In October, a black hoist operator named Paul Solomon stopped his elevator at the 45th floor of the Comcast tower — the same one where plumbers once blocked the special toilets — to pick up a glass worker. As the hoist came to a stop, according to Solomon, the glass worker swung a noose and said, “I want to kill someone.”
Solomon was hesitant to tell anyone about the incident. But eventually, word reached Bruce Crawley, one of the city’s most prominent black businessmen. “I was shocked,” Crawley said. “I was shocked because it had happened five or six days before, and nothing had been made public.” Of course, Solomon — a 14-year member of the heavy equipment operators union — had hesitated for a reason.
“Man, they’ve just worn me down,” he said recently. “I don’t even know what to do anymore.” Before the noose incident, he worked full-time. Afterward, he couldn’t find work. His own union, he said, had labeled him “a troublemaker.”
Race discrimination by labor unions is by no means isolated to Philadelphia. Last month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced a $6.2 million settlement with the Sheet Metal Workers, to resolve the claims of black and Hispanic members repeatedly denied opportunities by the union.
But Philadelphia -- and its long, troubling history of servitude to organized labor -- is the subject of Mr. Teague's brilliant expose. Not content to simply re-hash recent horror stories like those noted above, Mr. Teague discusses in detail the oppressive economic hold Philly's unions exert over urban development, their local political domination, the significant 1806 "Philadelphia Cordwainers" case, the "virtual military assault" on the non-union construction site of the Valley Forge Mall, and more.
Read the entire piece, and the comments published below it.
1 comments:
Very interesting post. Teague's article in Philadelphia Magazine is a gem. The User Comments on the article left me shaking my head (not up and down in agreement, but side to side in disbelief)
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