Challenge From Non-union Contractors
The Carpenters, like other building trades, had not faced serious employer opposition since the 1920s. This changed in the 1970s as the Business Roundtable, made up of the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, U.S. Steel, DuPont and others, undertook a program to reduce building costs by replacing unionized with non-union contractors. The Roundtable also attempted to weaken the Davis-Bacon Act and other legislation that protected construction workers. The building trades, caught off guard and used to organizing from the top down, lost large amounts of work to non-union contractors in the decades that followed.
Read more about this topic: United Brotherhood Of Carpenters And Joiners Of America
Famous quotes containing the word challenge:
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)