Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era

The Working Class in American History

by Michael Kazin

From the depression of the 1890s through World War I, construction tradesman held an important place in San Francisco's economic, political, and social life. Michael Kazin's award-winning study delves into how the city’s Building Trades Council (BTC) created, accumulated, used, and lost their power. He traces the rise of the BTC into a force that helped govern San Francisco, controlled its potential progress, and articulated an ideology that made sense of the changes sweeping the West and the country. Believing themselves the equals of officeholders and corporate managers, these working and retired craftsmen pursued and protected their own power while challenging conservatives and urban elites for the right to govern. What emerges is a long-overdue look at building trades as a force in labor history within the dramatic story of how the city's 25,000 building workers exercised power on the job site and within the halls of government, until the forces of reaction all but destroyed the BTC.

Genres: Labor, Politics, American History

338 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine.

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those very rare books of local history and of labor history that opens a new window on an era. Michael Kazin shows that in San Francisco, which by some measures was the most unionized town in the country at the turn of the last century, with almost a third of the workforce unionized, there was a radical yet not necessarily socialist alternative to fin de siecle capitalism. The Building Trades Council (BTC), led by Irish immigrant and former carpenter P.H. McCarthy from its creation in 1896 to his downfall in 1921, was the nexus of this municipal and union power.

The BTC constituted almost half of the unionized labor force in the city, and earned well-above median wages for their skilled trades. Unlike in other cities, its constituent craft unions rarely quibbled over jurisdictional disputes, because McCarthy's rule superseded both those of the different locals and of the quarreling international unions to whom they supposedly answered. Their three regular "business agents" (also known as "walking delegates") would patrol the city looking for anyone working on a site without a union card handy, or anyone not working directly on their proscribed trade, or any union member becoming a part-time contractor. The working people feared them and respected them, and although many were angered by McCarthy's autocratic style, they also knew he kept them paid.

McCarthy's power was augmented because for 10 eventful years, 1901 to 1911, Union Labor Party mayors ruled the city, the last two years the mayor was P.H. McCarthy himself. It was the first and one of the only cities in the countries to be run by a labor party. Admittedly, the party did less than a stellar job of it. Most of them were taken down on corruption charges in 1907, and they accomplished little of note. But they did prevent the police from breaking strikes, started the organization of the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 (on which the BTC promised to submit to a grand, no-strike, steady-wages contract), and begun the first municipally-owned railway in the country.

Kazin's book offers insights into several neglected fields, including the nature of local building unions, which were the most powerful and by many measures the most numerous in the country up until the 1930s, and the relationship between local governments and their unions in this period. It's a little tendentious, as you'd expect from a labor history, but it's a worthy read.

[Shaun Richman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another helpful look at the confounding pre-NLRA era of unions, when "militant" and "progressive" were more of a Venn diagram than meaningful synonyms.

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Kazen, Barons of Labor; The San Fransico Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (1987)
1. Case study of the S.F. building trades
2. The keys to the BTCs success was its ability to sustain the closed shop labor monopoly and to elevate the principle of the workers dignity

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on American Labor.