Carpenters Union Builds A Bridge Back to the City

John McCarron--Chicago Tribune September 6, 1999

Last winter, on a cold Friday in January, the Chicago-area carpenters union did a hugely right thing, though it rated only a three-sentence brief in the next day's Tribune (and even less in the other city daily).

The Chicago and Northeast Illinois District Council of Carpenters opened a state-of-the-art apprentice-training facility on Chicago's Near South Side. It's a $3.5 million, 34,00 square-foot laboratory of the carpenter's art located by the bend of the Dan Ryan Expressway where it splits Chinatown from the Mexican-American Pilsen neighborhood.

(Since this is about job training, two lessons for young publicists: Don't schedule your ribbon-cutting on a Friday, when editors have to shoehorn a full day's news into skinny Saturday papers. And if you can avoid it, don't let your event become a whistle-stop on a major politician's re-election campaign.)

The press that day was a lot more interested in getting Mayor Daley's parry to challenger Bobby Rush's last thrust than in some new union hall.

Not that Daley wasn't instumental in getting the carpenter's to build at 2141 S. Union Ave. He was. And it must have been a sweet ribbon-cutting for him, given the history.

The carpenters, you see, pulled their regional training facility out of Chicago back in the mid-80's So did the electricians, the painters, the pipe-fitters and several other unions.

It was ugly. Juiced by the election of Mayor Harold Washington in 1983, the number of black leaders and pols had gone on an "our turn" binge to make up for past injustices. Chicago's Board of Education summarily declared that Washburne Trade School, a unique collaboration between area craft unions and the Chicago Public schools, drastically increase minority enrollment in union apprenticeship programs.

It was true that those programs had been highly discriminatory before the civil rights movement of the 1960's. By the mid-80s, though, they were meeting or exceeding the federal guideline of 23 percent minority and 20 percent female. Yet the school board insisted on 40 percent black, 14 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent female.

Only they forgot one thing: It was still a free country and the unions were under no obligation to train their apprentices at Washburne or, for that matter, anyplace else in the city.

So one by one they pulled out, the electricians to a junior college in Palos Heights and the carpenters to a big new facility in Elk Grove Village. The net effect was that certain black politicians got to make angry, self-important speeches and, for years to come, young minorities got to make 20-mile commutes to distant suburbs in order to learn a trade.

But not anymore.

The carpenters still have the facility in Elk Grove, but the new placer on the Near South Side is almost as impressive. This year some 300 students will go there to study basic carpenter's math, to learn the difference between a joist and a rafter, and even to frame up (and tear down) small houses inside the cavernous, four story shop enclosure.

Union officials say minority enrollment is hitting about 32 percent, though on the day I visited last week easily more than half of the students were black, brown or female.

They were young men like Wilmer Maldonado, 23, a graduate of Clemente High School. After the nine-week apprentice training he plans to join a small contractor rehabbing apartment buildings in his Humboldt Park neighborhood. And there were not-so-young women, like Mary Therese Hausner, 39, a divorced mother of six from the Southwest side who said carpentry is her shot at a better life for her kids. She's aiming for the steadier world of commercial construction, where apprentices start at $14.10 an hour and can advance in her four years to a journeyman's wage of $28.20 an hour and up.

Douglas lid, who coordinates training for the union's 10-country district council, said the current building boom means his graduates don't have to wait for that first job offer from a construction contractor. And apprenticeship training is easier on the wallet than, say, junior college. Instead of tuition, students pay a one-time $80 book fee, though they recover that and more a few weeks into the course when the union provides them with a set of hand tools worth over $300.

Does all this mean the carpenters union, and indeed, the rest of the construction trades, have solved their equal opportunity problems?

Not necessarily, cautioned Paul King Sr., the president of UBM construction, one of the city's largest minority-owned construction firms. Back in the 60s King helped lead the fight to open union apprentice program to minorities.

"It was a major, major victory getting that facility where it is," King said, "but until we do a better job reaching out to young people of color, until we let them know there are good jobs for people willing to study a trade and work hard then our job is not finished."

You can learn more about the carpenters apprenticeship program by calling 847-640-7373.

But first, have a relaxing labor day.