McCarron led the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners out of the AFL-CIO, he says, because "despite the strong words and good intentions, the more fundamental changes have not been addressed." Under McCarron the Carpenters reversed substantial losses in membership, growing from 349,000 in 1995 to around 550,000 today. The percentage of union members in the construction industry rose from 17.8 percent to 19.1 percent in 2000.

Overall, the percentage of union workers in the United States fell last year to 13.5 percent, or 16.2 million, which is 200,000 less than in 1992. Union membership in privately owned companies fell to 9 percent in 2000, down from 9.4 percent the year before. The percentage of public employees in unions rose slightly, from 37.3 to 37.5 percent during the same period.

The July 23 Fortune magazine notes that McCarron's "defection highlighted Big Labor's central crisis: declining membership. The AFL-CIO spends a lot of money on public relations, lobbying, campaign contributions, and bureaucratic featherbedding--funds McCarron believes would better be spent on recruitment. 'We're surrounded by opportunity,' says McCarron.... 'There are a million unrepresented carpenters out there who should get fair wages, health care, and a pension."

In a May 2 press release, Sweeney said that during the negotiations between the AFL-CIO and Carpenters officials, "the disaffiliation remains in effect" at "every level of the labor movement." During this time the Carpenters "may participate in Building Trades Councils as well as AFL-CIO state federations and central labor councils on an ex officio basis, and all bodies will be encouraged to work informally and cooperatively with Carpenters local unions."

For Sweeney, the failure to reverse the decline in membership, a central component of his election pledge in his campaign for president of the labor federation in 1995, has become a crisis for the AFL-CIO officialdom as a whole. Many of his supporters have argued that there is a "new labor leadership" that can revitalize the unions, pointing to the recruitment figures racked up by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)--which Sweeney previously headed--the fastest growing union in the country.  
 
'Numbers totally unsatisfactory'
But last February Sweeney called a special meeting of the presidents of member unions to discuss organizing. He told those present that "not only are the numbers totally unsatisfactory, but if we don't begin to turn this around quickly and almost immediately, the drift in the other direction is going to make it virtually impossible to continue to exist as a viable institution and to have any impact on the issues we care about."

The SEIU, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers unions each organized 50,000-70,000 new members last year. The Teamsters, United Auto Workers, Steelworkers, and Machinists reported even more modest results, each organizing between 10,000 and 20,000 new members. About 10 of the 66 unions affiliated to the AFL-CIO carried out about 80 percent of the organizing over the past several years, according to press reports.

While the number of new members organized into AFL-CIO unions each year has risen from around 100,000 to about 400,000 since Sweeney took office, it is still less than what is needed to keep up with normal attrition and plant closings. Labor officials say they must bring in 500,000 new members a year just to keep total membership figures the same. Although several international unions have devoted a larger share of the yearly budget to expanding their membership rolls, many still allocate a mere 5 percent of expenditures to organizing efforts.

Two of the biggest organizing efforts during Sweeney's tenure came a cropper. These were the much-proclaimed drive to bring union representation to 20,000 strawberry pickers in the Salinas Valley around Watsonville, California, and the campaign to organize 60,000 construction workers in Las Vegas.

Unwilling to mobilize the labor forces needed to back farm workers in their fight against the antiunion offensive unleashed by the agricultural companies that dominate the Watsonville area--assaults that included sending goon squads into the fields--pro-union strawberry pickers were pushed back in their efforts to win union recognition.

And what Robert Georgine, president of the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department, called in 1996 the "largest organizing campaign ever to be launched in the labor movement," including a $5.2 million war chest, ended in Las Vegas with little more than a whimper before the unions ever got onto the field of battle.

New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse commented, "In contrast to the organizing situation, Mr. Sweeney has had major success in persuading unions to do more on the political front," meaning lobbying and trying to get "friend of labor" Democrats elected to office. AFL-CIO organizing director Mark Splain told the newspaper, "The American labor movement in terms of political operations and political juice has showed its stuff. The issue is, is there a way for the labor movement to duplicate that type of success in organizing?"  
 
Carpenters union victories
Faced with an antiunion drive by the construction companies over the past two decades, the Carpenters union ended up taking a different tack. In many major cities the construction bosses simply began refusing to use union workers, dramatically lowering the percentage of union job sites in the industry. Wages, working conditions, safety, seniority, and pensions went out the window as well.

McCarron's background is in the Southwest, most notably the 1992 five-month strike of mostly Mexican- and Central American-born drywall workers in Los Angeles. In the end, 49 contractors were forced to negotiate with the Carpenters union. The Militant reported at the time that the agreement provided "for union recognition, hiring to be done through the union hall on a rotating basis, medical insurance, and a pay scale. With an estimated 4,000 dry wall hangers in southern California, the struggle was the largest union organizing drive occurring in the United States.

"The victory was a result of daily mass picketing that involved thousands of dry wall workers throughout southern California. Hundreds of workers mobilized in demonstrations against police attacks and several deportations of strikers carried out by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)."

The Militant noted, "Wages of dry wallers were cut drastically over the past 10 years, from an average of $15 an hour to barely $5 an hour. The contract raises wages from four cents per square foot of drywall hung to seven and a half cents per square foot. The contract guarantees time-and-a-half pay after 40 hours of work, something that was rarely paid before the strike.

"Southern California's multi-billion-dollar homebuilding industry invested plenty of money, lawyers, and political connections to break the strike. The police, antiriot SWAT police teams, the INS, and the courts were all used against the strikers.

"But with determination, discipline, and solidarity, the drywall workers were able to break through the obstacles they faced, win a victory for all workers, and set an example of how to organize."

Since 1995, McCarron has cut the union's administrative staff in Washington from 240 to 25 and hired 600 new organizers, many of them Latino workers with experience in or connections to the industry, and boosted organizing funds to 50 percent of the union's budget. The union is demolishing its Washington office and putting up a 10-story building to lease for $20 million a year. The union's 1,700 councils were organized into 55 regions, and responsibility for organizing was taken from locals, whose officials tend to focus on "servicing" the local membership, and given to the regional bodies.

The Carpenters union now often accounts for up to 60 percent of workers on a construction site, making it more of an industrial-type union in the construction industry.  
 
'Immigrants are not the problem'
The assault by the bosses pressed construction workers to resist deteriorating conditions and organize the unorganized in order to keep the employers from getting rid of the union altogether. Many workers in the Carpenters union began to see the life-or-death need to bring immigrant workers into the union.

For example, in May 2000 thousands of construction workers massed in New York to condemn the decision of New York University to use nonunion contractor Alex Forkosh to build a student dormitory. The previous day 5,000 building workers took to the streets to demand better wages, the largest action of construction workers since 40,000 marched through Manhattan two years earlier to respond to the bosses' antiunion drive.

The Militant reported that John Hyland, a union construction worker and member of Carpenters Union Local 608, "insisted on making his opinion clear about immigrant workers, given that many of the workers employed by Forkosh hail from other countries. 'We're not against nonunion workers, we're against nonunion contractors. God bless anyone trying to make a living. They pay somebody $6 an hour for a job that they should be paid $30 for. They are usually immigrant workers,' he said. 'I wish everyone of them could get union scale wages. They're not the problem. It's the greedy bastards they work for.'"

Carpenters and other construction union members in the New York area have made famous the giant inflatable rats that have become both a symbol of resistance by working people and of the greed of the "rat" employers. Last August the Carpenters union set up a picket in front of a D'Agostino's supermarket to protest the use of a nonunion contractor to repair the roof.

Carpenters union members have also joined workers in struggle in other industries, such as on Teamsters picket lines last year in the fight to organize the Overnite trucking company.

Sixty workers at Utah Structural Coatings in Salt Lake City walked off the job April 30 over nonpayment of wages, arbitrary reductions in wages, deduction of insurance premiums without providing benefits, and failure to provide adequate safety training and equipment. The Rocky Mountain Regional Council of Carpenters responded to the fight and is now representing the workers.

Victor Bautista, a Carpenters union organizer, told the Militant at the time that when he first met with company owner Chris Utley, "He refused to negotiate with the union, denied all the charges, and said, 'I am going to call the INS.' I asked him, 'Why are you doing all this?' He said, 'They are illegal. They don't deserve to be paid the same,'" Bautista said.

"This is not just about money. Sometimes you have to stand up for your rights," the union organizer added. "We are going to prove this is not a country just for people who speak English."  
 
 
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