By Marcos Medeiros
On October 1 after stalled negotiations between the union and employers over wages and benefits, roughly 180 sprinkler fitters from Sprinkler Fitters Local 314 went on strike in Kansas City, MO. On the first day of the strike workers demonstrated at two locations including the Panasonics Electric Vehicle Battery plant project currently under construction, a project slated at $4 billion.
On the same day of the strike, 150 pipefitters—also part of the same international union, the United Association (UA)—walked off the job in solidarity with the sprinkler fitters. The next day they were joined by union insulator workers on the project who “called in sick” en masse, despite a circulated email from Whiting-Turner, the general contractor for the project, informing subcontractors about the installation of “dual gates” in anticipation of the strike. In the construction industry, the “Dual Gate System” is implemented to undercut the effectiveness of a strike picket by the erection of separate entrances for workers on the project—one gate where the union workers can picket and another for workers not directly involved with the labor dispute.
This system, which is recognized under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), serves to allow the general contractor (GC) to save face from the fallout of a strike. At times general contractors will be signatories to unions, usually the carpenters or laborers, and could find job site pickets stain their reputation as a “union shop”, especially those pickets which deal with issues of low wages and poor treatment of workers. The gate which striking workers are thus allowed to “legally picket” are usually situated away from public view and those of the other union workers, discouraging other unionized trades workers from expressing solidarity with their fellow workers by refusing to cross the picket and thus grinding a project to a halt.
Kansas City Painters and Finishers Local 2012 on strike in 2022. When workers from other trades refused to cross the picket line, this particular picket shut down the expansion of the Garmin world headquarters, a $350 million dollar project.
Heading into the strike’s second day, the union staffers of the sprinkler fitters directed their members to picket the shops of their contractors. The reasoning? they did not seek to picket jobs in the fear that they could be sued for shutting down a project. This tactic put forward by the union bureaucracy is intended to draw out the fight longer than it needs to be; it shifts the pressure from the general contractor and the customer—the company who hired the GC—who would be threatened with delays from solidarity walkouts, to theater by picketing empty store fronts closed for business during the strike.
Image: An apprentice class for Sprinkler Fitters Local 314
