A Different Type of Union

I grew up in a lower middle class household. Hard work was something to be admired as well as a requirement for getting anywhere in my dad's house. My dad believed that you could be anything or do anything you wanted to do as long as you were willing to work hard enough at it. All of the lessons I learned on basketball courts, baseball diamonds, and football fields could be condensed into that one belief. Practice makes perfect. Hard work and teamwork beats talent and natural ability in the long run every time. Every defeat was met with the same advice; "I guess you'll just have to work harder."

He also put this into practice with chores and work around the house. I worked on cars with him, my brother and I cut yards all over the neighborhood. We painted our house, we put shingles on the roof, and when we moved to the farm we added on to the house, built sheds, chicken houses, fences, hog farrowing houses, and worked on every piece of equipment on the place whenever it broke down. I learned early that hard work is one of the differences between success and failure in most every undertaking. It might not be the only difference, but it was often the only difference we could control. 

I have had a job to go to every day since I was fifteen years old. Before that I had paper routes, firewood to cut and sell, and hay to haul for other local farmers. Hard work was something to be admired in others and required in my brother and I. By the time I had found my way into working as an electrician's helper I had already worked many different jobs. I strongly believed in the work ethic that says you give someone an honest day's work for an honest day's wage. I enjoyed my work and I was good at it. 

I worked my way up from a green helper to a journeyman and then lead man electrician on commercial and industrial job sites in the span of 6 years. Most of the contractors I worked for were willing to let someone take on all the responsibility they were willing to shoulder; as long as they followed through and did good work in a timely manner. I learned by doing for the most part. I asked a lot of questions and I watched every skilled trade on the jobsite. I wanted to learn how everything worked, how all the different trades managed to work together to go from a patch of dirt to a functioning building. 

One thing I learned early on was a disdain for unions. In a strange sort of way unions were responsible for me learning a trade but that's a story for another day. In North Alabama, there were a few union jobsites but they were rather rare. Most of them were TVA plants or federal sites on military bases. There were very few commercial or industrial sites outside of the government that were union in this area; there still aren't. 

Most of the contractors I worked for flat out refused to hire anyone who had ever been in a union. They believed they learned to be lazy, that they worked to quotas that were inefficient and that they were so specialized as to be useless on smaller sites. There is some truth to all of these things. Later in my career, after I went to work for NASA, I came to realize this is still the case for a lot of union contractors but again.... that's a story for another day. 

As a non-union contractor, our wages were significantly lower than union pay scales. The notable exception to this rule was when the non-union contractors managed to win contracts on government facilities or won bids on projects that had Federal funds involved through HUD. On these jobs, we made scale money; which was considerably more than what the going rate for electrical workers outside of these jobs. I was making 11-13 dollars an hour running small commercial and industrial jobs. Scale jobs at the time were paying 17 dollars an hour for journeyman electricians. In other words, the top man on a non-scale job made 4-5 dollars an hour less than every journeyman on a scale job made. 

No non-union contractors paid benefits in those days. No insurance, no vacation, no paid holidays, it was just work until the job ended and hope they managed to win a new bid by that time. In truth, they usually tried to keep their best people so when jobs slowed down the first to go was always the hired journeyman without enough initiative to actually run crews or plan work. I didn't think much about any of this in those days; it was just the way things were. I was proud of my skills and proud to be one of the people that contractors depended on to get the job done. I went quite a few years without ever being laid off. It was a point of pride for me; to be valuable enough that contractors didn't want to lay me off. 

I was gung ho and a hard driver. I finished jobs on time and I did things right, everything had to be square and true and I took a lot of pride in those jobs. I still do today. I can point out buildings all over this area some 30 years later that I worked on. Eventually, I began to notice things that changed my perspective. I saw two people I worked with get permanently disabled because we were in a big enough hurry that we did unsafe things. One of them fell 25 feet onto a concrete floor and ruined both his legs because someone didn't take time to put all the safety pins in a scaffold and it collapsed. One of them cut the main artery in his wrist when a wrench slipped inside a 3000 amp main we were reconnecting on an emergency basis. We had worked 34 hours straight when that occurred. I had to drag him out of the inside of the main before he passed out as we simply coudn't have gotten him out without cutting the panel apart if he had passed out before I could get him out. He never did manual work again. 

As work picked up in the mid-eighties the contractors in this area began to organize. I suppose they were tired of cut-throat bidding each other out of work and stealing each other's men when work was flush. It suddenly became impossible to go from one contractor to another. If you were laid off, another contractor would hire you but they quit competing for hiring each other's help. Wages dropped for all but the very top lead men. I saw this happening but it wasn't affecting me directly as I was never out of work. I had built a good reputation and if I could walk off of one jobsite and onto the next with no problem if I wanted to. I did it several times over people trying to force me to take shortcuts on quality or code violations. I also had a good reputation with all the local inspectors. They trusted my work and knew I didn't do things that were against code so they didn't try to pick my jobs apart. I wasn't going to let a contractor trying to cut corners ruin my reputation and left a couple of jobs accordingly. 

I noticed all of this but didn't really pay too much attention until I was hired to work on a scale job and the contractor was falsifying records for the HUD inspectors. According to his records, I was the only journeyman electrician on that job. This was plainly not true but I figured whatever deal he had worked with everyone else about their wages was between them. Everything was fine until the contractor asked me to sign the progress report that listed all the journeyman electricians as laborers. I refused and told him that the HUD people wouldn’t buy it anyway. He insisted he had already worked it out with the HUD inspector but I just couldn’t bring myself to sign something I knew to be false. The whole scheme soon blew up and the contractor wound up paying everyone on the job as a journeyman along with back pay for all work performed so far. I managed to finish the job but it was not a pleasant work environment and I couldn’t wait to move on to a new contractor.

Soon after that job I was told that I needed to get an ABC certification as a journeyman electrician to continue working. ABC stood for Associated Building Contractors. I soon realized why wages were falling as it was in reality a union for people who owned electrical contracting companies in the area. Under the guise of improving the trade, the owners had organized a union just for owners and they were steadily knocking down wages by doing so. The workers who had helped private contractors keep unions off of local job sites suddenly found themselves victimized by a different type of union; a union for owners.

The ABC association soon was all over the state. As more owners joined, they lobbied Congress to lower federal scale wages for construction electricians. When the next wage report came out federal scale wages were down considerably. When I started doing electrical work it was around 17 dollars an hour. Two years after the ABC association appeared on the scene it was down to 10.80 an hour. The only people that were asked about prevailing wages were the owners of the companies so it isn’t too hard to understand how a union for owners can control that information.

I soon found the only contractor left in town who wasn’t a member of the ABC association. Shortly after that I decided to find a job with some health insurance and benefits. This meant a job in maintenance instead of construction but I was skilled enough to make that jump rather easily.

It was almost ten more years after the appearance of the ABC association before scale wages came back up to 17 dollars an hour. By then, federal scale wages were lower than what contractors on the street were having to pay to get people to work for them.

Now…. in this area, you will be hard pressed to find a construction electrician who isn’t an illegal immigrant; at least you won’t find many of them. For that matter you won’t find any skilled trades people in construction besides the top lead men who are not illegal immigrants. The ABC association long ago disappeared. There’s really no need of a union for owners to hold wages down when you can simply hire illegal immigrants for 15 dollars an hour. People who are afraid of being deported also aren’t very likely to ask for a raise or any semblance of benefits either.

I think about all of this when I read an article claiming that young people need to learn a trade; that demand for skilled trades people is climbing. Perhaps if Trump actually does stop illegal immigration this might be true but it isn’t at the moment. Of course, if it does; we can always crank the ABC association or something like it back up.

I recently saw a local post on Facebook suggesting that Trump’s election would introduce the rest of the country to Alabama Economics. Good luck with that……