The New York City building trades, 1890-1910

This is a study of the building industry in New York City from 1890 through 1910. In these years, the industry underwent a fundamental transformation with dramatic implications for workers. In response, skilled craftsmen reorganized their unions, focusing their efforts to maintain craft integrity on walking delegates. These officials, in turn, organized themselves into successively more powerful central bodies. Walking delegates enabled skilled workers to secure the eight-hour work-day, wage advances, and the closed shop. Walking delegates also helped these workers to develop an expanded sense of worker and union power and prerogatives. Their efforts to secure control over the materials used in building and to aid in the organization of unskilled laborers and other trades took walking delegates and their unions far beyond the traditional confines of "pure and simple" unionism. The study contains six chapters. Chapter One explores the transformation of the industry in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the technological and managerial innovations which allowed for the building of skyscrapers. Chapter Two is an examination of workers' response to this industrial change, and focuses on the central figure in the reorganization of building trades unions: the walking delegates. Chapter Three explores this response in more detail for bricklayers and carpenters. The next three chapters explore industrial relations in building in the first decade of the twentieth century. From the summer of 1902 through early 1904, the building industry was rocked by a series of strikes and lockouts. Chapter Four is a study of one aspect of this prolonged struggle: the public construction of working-class identity. The insistent association of walking delegates with corruption allowed employers to prolong and to prevail in a bitter and costly battle with their employees. Chapter Five incorporates this analysis of the role of representations into a narrative of the eighteen month struggle which culminated in the imposition of an arbitration plan. The final chapter follows the fortunes of workers and their unions from the establishment of the arbitration plan through its dissolution at the end of the decade.