated within one'’s own vast local. 

 

A carpenter wishing to be placed on the “OWL” has additional arcane rules to navigate. He must call into an automated system after a layoff and call again every thirty days to confirm his continued unemployment. An applicant must be reachable by phone between two and six PM every day. If a member refuses dispatch on three consecutive calls, he/she will be moved to the bottom of the work list (which could be a catastrophe, since there will be thousands on the list)!  Applicants shaping their own work must notify Central Dispatch. Negotiating these rules can be treacherous; as violations are subject to progressively steeper monetary penalties.

 

A properly administered automated system could ameliorate the potential for cronyism and corruption in job referrals. The danger is that an improperly administered system merely centralizes the opportunity for abuse. A thousand petty tyrants might be replaced by a single one armed with a silent and untraceable weapon to reward cronies and punish critics. Such potential for abuse inheres in the current system. The automated system, as described in council literature, is inscrutable to mere mortals. Should a rank and filer with an advanced mathematics degree suspect abuse, investigations must be prompt; referral records will only be retained for only six months. Members who fail to strictly adhere to onerous reporting requirements are subject to escalating fines. Punishments for violating the referral rules are potentially severe, but remain at the complete discretion of the Executive Secretary Treasurer or his designee. 

 

The revised skill sheets themselves represent both overt and covert dangers. Within the skills sheet, the carpenter is asked to identify whether he possesses particular skills and abilities and to identify his geographic preference for assignment. Each of these elements gives rise to novel avenues for retaliating against the disgruntled democratic unionist or insurgent candidate. If a union were so inclined, a carpenter on the OWL could be referred to jobs at onerous traveling distances and skills requirements could be manipulated to deny him employment.

 

Selecting geographic preferences within vast territory presents carpenters with a difficult Scylla-Charybdis choice between 1. Placing their names for work only in nearby counties (on a list that could include thousands of others) and so risking prolonged unemployment, or 2. Agreeing to work in most of the counties and so plying the trade as a traveler, a kind of itinerant worker in a territory encompassing thousands of square miles.

 

In a final coup, the council presents carpenters with a Hobson's choice. The law forbids employers from making payroll deductions for union dues or assessments without express authorization in writing by the employee. Therefore, nestled neatly at the bottom of those sign-in work referral sheets, carpenters are directed to authorize those check-off deductions...and more. In fine print, the signatory assigns to the council (not the local) dues check off and assessments that are irrevocable, regardless of continued union membership and the type of employer, for the period of one year. Every eleven and one half months, a ten day window occurs where a carpenter may revoke this authorization (which should be a welcome relief to the carpenter who finds himself working in another industry entirely at that point). Upon inquiry, one carpenter was informed by the union that unless he signed the authorization, he would not be entered on the out-of-work referral list. 

 

Apologists for McCarron'’s reorganizational plan insist that it will be benevolent.  It is hard to see the basis for that hope. But, benevolent or not, it surely is a blueprint for a burgeoning dictatorship.