Folding the Featherbeds

One big reason why houses cost so much is that the output per man-hour of carpenters, bricklayers, masons, painters, et al. is skimpy in proportion to the $2-to-$5-an-hour wages they draw. Restrictions designed to spread work and keep output low are written into thousands of building-trades contracts. Most painters insist on using brushes where sprayers would do the job a lot faster. Carpenters resist prefabricated panels, and in some places panels fastened together at the factory are actually taken apart at the building site and nailed together again. Some locals lay down a maximum daily quota of bricks, studs or square feet of surface for bricklayers, carpenters, painters. Specialization is carried to the point where a contractor on a small job may have to hire one pipe fitter to lay the pipe out and another to join it.

Last week the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s 19-union Building and Construction Trades Department took what seemed a momentous step toward eliminating such cost-boosting practices. Announced at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council meeting in Miami Beach was an anti-featherbedding code quietly drawn up over the past three years by the building-trades union and spokesmen for the National Constructors Association, whose members account for 90% of the U.S.'s heavy construction. The man behind the code: old (70) Bricklayer Richard James Gray, the B.C.T.D.'s unorthodox president, who shocked his fellow labor leaders at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Atlantic City, NJ. two months ago by urging a voluntary one-year wage freeze to hold prices down (TIME, Dec. 16). Gray's argument for wage restraint also applies to the anti-featherbedding code: high construction costs are against the interests of building-trades workers, because high costs curb demand, and lower demand means fewer jobs.

In its main provisions the code calls for an end to:

P: Union control over naming of foremen.

P: The widespread practice of systematically starting late and stopping early.

P: Limits on output, e.g., daily quotas of bricks per bricklayer.

P: Restrictions on the full use of proper tools or equipment.

P: Slowdowns, forcing of overtime, spread-work tactics, stand-by crews and featherbedding practices.

These provisions will have no real effect unless and until they are written into local contracts. But in the building trades even a start toward folding the feather-beds is revolutionary.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.