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From: Terry O’Sullivan. email: Date: 16 Jun 2010 Comments:
Over 1,000 tradesmen – some from as far as Indianapolis – massed before the World’s Fair Pavilion at Forest Park Tuesday afternoon to vent their anger at the renegade electrical union that has splintered the St. Louis construction trade.
“We will not tolerate the (expletive) the Carpenters Union is doing here in St. Louis,” thundered Terry O’Sullivan.
The general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, O’Sullivan was one of several speakers from international trade groups that came to St. Louis to excoriate the local labor leader who instigated the dispute.
“That man is Terry Nelson,” said Jerry Feldhaus, executive secretary of the St. Louis Building and Construction Trades Council. “Terry Nelson has made it his mission to tear down the unions and take away their work.”
Nelson, the executive secretary of the Carpenters’ District of Greater St. Louis is the force that two years ago created American Electrical Contractors Local 57 to compete with Local 1 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Feldhaus and most of the other speakers took pains to separate Nelson from the rank and file carpenters.
The carpenters, they insinuated, are victims of their union’s leadership.
Nelson, to put it mildly, was not similarly spared the speakers’ wrath.
“In the neighborhood where I grew up we hung ‘em high,” said O’Sullivan. “All I have to say is, ‘Where is the damn rope.’”
Tuesday’s rally kicked off a national campaign to draw attention to what AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades President characterized as the “destructive intrusions and predatory practices” of Local 57.
The campaign will include local radio spots, billboards and handbilling at construction sites at sites around the country.