Confront or Cave? Federal Pressure Splits the Building Trades

One of the last nationwide bastions of union jobs is getting jackhammered by the Trump administration. Members are languishing in ICE prisons without trial. Programs that protect members from racism and sexism are getting the axe.

In response, building trades officers are split: some are pleading, some are protesting, and others are surrendering without a fight.

Out of nine million construction workers in the U.S., one million had a union last year. Since the 1970s, when about forty percent of U.S. hardhats wore union stickers, anti-union developers have kicked unions out from most residential and private building sites.

The building trades took refuge in publicly funded construction projects and specialized industrial jobs. An old federal law that favors union hires for interstates and military outposts helps small locals of pile drivers and insulators straggle on even in rural Alabama or Wyoming, where unions are otherwise scarce.

FUNDING CUTS BITE

One week into President Donald Trump’s first term, top building trades officers were chumming it up in the Oval Office, celebrating a reboot of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

But when Trump returned to office this year, things were very different: First, the administration moved quickly to slash minimum wages on all federal contracts by 25 percent, down to their decade-old $13.30 level. Next, it canceled over $300 billion of funding at union construction sites, eliminating both public and private clean energy and infrastructure jobs.

In a leaked memo early this year, top trades staff complained about the lost jobs, but thought they’d best “remain silent” and hope to rekindle the old friendship. But after a few painful months, some leaders in the trades tested out a more combative tone. When ICE abducted Sheet Metal apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvador prison without trial, SMART officers held rallies, and North America’s Building Trades Unions’ top officer Sean McGarvey called for his release. Now Abrego Garcia is back in the U.S., though still jailed.

In April, the Trump administration canceled, without explanation, federal permits for the landmark Empire Wind project off the New York coast, which was already under construction. The head of the Laborers cut a video in protest. With pressure from many trades and politician friends, the project is back on. But nationally, most wind projects are still halted.

But across the country, the construction union brass is largely avoiding conflict. Since last fall, no U.S. construction union has waged a strike, aside from small locals of Cedar Rapids plumbers and Ironworkers near Pittsburgh.

Right before Trump’s budget passed in July, McGarvey called it “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country… threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs… to make room for more tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations and individuals in America.”

But despite the historic blow, the national building trades federation didn’t even plan a protest, just a meek appeal to “Republican allies” to come to their aid.

On July 23, in a groveling appeal to Trump (“Mr. President, we need your help. You’re a builder. You’ve forgotten more about what it takes to develop and build a project than practically anybody in the world ever knew …”), McGarvey raised the loss of tens of thousands of construction jobs from canceled projects, which he blamed on “some people around you.” Attempting to find common ground with the president’s vicious anti-immigrant agenda, among the actions McGarvey urged Trump to take was to have ICE send buses and investigate immigration violations at the Arizona TSMC chip plant.

UNDERMINING SISTERS

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters, with 400,000 members, has often been the lone wolf of the building trades. Its officers disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO two decades ago, and the union has frequently faced allegations of raiding from other trades. President Doug McCarron has consolidated power since 1995, stripping locals of their right to vote on contracts, while appointing regional leaders who often cover several states.

In May, McCarron cited the Trump administration’s “current executive orders and policies targeting identity-based initiatives” when he ordered every part of the union to drop “any involvement or expenditure” in the annual Tradeswomen Build Nations conference. Soon after, officers ended longstanding union support for Sisters in the Brotherhood, the official women’s committee, plus smaller Black, LGBTQ, and Latino member groups.

Taji Riley, a carpenter in Local 157 in New York City, has attended the Tradeswomen conference six times. The experience inspired her to become a local women’s committee member. “I met so many sisters from different states,” she said. “It empowered me to go beyond the ‘go to work, pick up your tools, go home’ attitude—to have more stakes in the union.”

Riley said it was infuriating for union brass to shut down the women’s committees and pull support from the conference. “There were no conversations with us. It puts such a sour taste in your mouth as a woman—so y’all don’t want us here?” Riley says she often faces hostility from men on the job.

“The officers have been talking more progressively for years about supporting our sisters,” said Laura Gabby, a ceiling specialist in Riley’s local. “Now the second the Trump administration starts pushing in an opposite direction, they fold immediately and throw in the towel?”

Gabby said the leadership claims that they’ll lose their tax-exempt status if they don’t accede to Trump’s demands—but that seems unlikely. Although locals in a few unions have temporarily lost tax-exempt status from the IRS for financial reporting missteps, Carpenters officers cited no evidence that the government would yank that status for political leverage. “I think people can’t take that as serious leadership,” Gabby said.

Some locals are resisting. “People who don’t normally speak up now are speaking out against this decision,” said Gabby. Members in eight Carpenters locals in Michigan, California, and Oregon swiftly passed a resolution to restore support of Sisters and the Tradeswomen conference. That should clear the threshold to get a vote at the Carpenters international convention in August, unless top officers maneuver to disqualify it.

In officer elections for the Portland local in June, two Sisters in the Brotherhood ran as part of the Carpenters for Union Democracy slate. The slate backs the Tradeswomen resolution and called for restoring members’ right to vote on approving contracts.

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The slate fell short, garnering about 30 percent of the vote. Turnout was just six percent—probably because members could only vote on a workday, and there was just one voting site for a local covering a territory 150 miles wide. According to union reformers, the incumbent president is currently also a company superintendent.

The reformers plan to keep up bowling nights and family socials to grow their rank-and-file group.

AN INJURY TO ONE

About three million construction workers nationally are immigrants, a third of the sector. Recent ICE raids have targeted some major non-union jobsites. Over a hundred workers building campus housing in Tallahassee, Florida, were arrested May 29.

Organizers say the persecution is further undercutting union organizing by making it tougher for non-union workers to stand up, noting a steep drop in complaints against wage theft and workplace abuse at non-union contractors this year.

In the 700,000-member Electrical Workers (IBEW), escalating attacks against immigrant workers have catalyzed the relaunch of the Latin American Electrical Workers Alliance, a caucus of members and some staff to increase Latino participation and political advocacy in the union.

LAEWA members are asking locals to adopt an immigrant defense resolution to mobilize against “government raids or racist groups.” The resolution has been adopted by locals in Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Portland, Oakland, Richmond, and suburbs of San Francisco and Seattle.

Francisco “Paco” Arago, a journeyman wireman and member of IBEW Local 11 in Los Angeles, said that caucus members wanted to “create a network to find out how we can defend our communities, as unionists and as electricians.” He added that the caucus is “learning a bunch of stuff as we go.” For instance, he said, the union’s apprenticeship program “turns out a good product for the contractor. But they’re not really turning out good unionists. And we’re taking it in our own hands at this point.”

After Local 11 adopted the immigrant defense resolution, Arago said, officers officers sent staff to a rally to support Abrego Garcia, the detained SMART apprentice, in downtown L.A.. Previously, officers had said they wanted to stay away from divisive issues.

As LAEWA mobilizes in defense of immigrant workers, it may force top officials to pick a side. Many members want to end structural barriers that keep Spanish-speaking workers from joining the union. Often locals have no Spanish language applications or training programs, workers said, even where state certification programs are available in Spanish.

“I was an organizer for a few years in the local and I had to turn away dozens of electricians [who were eligible for the union],” Arago said. “You’re watching him pull wire, you’re watching him do the work, and he can’t come just because he knows damn well, he cannot even fill out the [union] application without asking for his niece to sit down next to him and help him.”

“In our constitution for the IBEW, it clearly states that we want to organize every electrician, every electrical worker,” said Jesus Padilla, an electrical apprentice in the Oakland area who is pushing his local to pass the immigrant defense resolution. “It doesn’t say every Caucasian worker, it doesn’t say every English-speaking worker, it doesn’t say every Christian worker. It says every electrical worker.”

“As unions decline, their only path to the restoration of strength and power is based on increasing numbers, increasing market share, and organizing,” said Mark Erlich, former executive secretary-treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters. “If you’re not organizing the workers who are actually doing the work, then you’re simply irrelevant.”

MEMBER ENGAGEMENT KEY

International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) President Jimmy Williams Jr. has been a prominent voice against Trump’s attacks on immigrant workers and the labor movement as a whole. In March, he called on the labor movement to fight for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad student and former UAW member detained by ICE for leading protests against the Gaza genocide. Weeks later, the union condemned the deportation of Abrego Garcia of SMART and the detention of SEIU Local 509 member Rümeysa Öztürk.

Williams isn’t courting a confrontation for confrontation’s sake, one staffer said. The union is engaging members under the banner of their “One Union, One Family, One Fight” campaign. The plan is for Painters leaders to visit each district council in North America as part of a training program on building union power. In the training, workers will learn about the union’s history, look at policies that have diminished union density over the years, and discuss how they can get more involved in the union, from understanding their contract to joining a bargaining committee.

CHANGE THE TACTICS

As ICE raids spread terror across the country, organizers recruiting new members will need to change up their tactics, said Savannah Palmira, director of organizing at IUPAT District Council 5.

“The first thing workers asked my organizer yesterday is if they were ICE,” she said. Instead of wearing black safety vests resembling those worn by ICE, Palmira has encouraged her organizers to use colored safety vests. In addition, she said, some meetings will need to go under the radar to help protect workers from employer retaliation.

District Council 5 is working to ensure that every contract is available in Spanish, along with the union’s bylaws and constitution. The district is also building a Spanish-speaking committee and is planning classes for Spanish-speaking members who have questions about their contract or benefits. “We’re going to sit there with donuts or bagels,” Palmira said, and create “a safe place to ask questions.”

Defending immigrant workers isn’t just a question of ethics, Palmira said: “When immigrant workers are taken advantage of on a job site, that affects you, that affects me, that affects all workers. Because once one company gets away with it, they’re gonna keep getting away with it, and it becomes a race to the bottom.”

“I don’t care who they are, we’ve got to elevate the lowest worker,” said Palmira. “Because when you raise the floor, you raise the ceiling.”