I live in a construction labor union bubble. Their hopes are my hopes. Their causes are my causes. Their candidates are my candidates. The construction unions are labor organizations whose three million members are folks who work in the building trades and crafts.
For over thirty years I've belonged to, and worked for the Laborers, Pipefitters, Boilermakers, Carpenters, Operating Engineers, and others, and their regional organizations, called Building Trades Councils.
I've traveled, politically, across the universe. As a youth, I was left of the Students for a Democratic Society. Today, I'm with the Building Trades, whose politics are conservative Democratic, which is vastly improved from their earlier, reactionary positions.
Continue reading below the florid orange script, and I'll explain how my loyalty to the Building Trades has driven my comments on Kos Diaries regarding the proposed KXL Pipeline, when I discovered that reason had left me, and why I am declaring Ta-Ta-for-now (TTFN) and will not comment further in future KXL diaries.
The reactionary Nixon regime of 1968-74 radicalized me. The National Guard murdered students, the police murdered Black Panthers, the armed forces murdered Vietnamese, and folks were sentenced to life in prison for a few joints. I wanted the whole system to crash down.
After Nixon fell, I still needed a job while I waited for the Revolution. I'd been appalled when the AFL-CIO, which includes almost every important union in the US, had refused to endorse McGovern over Nixon for President. When I had a chance to get a truck driving job and join the Teamsters, I saw an opportunity to make good money and also preach revolution to the union workers.
Coincidentally, many youthful leftists made similar decisions at that time. We did swing several unions markedly to the left.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Once I started my truck driver job, I sobered up considerably, politically speaking, from laboring with folks whose priorities were making house payments, instead of waging a general strike to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat. I began appreciating unions for how workers were able to empower themselves.
After I lost my Teamster job during the Reagan Recession, I went back to college, got a degree, and began working as a organizer and researcher for unions. After a stint at relatively liberal unions like SEIU, I ended up at the Building Trades Unions.
I found the building trades a strange place for a radical like myself. In the 1950s and 60s, the construction unions were reactionary and racist bastions. Construction union officers has served in the Cabinets of Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. (Eisenhower's cabinet was famously known as eight millionaires and a plumber.) Hundreds of union construction workers had savagely beaten anti-war protesters during a rally against the Vietnam War. Plumber's Union officer George Meany had led the AFL-CIO to refuse to endorse the Democrat McGovern against the Republican Nixon for President in 1972. Less than 5% of union construction workers were minorities.
By the 1980s, the construction unions had done some sobering up of their own. In the 1960s, Corporate America decided that the solidly unionized building trades and their fat paychecks might infect the unorganized workers in America's factories with the cancer of unionization.
The big corporations like Dow and Exxon decided to set up non-union construction companies, and just give them no-bid construction and maintenance projects. The companies paid whatever it cost to get their new factories built, just to break the construction unions. By the 1980s, the companies had beat the unions down to about 50% of major construction work, compared with 90% in the 1950s. (See, for instance, Wars of Attrition: http://ir.uiowa.edu/...)
I really liked the construction union officers I met. By now, they actively recruited minority members. Many officers were Black or Latino.
They'd fought Corporate America in every way possible. They'd called strikes of tens of thousands of workers.
Some of those strikes turned into hand-to-hand pitched battles, and more, that would have done any revolutionary proud. But in the last seventy years, not a single pro-union bill ever became law, and Congress implemented new, virulently anti-union laws. In this legal climate, Corporate America forced the Building Trades into a slow retreat that continues.
I research non-union construction companies, among my duties, looking for examples where they've performed shoddy work. I spent many hours looking into the non-union TIC construction company, for instance, who in the past, accidentally cut into a natural gas pipeline and blew up one of the Colorado Fuel and Iron buildings.
TransCanada hired TIC to build the pumping stations on the first Keystone Pipeline. As many of you know, some of those pumping stations leaked and spewed crude oil on several occasions. Pipeline inspectors say it was because non-union TIC cut corners.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
While union workers build many pipelines, we don't always get much of the pumping station work, which is also considerable.
But for KXL, to our shock, TransCanada was not only refusing to rehire TIC, they were pledging to use all-union crews for all of the pumping stations too!
So KXL is a very big job for us, and TransCanada would also be slapping TIC in the face.
I know there are a lot of jobs numbers tossed around for KXL. All I can say for sure is that on the 485 miles of KXL that was recently built in 18 months from Oklahoma to Texas, the work force peaked at about 5000 construction workers. That is a lot of jobs, and a long job, for construction workers.
I get global warming. I've successfully advised unions not to invest in coal fired power plants. I did not attend meetings to support the coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest. I wrote a favorable Kos diary about the strong public opposition to those terminals, and I diaried against other coal fired power plants.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I understand that the KXL Pipeline is a powerful symbol of our odious addiction to petroleum vehicle fuels.
I just wish folks didn't have to pick a symbol that would provide work for thousands of union construction workers. We need the work. We need strong unions. We need unions in those Red states, where the KXL will be built, as a base for those of us who want to see a 50-state campaign by Democrats.
By now I've commented, and argued about KXL for too long on Kos. Finally a week ago, I recc'ed a Troll pro-KXL diary, just because. (I withdrew the Rec later that day.)
http://www.dailykos.com/...
If I'm reccing a troll diary, I've gone too far. I apologize.
So TTFN, for me, regarding commenting on any more KXL diaries. I still intend to comment on other energy diaries. But if I weaken, and comment on KXL in the future, feel free to HR anything I said.
I will, however, respond to any comments on this diary.