Douglas J. Mc Carron - District Council Tenure

District Council Tenure

McCarron was elected secretary-treasurer of the Southern California Council of Carpenters in 1987. He quickly reorganized the union, a move which became a hallmark of his later career as international union president. At the time, the Southern California carpenters' union had hundreds of mostly autonomous local unions which managed their own affairs (some well, some not), set their own work rules, competed with one another for jobs, and ran their own hiring halls. The district council had little power. Employers, however, wanted to work with just the district council, one set of rules and one wage structure.

McCarron quickly began merging locals, sometimes through elections and sometimes through trusteeship. In 1988, he forced 18 Southern California locals to merge, leaving only four large ones. Using the union's trusteeship powers, he appointed new leaders to the newly-merged locals and transferred most of their assets to the district council. The mergers caused heated political and legal battles. Five locals sued to stop the forced merger in federal court, but lost.

International union officials, who had already consolidated the number of union locals to 1,466 from 2,200 since 1978, sided with McCarron, and the wave of consolidations continued.

Some union members questioned McCarron's motivation for the mergers. For example, in 1991, several carpenter locals in Orange and Riverside counties were trusteed. The locals were forcibly merged into a new affiliate, Local 803, which was in turn supervised from McCarron's Los Angeles offices. In 1992, carpenters' international union president Sigurd Lucassen and McCarron ordered a snap one-day election to select new Local 803 leaders. Nominations and the election were held on the same night. Of the 3,400 active and retired members eligible to vote, only 140 did so. Union members appealed the election results to the international union, which rejected the complaint. The union members then complained to United States Department of Labor (DOL), arguing that union officials were trying to use the election to tighten their control over Local 803. A federal judge agreed, noting that Lucassen and McCarron had violated federal labor law and the union's own constitution.