The Last Union Town

THE LATEST AND largest cataclysm to shake the foundations of Philadelphia’s unions almost went unnoticed: a strange encounter between two men high in the scaffolding of the Comcast tower.

A bit of context, first: The biggest immediate challenge facing Philadelphia’s unions, as noted, is race. The neighborhoods from which unions drew strength for decades — even centuries — are quickly shifting. New people with new ethnicities are moving in, while the old people move out. The unions have, in one sense, succeeded too well: An electrician making six figures per year will very possibly move to a suburb in search of a better school system; so begins the crumbling of the stronghold. Pat Gillespie, the head of the building trades, says he doesn’t know how many workers under his purview actually live here.

“Yes, okay, a substantial number of people do live in New Jersey or the four counties,” he says. “But there’s also a substantial number in Philadelphia.”

That’s a meek pronouncement; in fact, apart from laborers, who are paid the least, 70 percent of the city’s building trade union workers live in the suburbs — a far cry from the days when a man’s neighborhood defined his livelihood. Two Street. Kensington. Iron, wire, shingle, wood. Black and Hispanic workers couldn’t get trade union cards, so they usually found work in the municipal unions — which we’ll come to momentarily — while blood bound more lucrative trade unions together. Fathers and uncles passed down union cards like a birthright: They found survival through solidarity. But that very mentality — the tight ethnic knit — now threatens to unravel the unions.

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 says. “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.”

Meanwhile, Solomon had, unwittingly, touched off a power struggle that reached the highest offices in the city.


CITY COUNCIL WAS shocked by testimony from Paul Solomon about the noose incident, leading Councilman DiCicco to demand that Pat Gillespie reveal the percentage of minority workers in his unions. Gillespie said he couldn’t.

The request shouldn’t have caught Gillespie so far back on his heels. An early warning came as long ago as 1969, from the unlikely figure of then-President Richard Nixon. He demanded in his “Philadelphia Plan” that the city’s trade unions working on federal projects set “goals and timetables” for hiring minority workers.

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