Today, May 20th 2009, is the 10th Anniversary of the 1999 Carpenters Wildcat strike. This weekend wildcatter Rob Rooke and current Presidential candidate for Local 713 will speak at the Labors Militant Voice Conference on the impact of the Strike. Contact LMV for details: 510 595-4676. His story is one of many being shared at this time.
I picked up my buddy at 3.30am and we drove over the Bridge to the San Francisco Airport, where we had no clue if 300 guys would be there or ten. This was day to be Day-One of the 1999 Northern California Carpenters Wildcat strike.
Days earlier our tailgate meetings in the parking lot of Local 713 had seen almost 200 workers gather to organize the strike. This was a strike against a crummy contract shoved down our throats with no vote. It was a strike against a union machine, increasingly out of touch with the workers and increasingly in love with the employers. A lefty union official had got on back of our speakers’ truck to argue against the strike. He lost the argument, because whatever he put forward it wasn’t going to mean more money on the check, or a guaranteed morning break or stopping straight-time Saturdays.
We got to the parking lot of the Airport, California’s biggest construction site, pretty early. It was dark and a few cars’ headlights began to show up. Within an hour, from our perch on the back on my pickup truck, dozens of rank and file carpenters were lining up to take the bullhorn and argue for a solid strike. At the Airport job, workers were prepared by days of word and mouth and were ready for this fight. One rank and filer, a former Marine helped line workers up the hundreds of carpenters to send them out to the different job entrances. We were going for a 100% close down. During the first days of the strike I was to head down to the city’s new Ball Park to close that job. After that our crew were to march around San Francisco with a growing group of strikers and a bullhorn to shut down any work we would see.
The Business Agents began showing up to tell us to go back to work. They were unenthusiastic given the huge crowds of energetic picketers. Some of the fulltime officials sent out were clearly sympathetic, others just felt awkward about not being in control. One Business Agent who is the current leader of the union’s organizing Department, clearly felt like he was scabbing and had nothing to say. Our position was he took an appointed job, he has to do what his boss (the Regional Council Executive Secretary) tells him.
Without the restraint of the Business Agents, herding and coralling the picket-lines, as they often do, and without lawyers on our backs we were able to run a efficient, fighting strike. We had no problem trespassing job sites and dragging off workers who had crossed the line. We figured out ways of getting around the Security Guards and wore our hardhats both on the picket-lines and behind the picket-lines too. Workers would show us how to get onto the jobsite avoiding the front gate and we would discuss and debate with individuals and they would feel awful about working and often walked out.
At the Ball Park we addressed a meeting of fifty electricians who didn’t want to cross our picket-line. Our appeal worked, they all drove off home. We marched onto jobsites where they were in the delicate position of being in the midst of a wet concrete pour, where we stopped the work. On day Two at other jobsites, workers asked us, “where were you? We thought you were coming to close us down yesterday. . . Okay guys, everyone off the job, we’re on strike!”
At one big high-rise jobsite in the city, we circled it, with bullhorns and hardhats and were initially getting no response. A few of us went on site and started climbing the stairs up towards the top floors. As we were half way, workers were coming down the stairs with their lunch pales joining the strike. “Is there anyone else up there?” we’d ask, “Yeah. They’re just packing their tools away.” I was surprised that their foremen weren’t threatening the workers for joining the Wildcat, but the foremen often sided with us, or simply shrugged their shoulders and didn’t put up a fight.
At another job a group of us entered a huge job where a safety meeting of a hundred workers was about to begin. Just as everyone was assembled and the boss was about to open his mouth, we jumped up on a table and addressed everyone. In this situation the workers were a bit intimidated by the direct eye of the boss, but some of the workers picked up their lunches and took off. The bosses brought in video cameras to film us for trespass, we told them where to go. They had footage of us but no names.
Every day in the afternoon we had a mass meeting for everyone to have their say. This is where the strategy was discussed and reservations aired. We elected a Chair, I proposed John Reimann, the Recording Secretary of Local 713. All the bosses’ arguments, the Union Bureaucracy’s arguments, all were raised along with a powerful component of union ideas and socialist ones.
By Day Two the strike was rising in some new areas and shrinking in existing areas. We would hear word of the strike spreading way beyond the Bay Area with new jobs just coming out. At the same time many of the other Trades workers were being increasingly intimidated by their union officials to return to work and not honor our unofficial/illegal picket-line. We also had tapers and painters join our roving pickets. Apprentices were at the forefront of the strike, alongside journeymen and many foremen, talking up the issues and pulling people off jobs.
Over the weekend a planned Wildcat picnic was not well attended. We heard that a fairly large number of workers returned to work at the Airport on Saturday. A meeting of some LMV members and wildcat leaders kicked around ideas to keep up the strike’s momentum. Given that this was an illegal strike and that the union was pressuring workers to return the trickle back to work on Friday was likely to increase on Monday. One of the things we probably could have done instead of simply electing a Wildcat Chair would’ve been to organize a more collective body to represent the strike: a strike committee. We had hundreds of phone numbers but not the resources to get out to everyone. The scale of the strike took everyone by surprise.
We kicked around some direct action ideas. We seriously discussed going to the Ball Park and breaking into the job and climbing up the Crane Tower. From there we could hoist a banner for the strike and occupy the Crane at the same time. This, we hoped would bring media attention to the strike and get word out to new forces. This remained a good idea and nothing more.
On Day 4 of the strike, Monday, it was evident we were losing numbers faster than gaining new strikers. My own fear was that Tuesday would be far worse and that a slow petering out of the strike would both diminish the importance of the strike in workers’ memories but also result in large numbers being fired. Although the strong construction boom meant the latter was less likely. I proposed a return to work Tuesday in an orderly, structured way. This was opposed by many workers, but accepted by the majority. I proposed we should go back to the jobsites and build for a One-Day strike on July 1st right before the Fourth of July weekend and that we encourage all members to head to their monthly union meetings to take up the fight there.
The strike got widespread coverage in all the Bay Area newspapers. In one the Regional Council spokesperson admitted their own passivity: “ the union’s not strong enough to negotiate more,” he argued. Our strike proved this lie wrong. On the other side the Head of the San Francisco Airport authority was laying down the law: “This (strike) is an illegal assembly. These workers are subject to arrest and fines.”
The role of the small number of Marxists in the leadership of the strike was significant but not critical to the strike. The mood of anger, first expressed in the breaking-up of the Regional Council meeting by rank and file carpenters and then becoming the Wildcat strike, was an objective fact. The conscious reformists in the movement were unable to talk-down the strike mood. The role played by LMV comrades was to encourage the strike forward, to help workers see its place in the wider picture and to strengthen attempts to build a more lasting organization out of the strike. If the wildcat had lasted longer, had widened and was not isolated, Marxists could’ve played a bigger role in helping bring together a united movement. For this, we have the future, and the Wildcat has deepened our small reserve of direct experience with mass movements.
The booming economy and the increasingly overconfident and rigid union bureaucracy gave birth to the 4-day 1999 Carpenters Wildcat Strike. The strike’s success can be measured by its legacy in the memory of the thousands of carpenters who took part, and ran their own strike. The pride of being a wildcatter resonates even to this day, where in Local 713 there is still a unspoken respect among carpenters for those that joined and led that strike. The strike built a special bond between strikers that has lasted a decade and has not diminished.
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