BROTHERHOOD OF CARPENTERS AND JOINERS OF AMERICA NO. 1646

BROTHERHOOD OF CARPENTERS AND JOINERS OF AMERICA NO. 1646. The union was created in April 1881, by Peter J. McGuire and Gustav Luebkert. The two men organized groups for collective bargaining, and started a newspaper called The Carpenter to facilitate their idea of a national union. The Brotherhood held its first convention in Chicago in August 1881. The cornerstone of local and regional affiliations in support of common goals was laid out to show ways to maximize the unions bargaining potential. The immediate common goals were wage and hour demands, and death and sickness benefits. The union grew from its 1881 membership of 2000, to 50,000 by 1890, and 100,000 by 1900.

While Peter N. McGuire was a socialist, the union itself was non-political, refusing to endorse any political party or philosophy. It was not, on the other hand, apolitical: it supported legislation establishing the eight-hour day. The union also struck to obtain the eight-hour day, calling a strike of its affiliates for May 1, 1886. The strike itself was ineffective and provoked a repressive response, particularly in Chicago, where police shot and killed two strikers two days later, leading to the Haymarket Riot the following day. The strike gave the Brotherhood added visibility that led to increased membership. The union struck again in 1890, with similarly uneven results, but now facing the stiffened resistance of newly formed employers associations.

The Brotherhood admitted both black and white carpenters on an equal footing when it was first formed; one of the union's vice-presidents in its early years was L.E. Rames, an African-American carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. In the South, however, the union often isolated black carpenters in segregated locals as a concession to the opposition of white carpenters and contractors. Local unions also often excluded black workers on a de facto basis. The union formally dissolved its segregated locals in 1963.

The union also faced fierce pressures from outside to exclude black carpenters: in 1919 supervisors from the Great Southern Lumber Company, the mayor of Bogalusa, Louisiana, and local businessmen affiliated with the KU KLUX KLAN, attacked and killed four union organizers who had attempted to organize black and white lumber mill workers. None of the attackers were convicted of any crimes.

The Carpenters Building, also known as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 132, was built in Washington, D.C., in 1926. It is listed on the NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES.

The union lost more than half of its members in the first years of the GREAT DEPRESSION as construction dwindled to almost nothing. The Union at first opposed unemployment insurance, consistent with the conservative politics of the AFL and the deep-seated opposition of its President William Hutcheson to governmental intervention of any sort in labor and employment matters. The union eventually dropped its opposition to unemployment insurance by 1934.

The union also opposed industrial unionism, claiming the right to represent any workers who might perform framing or other traditional carpenters' duties in industrial settings. While the union made concessions to those unions, such as the United Mine Workers of America, that had already established themselves as industrial unions, it opposed any support for organizing workers in mass production industries or permitting such organizations to affiliate with the AFL unless they first surrendered their skilled trade members.

While the Carpenters disdained industrial unionism, they were willing to accept mass production workers into their own union as second-class members. The Carpenters had fought with the Wood Workers union chartered by the AFL for decades, claiming that any workers who planed wood products that were subsequently used in construction, such as doors, sashes, mouldings and the like, were performing carpenters' work and must be brought within its union. While the Carpenters had never made similar claims on work performed by sawmill workers, much less tried to organize them, the union successfully insisted that the AFL assign the newly created Sawmill and Timber Workers’ Union to it in 1935. That forced merger was not successful, as most of these workers soon bolted to form the International Woodworkers of America and to join the CIO several years later after a recognition strike.

The Carpenters, like other building trades, had not faced serious employer opposition since the 1920s. This changed in the 1970s as the Business Roundtable, made up of the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, U.S. Steel, DuPont and others, undertook a program to reduce building costs by replacing unionized with non-union contractors. The Roundtable also attempted to weaken the Davis-Bacon Act and other legislation that protected construction workers. The building trades, caught off guard and used to organizing from the top down, lost large amounts of work to non-union contractors in the decades that followed.

The Carpenters were formerly, like most other craft unions coming out of the AFL, a union that allowed its Locals substantial autonomy in bargaining and representing their members. The Carpenter's International began to consolidate Locals into a District Council system in 1988 and since the International Convention of 2000, a system of "Regional Councils" has been implemented, further reducing the number of districts and high ranking Board members from 13 down to 10.

The Carpenters disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO in 2001, citing complaints about the National Federation's failure to follow up on its program to organize the unorganized. Other observers attributed the Carpenters' departure to its unhappiness with jurisdictional awards and other restrictions on its ability to raid the jurisdictions of other unions, as well as the AFL-CIO's uncritical and exclusive support of the Democratic Party.

Even after it left the federation, however, the Carpenters formed a temporary alliance, the New Unity Partnership in 2003 and the Change to Win Coalition with other unions — including SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the Laborers — to force the AFL-CIO to consider basic structural changes in order to facilitate organizing. In the summer of 2009, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters disaffiliated from Change to Win after the other affiliates in the Change to Win Coalition demanded the Carpenters cease raiding other Union's membership and allow Carpenter members basic democratic rights.

The 1937 Dubuque Consurvey Directory listed the LABOR TEMPLE.

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Source:

"United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America," Wikipedia, Online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Brotherhood_of_Carpenters_and_Joiners_of_America