Expansion and Conflict
McGuire was forced out of office in 1901 by Frank Duffy and others after a scandal concerning his inability to account for all of the funds received by the union. Many rank and file members of the time suspected that McGuire was framed by elements within the growing bureaucracy of the Carpenters' Union, with whom McGuire had fought several political battles over their attempts to gain more power over rank and file/local union control.
McGuire's successors took a more aggressive stance toward other unions whose members were performing work that the Carpenters union either considered its own members' right to perform or saw as a threat to their craft traditions. The union waged jurisdictional strikes to claim work that other unions, such as the Machinists, Sheet Metal Workers and Electrical Workers claimed as theirs. The Carpenters used its size to win many of these disputes. After the death of president James Kirby in 1915, it frequently disaffiliated from the AFL's Building Trades Department to protest those decisions it lost.
In the decade that followed, the union fought off employers' efforts to impose the open shop, which would have made it very difficult for the union to maintain the standards and membership it had won. While the open shop drive may have stalled the Carpenters' growth during the decade, it did not cause the severe membership losses and wage cuts that other unions suffered.
In some areas, the union not only prospered, but elected its own leaders to public office. The head of the most powerful Carpenters local in San Francisco and the head of the San Francisco Building Trades Council, P.H. McCarthy was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1909, while unionists riding the wave of populist enthusiasm won office in many other communities. The union won wage and union protections similar to the Davis-Bacon Act during World War I.
The Carpenters fought these same open shop battles a second time, after the end of World War I, when employers tried to impose their "American Plan" in the centers of union strength, such as San Francisco and Chicago. While the employers were successful in some areas, the Carpenters came out of the 1920s with improved wages and relatively slight losses in membership.
Read more about this topic: United Brotherhood Of Carpenters And Joiners Of America
Famous quotes containing the words expansion and, expansion and/or conflict:
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)
“If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle—absolute busyness—then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy—and without consciousness.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)