Jeffrey Grabelsky

Standing at a crossroads: the building trades in the twenty-first century

American building trades unions have historically played a critical and stabilizing role in the nations construction industry, establishing uniform standards and leveling the competitive playing field. Union members have enjoyed better than average wages and benefits, excellent training opportunities, and decent jobsite conditions. But in the last thirty years the industry has undergone a dramatic transformation. This article describes the decline in union density, the drop in construction wages, the growth of anti-union forces, the changes in labor force demographics, the shift toward construction management, and the emergence of an underground economy. It also analyzes how building trades unions have responded to these changes, identifies structural impediments to union renewal, and proposes strategies for building trades unions to reassert their presence and power.

Fanning the Flames (After Lighting the Spark): Multi-Trade COMET Programs

The COMET (Construction Organizing Membership Education Train ing) is an educational program utilized by building trades unions to gen erate rank-and-file support for organizing new members. Since 1996, the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO has been sponsoring COMET training in multi-trade settings for its 15 affiliates. Between 1997 and 1998, the Department undertook a systematic evalu ation of its multi-trade COMET programs to determine their impact on attitudes toward organizing as well as on the nature and extent of orga nizing activities. This article summarizes the lessons the Department learned. Among other conclusions, the evaluation reaffirmed that COMET training is an effective way to build internal support for external organiz ing and that local unions using the COMET appear to be more deeply engaged in organizing than those not using this program.

Community Workforce Agreements: A Tool to Grow the Union Market and to Expand Access to Lifetime Careers in the Unionized Building Trades

This paper profiles and explores variations in the nature and extent to which community workforce provisions have been effectively negotiated into Project Labor Agreements (PLAs). Community Workforce Agreements broadly aim to advance employment and career models for demographic groups underrepresented in the construction industry but have implications for coalition building and may facilitate a broader role for labor in long-term economic development. These arrangements are the focus of intense policy and research debate, where the issue of using PLAs on publicly funded projects has long been considered. However, the types of provisions regularly included in these PLAs, and the manner in which these provisions vary by geography, time, and size of the Building and Construction Trades Council, are not well understood. This paper profiles the most common provisions and their variability and briefly touches on outcome effects of these agreements to communities, using a content analysis of 185 negotiated agreements over fourteen years, a survey of over 300 building trades councils, and three case studies from projects in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and New York.

Psychosocial Capacity Building in New York: Building Resiliency with Construction Workers Assigned to Ground Zero after 9/11

Construction workers who worked on “Ground Zero” after 9/11 in New York City were exposed to stressful and traumatic conditions. Clinicians, trade union leaders and the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations designed a psychosocial capacity-building project which helped workers to recognize, understand and respond to their reactions through a series of interventions that included peer training, psychosocial workshops, brochures, and outreach and referral services. The project emphasized the use of mutual aid and social support through group interventions facilitated by clinicians and offered by trade unions. The article describes the planning and implementation of the project as well as the results of qualitative evaluations of the effectiveness of the project.

Educating for Change: How Labor Education Centers and AFL-CIO Bodies Can Grow and Transform Together:

In order to survive and prosper today, both labor councils and labor education centers need to rethink their mission, goals, and strategies. In this report, we examine how partnerships between these two types of organizations have fostered creative transformation for both. We examine the innovative relationships between labor education programs and their respective labor councils and state federations in five states (Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Iowa, and West Virginia). These cases include those with long-standing strong relationships and those that have been recently rebuilt or rethought. In several cases, the labor education centers owe their very existence to the work of state labor leaders to who helped found them and, more recently, to maintain and expand their resources. In addition, we document the role played by the UCLA labor education program in revitalizing the Orange County AFL-CIO, as well as two key partnership programs of Cornell and the AFL-CIO in New York: the Union Leadership Institute and the New York City Capacity Building Initiative.