The Last Union Town

A BIT ABOUT the battleground.

The latest crisis — in an array of crises — for Philadelphia’s unions started in December. A black union worker shook City Council with testimony about an encounter he had with another man on a construction site, 45 floors above Philadelphia’s streets. His story — which we’ll get to eventually — moved Council to investigate the racial makeup of the city’s trade unions.

Council members asked the boss of Philadelphia’s building trades, Pat Gillespie, to come speak at a hearing. Gillespie contends they set him up.

“I got a call about a quarter to six the evening before,” he says. No one told him specifically what City Council wanted to know; when he arrived, he felt taken aback when Councilman Frank DiCicco launched into questions about race, boiling down to: What percentage of his unions’ membership are minorities?

Gillespie said he didn’t know. Council recessed so he could look up the numbers. When it reconvened, Gillespie held firm: He didn’t know the numbers, and couldn’t get them.

In years past, that answer might have satisfied any politician’s curiosity; Philadelphia’s unions have long financed and influenced the city’s most powerful people. But there’s something new happening in the city. And incredibly — dangerously, even — Council reacted by broaching the possibility that maybe non-union outfits should have a crack at the Convention Center.

“For Pat Gillespie to act surprised that a Council member would have the audacity to ask for the numbers — well, I’m dumbfounded,” DiCicco said recently.

Gillespie fired back, “I don’t know what his agenda is, but it’s not affirmative action. It’s not inclusion.”

DiCicco said there’s no conspiracy afoot. He and other Council members simply want to do what’s right: “I think it may be that I have carried my concern — about minorities and women in the union — further than Gillespie thinks a white man would.”

Gillespie dismissed the idea.

“Those people wanted a fight,” he said. “And fighting is what we do.”


LABOR UNIONS HAVE swayed the City of Philadelphia for so long now that the street-level observer can hardly tell which props up the other: which is the scaffolding, and which is the structure.

Through the years, the unions, particularly the building trades, have entwined themselves into the material of the city, so that the very idea of introducing a free market has become almost unspeakable. Meanwhile, the unions, for all the good they once did, strive to hold on to their power even as the city staggers beneath their weight. That’s why there’s no non-union work allowed at the Convention Center, and any non-union work elsewhere in the city is often done literally under the cover of darkness, hidden from the unions’ vigilant watchers.

In its recent effort to introduce racial balance to the unions, City Council tapped — however lightly — the idea of competition from non-union workers. In doing so, it shocked the unions into compliance, in word at least, and took a good step toward racial fairness in Philadelphia’s workforce. But the threat of non-union work still looms. Building a house in Philadelphia continues to cost one-third — even one-half — more than building an identical house in the suburbs. So the question remains: Are Philadelphia’s leaders willing to address the city’s larger peril?

To fully grasp the enormity of the current moment, we’ve got to look back to the beginning: of the unions, of the city, of America itself.