United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America - Depression and Change

Depression and Change

The union lost more than half of its members in the first years of the Great Depression as construction dwindled to almost nothing. The Union at first opposed unemployment insurance, consistent with the conservative politics of the AFL and the deep-seated opposition of its President William Hutcheson to governmental intervention of any sort in labor and employment matters. The union eventually dropped its opposition to unemployment insurance by 1934.

The union also opposed industrial unionism, claiming the right to represent any workers who might perform framing or other traditional carpenters' duties in industrial settings. While the union made concessions to those unions, such as the United Mine Workers of America, that had already established themselves as industrial unions, it opposed any support for organizing workers in mass production industries or permitting such organizations to affiliate with the AFL unless they first surrendered their skilled trade members.

This dispute came to a head at the AFL's convention in Atlantic City in 1935, when Hutcheson interrupted a speech by a representative of the committee that was attempting to organize tire factory workers with a point of order. John L. Lewis, President of the Mine Workers, responded that Hutcheson's point of order was "small potatoes," to which Hutcheson replied "I was raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small." Lewis left the podium and, after some more words, knocked Hutcheson down, then relit his cigar and returned to the rostrum. Lewis and a number of other unions left the AFL two years later to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

While the Carpenters disdained industrial unionism, they were willing to accept mass production workers into their own union, albeit as second-class members. The Carpenters had fought with the Wood Workers union chartered by the AFL for decades, claiming that any workers who planed wood products that were subsequently used in construction, such as doors, sashes, mouldings and the like, were performing carpenters' work and must be brought within its union. While the Carpenters had never made similar claims on work performed by sawmill workers, much less tried to organize them, the union successfully insisted that the AFL assign the newly created sawmill workers union to it in 1935. That forced marriage was not successful, as most of these workers soon bolted to form the International Woodworkers of America and to join the CIO several years later.

Hutcheson ran the union without room for opposition to his administration; he revoked the charters of locals that opposed him or that he believed to be "communistic". He refused to permit the nomination of candidates to oppose him at the union's convention and named his own son, Maurice Hutcheson, First Vice-President in 1938. Maurice succeeded him on his retirement in 1952.

Hutcheson was a vocal opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he denounced as a "dictator" while campaigning for his opponent, Alf Landon, in 1936. Hutcheson's conservative politics and his conflict with the CIO may have played some part in the government's decision in 1940 to charge Hutcheson and other union leaders for criminal violations of the Sherman Act in 1940. The government claimed that the union's traditional methods of protecting its members' work — jurisdictional strikes, resistance to work-displacing technology, and featherbedding — were illegal restraints of trade. The United States Supreme Court upheld the district court's dismissal of the indictment in the first prosecution brought by the government in United States v. Hutcheson, 312 U.S. 219 (1941), ending any further prosecutions of the Carpenters.

The Carpenters found themselves in an unusual alliance with a coalition of other craft unions in Hollywood, the Conference of Studio Unions, led by Herbert Sorrell of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. After a long and drawn out strike caused by a divide and conquer strategy of the producers, CSU found itself forced out of Hollywood, leaving the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees as the primary representative of back lot crafts.