But today, a new crop of union leaders - including Dorchester State Representative Marty Walsh - are pushing to change the way unions do business. Walsh, secretary-treasurer of the Boston Building Trades Council, is egging unions on to recruit those who have traditionally been left out.
And he should be. Expanding the pool of new recruits increases the chances of finding talented workers. It’s also a matter of survival: Unless unions sign up Brazilians and Dominicans, those workers will flock to non-union jobs and further erode support for the idea of organized labor.
But there is one other reason for the new inclusiveness: a little-known clause in a Boston Housing Authority contract, pushed for by BHA chief of staff Trihn Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant.
It goes like this: The Boston Housing Authority hires a company to do $63 million worth of energy-efficient upgrades. The company agrees to use union labor on the job. It also helps fund a training program to prepare low-income residents for union jobs in construction. And unions who want a piece of this action agree to hire them.
That last crucial component - jobs from the unions - has often been missing from previous efforts to train low-income residents. This time - partly because of the tenacious advocacy of Walsh and Nguyen - unions seem to be on board.
Unions have promised to place all 15 trainees who graduated in November. One - 25-year-old Patrick Pochette, the son of Haitian immigrants - is already working.
The success of the seven-week training program - called Building Pathways - hinges on coordinator Brian Doherty, whose father raised eight kids on carpenters’ union wages. When Doherty wanted to earn money for college, his father helped him join a union too. Now he wants to give others a shot.
“I tell them ‘Somebody made that call for me. I’m going to make that call for you,’ ’’ he said.
