The Construction & Building Maintenance Sector

The construction trades once provided unionized craftsmen a route to the middle class and a sense of pride and dignity often denied other blue-collar workers. Today, union members still earn wages and benefits that compare favorably to those of college graduates. But as union strength has declined over the last fifty years, a growing non-union sector offers lower compensation and more hazardous conditions, undermining the earlier tradition of upward mobility. Revitalization of the industry depends on unions shedding past racial and gender discriminatory practices; embracing organizing, diversity, and the new immigrant workforce; and preparing for technological changes.

Mark Erlich blends long-view history with his personal experience inside the building trades to explain one of our economy’s least-understood sectors. Erlich’s multifaceted account includes the dynamics of the industry, the backdrop of union policies, and powerful stories of everyday life inside the trades. He offers a much-needed overview of construction’s past and present while exploring roads to the future.

The Red Baron of IBEW Local 213

A ground-breaking study of the firebrand leader of the leftist faction of a construction trade union at a pivotal moment in labor history.

The “Red Baron” from Local 213 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was Les McDonald, a firebrand Communist activist and the youthful leader of the left faction within the Vancouver electrical workers’ union. His fate would be intertwined with the Lenkurt Electric strike of 1966, a wildcat strike that led to the imprisonment of four trade union leaders. McDonald’s important role in Local 213 and the Lenkurt strike—a watershed moment in Canadian labor history—was, until now, the untold story of the first half of his life. Referencing Local 213’s Minute Books, newspaper articles, collected correspondence, as well as dozens of personal interviews conducted by the author, this book examines the history of IBEW Local 213 in the turbulent years leading up to the Lenkurt strike. In addition to describing these events and their important historical ramifications, Ian McDonald chronicles how his father helped to rebuild a left faction within the local union.

Bigger Labor: A Crash Course for Construction Union Organizers

The book BIGGER LABOR is a crash course for construction union organizers written by Bob Oedy. If you want to recruit more members and contractors, this is the book for you. Learn the vital skills and nuts and bolts you need to produce explosive growth for your union’s future. BIGGER LABOR is the ultimate resource for building a more powerful Labor movement. BIGGER LABOR examines the components of the current construction organizing model and offers a more innovative approach. This book has enabled hundreds of organizers to take back their industry, and it will show you the way too. You will discover how to: organize contractors, recruit members, maximize your time, develop better listening skills, avoid job burn-out, and more.

Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Part 3)

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we so need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism (chapter 10)

Bureaucratic labor unions are under assault. Most unions have surrendered the achievements of the mid-twentieth century, when the working class was a militant force for change throughout the world. Now trade unions seem incapable of defending, let alone advancing, workers’ interests.

As unions implode and weaken, workers are independently forming their own unions, drawing on the tradition of syndicalism and autonomism—a resurgence of self-directed action that augurs a new period of class struggle throughout the world. In Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, workers are rejecting leaders and forming authentic class-struggle unions rooted in sabotage, direct action, and striking to achieve concrete gains.

The tangible evidence marshaled in this book serves as a handbook for understanding the formidable obstacles and concrete opportunities for workers challenging neoliberal capitalism, even as the unions of the old decline and disappear.