Stop by Civilbeat.com and check out my Hawaii Monitor column for this week, which tries to give shape to my uneasiness over the Carpenters Union/Pacific Resource Partnership campaign against Ben Cayetano.
The PRP ad campaign comes across as a form of digital bullying aimed at intimidating voters rather than educating them, spreading misplaced fears rather an understanding of issues.
It has had all the subtlety of a group of brawny men in pro-development T-shirts bused in to pack a public hearing and shout down opponents, unfortunately not an unknown event in island politics.
And that’s where I see a problem.
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I have always been able to access CB. Is it only the ability to comment that one has to pay for? By the amount of comments there must not be that many paying.
The implications of your article for PRP and its constituency are dire. Either way, they lose. If Cayetano wins, I expect that it will have been largely union dues that were wasted in an effort to defeat him in an effort that is really under the leadership of contractors. This might cause a certain ferment within union membership. If Caldwell wins, Hawaii’s educated class of voters get to re-experience the dismay they felt during the presidency of George W. Bush (especially if Caldwell gets re-elected, the way Bush did), and moderate and even liberal voters will turn sour on labor unions (and come perhaps come to embrace environmentalism more). In fact, even other unions may turn against the carpenters.
Tradesmen have historically always been nomads. The skilled workers who built the cathedrals in France were from all over Europe. It’s as though the tradesmen in Hawaii, however, do not know this. So they try to hijack the society….
I remember reading about the boom and bust construction industry on Maui. Whenever there is a new housing development being built on Maui, most of the workers are from the mainland, with a minority from Hawaii. The author lamented that Maui would be swamped with mainland workers, then the project would end and the local tradesmen would be thrown out of work. But even those local tradesmen were not from Oahu, they were from Maui! Even Oahu workers do not want to go as far as Maui! Local guys are very rooted. They want to learn a skill, then buy a house in Kaneohe and drive their trucks to work every day. That’s an incredibly distorted view of reality. The nature of the trades is nomadic. It’s like joining the military or the circus. But I guess they got away with it for so long with Hawaii booming, they never figured that out, even with all the mainland tradesmen coming here all the time. The nature of the job is, if you want to build houses, you must have frequent flier mileage! But the thing is, most of the tradesmen today in the US and especially the southwest are Mexicans, and a lot of the contractors are Korean immigrants. The labor competition in the US is global now, and the US may never again boom, especially housing. We may have a very distorted view of reality in Hawaii rooted in a building boom that lasted two generations. That was an anomaly. Nothing could be more different from today’s economic reality. Even moving to the mainland at this point would be futile to a local tradesman.
Don C., PRP is not funded by dues paid by the carpenters. Contractors who employ union carpenters, agree to pay a certain percent of wages into the Carpenters Market Recovery Program Fund. If they don’t, they are sued in court — I saw a couple of law suits on line. So like it or not, the contractor has to pay. If I recall, the Fund has over $30 million. Ian put up a link to their latest tax return and organization reports several weeks ago.
PRP’s exec dir John D. White Jr told Gina Mangiari, KHON-2, during primary election night interview, that he could justify the expense of the TV ad campaign against Cayetano — to every member.
Thanks, Ian, for the nudge to Civil Beat where folks can read the very cool stuff you are writing for us every Wednesday. CB is actually free to occasional readers and you don’t need to subscribe. But you do need a Facebook account to comment there. So best of both worlds, you can comment there AND on iLind.net. Keep Romeo and his friends stocked with the best cat treats!
Thank you for the explanation, Patti. I occasionally read Civil Beat (more often now that Ian has a column) and I’ve been wondering if I would be seeing more if I subscribed.
Hi Ian, Thanks for all your interesting opinions, research, and articles. I happened to see you (holding umbrella) and Meda walking on Kam Hwy headed for your morning beach walk this early morning. I was driving to Laie. Aloha!!
I remember the longshoreman’s strike in 1949. Even though I was only 8 years old at the time, I was outraged that one group of people could/would hold an entire state hostage. My mother had to ration toilet paper; two squares to girls for #1 and 5 squares to boys and girls for #2. That experience has colored my view of organized labor to this day. The irony of it is that longshoremen as a trade have almost vanished at least partly because of that misuse of power.
Auto workers, steel workers, textile workers, shoe workers and many others have either vanished or are greatly diminished because of better technology, better designs, foreign competition and not least, high cost driven by powerful unions. I would suggest that the skilled trades are going the same way. High cost, better technology and other factors are slowly making them irrelevant. And, because of the heavy handed tactics they are using during this election, I for one, will shed no tears.
I am thankful I do not own a TV, that’s all I can say. Mailers against Cayetano have been coming fast & furious, but they hit the rubbish bin in 20 pieces just as fast. I understand the unions of yesterday. I loathe the unions of today.
Seeing one certain union go on strike when our community – with its seniors & disabled – had no power turned me away from unions forever. Same ‘me me me’ mentality, throughout the whole lot of them.
Loathing today’s unions, aikea808, but understanding the unions of the past.
Just wait. Your attitude is just what the union busters have been working hard to foster with the result in income inequality and wealth disparities approaching levels not seen in a hundred years.
I am part of a union and proud of it. We have a long history of being in the forefront of the fight for civil rights and a more equitable sharing of the prosperity created by our work.
“I am part of a union and proud of it.”
Would you be proud of it if they did what PRP is doing?
Would you be proud of it if they did what PRP is doing?
Apparently Senator Inouye and Mr. Caldwell are quite pleased. I certainly do not see either one of these persons who are prominently featured in the PRP’s worst ads, complaining that thier image was hijacked or used without their agreement.
“I am part of a union and proud of it.”
@Lopaka43:
Really? Hey, if you’re one of the Union members who left our community in the dark, kiss my flashlight. If you’re one of the Carpenter Union members, I’m embarrassed for you.
Umm, “union busters” have nothing to do with holding communities hostage, sorry. Nice try, but no one to blame but yourselves.
Ian, people making these comments critical of unions are progressives.
You were right!
Don C. who commented above made a related comment on another of Ian Lind’s entries:
http://www.ilind.net/2012/10/29/hotel-workers-working-to-defeat-house-speaker-calvin-say/
Anyone who found the Don C. comment on this page interesting may also want to read this other one, which some may have missed because the comment extends slightly beyond the title of the entry.
The main take-aways for me were these.
“The labor-corporate alliance in Hawaii reminds me of what I have heard about Canadian politics. There is a very powerful alliance in Canada between corporations in Canada involved in resource extraction (oil, timber, etc.) and their unions. On the one hand, the corporations have to pay their workers much more to maintain this alliance, but, on the other hand, this coalition is politically unstoppable.”
“So, when the US home-building industry discovered that there are only so many houses Americans can afford to buy and only so much land to build on, Canadians then discovered that there is only so much timber they can cut down and sell. They eventually ran up against their natural limits.
This might be the kind of bind that the corporate-union alliance in Hawaii is now facing. Hence their need to create questionable grand public projects and bypass the rule of law. But if they do get all that they want, in ten years (or even five years) they’ll be back to square one, demanding more. It’s a denial of basic geographic reality.”
His second to last paragraph compares what is happening in Hawaii to a scene from the movie “the Godfather.” This paragraph concludes in sentiments that parallel the concerns raised by Ian Lind.
“Unfortunately, real unions like the hotel workers — who are not highly compensated, nor in cahoots with corporations, and who do support genuinely progressive candidates — may get tarnished in the public backlash.”
I think the nail has been hit on the head here.