National Building Trades Council - Precursor Organizations

Precursor Organizations

In the late 19th century, the construction industry in the United States was in transition, and this transition led to large and frequent jurisdictional conflicts between labor unions. Small buildings (usually no more than five stories high) were giving way to skyscrapers. Whereas most buildings had been constructed primarily of wood, cut stone and plaster, now metal framing and trim, reinforced concrete, prefabricated materials, and man-made tiles were becoming the norm. Proliferation in new building techniques and materials led to an increase in specialized construction professions. This, in turn, led to the formation of unions for these specialty professions, and fights over which union's members would perform the work.

The nature of the construction industry at the time also concentrated power in the hands of local rather than regional or national unions.

In an industry that was essentially local as far as actual building construction was concerned, local unions were the heart of the building trades movement. Primarily interested in controlling local work for local members, they lobbied politicians to enact building codes and licensing laws to protect work standards and union jobs. They hired full-time business agents ("walking delegates") to police their trade agreements and to ensure that contractors actually paid the men, and allied themselves with other local unions in building trades councils to support one another's strikes.

Local construction unions made their own work-rules and played their own political games, and national and international union constitutions respected the autonomy of the local union by requiring the consent of local unions in the enactment of national union policies or by providing for optional participation in the programs of the national union.

These jurisdictional disputes only became more frequent and intractable over time. Jurisdictional disputes occupied much of the time and attention of the American Federation of Labor. "So much time was consumed by the individual unions involved in these disputes that it often left little for anything else." Nearly 95 percent of all strikes from 1897 to 1914 involved unions striking over which workers were to perform which jobs.

Increasingly, the debate involved a growing battle over craft versus industrial unionism. Certain unions—such as the Teamsters, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and the National Union of United Brewery Workmen—were already industrial unions in all but name, and vigorous battles were fought within the AFL to pare back the jurisdictions of these industrial unions.