I am a X generation ironworker. I am divorced with a very talented handsome 16 year old son whom I am very proud of and very involved in his life. I graduated from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (GO Salukis) with a Bachelor of Arts in Radio/Television with an emphasis in Sales and Management and minors in English and Theater. I went to work in Radio and then the non-profit field eventually becoming the youngest Executive Director of a major Office of a National Economic Education Organization. I managed to burn myself out, so I left the business world and went through the Ironworker Apprenticeship and became a Journeyman Ironworker. This may seem like a stretch but I grew up in a family of union craftsmen and I am the son of a major Union Leader and Organizer for the Carpentersv(now retired). Immediately upon reaching Journeyman Status, I was invited to become an Apprentice Instructor and have done so since 1998. In August of 2004, I was working at an elevation of 45 feet when the decking gave way. I fell 4 stories onto concrete, breaking my leg, pelvis, all the ribs on the right side, sternum, 5 vertabrea in my back and 2 in my neck. I also pinned the nerves in both elbows and had to have cupital tunnel syndrome surgery. I was able to go back to work with my tools but the damage to my back eventually had to be repaired with rods. But luckily, because of my degree and experience in training, I was able to secure the Position of Training Coordinator with one of the top 5 steel erectors in the Country. Hopefully, I can keep one of my brother Iron workers from making the mistake I did. I spend my spare time with my son, my relationship partner Mary, my parents(as much as possible beforI lose them). I have also been researching my family history. Most of my Ancestry on my Dad's side, my Grandparents were from Quebec, I have traced back to France in 1630's. On my moms side I have them traced to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and New Amsterdam, but her Dad's family was from Denmark and Ireland and they came over in the early 1800's.. My ancestors mostly came here to Illinois for Bounty Lands after the was of 1812. I can't believe a lower middle class kid growing up in a tough neighborhood had that much blue-blood in him, makes me laugh. I am a life long Democrat and a strong advocate of the Union labor movement. I am also a devout Catholic, against both abortion and Capitol punishment, I believe the best way to stop both of these is through good paying jobs and benefits. I love music so check the updates to my play list from time to time. I am a staunch supporter of Barack Obama, I feel he can unite this country. Not because of any Kool-aid I drank, when he was running in the senate primary I got to meet him and we spoke for over a half hour over smokes before a labor day parade. He is brilliant and can talk the talk and walk the walk.

MIck Jones of the Clash/Big Audio Dynamite and I would also like to meet once again with President OIbama.

Shooting Darts and Sodahead
I love to shoot darts, have won the masters 2 person open cricket 2 years now. I love to hang out with my fellow members of the International Order of Vikings. I absolutely love Thai and Southeast Asian Food. The hotter the better. The greatest dish in the entire world is the beef noodle soup PHO, there is even a website dedicated to it called www.phofever.com.(CHECK IT OUT)

International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers
The International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers is a union in the United States and Canada, which represents primarily construction workers, as well as shipbuilding and metal fabrication employees.

Origins

Iron work is a new craft, made possible with the advent of modern steel-making processes, iron bridges and skyscrapers. It was and is also an exceptionally dangerous job; hundreds of iron workers fell to their death every year in the late years of the nineteenth century. As one saying among Iron Workers of the day put it, "We're killed, but we seldom ever die."

The union was formed in 1896 at a meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of delegates from local unions from Boston, Massachusetts, Buffalo, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. Those locals, and others established later, often protected their own autonomy jealously, rejecting at least one national contract with the American Bridge Company because it would have reduced their power. The internal divisions also led the union, which had affiliated with the American Federation of Labor shortly after its formation, to disaffiliate in 1901, only to reaffiliate two years later. It was one of the charter members of the AFL's Building Trades Department, which was created in 1908.

Battles with the employers

A number of employers tried to destroy the craft unions that made up the AFL in the first decade of the twentieth century by insisting on maintaining an "open shop", i.e. hiring without reference to union membership. For craft unions, such as the Iron Workers, who maintained union wages and working conditions by controlling the supply of labor, the open shop meant that the employer was free to set any wage standards it chose and to discriminate against union members in hiring.

The Iron Workers had successfully repelled the open shop demands of American Bridge Company (or "Ambridge"), an arm of the United States Steel Corporation, in 1903. In 1905, after the union's collective bargaining agreement with Ambridge had expired, Ambridge and the other members of the National Erectors Association began refusing to hire union members and hired labor spies to infiltrate the union. When the Iron Workers struck in response, the employers obtained injunctions and local ordinances that barred picketing or limited it to an ineffective display.

Some unionists went further and planted bombs at non-union work sites. The most famous one, and the only one to cause any loss of life, killed twenty employees of the Los Angeles Times, the main supporter for the open shop movement in Los Angeles, on October 1, 1910. The authorities arrested the Secretary-Treasurer of the union, John McNamara, and his brother James, based on the testimony of an accomplice.

The union hired Clarence Darrow to defend the McNamaras. Darrow, however, concluded that the brothers faced a strong chance of receiving the death penalty for the crime; he therefore made a clumsy attempt, in broad daylight in downtown Los Angeles, to bribe one of the jurors. As it turned out, it was a trap and Darrow was arrested. Now more desperate than ever, he persuaded the McNamaras to plead guilty on the basis of an unwritten plea bargain that would have freed John. Once they pled guilty, however, the authorities denied that they had any deal at all. John McNamara served nearly ten years, while his brother spent his remaining years in prison.

Their guilty pleas effectively defeated the campaign of Job Harriman, who was running for mayor of Los Angeles as a socialist, and nearly destroyed Darrow. The federal government then indicted dozens of other Iron Worker officers for conspiring to transport dynamite as part of this campaign; the International's current President, Frank M. Ryan, and one of its future Presidents, Paul "Paddy" Morrin, were convicted along with several other defendants on December 31, 1912, after a trial in which Herbert Hockin, the International Secretary-Treasurer, testified against them.

John J. McNamara later returned to the union after his release from state prison. He was expelled from the union in 1928, however, for submitting false audit reports on behalf of his local union.

Battles with the AFL, employers and the IWW

The Iron Workers soon found themselves at war with the AFL and, in particular, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. The Carpenters claimed that pile-driving work, which was done primarily by Iron Workers in many areas, belonged to them and convinced the Building Trades Department to go along with them. When the Iron Workers refused to relinquish this work the AFL suspended it from membership in 1917. Other unions, such as the Lathers, then claimed that work that had historically been done by Iron workers belonged to them instead. Unable to call on the support of other AFL unions in its fights with employers, the Iron Workers relented the following year and ceded pile driving work, with the exception of work related to bridge building, to the Carpenters.

These fissures contributed to an extent to the failure of the Iron Workers' New York City strike, called in 1921 to resist the American Plan, the open shop movement that reversed much of the labor movement's gains, particularly in construction, of the previous decade. When the strike failed, the union sued the employers, also without success. The union survived, but in a much weaker state.

The union also fought the Industrial Workers of the World, which had won leadership in a number of its west coast locals in the era after World War I. International President Morrin expelled some dissident locals and sued others to regain the locals' property. By 1928 the rebellion was over.

The Great Depression and the New Deal

The union lost roughly half of its members in the early 1930s. While the passage of the Davis-Bacon Act required payment of the prevailing wage on federal construction projects, the desperate shortage of work allowed some employers to force their employees to pay kickbacks to them to hold on to their jobs. A number of union members hopped freight cars to go in search for work. At the same time the union's old enemy, the Carpenters union, resumed its jurisdictional war with it.

Conditions improved somewhat with the advent of the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration's creation of the Works Progress Administration, a public works project that employed thousands of iron workers and other construction workers. The union was also spurred to organize, particularly in the inside fabricating shops, by the threat of competition from the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations. The union's membership grew slowly, reaching 40,000 by 1940.

[edit] World War II, the postwar boom and change

The union grew even more rapidly during World War II and the years afterward, reaching 100,000 members by 1948, when John H. Lyons succeeded Morrin as president of the union. His son, John H. Lyons, Jr., succeeded him in 1961.

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, limited construction unions' rights to picket worksites at which non-union contractors were working by barring secondary boycotts. Even with those restrictions, however, the Iron Workers continued to grow in the expansive economy of the 1950s.

The union, like most other United States construction unions, had remained nearly all-white for most of its history. That began to change in the early 1960s, as the American civil rights movement began to challenge employment discrimination in the north, then picked up steam in the 1970s as the federal government began using the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to knock down some of the barriers to African-American workers' entry into the industry. Some local unions of the Iron Workers fought integration and affirmative action tenaciously, but usually unsuccessfully.

The union also found itself challenged by a change in the business climatein the 1970s, as non-union contractors invaded markets that had been solidly union for years with the support of the Business Roundtable, made up of the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, U.S. Steel, DuPont and others. The Roundtable also attempted to weaken the Davis-Bacon Act and other legislation that protected construction workers. The Iron Workers and other building trades, caught off guard and used to organizing from the top down, lost large amounts of work to non-union contractors in the decades that followed.

World Trade Center cleanup

After the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, the union helped to clear the debris, sending many iron workers to clear the mass of wrecked steel.

[edit] 21st century controversies

The union's International President, Jake West, pled guilty in 2002 to improper use of pension funds and making a false statement on a union report filed with the United States Department of Labor. Joseph Hunt succeeded him. A number of lower-level officers and the union's accounting firm likewise pled guilty to related embezzlement and disclosure charges.



The Ironworkers Prayer

Monuments built by human hands;

Bridges, towers and buildings, too
By men who work for me and you.

Men with strong and callused hands
Who toil all day upon our lands.
They work in weather dark and dreary;
When day is done they come home weary.

They work in hottest heat of day
And earn every bit of their weekly pay.
They work in mud and sleet and snow
And go where others dare not go.

They work alone and with each other
And that is why they're called "Brother"
They climb where angels fear to tread
They never look down in fear or dread.

So, Don't wait till the bye and bye
To say a prayer to the one on high
For men on whom we all rely,
Bless the Ironworker in the sky.

Topping Off

Somewhere between groundbreaking and ribbon cutting comes a little ceremony in the construction of many modern buildings called "topping off." It occurs when the highest structural element of a high-rise is about to be swung into place. Flagpoles, spires, and ornaments don't count. But when the last important beam is cabled to the crane, the workers sign it. And after it is welded into position, a small pine tree is often anchored atop.

A building on my campus was recently topped off with what looks from down below like a midget Christmas tree. One of the beams several stories down echoes Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, "I could have been a contender!" and the workers have left several other I-beam publications for posterity. But the tree is the key symbol and it is not, as many might suppose, a holiday touch. In the high-steel trade, it announces that the construction has reached the sky without loss of life or serious injury. And it is meant to auger well for the future inhabitants of the building.

Actually, the little tree appears to convey different meanings to different people. The folks who topped off the Laboure Center in South Boston explained that it symbolizes the workers' "respect for nature's contribution to building process." When Cincinnati's Freedom Center was topped off, an official noted that "the tree tradition was started by Norwegian ironworkers in 1898." Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network topped off its new construction saying the tree signifies "a job well done." Well, at least a job half done. In Cleveland, celebrants at the South Points Hospital claimed the pine symbolized "new growth."

No doubt there are still other explanations, generally of a positive cast even if they diverge on details. Among us anthropologists, these kinds of explanations are often called "exegetical meanings." They are what people say when they try to explain a custom; and often they miss a lot of the story.

The topping-off ceremony actually predates steel-frame skyscrapers by about 1200 years. The earliest references date from around 700 A.D., when Scandinavians topped off construction of new halls with sheathes of grain for Odin's horse, Slepnir. Odin, supposedly impressed with this consideration for his horse — and with the raucous good cheer of the crowd — bestowed good luck on the future occupants.

The Vikings spread their customs across the portions of the European world that they raided and colonized. Topping-off, however, was modified by some tree-worshipping pagan tribes. Britons and Germans substituted small trees for sheathes of grain, and German tribes made a particular point of using only evergreens. Some traditions also suggest that the Vikings themselves adopted the pine tree as the appropriate touch for a topping off. In any case, the claim that the tradition reached America via immigrant Norwegian iron workers is plausible. But Americans added their own twist to the ceremony, by hoisting an American flag beside the tree.

The ancient origin and long history of the "topping off" ceremony, however, doesn't really explain it. I doubt that many of those modern high-steel construction workers think that Slepnir is going to stop and graze on Douglas fir needles. Odin may be making a comeback with neo-pagans, but he is not big in the building trade.

What the topping-off ceremony is really about is the satisfaction we take in getting the hard part done. A great deal of labor may lie ahead, but in putting that last beam in place, we have pre-figured the whole. All the world can see how far we have reached. The little tree announces not just the workers' pride in their accomplishment, but also high spirits and sheer delight in the event.

And that, in turn, may be the connection with Christmas trees. When European Christians appropriated this old pagan symbol, they ornamented it with dozens of new meanings, perhaps most importantly associating the evergreen with the Gospel's promise of new life. But there is no mistaking that behind any sober explanation of what the tree symbolizes is exuberant joy in the object itself as a glittering rebuttal of the darkness of the year. We are topping something off.