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The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Day
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters has a long, proud and very
distinguished history.
It began in 1881, when 36 carpenters from 11 cities formed a national
union with a constitution, a structure and two thousand members. From
those humble beginnings arose a powerful political and economic force,
setting the standards for wages, benefits, conditions and quality on
every project in the United States. Much has changed in a century, but
growth still rests on reaching out and opening doors to all working
carpenters.
Click on, scroll down, and learn more about the founding, forefathers
and formative years of the Brotherhood!
Formative Years
In August 1881, 36 carpenters from eleven cities met in a Chicago
warehouse to form a national union. Four days of heated discussion
produced a constitution, a structure, and a new organization with two
thousand members—the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
The founding of the union was a response to changing conditions in
the construction industry in the second half of the 19th century. The
old ways of building were disappearing as a new "modern" system emerged.
Shifts in the larger economic order transformed the daily life of the
working carpenter. Facing turbulent times and an uncertain future,
carpenters turned to unionism to serve their collective interests.
The carpenter in colonial America had been a man with considerable
bargaining power. As one of a small number of skilled artisans in a
young society eager for new houses, commercial buildings, and wooden
ships, he often earned more than twice as much as his English
counterpart.
The carpenter who carried his tools across the Atlantic also brought
with him the European "guild system" in which the categories of workers
encompassed masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Each handled the tools
of the trade in a centuries-old division of work responsibilities. The
rules were unwritten, but tradition held that masters looked out for the
long-term welfare of journeymen and the training of apprentices, as they
passed on the "art" and "mystery" of the craft to the next generation.
The division between the groups was not one of permanent status, but of
age, years of experience, and levels of skill. Barring unforeseen
circumstances, an apprentice who stayed with the trade could expect, in
time, to become a master.
To the extent that masters, journeymen, and apprentices shared a
common work experience and vision of the industry, their economic
interests tended to coincide. Early efforts at organization focused on
stabilizing prices and reducing competition between carpenters, not
employer/employee conflicts. In the 1700s, master and journeymen
carpenters united in most American cities to establish "books of
prices," volumes that standardized the costs of every aspect of the
carpentry trade.
As the Industrial Revolution unfolded in the United States, the guild
system gave way to a capitalist set of relations in the building
industry. The dramatic increase in post-Civil War construction activity
outpaced the ability of the masters to meet the labor demands. The
volume of building activity shot up 250 percent between 1866 and 1906,
an upsurge that included wild swings of phenomenal expansion and
terrifying crashes. The dizzying pace of new construction was part of a
nation in change. Railroads connected once remote towns and villages.
Technological innovations wiped out entire handicrafts and introduced
the factory system to growing numbers of industries. The United States
emerged from a sea of self-contained communities to a unified country
linked by communication and transportation systems.
Mechanical inventions and new building materials altered the
carpenter's work. Factories with new machines—cut-off saws, mortising
and tenoning machines, borers, compound carvers, and power
sanders—enabled the mass production of items such as blinds, doors,
flooring, and stairs that had been fashioned by hand. Cast-iron replaced
wood beams as early as 1852 and, by the end of the century, the
introduction of structural steel reinforced concrete, and the elevator
laid the groundwork for the modern skyscraper.
But the industry changed in other ways as well. The opportunities for
profit generated by economic growth attracted speculators and middle men
with little or no attachment to the traditions of the industry. These
men seized the opportunities created by escalating construction demand
but remained ignorant of the issues of craft pride and quality that
characterized the guild system. "Jerry" building and "botch" work were
frequently the by-products of the new breed of builders who emphasized
speed, productivity, and profitability.
The emergence of the contractor/businessman strained the personal
connections that had existed between masters, journeymen, and
apprentices. At one time, a carpenter might have worked for a single
master for twenty years; by the late 1800s, he might have as many as
twenty employers in one year.
At the turn of the century, Connecticut carpenter J.W. Brown looked
back at the five decades of his trade. He recalled the times when his
employer "felt himself under a moral obligation" to the working
carpenter and his steady employment. Now, reported Brown, the carpenter
had become "accustomed to look upon himself not only as a wage worker
for life, but as an appendage to a monstrous machine for the production
and distribution of wealth."
Founding A National Union
The Chicago convention was the brainchild of
Peter J. McGuire,
a 29-year-old carpenter who was to become one of the great labor leaders
of the 19th century. A product of the tenements of New York City's lower
East Side, McGuire decided to devote his life to the cause of labor at
an early age.
McGuire recognized that the turmoil in the construction industry made
conditions ripe for the organization of carpenters. If the carpenter's
trade was under attack, there was only one appropriate response—protect
and defend the trade through the collective action of its members. The
delegates who gathered in Chicago acknowledged his leadership as a
crucial element of the union's potential for success. While they could
not resolve all the debates over the issue raised at the convention,
there was no disagreement over who would fill the one full-time
position. McGuire was unanimously elected to the post of General
Secretary.
The union grew gradually, from a membership of 2,042 in 1881 to 5,789
in 1885. Some cities were well organized while others remained entirely
non-union. McGuire worked 18 hours a day to keep the union alive.
However, in 1882, both McGuire and the union were penniless. McGuire was
forced to borrow $30 from a friend just to print "Carpenter", the
union's official monthly. McGuire, writing to Gabriel Edmonston, the
first UBC General President, for advice and support, vowed to devote his
life and wages to keeping the union alive. "I will work at my trade,
give up my salary, and kill myself at night to keep things going, if
necessary."
McGuire's sacrifices eased as the fortunes of the UBC rose with
escalating militancy of the American workforce in the 1880s. A general
strike initiated and led by the carpenters' union for the eight-hour
work day on May 1, 1886, began what proved to be one of the key
political events of 1886, a year that historians refer to as "the great
uprising of labor."
During the spring, McGuire temporarily suspended the regular business
of the UBC as he criss-crossed the country speaking to countless
audiences about the shorter hours movement. His efforts paid handsome
dividends. More than 340,000 workers demonstrated for the reduced
working day on May 1. In almost every city, carpenters led striking
marchers. As a result, union carpenters won higher wages and/or
decreased hours in 53 cities in 1886. Unorganized carpenters flocked to
the activist organization as the Brotherhood's membership swelled to
21,423 by the end of the summer.
The militancy of American workers in 1886 stunned the business world
and surprised cautious labor leaders. The hundreds of rallies, walkouts,
and strikes demonstrated the appeal of the eight-hour day and prompted
the American Federation of Labor to plan a follow-up series of actions
for May 1, 1890, under the banner of the nation's single most effective
labor organization. The AFL selected the Carpenters Union because, in
the words of President Samuel Gompers, it was the "best disciplined,
prepared and determined" force in the labor movement. The UBC lived up
to its reputation. As part of a massive national and international
effort in 1890, over 23,000 American carpenters in 36 cities won the
eight-hour day and 32,000 more gained a nine-hour workday. At the end of
the campaign, McGuire was able to describe the 55,000-member UBC as "the
largest and most powerful organization, numerically, of any special
trade in the whole civilized world."
A carpenter's average wage at the time of the union's birth was $2 a
day. Twenty years later it had doubled, and it was as high as $5 in the
larger cities. By 1903, union membership had climbed to 167,200. Four
years later, eight hours was the standard length of the carpenter's work
day across the country, at a time when ten- and twelve-hour days were
still common in many other industries.
Success rarely comes without cost, however. And McGuire's years of
maintaining a grinding schedule took their toll. By the turn of the
century, his body was wracked with disease. McGuire resigned at the
union's 1902 convention, looking considerably older than his 50 years.
The now-frail leader told the assembled delegates that he could not and
would not continue as their leader. "A man wears out like a piece of
machinery," he concluded. The man who founded the Brotherhood and
presided over its meteoric growth died four years later at his home in
Camden, New Jersey.
Beating the Open Shop, The Early 1900s
During the twenty-one years of McGuire's stewardship, the UBC succeeded
in setting union standards for most carpenters on most construction
sites in the U.S. The struggle to achieve these goals was long and
difficult. Building contractors used all the tools that employers have
typically adopted to drive away unionism—strikebreakers, blacklisting,
yellow-dog contracts, and violence. Long after the UBC had established a
firm foothold in the industry, contractor associations continued to
attempt to undermine the union's power.
In the first decade of the 20th century, an aggressive nation-wide
open-shop attack was mounted against the carpenters' union. Employers
locked out union carpenters in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh,
Louisville, Houston, Milwaukee, and a number of other cities. Frank
Duffy, the General Secretary who succeeded McGuire, wrote in a 1904
issue of the Carpenter that building employers had "organized, combined
and affiliated with one another, with the avowed purpose and firm
determination of putting our local unions out of existence altogether."
Yet, despite the bitterness of the conflict, the peculiar
characteristics of the construction industry made organizing
turn-of-the-century carpenters a possibility at a time when many other
sectors of the workforce were unable to break through the barriers of
anti-unionism.
In 1900, as the Brotherhood was rapidly expanding, no more than 6
ercent of the manufacturing workforce was organized—and that group
consisted almost exclusively of the small number of highly skilled
operatives whose craft had not been diminished by the factory system.
The difference between the organizing potential of factory vs. building
trades workers is illustrated by the comments of employers in each
field. In an era when a U.S. Steel executive could boast: "I have always
had one rule--if a workman sticks up his head, hit it." Otto Eidlitz,
one of the nation's most powerful builders, proclaimed, "It is without
question not only the right but the duty of labor to thoroughly organize
itself and it. . . is a power of good in the trade."
The differences in viewpoints were not due to the benevolence of
construction employers. Rather, the economics of the industry encouraged
fair-minded builders to reach an accommodation with the unions. Short on
capital and dependent on monthly progress payments, small and
medium-sized contractors were unable to stockpile resources to withstand
the financial strain of a long strike. Furthermore, the highly skilled
nature of the work made it difficult for anti-union employers to quickly
replace competent carpenters with capable strikebreakers. As a result,
builders who were faced with the power of a militant and popular union
ultimately chose to forego endless battles and instead accepted
agreements with local unions.
Additionally, many building employers recognized the potential
benefits that unions could provide in terms of apprenticeship training
and hiring hall. In a highly volatile industry with boom-and-bust
cycles, employers had difficulty making long-range plans with regard to
labor requirements. To the extent that unions willingly accepted the
responsibility of training and supplying labor, contractors were
relieved of a difficult burden. From their perspective, the positive
role of the unions often outweighed the added costs of union recognition
and above-average wages in the construction field.
The conditions in the industry thus laid the groundwork for McGuire's
brand of democratic and activist unionism to flourish in the late 1800s
and early 1900s. Despite the intensive efforts of open shop employers,
membership in the Carpenters' Union reached 200,000 by 1910. A union
card became as crucial to a self-respecting carpenter as a complete set
of tools. For those who knew the industry, it was a matter of common
wisdom that, "the craftsman without a card is a man without a trade."
McGuire's successors--Frank Duffy and William Hutcheson (who, as
General President, presided over the Brotherhood from 1915 to
1951)--altered the union's orientation. Less intent on carrying out
McGuire's motto of "organize, agitate, educate," they emphasized the
smooth administration of the union operation. Less interested in
McGuire's philosophies of social change, the UBC under Hutcheson took on
a more conservative political cast. More skeptical of broad
working-class movements, Hutcheson's Brotherhood staked out a tougher
position in a relation to other labor unions in and out of the building
trades. Conflicts over jurisdictional assignments became one of the
primary methods of extending working carpenters' interests.
The basic mission of the union--protecting carpenters' rights on the
job--remained the same. With the onset of World War I, the union faced a
new challenge. Wartime needs for temporary military housing,
shipbuilding, and ammunition factories pushed the federal government
into a massive construction spending program. When President Woodrow
Wilson allowed open shop contractors on federal construction sites,
Hutcheson refused to participate in the government's oversight boards.
"While we have every desire to assist the government in the crisis we
are now passing through," he said, "we have no intention of waiving our
rights to maintain for ourselves the conditions we have established."
Despite extraordinary pressures, the union leadership held firm. On
November 7, 1917, 1,300 building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts
participated in a general strike on all military work in the area to
protest the use of open-shop builders. The strike persisted in the face
of threats from the U.S. War Department. Influential preacher Billy
Sunday whipped anti-union hysteria to a higher plane, invoking the name
of God to denounce Hutcheson's treason. While that strike was settled
within a week, the larger issue remained unresolved until April, 1918
when the federal government approved a new system that guaranteed closed
shops in those areas that had them before the war.
Hutcheson's firmness preserved union standards for carpenters. As the
war became a memory, attacks on the patriotism of unionists gave way to
a closer examination and subsequent recognition of wartime profiteering
by employers. Secretary of War Newton Baker (who had been a vocal critic
of the UBC) confirmed many unionists' suspicions when he admitted that
labor had been "more willing to keep in step that capital."
Peace brought a new and different kind of battle. Employer
associations of all kinds initiated a furious assault on union labor
under the label of the "American Plan." Building employers, supported by
large industrialists and local Chambers of Commerce, pitched in. They
took on construction unions in Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee,
Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
Contractors in Chicago insisted on a wage cut in January 1921 and
locked out workers after the unions rejected their demand. In June, all
the crafts except the Carpenters and Painters agreed to submit the
dispute to arbitration by federal judge Kenesaw Landis. The judge's
drastic decision slashed wages beyond the initial contractor proposals
and weakened long-standing union work rules. The UBC refused to
recognize the judgment and let the fight against the "Citizens Committee
to Enforce the Landis Award" for five years until union shop conditions
finally returned to Chicago.
In San Francisco, the Industrial Association broke the 20-year reign
of one of the country's mightiest union shops in the building trades.
Financed to the tune of $1.25 million and in control of the building
materials' suppliers, the Builders' Exchange refused to call off a
lockout even after the city's Building Trades Council meekly accepted
the contractors' original wage cut demand. Determined to crush the
unions, the employers of San Francisco settled for nothing less than
open shop and an end to mandatory collective bargaining in the building
industry.
While the American Plan did take its toll, the San Francisco
experience was unusually severe. The Brotherhood survived the 1920s. The
number of union carpenters declined from 400,000 in 1920 to 345,000 in
1928, but this drop in membership compared favorably to the losses of
other labor unions in the prevailing anti-labor climate. Wages in the
building trades actually rose by roughly five percent a year. The fury
of the anti-union campaigns subsided by the end of the decade.
Decline and Recovery
The American Plan of the 1920s challenged the status of unions in the
United States, but the Great Depression of the 1930s threatened the very
existence of working people. The stock market crash in 1929 was a signal
to the world that the economy was in crisis. In the months that followed
unemployment rose at the astonishing rate of 4,000 workers a week.
As always, the construction industry served as an advance indicator
of general economic conditions. In many parts of the country, the
depression started for carpenters in the midst of the "Roaring
Twenties." By 1928, many local unions were issuing "stay away" warnings
to travelling carpenters. Conditions only worsened, however. Total
construction in the United States amounted to $20.8 million in 1929;
four years later it reached just $6.6 million. Membership ultimately
dropped to a low 242,000 in 1932 and fully 40% of those members were
unable to pay their dues. By the next year, the Carpenter reported that
less than 30% of the union's ranks were employed as carpenters.
The pain of unemployment was devastating. The incidence of
alcoholism, divorce, emotional depression, and suicide soared during the
early 1930s. Proud carpenters, whose sense of self-worth was wrapped up
in their craft and their ability to make a living as independent
tradesmen, were unable to put bread on the family table. Local unions
tried a variety of ways to ease the pain--lowering dues payments,
negotiating for 24- or 30-hour work weeks, forbidding overtime, and
instituting job-sharing programs. But all of these attempts were little
more than bandaids on a fundamentally crippled industry.
Some union leaders on the local level looked to political action as a
solution to their problems. A number of locals called for an independent
Labor party as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic political
parties. In 1932, the Chicago Carpenters District Council urged the UBC
national leadership to lead the fight for an unemployment insurance
system. Hutcheson was wary of such activities. His mistrust of
governmental intervention in the collective bargaining process, fueled
by his experiences during World War I, made him reluctant to support an
activist agenda by the federal government. While Hutcheson ultimately
accepted the idea of unemployment insurance, he unsuccessfully opposed
the AFL's endorsement of a minimum-wage bill in 1937. As late as 1940,
after eight years of popular New Deal legislation, Hutcheson maintained
his opposition to extensive federal involvement. "Labor," said
Hutcheson, "has known that what government gives, government can take
away."
Rank-and-file carpenters and local leaders had less difficulty
welcoming the New Deal programs. Like Hutcheson, unemployed carpenters
were not advocating welfare or relief. But they did want jobs. They
eagerly greeted Roosevelt's alphabet soup of public works agencies (PWA,
CWA, CCC, and WPA) instituted to help revive the ailing economy.
Initially, conflicts arose between federal desires to put people to work
at any price and union commitments to maintaining a decent wage. By
1936, however, federal and union policies coincided to enable skilled
tradesmen to move into their customary roles.
New Deal initiatives created jobs for millions of Americas but they
did not end the Depression. In fact, almost 9.5 million people were
still out of work in 1939. Only the monumental task of preparing for
entry into World War II was finally able to generate enough work to
eliminate the suffering of the jobless. The war-driven building demand
and the general post-war prosperity finally provided American carpenters
with reasonable opportunities and greater financial security.
The wages of union carpenters rose 15% between 1945 and 1949, 30%
through the 1950s, and 72% during the 1960s. While inflation ate away at
some of those gains, by and large the quarter-century following World
War II proved to be the longest period of sustained improvement in the
standard of living of American workers. The nation's labor organizations
reflected this growth, representing nearly one-third of the workforce.
The UBC reached its peak membership of 850,000 in 1958 and again in
1973.
Prosperity, Complacency and Trouble
Local unions took advantage of the favorable conditions to expand into
new areas of collective bargaining. In 1950, for example, the New York
District Council of Carpenters negotiated a 3% payroll tax to support a
Carpenters Welfare Fund. The idea of health and welfare funds became so
attractive that the national office's Health and Welfare Committee,
appointed in 1954, urged all locals to set up programs as quickly as
possible. Jointly trusteed pension funds soon followed, as well as other
contract gains, such as safety measures, travel time, and coffee breaks.
The accomplishments of this period brought additional stability into
the lives of working carpenters and their families. Unfortunately, the
extended boom and success in the bargaining arena also bred a measure of
complacency within the unions. With nearly full employment becoming
routine, business agents often reduced their roles to those of office
administration, job referrals, and contract negotiations. Traditional
tasks such as organizing the unorganized and membership education fell
by the wayside. Furthermore, many union leaders and rank-and-file
members, terrified by the nightmare of the Great Depression, were
convinced that job security depended on limiting the number of union
members in order to minimize competition for a finite number of jobs.
The post-war construction boom, however, outpaced the unions' ability
to satisfy all the labor requirements. As a result, a significant number
of non-union contractors began to appear on the fringes of the industry,
particularly in suburban and rural homebuilding. Many unionists remained
unconcerned about the potential threat of these newcomers since work was
plentiful in the growing commercial and industrial construction sectors.
Compared to the physical demands and the short life span of house
construction, employment was more stable and of longer duration on
large-scale projects. Ignoring the emerging non-union workforce came at
a cost, however. While union trades workers continued to build 80% of
all construction in the U.S. As late as 1969, the reliance on bigger
projects and a limited membership allowed the non-union employers to win
a foothold in the industry.
The 1970s began a new and more difficult era. The face of labor
relations in construction has been completely transformed in the last 20
years. While the Carpenters Union and other building trades unions have
always had to contend with hostile governmental interference and
economic insecurity, they still successfully established unionism as a
widely accepted force in the industry by the turn of the century. Since
1970 however, the rapid rise of the open shop has upset the
long-standing collective bargaining equilibrium in construction. Modern
anti-union advocates have been able to accomplish much more than their
predecessors did. Today, just 30-35% of the construction dollar in the
U.S. involves union workers.
The roots of this transformation can be found in the spiraling costs
of the late 1960s. Escalating materials and labor prices set off alarms
in the ranks of building owners, management consultants, corporate
journalists, and public policy makers. In 1969, 200 of the nation's top
executives formed the Business Roundtable in order to put a lid on
construction bills. The Roundtable, made up of the heads of General
Motors, General Electric, Exxon, U.S. Steel, Du Pont, among others,
concluded that the route to financial control over capital construction
costs lay in blunting the power of the building trades unions.
The Roundtable built political support to weaken legislation, such as
the Davis-Bacon Act, that protects construction workers' wages. It laid
out a collective-bargaining agenda to eliminate union gains. Finally,
many of its members sponsored and subsidized non-union contractors on
their own projects. The Roundtable's efforts combined with the severe
building recession of the mid-1970s and an increasingly anti-labor
political climate in the United States to provide a generous window of
opportunity for the open-shop movement.
Non-union builders, gathered under the umbrella of the Associated
Builders and Contractors (ABC), took advantage of these opportunities.
Today, construction in the U.S. is no longer dominated by union
contractors. Open-shop and/or double-breasted firms now participate in
and even control many major construction markets. Their mission is
clear. They reduce wages, weaken established safety and working
conditions, and change the way work is carried out on the jobsite. They
seek to replace the traditional egalitarian apprentice/journeyman system
with the co-called "merit shop" philosophy in which workers are pitted
against one another and have no real shot at quality training or a
decent lifelong career in the trades.
Today: UBC Meets the Challenge
Initially, many of unions were taken by surprise by the non-union
sector's developing economic clout. In the absence of a comprehensive
counter-strategy, a number of locals and district councils adopted wage
concessions in order to stay competitive with the non-union sector.
Non-union employers effectively undercut that tactic by simply driving
their own pay rates down further. At the same time, the ABC grew in
political sophistication and became one of the linchpins of the "New
Right" that propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.
"Our organization was set up to deal with the industry as it was in
post-World War II North America," said UBC General President Doug
McCarron when he was elected in 1995. "But the industry has changed
drastically since then, and we must change with it."
Since his election, McCarron has reorganized the Brotherhood's
priorities and its structure. He set organizing as the union's number
one priority and has redirected its resources to get that job done. The
union's localized and often politically-motivated structure has also
been restructured and streamlined to reflect today's regional and
national construction industry, as well as to ensure that union leaders
are more accountable to members for the job they do.
The ultimate goal of these structural changes is to organize and
reorganize every carpenter and contractor in North America and set the
standard for wages, benefits, and working conditions on every jobsite.
It is an ambitious goal, and one that will take a long-term effort to
complete. But it can be done through organizing.
The UBC faces a complex and challenging future. New tools and
materials and new methods of construction are entering the industry at
an accelerated rate. In many ways, the carpenter of the 1990s is no
different from the carpenter of the 1880s. But all indications are that
the dawn of the 21st century will bring much more rapid technological
innovation. Increasingly, the on-site carpenter is more an "installer"
than a "fabricator" with the development of prefabricated materials,
modular components, and panellized building sections. The multi-faceted
general contractor is giving way to the construction manager whose
subcontractors expect their carpenters to restrict their skills to more
highly specialized tasks, such as concrete forms, framing, drywall,
ceilings, finish work, etc. Union apprenticeship and
journeyman-enhancement training programs have addressed these new
developments while at the same time maintained a high level of
all-around craft competence that union journeymen will always need.
Ultimately, maintaining and extending a strong union for carpenters
will depend on combining an awareness of the dynamics of the future with
the finest traditions of the past. The days of "country club" unionism
that provided job security to members by keeping membership numbers down
and the unorganized out are over. The UBC's growth in the future rests
on its ability to reach out and open its doors to all working
carpenters.
Just as Peter J. McGuire built the Carpenters Union in the 19th
century by organizing all carpenters, today's leaders must rebuild this
union in the 21st century in much the same way. They must embody that
same spirit of inclusion in order to organize the unorganized and
mobilize current union members to talk to their non-union brothers.
In 1882, W.F. Eberhardt of Philadelphia's UBC Local 8 (which remains
strong to this day), wrote a letter to the Carpenter. He outlined the
efforts of his local's members to contact every single carpenter in the
city on a ward-by-ward basis. He described how those pioneering
volunteer carpenter-organizers held regular meetings across the city to
bring the unorganized carpenters into the new union. Today, more than
116 years later, the Brotherhood is using a "new" model much like the
outlined by Eberhardt. Every district, council, and local in the union
currently boasts an active volunteer organizing committee that uses
today's modern techniques and technologies, as well as old-fashioned
one-on-one contact, to spread the still-relevant message of unionism to
every non-union carpenter in their area.
The American workforce may look different today--more multi-cultural,
multi-racial, and multi-lingual. But the underlying principle of
organizing all the men and women who make their living at the carpentry
trade is exactly the same as it was in 1881, when 36 carpenters met in
Chicago to improve their lives, their futures, and their trade.
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