A different view outside AFL-CIO’s big tent

By Michael Mishak

Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Is Pete King Corp. an abusive contractor or a pillar of the region’s construction industry?

The answer depends on which union you believe.

Last month the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters launched a blistering media campaign against the local painting and drywall contractor, accusing it of hiring illegal immigrants, paying less than minimum wage and denying workers overtime and benefits.

Moreover, the carpenters allege Pete King has refused to provide adequate safety equipment and training, leading to unsafe working conditions and employee injuries.

The company, with headquarters in North Las Vegas and Phoenix, denies the allegations — and, in a strange twist, has the support of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.

The painters, who have a contract with the company’s Arizona operation, defended Pete King with a full-page ad in the Arizona Republic, saying the contractor “sets the standard for quality workmanship, integrity in business and fairness to its employees.”

The union infighting provides a window to a larger fissure in the labor movement — and highlights the competitive pressures felt by the building trades as they attempt to organize in the moribund construction industry.

The Pete King dispute is part of an ongoing war between the carpenters’ union and the AFL-CIO and its construction affiliates, including the painters.

The fight goes back to 2001, when the carpenters, under the leadership of Douglas J. McCarron, split from the country’s largest labor federation, dismissing the AFL-CIO as a lumbering bureaucracy that had failed to adapt to changes in the modern construction industry.

The carpenters pledged to organize nonunion workers through so-called “wall-to-wall” agreements, designed to place all workers on a project under the carpenters umbrella. Such pacts, however, effectively meant poaching members from other trades, thus setting up jurisdictional warfare across the country.

After years of fighting, the battle seemingly came to a head in August at the painters union convention in Las Vegas. Painters officials called on the AFL-CIO to condemn what they called the carpenters’ “predatory behavior” and asked the federation’s new leader, Richard Trumka, to help them fight back.

Delegates exclaimed in unison: “It’s about time!”

The AFL-CIO responded at its convention in Pittsburgh last month, passing a resolution urging the carpenters to rejoin the federation. Failing that, the AFL-CIO gave its Building and Construction Trades Department permission to start organizing carpenters — with the ultimate goal of forming a competing carpenters union.

In a statement, McCarron dismissed the resolution as “a solution in search of a problem,” adding that his carpenters work with AFL-CIO unions on a regular basis to complete construction projects.

He said the federation’s officials should spend their resources “organizing the craft workers in the markets they used to represent, before they divert their members’ hard-earned dues in efforts to reach out to workers they lack the knowledge to represent and the skills or resources to train.”

The carpenters’ aggressive organizing strategy, McCarron said, reflects “the industry our members work in, instead of the industry our founders knew.”

Labor experts said they expect the conflict to intensify as more and more contractors engage in work that cuts across traditional jurisdictional lines.

“There are legitimate questions about how the work in the construction industry is organized and what the most effective models are for bringing that work under collective bargaining,” said Jeff Grabelsky, director of the Construction Industry Program at Cornell University. “In some cases, the traditional lines are appropriate. In others, it’s not unfair to ask if they present an obstacle to getting a contract.”

The scarcity of work heightens the tension, experts said.

According to the Associated General Contractors of America, all but two states suffered significant declines in construction employment in August. Arizona and Nevada led the nation in job losses, with Nevada shedding 29,500 construction jobs over the past year — a 25 percent decline.

Grabelsky said the organizing debate is healthy, but the dueling ad campaigns were not. Such moves, he said, consume vital resources.

“There’s no question the industry has changed in ways that challenge the traditional jurisdictional lines,” he said. “But it would be great if the building trades could figure out how to resolve that without going to war with each other.”