This Special Section will feature the troubling patronage of Mark Breslin by the Construction Trade Unions and the IBEW.
Editor’s note: Here is Breslin’s core resumé:
Mark Breslin now serves as the CEO of the Engineering and Utility Contractors Association, (EUCA) a multi-employer bargaining group that represents hundreds of union employers performing billions of dollars in contracts annually in California.
Mark became Executive Director at age 26, becoming one of the youngest in the US to hold this position at the time. He has been chief executive, negotiator, and contractor advocate for the past 21 years. He has also served as a Trustee on numerous Taft Hartley Trusts.
– Partners in Progress 2010 Conference
Mark Breslin has established himself as a fixture within the IBEW. He is a main contributor to IBEW Hour Power – Breslin Brief an ongoing series of videos meant to reform the attitudes of union members:
Breslin’s Bumper Sticker Video
He holds a unique distinction of being a high powered negotiator and director of a contractors association who’s somehow been able to establish a mole hole at the heart of our international. It is imperative that we begin the process of exposing and rooting out agents for the other side of the negotiating table who’ve “turned” our leadership at both local and international levels.
We feel obligated to expose this particular figure of a cancer that underpins many of our battles to preserve our bargaining positions and solidarity in and between unions. This snake oil cloaks itself as an adaptation to change and the “new” global realities of the marketplace. In fact it uses a conniving argument at its core: that in adapting we must scatter, split and run. Read Breslin and you can dissect its bare elements from the manifesto of “self” help for trade unions. Those elements swirl around a tag cloud of “branding” and “differentiate yourself” other such market-speak meant to internalize a view of a tradesmen as a commodity. And if that’s the case for an individual in this distorted vision why should Breslin see it any differently when it comes to a union as a whole or even the whole trade union movement within the AFL-CIO?
The fact that we are presently scrambling to arrest and repair the breech of our wages and power as JIW’s and in particular this disastrous and desperate ploy of CE/CW mult-tiered anarchy is directly related to the high priests that have made careers brainwashing the present leadership to submit and capitulate to the way things must surely appear to be: the end of unionism in the trades. Breslin can offer them a convenient but very temporary land bridge to rationalize the dismantling of their own locals, consolidation of districts and the new monolithic model of the International Union. Hyperbole? Read below and note that Breslin has just crossed into a kind of survivalism for the trades and is building the model for what can only be described as a biosphere away from the rest of the AFL-CIO. Maybe he can join the Carpenters and the others who’ve made their exodus to a desert promise land of All for none and One for nobody.
Will anti-public pension tide swamp trade unions, too?
November 26
Michigan Building Trades
Current Issue
“…The under-funding of these benefit plans has not even begun to be addressed and yet the newspapers are already full of bile and outrage. We are not talking about Tea Party people here – John Q. Public is pi–ed. Within five more years, the under-funding of benefits for teachers, state workers, city workers, public safety, transit and many other unions will cause a huge and highly visible financial crisis of benefit costs vs. resources.
All unions (involved or not) are going to get the blame for it.
The identity and brand of private sector unions must be different than public sector unions. The problem is that everyone lumps all unions into one bucket – despite the significant differences between the two. Within a relatively short time period, unions will be assailed for some of the largest public tax obligations ever seen, and the question is – what will the result be? The potential is more anti-union rhetoric, damage to union political and public influence, less attractiveness for unions, for employers, for workers and more.”
There’s that cancer called “branding” in action again and Breslin is one of the slimiest snake oil seminarists practicing the art. Only this time its to fracture labor solidarity between the largest employers of union members – the public – and the shrinking and hobbled trade unions.
Further Breslin Oil:
“Finally, trade union leaders had better have a strong presentation as well on why things like prevailing wages, PLAs and other cost stabilizing strategies should not be seen as “more entitlements for those damn union guys.” If you get lumped in with the least popular among labor, you better have a way to differentiate yourself or you are going to get the same treatment – whether you deserve it or not.
Mark Breslin is a strategist and author specializing in labor-management challenges. He is the author of Survival of the Fittest, Organize or Die and Alpha Dog. He addresses more than 50,000 labor and business leaders each year in North America. More on his work and profile is available at www.breslin.biz.”
Why does the Michigan Building Tradesman insist on publishing anti-union arguments posing as therapeutic remedy on a consistent basis with this sham artist? Doesn’t it yet realize that this is the poster boy for a self-serving and shallow understanding of modern marketing?
Has Mark Breslin finally jumped the shark and exposed with his own words that in his world view the trade union movement should be severed from the rest of the labor movement in the U.S.?
It’s Time to Tell Mark Breslin to Tell the Truth
Here at Local 58 we get messages via email sent us through our business manager’s office.
This month of November 2010 included a link (that didn’t work) to a Mark Breslin essay entitled “It’s Time to tell the Truth”.
Maybe you’ve heard of this “motivational speaker” on the labor circuit who’s parlayed a sketchy stint in the trades into a full time career as a preacher of change. We have here since he’s constantly invited into our jurisdiction and given access to our trades’ officers and management to put the fear of God into them about “market share” and other economic fire and brimstone of our employers woes as business owners.
All this would be par for the course and nothing that we haven’t seen before from the Chamber of Commerce or any other business round table seminar luncheon for small and large business owner/managers that’s infected our post Oprah/Dr. Phil culture. But this guy is specifically hired (with dues money and Labor resources) to preach and flog the Union perspective as being the problem. TO UNION LEADERSHIP. I hate to use caps but it is warranted in this upper case.
So go and read the latest gospel according to Mark
Specifically note his bullet points (his “truth is as follows”) all of which are a laundry list of repetitive and banal complaints from the business end:
the truth is as follows;
• the good old days are gone
• there is no entitlement available now or ever again
• they are responsible for their own future
• there is a limit to what construction owners will pay
• when you exceed that limit and don’t provide value, they go to the competition
• your pension, health and welfare and career are directly tied to market share
• if many younger union members are not well mentored in skills then the pension plans for existing journeymen are at high risk
• if market share declines then everything has to be up for change or we go under
• this is not the contractor or your business manager’s fault
• complaining won’t fix anything
• change is not only necessary; it is the only answer
Obvious questions about Breslin’s list include:
- If complaining won’t fix anything WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN?(or is it OK to complain to the union and trades about their fault?)
- Who’s claiming entitlement? Now or ever again?
- Who’s saying we aren’t responsible for our own future?
- There’s a limit to what construction owners will pay?! Really? Why can’t we soak them for everything they’re worth? (snark for idiotic statements like this)
- Who is saying this is the business manager’s fault? Or is there a reason you feel the need to defend leadership of the trades for the situation so clearly in need of change?
And as to the one whopper of a bullet point:
• if many younger union members are not well mentored in skills then the pension plans for existing journeymen are at high risk
How does that square with the introduction of CE/CW and multi-tiered low wage, low skill classifications meant to “change” the equation with our competitively challenged JIW’s?
It doesn’t.
These are throw away lines delivered with all the gusto of Billy Mays in the famous Sham Wow commercials. Only most likely your union is paying to have them delivered to a local union construction trades council near you.
Here’s what Breslin says in his September post at his website:
Private sector unions like the construction trades have been working hard for at least ten years to emphasize their economic value and competitive relevancy. Will the tide of business and public opinion sweep away these efforts when the bill comes due for the Baby Boomer public sector pensions and benefits? Trade unions like construction had better start thinking about whether they still align with these other public sector unions.
Breslin is now openly declaring a split in what remains of our splintering labor movement between the public and private spheres of unionism in the USA. This is the antithesis of union advocacy and furthers the ends of our opponents by attempting to cajole our membership into allowing a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to save trade unions. Read the Declaration in our Constitution on our About page to fully appreciate how a union member might feel about Breslin’s posture:
We will find and expel from our midst any who might attempt to destroy, by subversion, all that we stand for.
A house divided cannot stand by itself. Famous and wise words from the good book and something ALL unions “better start thinking about whether they still align with”.
Breslin’s is the kind of tripe you might run across in the near future as our leaders become increasingly desperate for talking points to explain away our crisis. This is what your union may be spending market recovery money and assessments on to get that old time religion about the supremacy of the business model and a how to manual on splitting the labor movement apart. This is what you may read in your local building trades paper as it unwittingly reprints anti-union drivel packaged as motivation for Big Labor.
What “change” means to the converted of Breslin is different than what you might believe as a union electrician and they mean to take the message back to the membership and tell them as our business manager did in that same email:
These messages may not be what you want to hear, but they will be what you NEED to hear.
I leave it to that succinct assessment of our present union leadership that we might NOT want to hear what they think we need to hear or even realize that our leadership has been converted to it.
