"McCarron is not
intervening in the NWCU to “clean up” the region, let alone to make it
more answerable to its members.
Weeks after sellout of Seattle carpenters strike, union officials ousted over corruption allegations
22 November 2021
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC)
union has put the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters under
trusteeship and installed James Gleason as supervisor. The regional
council, also known as the Northwest Carpenters Union (NWCU), is the
collective bargaining unit for 28,000 carpenters and other building
trades workers across Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and
Wyoming.
Executive Secretary-Treasurer Evelyn Shapiro, Director of
Organizing Juan Sanchez and Director of Contract Administration Dan
Hutchins all resigned from their positions and the union. Among their
last official acts was to issue a statement to “welcome and consent to
the UBC Trusteeship.”
The decision was taken October 25, just two weeks after Shapiro,
Hutchins and other NWCU officials—working under the direction of the
national parent union, the UBC—shut down a three-week strike by
carpenters and narrowly pushed through a pro-company contract.
After
years of eroding living standards and working conditions, overseen by
the unions, rank-and-file workers rejected four consecutive NWCU-backed
contract proposals and forced the union to call its first strike since
2003 on September 16. Instead of calling out all 12,000 union carpenters
in Washington, the NWCU kept 10,000 on the job, citing “no strike”
pledges it signed with the contractors at projects receiving government
subsidies and tax cuts.
After weeks of strikebreaking by union officials, the NWCU pushed through
a fifth deal, which included a $10-an-hour raise over three years, far
short of the workers’ demands for a $15 an hour raise. The union also
agreed to a mere $1.50 per hour for parking pay, leaving carpenters to
pay hundreds of dollars each week to park their vehicles in expensive
downtown locations.
According to a November 3 letter to NWCU
members from Gleason, the supervisor from the national union, “There is a
UBC team on the ground in the Kent office conducting a thorough
investigation into voter fraud, pension and welfare investment
improprieties, and other areas of mismanagement.”
A report on the
NWCU web site said UBC President Doug McCarron attended a November 8
union meeting in Seattle. Among the issues McCarron reportedly
“clarified” were:
- “The Delegate body and E-board are
disbanded while NWCU is under UBC trusteeship. New elections will be
held once the trusteeship is complete.
- “A new investment advisor has been hired by the Carpenters Trusts of Western Washington.
- “$250 million of pension and health fund assets were lost in the Allianz hedge fund investments.
- “There
was evidence of voting fraud during the member ratification vote for
Western and Central Washington Tentative Agreement (TA) 3, but it has
not been determined whether TA4 or TA5 were impacted.”
What
“improprieties” occurred with the pension and health funds is not yet
clear. However, they would be nothing new to McCarron (salary $519,000),
who runs an organization that is little more than a criminal syndicate.
A
month before putting the Seattle-based region under trusteeship,
McCarron dissolved the St. Louis-based region, transferring oversight to
the Chicago regional office. Executive Secretary-Treasurer Al Bond, who
led the St. Louis region since 2015 and is a major player in the local
Democratic Party, oversaw a 63 percent increase in payroll expenses for
union officials, plunging the local into $8 million in debt.
In
2011, Walter Ralph Mabry, former chairman of the Michigan carpenters
pension fund’s board, pleaded guilty for taking kickbacks in the form of
$5,000 to $10,000 in hotel and entertainment reimbursements from an
investment consultant and one of the fund’s investment managers.
In
2019, George R. Laufenberg, the former administrative manager of New
Jersey Carpenter’s Pension, Annuity, Health and Training/Apprenticeship
Funds, was indicted for defrauding the funds of more than $1.5 million.
Laufenberg, who made a $300,000 salary, was charged with using his
authority to unilaterally grant himself a $120,000 pension and $180,000
in annual deferred compensation, without retiring, or without giving
notice or receiving approval from the funds’ board of trustees.
John
Ballantyne, a former high-ranking official in the Northeast Regional
Council of Carpenters, filed a lawsuit against the national UBC
leadership, alleging that they had put the local council under
trusteeship in May 2018 as cover to fire Ballantyne for revealing
Laufenberg’s corruption, which had the blessing of the national
leadership. The defendants in the case include McCarron, Frank Spencer,
the second general vice president of the national union, and Michael
Capelli, the Eastern District vice president.
McCarron is not
intervening in the NWCU to “clean up” the region, let alone to make it
more answerable to its members. In the eyes of the UBC leadership,
Shapiro & Co. are too discredited to contain the revolt of the
carpenters, which threatens the union’s longstanding and lucrative
relations with the construction bosses and the two big business parties.
The
health and pension funds are controlled and administered by “equal
representation of labor and management” and form the core of the
corporatist arrangements between unions and contractors. Sweetheart
contracts—such as the Project Labor Agreements, which include no strike
clauses and substandard wages and conditions—provide a steady flow of
dues income to the union bureaucracy, plus employer contributions to the
joint pension funds. The pension funds provide both “legal” and illegal
streams of revenue for bureaucrats at every level of the UBC.
Long
before the pandemic, the carpenters and other unions gambled with
workers’ pension funds, and if losses occurred, they simply made
retirees pay for it. A November 2019 Detroit Free Press report
noted that the Detroit Carpenters Pension Trust Fund—which covers almost
20,000 active and retired members—sunk $100 million in risky
investments and real estate deals, including “a time-share resort in
Hawaii that didn’t get built and an energy drink company run by a
twice-convicted felon that went bankrupt.” It added, “To stabilize the
fund, the pension trustees are seeking permission from the US Treasury
Department to slash many of their members’ pension checks by amounts
such as 16% to 26%, starting in July 2020.”
The Carpenters Trusts
of Western Washington (pensions) and Carpenters Health & Security
Trust (retiree health benefits) were two of several union funds which
lost billions after the 20 percent fall on the stock markets in February
and March 2020. The pension funds for carpenters, New York City transit
workers, Teamster truck drivers, Milwaukee city workers and Arkansas
teachers are currently seeking $6 billion in damages from the
German-based hedge fund manager Allianz Global Investors, alleging they
were misled about the company’s risky investment strategies.
The
Seattle strike is part of a growing wave of construction workers
struggles. In April 2020, 13,000 carpenters in Massachusetts carried out
a two-week strike over the lack of pandemic protections on construction
sites, defying Republican Governor Charlie Baker’s declaration that
builders were “essential workers” who had to continue risking their
lives. “You’ve got a lot of uncertainty with all the different factors
facing construction today, from labor shortages to materials,” Charles
Krugel, a labor attorney for management in Chicago, told Construction Dive. “So you’re bound to see more labor action, either in the form of picketing or striking of construction sites.”
The
UBC national leadership is looking to strengthen its grip over regional
councils and prevent future upheavals. The charges of “vote-rigging” on
the third tentative agreement—which was roundly defeated by
carpenters—suggest that the UBC hopes to impose tighter control over
ratification votes, not to prevent vote-rigging in the future but to
assure it.
As the WSWS warned from the beginning, the union
bureaucracy cannot be pressured to adopt more militant tactics or reform
itself. This was and continues to be the perspective of the so-called
union dissidents who lead the Peter J. McGuire Facebook group. In an
October 28 statement, McGuire chairman Art Francisco Esparza said that
the resignation of the “criminal Shapiro” and the “dissolving of the
criminal council Executive Board involved in massive voter fraud over
the contract shows” that his group’s “vision, tactics, and strategy were
on the right side of history.” He goes on to say, “It is time for
working carpenters in the Pacific Northwest to control the Pacific
Northwest from the bottom up!”
In fact the group’s “vision,
tactics and strategy” of reforming the pro-capitalist unions is
hopelessly out of date. The fate of previous efforts by the Teamsters
for a Democratic Union, the Miners for Democracy, the New Directions
faction in the United Auto Workers union and countless others proves the
bankruptcy of such a perspective. In the end, these erstwhile reformers
were inevitably incorporated into the bureaucracies, which remain as
corrupt as ever. There can be no doubt the UBC is currently working to
recruit members of the McGuire group to provide the new regional council
with a “democratic” cover.
Nor can any faith be placed in
figures such as Seattle Councilwoman and Socialist Alternative leader
Kshama Sawant, who repeatedly urged carpenters to appeal to “Sister
Shapiro” to adopt more militant strike tactics. In a statement on the
lessons of the strike published on its website on November 4, Socialist Alternative
explicitly downplayed the revelations of grotesque corruption because
it undermines their efforts to keep workers tied to these rotten
organizations.
The “most prevalent and insidious corruption isn’t
stealing union funds or kickbacks from the bosses” author Logan Swan
writes. Instead, “it’s ideological—a corruption of trade union
principles. Without any confidence in the organized working class to
struggle and win, without being politically equipped to reject the
‘rights’ of the bosses to private property and profit, the union
officials accept the terms of the employers and their job then is to
strongarm bad contracts and police dissident workers.” In other words,
if the mistaken ideas in the heads of the union officials can be
changed, all will be well!
Sawant also urges workers to pressure
“progressive elected officials,” i.e., the capitalist politicians in the
Democratic Party, to protect their interests. But the
corporate-controlled Democrats is not going to renounce their material
interests any more than the trade union bureaucracy.
The events since the end of the strike confirm everything the World Socialist Web Site
said about the need for carpenters to take their struggle out of the
hands of the UBC. Workers must build a rank-and-file strike committee,
completely independent of the UBC and other pro-company unions, that
will not bow to their authority. These committees, democratically
controlled by the rank and file and committed to fight for what workers
need, will establish lines of communication to unite all construction
workers and ever broader sections of the working class in the US and
internationally. At the same time, the growing industrial struggles of
the working class must be fused with a socialist perspective aimed at
putting an end to capitalist exploitation and social inequality once and
for all.
READ IT HERE
FOR THE RECORD ONCE AGAIN I AM NOT POLITICAL.I THINK THEY ALL SUCK DOGS ASS.I ALSO DO NOT BUY INTO POLITICAL IDEOLOGY THAT LOOKED GOOD ON PAPER TO SOME BUT HAS ALWAYS BEEN CORRUPTED BY GREEDY SLIME BALLS
HOWEVER REGARDLESS OF THE SOURCE THE TRUTH STILL SPEAKS FOR ITSELF AND TO IGNORE IT AND CRY ABOUT WHERE IT ORIGINATES.....WELL JUST MAKES YOU A DUMB ASS DOOMED TO CONTINUE TO BE A DUMB ASS
