March 9, 2006

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

The noise at the Alley24 construction site was deafening, but not from hammering or drilling.

Instead, about 60 carpenters, wives, cousins, and friends spun two-foot-long wooden noisemakers that raised a huge clatter as they marched around the four-building construction site across from Seattle’s REI store. As they marched, they chanted union slogans in Spanish.

Out in front, in a pink hard hat, tiny Llewellynn Wheeler led the group up a European-style alleyway that divides the apartments and offices in the Alley24 complex, which is being developed by Pemco Insurance and Vulcan Inc., the investment company of billionaire Paul Allen.

Wheeler, 24, is a union organizer who started working at the Alley24 site Feb. 23 after the National Labor Relations Board forced her employer, framing contractor Dan Brown Enterprises, to reinstate her with $2,000 back pay after nine months off the job.

Wheeler has since left Dan Brown for another union job after filing a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She says she was subjected to inappropriate remarks and physical contact. But the union fight that she helped start inside the company is alive and well.

“ We’re not going to let them go,” Wheeler says of Dan Brown. “They’re small enough we can wear them down.”

Wheeler’s part in the carpenters’ union drive began a year ago when she took a job at Dan Brown to start agitating from the inside. As a union “salt,” her task was to listen and learn from Dan Brown’s non-union workers — many of them Hispanics making half the union wage — in order to help turn their concerns into solid calls for unionization.

Last May, after working three months for Dan Brown, Wheeler wore a union shirt to a Mercer Island work site that read: “Dan Brown Not Fair! Union: It’s My Right.” She says she walked off the job after the general contractor ordered her — illegally — to take off the shirt.

“ I walked up to my boss right after it happened and said, ‘Are you aware of what’s going on here?’” Wheeler recounts. “He said, ‘Sweetheart, we know what you’re trying to advertise.’ And I said, ‘I’m not advertising, I’m organizing!’”

Wheeler filed an unfair labor charge with the NLRB. Dan Brown settled, in part, by rehiring Wheeler at the Alley24 site in February. After that, the carpenters’ union started leafleting and rallying at the project.

Lloyd Weatherford, an organizer with the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, says the union chose Everett-based Dan Brown because it’s been taking on larger jobs such as Alley24 — and it pays a low $10 to $20 an hour. A journeyman carpenter on such a job, he says, would make $29.

“ They know wherever I go, I’ve got you guys with me,” Wheeler said over a bullhorn during the noontime rally with the noisemakers.

With her tiny frame and soft voice, the single mother is not exactly the kind of bulldog you’d expect to be organizing carpenters. But, to survive, the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters has figured out the union needs women and minority workers — documented or not.

“ If you look back in labor history, whenever the union got its butt kicked, it was when it excluded someone,” Weatherford says.

The bosses, he adds, would say, “That’s who we’ll hire to break the union,” whether it was an Irishman in the past or a Hispanic today.

Wheeler is part of that change in thinking. Even as a special education aide, she says she had trouble supporting herself and her five-year-old son, who were homeless at one point. Then Wheeler got into a two-year apprentice program and started working union jobs at $14 an hour.

At the Alley24 site, Wheeler says workers were very excited about the union and asked lots of questions — until the boss cracked down.

Besides being sexually harassed, Wheeler says, Dan Brown immediately isolated her from other workers. That included putting her in the back of an on-site panel shop where about eight, mostly Spanish-speaking workers pre-assemble walls used in the project.

She says a supervisor also stopped letting the shop workers eat lunch without him present and started following her around, even to the restroom.

Managers at Dan Brown and Compass General Construction, which oversees the Alley24 project, did not return phone calls. “We don’t have any statements to give out,” a Dan Brown office worker said.

Though Wheeler is no longer at the site, she says she’s played an important role in this drive — and will in others.

“I didn’t go into it for any reason other than I’m a single mom, I’ve been homeless and I’ve worked so hard to end up with nothing,” Wheeler says.

“ These good ol’ boys think they have the right to rip somebody off just to make a profit,” she says. “That’s why I started doing this, because I believe in it so strongly.” n