Association for Union Democracy

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Centereach, NY

Permit No. 69

Carpenters organize for international union reform

One hundred carpenters came together in Boston on March 4 to discuss how to regain lost rights and strengthen membership control in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Among them were representatives of reform groups in Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Takoma Park, New York, Wisconsin, and individual members from other localities. They voted to establish the Carpenters for a Democratic Union International as a continuing reform caucus and chose a pro-tern steering committee representing each of the thirteen union regions represented at the conference. The CDUI becomes the first nationally organized movement for democracy in any of our construction unions. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Association for Union Democracy and Boston Carpenters for Democracy. Susan and Mike Cranmer and other Boston union activists made the arrangements for the meeting.

In recent years, carpenters in many cities have been provoked into action by an international restructuring plan which has moved power away from local unions and city union councils and has concentrated authority in the hands of the executive secretary treasurers of large, sprawling regional councils (the New England Regional Council stretches from Connecticut To Maine). By this process, members lose the right to elect business agents or vote on contracts. Local unions, denied the right to pay their own staff representatives, attorneys, and

elected officers, or to process their members’ grievances, are reduced to powerless administrative shells.

Special assessments are imposed without membership referendum. No one is permitted to hold any paid union office in the district without permission of the all-powerful executive secretary treasurer. The officers of the regional council are chosen indirectly by delegates, not by the membership. The delegates themselves are beholden to the executive secretary treasurer for paid union staffjobs.

This process of consolidation has stimulated local rank and file opposition movements all over North America. The Boston conference brought them together for the first time.

The new structure has its advocates. Mark Erlich, assistant administrator of the New England Carpenters Council, has argued in Union Democracy Review that the restructuring has shaken up a system of ineffective local “fiefdoms.” The old local-based structure he says, “cannot survive in the face of sophisticated regional contractors.” The concentration of power in the councils enables the new leaders to overcome resistance to new organizing, to bring in new immigrants and workers of color, and generally to organize contractors and workers who have been historically neglected by the union.

Critics among the rank and file question some of these

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