NONUNION TOWN – the fall of the New York City construction unions, 1969-2026

 

NONUNION TOWN – the fall of the New York City construction unions, 1969-2026

The City of New York has over 1 million occupied buildings, worth a total of $1.57 trillion dollars, the most valuable pool of real property on the face of the Earth.

All of that value is created by New York City’s 400,000 construction workers (the largest construction workforce in America and 4% of this country’s 10 million construction workers).

Those buildings are maintained by the city’s 200,000 janitors and stationary engineers, 100,000 security officers and 50,000 hotel workers.

Those 750,000 workers maintain these one and a half trillion dollars worth of capital in usable condition, and help keep the city’s 8,000 big landlords wealthy.

They don’t get a whole lot in return – 300,000 of those construction workers, 75%, are non union and are paid an average of $20 an hour. 

Around a third of those non union workers are paid off the books, with many of those workers being undocumented and having no other choice.

The 100,000 union workers make more per hour – usually around $50 – but most of them spend at least part of the year unemployed

The city’s 150,000 non union janitors and stationary engineers, 75,000 non union security officers and 20,000 non union hotel workers also endure poverty level wages and no benefits.

The 50,000 union janitors and stationary engineers, 25,000 union security officers and 30,000 non union hotel workers make around $50,000 a year (about $90,000 a year below the $ 140,000 salary you need to earn to have a middle income standard of living in NYC) and actually have employer paid benefits and defined benefits pension

By the anemic standards of America’s construction and building service workers unions in the 2020s, this is a pretty high level of unionization and a pay scale that’s as working poor status as much of the nation’s private sector union workforce.

By historical NYC standards, its pathetic.

As recently as the 1970s, 90% of this city’s construction and building service workers were unionized and they enjoyed a solidly middle income standard of living

Most non union building workers in New York City can’t afford to buy a home here, a lot of them can’t even afford to rent an apartment within the city limits (they either double or triple up in one family apartments illegally converted into single room occupancy residences, or they commute to work from the inner ring suburbs)

How did America’s quintessential “union town” become an open shop city?

This is that story

In 1969, the City of New York repealed Rent Control, as part of a broader package of changes to the NYC Housing Maintenance Code, the law that governed the apartment buildings where a majority of New Yorkers reside.

The Rent Control Law, which was enacted into law in 1947 after three decades of communist-led tenants rights struggles, had made NYC an affordable place to live for working class tenants.

That’s precisely why the city’s landlords and their lobbying group the Real Estate Board of New York hated that law. The new Rent Stabilization Law made it easier for landlords to raise the rent. Units that were covered by the old Rent Control Law would remain under that law until the current tenants moved out.

This created a strong incentive for landlords to drive out current tenants who were covered under Rent Control and replace them with Rent Stabilized tenants.

In some areas of the city, mainly predominantly White areas in Manhattan or the parts of Queens and Brooklyn that had easy subway access to the downtown and midtown central business districts, this gave landlords an incentive to drive out tenants from existing buildings.

Sometimes this would take the form of landlords deliberately letting buildings become uninhabitable to drive out the current residents.

In largely Black or Latino parts of Manhattan, and in areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens that were either too far from Manhattan or too heavily Black or Latino, this pressure to drive out tenants took the form of landlords hiring “torches” (professional arsonists) to burn their buildings down

In still other areas of the city, landlords legally tore down existing Old Law Tenements (built before 1901) and New Law Tenements (built between 1901 and 1929) and replaced them with modern Class A apartment buildings.

The City of New York assisted this process through the Mitchell Lama program that provided financial incentives for this new construction. A total of 135,000 apartments (69,000 tenant owned co-op units and 66,000 rental apartments) were built under this program.

The City funded this program by taking out $784 million in short term high interest rate loans from the banks, and then lending out the money long term at low interest (this did not end well for the City government and its finances, as I will discuss below)

The rent increases in residential also had a ripple effect on commercial rents for the city’s many small businesses.

The rapid increase in commercial rents accelerated the collapse of the city’s garment manufacturing industry and the flight of New York factories from Chinatown and the Garment District to the South, Mexico and Hong Kong. Similar displacement affected printing shops, food processing plants, furniture factories and other light industries as well and cost a lot of low wage but unionized New York factory workers their jobs.

Between the illegally burned down buildings, the legally demolished ones and the new Mitchell Lama hirises, this led to something of a building boom in the city. This was good, because commercial construction was in a slump due to all the office spaced dumped onto the market by the then newly built World Trade Center being completed.

Back then, most NYC construction was unionized…kindasorta

 

The construction unions were dominated by the Genovese Crime Family and other cosa nostra or cosa nostra-affiliated organized crime syndicates.

These unions had been mobbed up since just before World War I and the many years of gangster domination  had caused a strong internal dry rot within these labor organizations.

By the 1970s, the Carpenters Union was probably the most wiseguy dominated union in the industry, closely followed by the Laborers, who in turn were closely followed in corruption by the Painters and the Plasterers and Cement Masons

Any client attempting to do a hirise concrete job in New York City worth more than $ 2 million in that era had to go to a pizza shop in East Harlem and get the approval of the  owner, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno.

Fat Tony wasn’t just a restauranteur, he also was a hirise concrete contractor, the owner of S & A Concrete, in addition he was the underboss of the Genovese Crime Family, the chairman of The Commission, the body that coordinated the five cosa nostra families of New York and he ran The Concrete Club, a group of concrete contractors that paid a 2% “tribute” bribe to Fat Tony and his family for every job they did.

If your job was worth between $2 million and $10 million, Fat Tony would decide what company in The Concrete Club was allowed to submit the lowest bid for your job (and they had to pay him 2% of that price).

If the job was worth $10 million or more, you had to use Fat Tony’s company, S & A Concrete, and he’d charge you whatever he felt like charging. Woe be unto anybody who tried to underbid Fat Tony

If you were doing interior drywall work, you had to go to one of Fat Tony’s captains, Vincent Di Napoli. He ran the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, one of the city’s two organizations of drywall and ceiling contractors (the other, less corrupt, group was the Association of Wall-Ceiling and Carpentry Industries of Greater New York)

Di Napoli also ran something called “The Wheel”. Every union drywall contractor in the city would have its name put on a wheel. When it was their turn, they’d get to do the work, their bid would be the lowest bid, everybody else knew to put in a higher bid, and they’d pay Di Napoli a 2% tribute for getting the work.

This system had been created by the Genoveses, the other four NYC cosa nostra families (Columbo, Gambino, Lucchese and Bonnano) and the Irish and Jewish organized crime syndicates that were associated with them.

This system regulated competition in the industry, kept prices high and kept conflict between contractors to a minimum.

Labor racketeering in the New York building trades had been pioneered by an Irish gangster named Robert Brindell who ran the New York District Council of Carpenters during World War I. He was one of America’s first labor racketeers and one of the first men to go to prison for labor racketeering. Cosa nostra had perfected his racket

 

However, by the 1970s, the system was in crisis.

Much of the work in New York City’s suburbs went non union during the post World War II Veterans Administration-financed housing boom. The unions had long since ceased to be independent workers organizations and functioned as junior partners of the contractors and the wiseguys.

Also the de facto racial segregation that had limited competition among workers had come under attack during the 1960s.

Maoist communist-led workers organizations that came to collectively be known as The Coalition had organized mobile teams of workers who shut down jobsites that wouldn’t hire Black, Latino or Chinese workers.

The Progressive Labor Party ran the predominantly Black Harlem Fightback organization, the Communist Workers Party ran the Chinese Construction Workers Association (it had a sister group, the Chinese Staff and Workers Association which organized garment and restaurant workers in Chinatown) and local Black and Latino gangsters in various neighborhoods around the city organized their own Coalitions

These groups would send around workers in old school buses and they would roam around the city, occupying jobsites with all White crews and forcing contractors to hire workers of color

Once you have a job in the industry the union for your craft has to let you join so this forcibly desegregated the unions far faster than the civil rights lawsuits of the era ever could.

Soon the coalitions pivoted.

Some like Fightback and the CCWA became semi respectable community based organizations, going from Mao Zedong Communist to John Lindsay Democrat with astounding speed.

Others basically became labor racketeers, shaking down contractors to pay them to be “equal employment opportunity consultants” and hiring out their members as “site coordinators” - jobsite security for contractors to keep other Coalitions away

The overwhelmingly White NYC construction industry quickly became heavily Black, Latino and Asian as a result.

Meanwhile, landlord arson still rampaged across the city, leaving much of NYC looking like Dresden after World War II.

Also the financial time bomb of that $784 million dollar Mitchell Lama loan kept ticking.

In June of 1975, the bill came and the city did not have the money to pay.

The Wall Street financiers who held the city’s public debt set up a bankers junta called the Municipal Assistance Corporation (popularly known as “Big MAC” like the fast food burger)

Big MAC took over the city’s finances and immediately imposed massive budget and service cuts. Twenty percent of the city’s unionized workers (50,000 out of a 250,000 person workforce) were laid off, the rest got pay and benefit cuts and were forced to work for one week without pay (with the wages for that week deferred to be paid when they retired)

Reducing the number of firefighters was a real problem what with all the fires. Reducing the number of police and corrections officers made the crime wave worse. Less teachers and social workers made life harder for New York kids and families. Less sanitation workers made the city filthy. Reducing the number of transit workers made it harder to get to work, school or shopping. Big MAC imposed a crisis of social reproduction on New York’s poor, working class and middle class.

The City running out of money also stopped a lot of city funded construction work.

This was a problem. The nation was in a deep recession at the time and much of the work ongoing in the city was municipally funded renovation work on buildings that had been damaged by landlord arson, and putting up new buildings in place of the old ones that had been burned down and demolished

Many of the city’s 250,000 construction workers were laid off and the industry permanently shrank by 20% - 50,000 jobs permanently lost

The City also had a problem. They had to rebuild all these destroyed blocks but Big MAC wouldn’t allow the City to use the funds to do the work while paying Davis Bacon prevailing wages that were pegged to union scale

So, the City came up with an idea.

They would transfer the funds to renovate the burned out buildings to not for profit organizations. That meant they could claim these construction jobs were private sector jobs and they had no requirement to pay Davis Bacon prevailing wages, or even to use union labor.

The construction unions put up absolutely no resistance to the deunionization of this work. The only response was the unions agreeing to cut wages on unionized renovation jobs (and a lot of new construction got reclassified as “renovation” work to get the lower pay scale)

Also, some contractors in concrete and drywall work started paying union workers off the books at less than union scale, a practice that came to be known as “working for cash” or “lumping”.

Cash and lumping let the contractors submit lower bids on work and still make money (even allowing for the tribute they had to pay to cosa nostra for the privilege of violating the union contracts)

Only one drywall industry union put up any resistance, local 1974 of Painters District Council 9 the drywall tapers local that represented the workers that did sheetrock finishing work.

In part this was due to the fact that DC 9 was controlled by the Lucchese family rather than the Genoveses, in part this was because there was an active dissident movement among tapers and in the painters union in general based among the many communist or socialist Jewish workers in the painters trade.

The tapers two big issues were being asked to work on stilts instead of on ladders or scaffolds (a big safety issue) and also tapers wanted to end the practice of taper foremen verbally abusing workers on the job.

This led to a tapers strike in 1978.

Unfortunately, the District Council of Carpenters ordered its members (the majority of the drywall workforce) to scab on the strike.

This meant that jobs still got framed and rocked, but there was nobody to tape the sheetrock, which meant that the walls couldn’t get painted

So, the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association, the Association of Wall-Ceiling and Carpentry Industries and their affiliated contractors turned to Vincent Di Napoli and the Genovese family, and they turned to one Louis Moscatiello, Jr.

Moscatello was a Bronx insurance agent and Democratic Party district leader who had never actually worked in the construction industry, but he was given a local union charter by the Plasterers and Cement Masons union.

His new union – Drywall Tapers and Plasterers local 530 – would supply scabs to break the local 1974 tapers strike.

Sadly, Moscatello and the strikebreaker local 530 succeeded. The jobs kept going, the sheetrock walls and ceilings got taped, the carpenters kept working with the strikebreakers, as did all the other trades on the sites.

This was the New York construction industry’s PATCO moment, it was all downhill for the union trades from then on

Coming out of the defeated strike the New York construction trades had been reduced from 80% union to two thirds unionized, with about 20% of the construction workforce permanently displaced from employment in the trades, union or non union.

The 1980s were a high point for labor racketeering in New York City, but it would end up being their last hurrah.

The clients liked the lower bids they got from the contractors thanks to lumping and working for cash, but they did not like that these low wages were under the table deals. They wanted to pay low wages openly and legally. They were also tired of paying the Genovese family its 2% tribute.

So, the clients reached out to the government and the investigations began

The District Attorney of New York County (Manhattan), the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan, the Bronx and NYC’s northern suburbs) the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and Long Island) and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force all began looking into labor racketeering in NYC,  primarily but not exclusively in construction.

The building boom of the 1980s that had been inspired in party by an uptick in office building and luxury housing construction and in part by the substandard wages that were now becoming common in the trades gave a very big incentive for the end users to cooperate with the investigations

This could have been a big opportunity for the New York construction unions to reverse the declining incomes of much of their membership and even make some major advances

The Hotel Trades Council (to which some of the construction unions were affiliated) certainly did – they called a 67 day strike in 1985 and got major wage increases.

Imagine if the building trades and Service Employees International Union local 32B-32J had joined in?

But the leadership of the trades were too busy being junior partners with the Genovese family in shaking down the industry at the expense of their members

Local 32B-32J called a residential building service workers strike in 1991.

However, they walked out in isolation from the hotel workers, construction workers and 32B-32J members in the commercial sector.

New York City construction unions hadn’t gone on strike since 1916 and their leaders weren’t about to start now

 

Only the city’s unionized sanitation workers respected their picket lines, refusing to pick up trash put out for collection by strikebreaker building service workers.

Due to the lack of labor solidarity, the results of this strike were limited.

The building boom ended in the early 1990s, around the time that a lot of union leaders and organized crime figures were getting prosecuted.

At the same time, the federal government had deposed the leadership of the Teamsters nationally and the District Councils and locals of the two most corrupt construction unions, the Carpenters and the Laborers in New York City.

The new reform leaders of the District Council of Carpenters and the Laborers Mason Tenders District Council talked a good game about organizing the half the construction workforce that were now nonunion but the main result was very visible but ineffective picket lines.

Those pickets made Scabby the inflatable rat a modern icon (ironically enough those rats were literally made in a non union factory), but the trend towards deunionization of construction accelerated regardless.

Also in 1994 the city government attacked working class tenants by imposing luxury decontrol on rent stabilized apartments.

That meant that if a landlord raised an apartment’s rent to over $2,000 a month, it was legally a luxury apartment and there were no restrictions on rent increases.

Landlords get to raise stabilized rents every time they replace an old tenant with a new tenant, and every time an existing tenant signs a new one year or two year lease.

Gradually, much of the city’s housing stock went over that $2,000 a month mark and could have unlimited rent increase

This process of gentrification began slowly forcing many working class New Yorkers to either take in roommates, or take a second or third job, or have to move to the city’s inner ring suburbs in Long Island, Westchester and Northern New Jersey.

The construction worker unions didn’t have anything to say about this, even though this gentrification was a direct attack on the majority of their members and their families who lived in rental apartments.

As for the members who were homeowners, this didn’t affect them, but between stagnant wages and skyrocketing house, co-op and condo prices, the new generation of workers would never be able to make enough money to ever become homeowners

Conditions for the non union workers were even worse – union wages at the time were at the $30 to $40 an hour mark, wages on the nonunion side were between $4 and $7 an hour, often paid off the books.

SEIU local 32B-32J, under pressure from its members, launched a desperate strike in the winter of 1996 to fight against the declining standard of living of building workers

Unfortunately, they were defeated. The Real Estate Board of New York and the landlords imposed a two tier wage that was a 20% pay cut for much of the industry’s workforce.

Them striking in isolation, with the hotel workers and construction workers still on the job, was a major factor in their defeat

In the wake of this defeat, unionized janitors, guards and hotel workers, most of whom were renters, were hard hit by the rent increases that were imposed parallel to the pay cuts. The non union building service workers had it even worse (at least the building supers had free apartments, the main benefit of that job)

There was a brief bright spot for New York City construction workers on June 30, 1998.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was building a new subway command center on West 54^th Street and 9^th Avenue, and they were going to use non union sheet metal contractor Roy Kay, Inc as the general contractor.

The MTA had always built union from 1921 up until that point so this was a shot across the bow of the New York building trades. The NYC Building Trades Council reacted by calling a rally in front of MTA headquarters on Madison Avenue and East 45^th Street.

Most union construction workers working in Midtown that day walked off the job in a wildcat job action to attend the rally. About 40,000 union trades workers were at the event, which eventually came to be called ‘the 40,000 man march’.

A group of rank and file union plumbers and steamfitters took over the rally and led an unpermitted march on the Subway Command Center site.

They blocked traffic from West 40^th Street to West 59^th Street from 5^th to 9^th Avenues. Once arrived at the site, the NYPD sent 400 officers to stop the workers from rallying at the site, with many of the officers apologizing to the workers for having to follow orders to stop the protest.

This forced the MTA to turn the site union and Roy Kay was forced to sign a union agreement.

This could have been the start of a citywide mass movement of construction workers to re unionize the industry.

However, the labor officialdom’s reaction to that was to have the secretary treasurer of the NYC Central Labor Council go live on New York 1 cable news that night to publicly apologize for the strike.

That was the last serious effort to use strike action to rebuild the unions in the New York trades – the workers were enthusiastic about continuing those rallies but the union leadership were dead set against it.

So the decline of the trades continued into the new millennium.

When al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the building trades immediately responded. The Ironworkers, Laborers, Carpenters, Teamsters and Operating Engineers sent hundreds of workers to clear the rubble and search for the remains of the victims, side by side with police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, transit workers, national guard soldiers and non union janitors

At the time, trades workers were told, falsely, that there were no health hazards associated with the highly toxic site, hazards that led to many tradespeople, first responders and non union cleaners dying of cancer or other diseases later on.

The building trades unions assumed that this heroic and dangerous effort and public esteem for their work would somehow reverse the decline of the construction unions. That didn’t happen.

The financial meltdown of 2007 and the construction layoffs it caused made things even worse for the city’s building workers and working class tenants, and also accelerated the process of gentrification and pricing workers out of much of the city.

The unions’ reaction to this was Project Labor Agreements; letting contractors on certain jobs pay below union scale and use non union labor. The Building Trades Employers Association took the opportunity to renounce its 1921 agreement with the unions to require every contractor on a job run by union general contractors to use union labor. Now they were officially open shop for the first time in 90 years. The BTEA also demanded a 20% pay cut for all the union trades on the still organized jobs

Also lots of contractors used the opportunity to go openly non union. Almost all class C office buildings and almost all apartment building renovation and new construction of apartment buildings went non union at this time.

The huge Hudson Yards project on the West Side of Manhattan started up at this time, and it was run under an open shop Project Labor Agreement that let non union contractors work on the job.

The unions reaction to that was the “count me in” rallies – workers would come to work early, have a protest against non union labor on the site, and then go in to work side by side with non union workers.

Since the workers weren’t stopping production, just protesting open shop sites and then going upstairs to work open shop, they were spectacularly ineffective. The Hudson Yard megaproject actually got more non union as it went on, despite the morning rallies.

The deunionization of the industry, the collapse of construction wages that went along with it along with stricter safety enforcement by the city increased the size of the construction workforce.

There were about 300,000 workers in the industry now, an all time high, but two thirds of those workers were non union. The non union side of the industry’s low wages – between $15 and $30 an hour – meant that most workers were desperate people that had no other options for employment; undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, recent parolees.

The unions attempted to prevent the loss of “market share” through two tier wages, project labor agreements that allowed open shop jobs and other concessions. This just accelerated the race to the bottom.

By 2015, there were 80 story buildings going up in Midtown Manhattan with non union crews. The token area standards picket lines by the carpenters, laborers and painters were useless and there was no effort to organize strikes to turn these jobs around.

In 2019, the District Council of Carpenters imposed a two tier system on its members.

Graduates of the apprenticeship program and former non union carpenters who joined the union as journeypeople would have to work for 10,000 hours as “provisional carpenters”, earning $42 an hour, $10 an hour below full “certified journeyman” scale of $53 an hour, a pay scale that itself had been frozen for almost a decade at that point.

Also workers on residential work in Manhattan, or on all jobs in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island would get a lower pay scale.

A group of apprentice carpenters who were members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) tried to organize a wildcat strike against this pay cut, but the District Council was able to defeat the movement and prevent the strike by expelling the apprentice who was the spokesman of the movement from the union.

The two tier provisional vs certified pay scale deal became permanent, and many carpenters found that once they’d worked 10,000 hours and were certified, their employers would lay them off and replace them with low paid provisionals.

By the mid 2020s, there were 400,000 construction workers in New York, 300,000 of them were non union, 80% of the city’s construction work was done by non union labor and on the non union side, wages were as low as $18 an hour. About a third of the non union workers, a quarter of the trades workforce, worked off the books.

The industry had changed a lot from 1969, it was now majority Latino, much of the non Hispanic workforce were Black or Asian, and the trades went from a path to the middle class into the working poor status that prevailed in the pre union era of the 19^th century.

New York construction wasn’t as deunionized as the rest of the country, where the trades were over 90% non union, but it had fallen very far from the old days when construction was almost entirely union here.

What are the unions doing about this?

Not very much.

The Carpenters, Painters and Ironworkers have carried out some very limited one contractor at a time organizing campaigns, using lots of well paid staff to unsuccessfully attempt National Labor Relations Board elections that even if they won would almost certainly lead to the newly organized company closing and reopening under another name as a non union shop

The Laborers have carried out a public protest campaign at the “body shop” temp agencies that have become a sort of non union hiring hall system for the unorganized contractors. This has also been ineffective

The Carpenters and Laborers also had dueling legislation to try and get the City of New York to order the non union contractors who build city subsidized affordable housing at a $40 an hour wage that’s slightly above the poverty line (but still far below prevailing wage or union scale)

SEIU local 32BJ is trying to organize 50,000 non union security officers. At present they represent 20,000 workers in the industry while the other 80,000 are non union. Hopefully they can turn this around but if they meet any resistance that might be a challenge.

DSA Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani promised that in office he’d build all the city’s affordable housing with union labor.

However, once in office, the real estate developers who build affordable housing and the bankers who sell the municipal bonds that pay for that housing made it very clear that they were absolutely not going to let the city re unionize their workforce.

They’d been building with non union labor since 1975 – over 50 years – they liked paying $18 an hour, minimal benefits and no pension as opposed to $53 an hour plus benefits and pension they’d have to pay with union labor or $53 an hour plus the cash equivalent of benefit and pension payments they’d have to pay for non union prevailing wage workers.

They also liked the lack of work rules on non union jobs. On union drywall jobs, hanging sheetrock has to be done by carpenters and finishing that sheetrock requires union tapers, non union, they can make the carpenter do the finishing. Union concrete crews have to have carpenters, laborers, cement masons and lathers, a non union crew can have one person do all four of those jobs.

So, Mamdani backtracked on those promises and the city’s affordable housing will still be built by low paid non union workers, as it has been under the Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, De Blasio and Adams administrations over the last half century.

Also, the City of New York would continue privatizing its public housing projects.

Public housing buildings, which are maintained by unionized workers in Teamsters local 237 and where all the apartments are reserved for low income renters who can’t afford to live anywhere else will have their tenants “temporarily” removed, be gut rehabbed or demolished and replaced by low paid non union workers, and then will reopen as city owned but privately managed “mixed income” housing developments, maintained by non union building service workers and where most of the current tenants won’t be able to afford to live

This is an issue that construction workers, building service workers and tenants could unite around and fight against but that’s not happening.

Things are likely to get worse for the 750,000 workers in NYC’s building and construction industry.

So, what’s the way forward?

The city’s 20,000 hotel workers have some realistic prospects of being organized by the Hotel Trades Council.

The city’s 150,000 building service workers and 80,000 security guards have a very strong prospect of being organized by Service Employees International Union local 32BJ.

However, that leaves the 400,000 workers of the construction trades

It is extremely unlikely that the 300,000 non union workers in the trades will be organized by the construction unions. It is very likely that the 100,000 union workers will continue to be hit with two tier wages, giveback ridden project labor agreements and open shop jobs.

Perhaps its time for these workers to build a new union to replace the failed and rapidly declining 17 unions of the building trades?

Having one industrywide union would be an improvement on the workers being divided into 17 rival craft unions. Pretty much most of the world outside the anglosphere (America, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia) has one industry wide construction workers union, with one unified pay scale for all trades workers, maybe its time we give that a shot here?

It works for Mexico and the Sindicato de los Trabajadores del Construccion has a much higher union density than we do (25% vs 10%)

Also, one contractor at a time National Labor Relations Board elections are deliberately designed to prevent workers from organizing, unionizing and striking. They are a bad way to organize even at large companies with permanent workforces, at small competitive contractors with temporary workers they are a guaranteed fail.

Historically, construction workers have organized by uniting all the workers in a city or metro area into a union, leading them on a trade wide strike and making all the employers in the area go union at the same time

That’s how construction workers were first organized in the 1850s, that’s how the old construction unions were built between the 1880s and the 1920s and that’s the only way we’re going to get unionized today.

It would also help if this was part of a broader effort to build new unions in the American private sector, which has fallen from 35% unionization in the 1950s to barely 5% today. This should also be part of a broader effort by workers in the public sector unions to put a struggle oriented leadership to lead their unions and to organize the non union public sector workers.

These efforts to build new struggle oriented  unions and to put struggle oriented leaderships in charge of the existing unions should be part of broader working class political organizing.

The working class in New York City and this country as a whole badly need to break with both parties of the billionaires, both the Republicans and the Democrats, and to build an independent workers party.

That party should work to coordinate these efforts to build new unions and also efforts to organize workers in their communities.

In a city like New York where the majority of the population are tenants in apartment buildings, that means we need to organize tenants to fight for a rent freeze, a rent rollback and citywide rent control.

Construction and building service workers can’t rely on progressive legislation or lobbying or court orders or the good will of the powers that be to make their wages higher or make rents lower.

Even with a DSA Democrat in the mayor’s office, we cannot rely on the politicians to save us, even if they say they are socialists.

The only people who can save us are us