The Union Label

I work in one of the parts of town that’s still tran­si­tion­ing from grotty to more mixed-use. All over town, condo-business-retails spaces are going up, and there is finally some move­ment over at North Sta­tion. So there are lots of con­struc­tion work­ers stand­ing around. One site is clearly union, and there are always four or five white guys smok­ing, drink­ing their cof­fees, and block­ing the side­walk. Seems like two of them are always the same guy, no mat­ter what time I get off the train. Maybe they’re “super­vi­sors.” Nonethe­less, the build­ing does seem to be going up, prob­a­bly due to the efforts of the younger guys with less senior­ity that I see at the dough­nut shop, order sev­en­teen cof­fees and jug­gling them back to the site.

Fur­ther down the street, one of the older brick build­ings, with store­fronts on the bot­tom and business/office space on the top is being ren­o­vated. It’s on a street with the first lux­ury hotel to be built over here, and the whole block seems to be under ren­o­va­tion. This par­tic­u­lar build­ing is on the cor­ner, with lovely long win­dows and old, black-painted wood­work on the ground floor. The ground floor’s not yet under con­struc­tion, but there’s scaf­fold­ing and sounds of indus­try above. I never see any work­ers com­ing in and out– but I do always see rem­nants falling into dump­sters, sounds of ham­mers and saws, clouds of saw­dust poof­ing out of screened windows.

What I do see is a bunch of union pick­eters down­stairs. The major­ity are older guys, prob­a­bly retirees. But there’s always a dozen or so in total, includ­ing a bunch of over­weight, slovenly, chain-smoking middle-aged men block­ing the side­walk, lit­ter­ing, swear­ing, throw­ing their butts any old place. Maybe they’re out on worker’s comp. Maybe the work is slow, but judg­ing by the num­ber of tow­ers going up all over, I’m more inclined to say the union is over­sub­scribed. “Are there ille­gals here?” their hand-scrawled signs read. “Unfair work prac­tices” read other, more clearly stan­dard signs. But there’s never any orga­ni­za­tion. No chant­ing. No hand­ing out infor­ma­tive leaflets. Just uncouth milling-around. In the sun­shine. Because, I should men­tion– there are never any pick­eters when it’s rain­ing, though the sounds of work con­tinue up above. And on Fri­days, there are no more than a half-a-dozen pick­eters. I sup­pose they’ve all gone up to their lake houses in tax-free New Hamp­shire, which, I notice, is where many of their over­sized pickup trucks seem­ingly hail from, though it’s most likely these fel­lows “live” locally– Boston ordi­nances require a cer­tain num­ber of city res­i­dents on the job.

The thought that these guys are being paid by the union to stand around and make the union look bad? Makes me sick. The pen­sion­ers are more orderly, leaner, keep to them­selves. I would hate to think they’re being paid to picket on top of their already com­par­a­tively gen­er­ous pen­sions (I mean, who gets pen­sions any more?). But the “youth­ful” work­ers? They do not make me believe in the con­tin­ued legit­i­macy of unions. These guys think they are enti­tled to jobs, beer guts, obnox­ious behav­ior notwith­stand­ing. Mean­while, the guys upstairs are work­ing away, unseen, but heard and felt in the thump of debris into dumpsters.

“Are there ille­gals here?” Prob­a­bly. Are they being under­paid? Prob­a­bly. Is the over­see­ing con­trac­tor the one ulti­mately respon­si­ble for fair work­ing con­di­tions and safe con­struc­tion? Absolutely. But are those union guys out­side con­vinc­ing me that the work itself would be per­formed any more quickly or safely if they were on the job? Not a chance.

Com­menter “g” made a good point about strike v. infor­ma­tional pick­et­ing, and I rec­om­mend you look at her com­ment (#5).  One thing I could have made clear is that gen­er­ally, my pinko com­mie heart (thanks, Mag­pie, for the reminder) wants to like unions.  I think that some of them do impor­tant work, espe­cially in immigrant-heavy ser­vice indus­tries where few work­ers at all have been union­ized before.  But there are valid crit­i­cisms against larger unions, despite the good work that they too, can still do, and what I observed and set out above was my spin on one of them.  I would like to be an unre­pen­tant defender– but the symp­toms I saw of a larger dis­ease make that impossible.