More from the brilliant geniuses who are leading the Carpenters Union.
The February issue of The Carpenter magazine just arrived from the Northern California Regional Council of Carpenters. I know. It just arrived one day before March, but you can’t have it all. Anyway, here’s what these all-time great union leaders are putting out, this time about “working to minimize stress”.
Any carpenter knows what are the main causes of stress on the job: Getting yelled at or pressured to work faster; never knowing from one day to the next if you’re going to be laid off; discrimination of one sort or another; carpenters competing with, and therefore backstabbing, each other because nobody has any sort of security.
Take a look at the suggestions these great union leaders propose as far as what you can do about it:
- “Accept it”
- “Communicate your feelings to your employer”
- “Adapt to it – learn to cope with the situation”
Notice anything missing? Like: “Go to your union rep or steward” Or “Organize and fight for better contracts”. Or even “If all else fails and there’s plenty of other work around, tell your boss to take this job and shove it.” Then, to add insult to injury, they tell you that stress can be good since in can “improve your performance”. Don’t fight back. No, no, no. no, no. Be a good little slave, accept your lot in life and make the boss plenty of money.
In other words, your boss should keep you stressed to the degree that you work as hard as humanly possible without being so stressed that you make mistakes. If it makes you old before your time… Well, there’s always the next carpenter waiting around the corner to take your place.
And you wonder why the union is steady going downhill?
(Also recommended is this article on sellouts in the carpenters union.)
Categories: labor
Exactly. When the UBC General President embraces business-unionism, the essence of the carpenters union is going to reflect that. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters is slipping further and further away from being a union towards General President McCarron’s goal of turning it into a high profile labor agency. Read any contract and you will see evidence of that. The Washington State contract obligates the union to provide more carpenters if an other trade goes on strike and has a picket. The NYC District Council convinced their members to cross a once united building trades picket line at the 144 acre Hudson Yard project. They signed a separate deal because they said it would benefit the carpenters there.
At my local in Renton, WA we are forming now a 2021 Contract Ready Committee to prepare the membership for a contract that is now a year away. Look at it this way. The employers are ready now to negotiate that contract. The Regional Council is ready now to negotiate that contract. The only separate entity ill prepared is the rank and file membership. We intend to change that. We hope that we can get enough Washington carpenters to understand that they should know that contract as well as they know their craft. We very much hope that they begin to look critically at the contract – see its strengths and weaknesses, and when the union sends out its lame survey, the members who respond can give an educated response and hold the union’s contract administrators feet to the fire.