Why Jim Ansara Unionized His Own Company

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When he called on Bob Marshall back in 1984, Local 33's business representative wasn't rude, says Ansara, "just not very interested. He handed me an agreement and said, 'Sign if you want, but if you don't sign, don't try to do any work in Boston.' I didn't see us joining the union. I thought I could talk to them, show them that we could coexist." Wishful thinker. Coexistence wasn't in the union's vocabulary.

The issue facing Ansara in 1984, and still in 1985 when his financial problems began to come to a head, wasn't the union per se. His jobs weren't being picketed. No one was pressuring him. Ansara was really trying to figure out what business Shawmut was going to be in and where its market lay -- with the prestigious city jobs or somewhere else.

To his credit, Ansara came to the subject of unionization as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That's probably what has made his union experience work so far. His original visit to Marshall had been prompted by the possibility of Shawmut's landing a highly visible downtown renovation job. "I was worried about being picketed or harrassed," he recalls, "and I wanted to avoid that, not because I was noble, but because I wanted to keep my options open."

He had lots of them.

He could stay out of Boston, for instance. Shawmut wasn't so big or so hidebound that it couldn't adapt itself to another kind of contracting -- maybe office or retail buildings in the suburbs, where unions would be a nonissue.

Or, Shawmut could, like other contractors, become "double-breasted." It could get union work, at the same time creating a nonunion subsidiary for other jbos.

Or, it could remains small and inconspicuous, hoping that the union wouldn't notice or bother with it for as long as possible.

Ansara began talking to people. He talked to other contractors. Their response, he says, was, "Why would you want to go union? You've got a growing company. You're a nice boy. You don't want to get involved with them." They told him horror stories -- about, for instance, union stewards who draw pay but don't work. When you're running jobs with small crews -- three or four people, as Shawmut often did -- a nonworking body on the payroll can eat up any profit.

Those were other people's experiences. But then, over dinner one night, a nonunion subcontractor told Ansara he could always tell when he was on a union job: it was cleaner and better organized. What Ansara saw with his own eyes confirmed this. "We had started working with a union subcontractor," he recalls. "He did astounding work, and I was amazed at how organized and knowledgeable his people were on the job. We noticed the amount of production he got out of them, and that his average worker was 35 to 45, not 25 like ours. I think that he was the first person I talked reality with, and he told me to go see Andy Silins. He said Andy was a reasonable and progressive guy."

"When Jim first came in," says Silins, the well-dressed general agent for the carpenters' Boston District Council, "he was scared stiff of the union." The two men met off and on for six months in 1985.

"Andy," Ansara recalls, "said that unions had made big mistakes in the '60s and '70s in not recognizing changing times and that there was new leadership, better training, and more flexibility. . . . He was very laid back about it and said, 'We'd love to have you, but we need you to feel comfortable. Feel free to ask questions, to come back and talk to me.' Each time I sat with him, I got a little clearer picture of what it would be like."

So, on the one hand were the horror stories his more experienced colleagues told, and on the other was his own limited experience and this charming, almost conciliatory union organizer.

Ansara broached the union issue with his supervisors and project managers. Most were skeptical, some reluctant almost to the point of opposition. "My inclination," says David Coolidge, a project manager, "was . . . I have a lot of problems with unions. Not philosophical, but the reality of what you have to deal with. In previous companies, I've seen nightmares. The worst was a dispute in Portland, Maine, between plumbers and carpenters over who would do work on a lift, and the issue was the diameter of the piping. That fight shut the job down. It was a situation that I didn't want to get back into."

The Shawmut managers thought parts of the union agreement were pregnant with problems for a small contractor. Three clauses in particular bothered them. They took their qualms to Silins, who was soothing. Shawmut wouldn't have any problems with those clauses, he assured them, but when Ansara asked for formal exemption from parts of the three clauses, Silins deferred to Bob Marshall, Local 33's business agent and the president of the District Council. So they took their fears to Marshall, tough guy to Silins's smoothie. No way, he said in short.

"Marshall gave us verbal assurance on lots of small issues," Ansara recalls. But on Shawmut's big three concerns, there would be no side agreements. Take it or leave it. "I couldn't rip a contract apart for just one company," Marshall says. But, Ansara says, he did promise them there wouldn't be a problem. "'Follow the rules,' he told us, 'treat people with respect, and we'll return the courtesy.' I believed it 75%, so we went ahead and signed."

The decision to sign didn't come out of his head, Ansara says, but from somewhere closer to his ample waistline. He wanted to graduate from the small jobs to more challenging, highly visible work in the city. He wanted a classy company. He wanted Shawmut to be a respected company, to have prestige. "As I saw more of union companies," he says, "I wanted to be affiliated with them. I wanted Shawmut to have that image. Somehow, having a union would legitimize us."

The decision to go union was really a decision to move downtown, to play in the big leagues. It had little to do with money and profitability. Indeed, one of Ansara's business problems from the start has been that he never paid enough attention to profits. The decision to go union, in fact, was almost axiomatic, given Ansara's ambitions for Shawmut. It just happened to be a good business decision as well. Taking the company union, whatever it did for Shawmut's prestige and Ansara's pride, has helped clean up the company's bottom line and straighten out its management mess.

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