Vol. 79/No. 31 September 7, 2015
The picket line on 36th Street on Manhattan’s West Side was organized by the Carpenters union to call attention to the conditions prevailing on nonunion construction sites across the city, where workers, often Latinos without papers, pay with life and limb for the bosses’ profit drive.
On Aug. 5, two construction companies and two of their managers were indicted on charges of manslaughter for recklessly causing the April 6 death of Carlos Moncayo, 22, originally from Ecuador.
An inspector that day tried to get supervisors to stop workers digging a trench that was seven feet deep without fortifying walls. He kept pleading for more than two hours before a boss finally told the workers to get out. Moments later the trench, then 14 feet deep, collapsed and Moncayo was buried alive.
Ten workers were killed on construction sites in the city and Long Island in 2013 and 11 in 2014. So far this year 11 have lost their lives, most of them working nonunion jobs. Latinos make up 25 percent of construction workers, but represented 38 percent of fatalities in 2012.
“They make $10, maybe $12 an hour and lots of them don’t have papers,” said José Zayas as he walked the picket line. “I speak Spanish, but we can’t really talk to them, because bosses are standing around watching and we don’t want to cause them losing their jobs or even risk deportation. But we always tell them this is not against them.”
Most union jobs pay from $35 to $65 an hour. Nonunion workers are paid between $8 and $30, mostly at the lower end. At least half are paid off the books, with no Social Security, unemployment compensation, coverage for workers’ compensation or health insurance.
The City of New York and its housing development agencies have overwhelmingly contracted nonunion outfits to build so-called affordable housing, making it the least unionized and lowest paying construction segment in the city.
According to the 2015 report “The Price of Life,” 25 percent of close to 90,000 carpenters in New York state are undocumented, in addition to 40 percent of 125,000 laborers and roughly one-third of dry wallers and roofers.
The wholesale organizing drive needed to unionize these workers faces many obstacles, among them organizational disputes and little interest from the existing unions, which are fractured along trades lines.
“We can’t legally bring in members who don’t have a Social Security number, a high school diploma or a public work record,” said picket captain Gerald Matthews, an official with the Carpenters. “But we are reaching out to organize them. We have a provisional membership, where we place workers in sites we organize. After two or three paychecks they have a work record and we can bring them into full membership.”
Matthews estimates that 75 percent of construction sites in the city today are nonunion.
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