Our History & Mission
Building on a 125-year Dedication to North Texas
The United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Welders Local 146 was founded on the belief that tradespeople doing the same work should have a standard wage scale, be able to fight for better working conditions and improve their standard of living. Members of UA Local 146 are provided quality benefits from the first day.
The UA Local 146 History as told from our 2023 Anniversary event
Very shortly after it was established in May 1895 as the first organized group of piping-industry tradesmen in the city, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, Steamfitters and Steamfitters’ Helpers’ Union of Fort Worth later that same year either was disbanded or was absorbed by the United
Association of Journeyman Plumbers, Gas Fitters, Steam Fitters and Steam Fitters’ Helpers of the United States and Canada. Founded in 1889 as the predecessor of today’s United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry of the United States and Canada (U.A.), the original United Association then chartered plumbers and steamfitters Local No. 146 in Fort Worth on November 1, 1895.
With an initial membership of 11 tradesmen, including President William H. Merrill, who had also served in that position for the predecessor Union of Fort Worth, Local 146 initially met weekly every Tuesday at the Stationary Engineers Local No. 5 Hall in the Board of Trade Building at Seventh and Houston streets. But by 1901, the local had only grown to 15 members who for the previous couple of years had been meeting twice per month at the Board of Trade Building.
Regardless, the small local went on strike against its employing “master plumbers” beginning January 1, 1901, after the contractors refused to sign a new agreement that had been offered by the union three months earlier. The proposed contract would have raised its member journeyman plumbers’ wage rate from 50 cents to $4 per day and set working hours at 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a one-hour break from noon to 1 p.m.
After the Local 146 membership rejected a contract offer on January 2, the plumbers and house electrical linemen, who had also went out on strike the first of the year, organized a cooperative plumbing establishment, which they had “decided was the best way to make their former employers come to terms and also to make certain that no citizens suffered for want of needed plumbing on account of the strike,” the Fort Worth Record and Register reported on January 15, 1901. As the strike dragged on, the local also voted on January 17 to ask for “financial aid” from the other I.B.E.W. locals in the State of Texas.
In mid-February, the two sides submitted their agreement negotiations to a newly formed arbitration board that had been created by the Building Trades Council, of which the local was a part, and the contractors’ Builders Club of Fort Worth. While the board’s first-ever arbitration hearing, which was held in City Hall on February 18, was “exhaustive,” according to a report in the July 16, 1901, Record and Register, the board granted the $4 daily wage scale and 8-hour workdays to the local.
Noting that arbitrated disputes in years past had largely gone in favor of the contractors, Local 146 Secretary-Treasurer William E. Thacher later announced in the April 1901 U.A. Journal magazine, “After being out for seven weeks … we were awarded a very satisfactory decision. Of course we lost some few points, but taking it all in all we consider it quite a victory, especially as some of the shops declared they would close up before they would pay $4 per day.”
Later that month, Local 146 joined its sister locals in forming the Texas State Association of the U.A. during a convention held on April 19, 1901, in San Antonio. Brother Thacher, attending as the local’s delegate, was elected the new organization’s secretary-treasurer. Giving his report on his local conditions to convention delegates that day, Brother Thacher announced the local’s $4 scale and 8-hour workday and declared, “All competent men are in the union, all first-class shops are fair and state of trade very good.”
But as difficulties between organized labor and its employers in Fort Worth escalated as the year progressed, Local 146 staged a one-day strike on July 12, 1901, in support of the city’s laborers’ local union, which had received an unfavorable decision from the arbitration board while it was embroiled in a protracted strike against its contractors. Honoring its own arbitration result from February, the plumbers only stayed off their jobs for the single day – but after the Building Trades Council refused to support the laborers or the action by the plumbers, Local 146 withdrew from the council later that month.
The fortunes of Local 146 – along with those of Fort Worth – changed dramatically beginning in 1902 when Swift; Armour; and Libby, McNeill & Libby erected and opened meat-packing factories in the city, around which several allied industries grew during the ensuing decade. As a result, Fort Worth’s population grew by 174.7 percent between 1900 and 1910, when more than 73,000 residents called it home.
As the city it served flourished, Local 146 membership likewise increased during the decade, although that progress was sometimes slowed. Early on, the local grew from 15 members in 1902 who met every other Thursday at the Powell Building on Main Street in Fort Worth to 20 members in 1904 who met the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month at the new Labor Temple – which the Fort Worth Trades Assembly, with which Local 146 was affiliated, had established on July 4, 1903, in Ellis Hall at 309 Throckmorton Street.
(The Fort Worth Star-Telegram described the opening of the facility in a July 5 article: “The place of most activity yesterday was at Ellis Hall, where at 11 o’clock there was a celebration which included the ‘tapping of a keg.’ The northern end of the building upstairs has been taken into charge by the various labor organizations of the city. It is to be known as the Labor Temple.”)
Local 146 and the “master plumbers” that employed its members reached an agreement on a new, one-year contract on October 3, 1904, that provided the union journeyman plumbers with a $4.50 per-hour wage they had requested during negotiations. The pact also set a journeyman-to-apprentice ratio that could be employed on jobs at 4-to-1, which the union had also sought. After the two sides signed the contract, Brother Thacher, who served as the local’s negotiating committee chairman, stated in the October 4 Star-Telegram that Local 146 was “well satisfied with the new contract and that the utmost harmony had prevailed at all the meetings.” He further noted, “Both sides made concessions, and the agreement was thus reached.”
Conversely, two years later, six Local 146 members went on strike against the Van Zandt Heating and Plumbing Company beginning June 1, 1906, after the master plumber was the only one of the local’s four contractors to reject the union’s demand, which it first made on May 1, for a wagescale increase from $4.50 to $5-per-day for its journeymen. In response to the walkout, Company office John Van Zandt announced in that day’s Star-Telegram. “We are willing to pay some of them $5 per day, as some of them are worth that amount, but others are not worth it, and we refuse to pay it. We have concluded arrangements with non-union plumbers for all help needed, and we will proceed with our business as heretofore.”
Local 146 President Edward J. Keras subsequently called the contractor’s statement a “mere bluff” in a letter in the June 4 Record and Register. “Labor is too scarce at present to pick up 20 plumbers, which he could use at this time,” Brother Keras continued. “As for our men who walked out Friday morning, they are not going back for the old scale of wages as there is work for them elsewhere.”
What’s more, the local assessed each of its working members 50 cents per day for a defense fund “to take care of those who may be out as a result of the walkout.” The union also made other funds available for use by the striking members. But ultimately, the contractor spurned the union and continued to employ non-union plumbers, after which more firms in the city followed suit and hired non-union workers. With former Local 146 officer and U.A. general vice-president Thacher even working by 1907 for the “unfair” nonunion Van Zandt Heating and Plumbing, U.A. General Organizer Edward W. Leonard was compelled to report in the February 1908 Journal, “Conditions of Local 146 are not of the best.” Throughout that year, the local was also obliged to regularly post “KEEP AWAY” notices in the union’s publication, informing potential travelers from sister U.A. locals who were seeking work outside of their home locals’ respective jurisdictions that there were no union positions available in Fort Worth.
With two major construction projects underway within the Local 146 jurisdiction in 1909, the local and the U.A. stepped up their efforts that year to halt the union’s slide and improve its condition in and around Fort Worth. To those ends, U.A. General Organizer William Lynn joined Local 146 President William B. Smith in meetings with the three non-union contractors in the town in September of that year. Subsequently, two of the firms “were inclined to clean up their shops and enter into a working agreement,” Organizer Lynn reported in the November 1909 Journal, while one of those contractors which had just closed the plumbing contract on one of the new large jobs, pledged that “his shop will be straightened up before that job was started.”
Additionally, during the local’s regular meeting held on September 20, it initiated some of the men that had been working in the two shops. The local and Organizer Lynn also appointed a committee that would “make an active campaign against” the non-union shops and “meet with other conditions as they arise,” he reported. The local further adopted a plan to put a business agent in the field who would work between Fort Worth and Dallas. With a new plumbing ordinance also in force that was recently revised by President Smith, who was also the city’s plumbing inspector, to comply with the state plumbing law that Local 146 member Brother G. Edward Allgaier had been instrumental in passing, Organizer Lynn expounded in his report, “With this committee to handle these shops and a business agent in the field, Local 146 will have complete control of conditions in their city.”
Indeed, the local’s membership was fully employed throughout the balance of the year and the decade. What’s more, into 1910 the local doubled in size over the previous year to 35 members.
Like Fort Worth, Local 146 responded to the additional impetus for growth during the 1910s that saw the city swell to more than 105,000 residents and the local expand to more than 70 members by 1920. Among the primary stimuli of that development was the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917, during which Fort Worth became a substantial military base almost overnight with the establishment of U.S. Army Camp Bowie on the western edge of the city and three training airfields within 14 miles of its limits.
Additionally, the “Ranger Oil Boom” that began in October 1917 after oil was discovered at a well in the town about 100 miles west of Fort Worth resulted in scores of oil companies moving to the city and hundreds of other companies being established in and around it. With the discovery of other oil fields nearby, Fort Worth soon after became the center of one of the richest oil-producing regions in the world.
Before those new sources of employment for Local 146 members emerged, however, the local struggled during the initial years of the decade – by which time it was holding its regular meetings in the new Labor Temple at 211 East 2nd Street in Fort Worth. As two large non-union contractors and multiple small non-union shops presented regular challenges for the local during that time, U.A. General Organizer Frank J. Kennedy noted in the July 1911 Journal, “Local No. 146 has had a hard battle in maintaining conditions and should be congratulated and encouraged in the persistent fight they have made.”
Regardless, the local continued to make inroads, highlighted at the time by the local’s first-ever three-year contract with the master plumbers that provided a wage raise for its journeymen of 50 cents to $5.50 per day beginning January 1, 1912, and $6 per day for each of the ensuing years to the end of 1914. The agreement also stipulated that plumbing firms in the city would be “closed shops” and employ only union members.
Although the local gained another new agreement with contractors in 1915, employment in its jurisdiction for much of that year was “very dull,” as U.A. General Organizer Jason H. Sheehe described it in his report in the December 1915 Journal. But as construction work in the area picked up the following year, during which the local’s membership fell at one point to 54 plumbers and steamfitters, U.A. General Organizer John H. Ryan was able to announce in the November 1916 Journal after a visit to Fort Worth, “I found (Local 146) was in good condition. Plenty of work now … and all men working. Another old-time local with good conditions and a live plumbing inspector who treats all alike, still fighting to better their conditions and will get them if they are to be gotten.”
With the construction and expansion of Camp Bowie well underway and employing Local 146 members in 1917 and 1918, the local’s members enjoyed steady employment. But before year’s end, after work at the camp and on other projects decreased, the local’s constantly fluctuating condition again diminished, leaving Business Manager William A. Broyles to report in the December 1, 1918, Star-Telegram, “At present there are plenty of plumbers idle, and they are only too willing to do their share of work, if they can find it.”
But as development in and around Fort Worth escalated, employment again picked up and remained strong throughout 1919, during which the local signed another new working agreement with contractors, enabling Brother Broyles to announce in the February 27, 1919, RecordTelegram that “very few plumbers or pipefitters are out of employment.” In fact, the city’s accelerated growth helped provide work for all of the local’s members to the point that the business manager reported in the July 13 Star-Telegram that “the demand for plumbers … out exceeds the supply.” In that advantageous environment, the local also rapidly gained new members, pushing its roster to 75 union plumbers.
“Matters were running along smoothly in Fort Worth,” U.A. General Organizer Thomas B. Clark proclaimed in his report in the November 1920 Journal as Local 146 continued to progress during the initial years of the “Roaring Twenties” (so-called as a nod to the decade’s surging economy and mass consumerism in the United States following a recession in 1920). Early in 1922, however, work for the union’s plumbers in and around Fort Worth became slack as construction slowed and non-union piping-trades concerns became more active within the local’s jurisdiction. To help counteract that adverse surge, on March 25 of that year the local voluntarily took a pay reduction of $1 from $10 per day to $9 per day in its journeyman plumbers’ wage scale, effective April 1, in an attempt to gain more jobs for its contractors.
As a result, while two of the local’s larger employers “strayed from the straight-and-narrow path” and became open, non-union shops, as U.A. General Organizer E. B. Fitzgerald described in his report in the July 1922 Journal, he was also able to declare, “Our members here have been very successful in warding off the open shop.” Taking stock of the local, Brother Fitzgerald went on to announce, “All of our members in Fort Worth are working and considering all and all, we have not fared badly by any means.”
The local continued to thrive throughout the following two years, near the end of which Brother Fitzgerald reported in the December 1924 Journal, “While in Fort Worth, I had the pleasure of calling upon several of our employers … and I find the conditions that now exist in Fort Worth are very favorable.” He further predicted that “from the present outlook, the future holds much prosperity for the membership of this local union.” The following year, the local also reaffiliated with the Fort Worth Building and Construction Trades Council after attendees passed a motion to do so during the local’s May 25, 1925, regular membership meeting.
With the local’s beneficial situation persisting, in 1926 the wage scale for its journeyman plumbers and steamfitters reached $12 per day (or $1.50 per hour for 8-hour workdays) in a contract with its employing master plumbers. By then, the local’s members were also receiving double-time pay for overtime work on Saturday afternoons, Sundays and legal holidays.
Conditions were further boosted in the late 1920s by a “building boom” that, as the book The New Frontier: A Contemporary History of Fort Worth & Tarrant County asserts, was fostered by Fort Worth’s Five-Year Work Program, for which “far-sighted businessmen and politicians in the late Twenties had convinced voters to pass $100 million worth of bond issues to finance roads and bridges and erect new public-use buildings to replace facilities the city had outgrown.” With an additional $50 million share from a state improvement program financing more construction, Fort Worth led all Texas cities in a new building in 1929 and 1930, according to The New Frontier.
Accordingly, employment in the city and of Local 146 members were not initially impacted by the Great Depression, the historic, nationwide economic and societal disaster that began following the U.S. stock market crash on October 29, 1929 (history’s “Black Tuesday”) and lingered into the late 1930s. To the contrary, while national unemployment surpassed 10 percent in 1930 before peaking at around 25 percent in 1933, Fort Worth’s increased construction and railroad traffic, oil production and cattle and poultry industries were “stabilizing” influences for its workforce during the first year of the decade, articles in the Record-Telegram and Star-Telegram pointed out.
Work for the city’s union plumbers was relatively stable into 1930 – when Business Manager Broyles was even able to report during Local 146’s January 31 regular membership meeting, “All men working” – and throughout that year. But elsewhere, the nationwide financial collapse brought hard times to U.A. members across the country as unemployment among its ranks soared. “Construction all but stopped, and this led to a significant decline in manufacturing,” the U.A. International history recounts. “The economies of both (the United States and Canada) spiraled ever downward, until unemployment reached extremely high numbers and workers began to give up altogether.”
The Journal ran several issues during the early 1930s that offered advice on how members could make their wages stretch as far as possible, but much of the focus of its articles was either on calling on the government to take action to help people or on trying to offer some hope and encouragement to the U.A. membership. Meanwhile, as its overall international membership declined and the U.A. held no conventions between 1928 and 1938, “the union held it together,” the U.A. history declares. Even as its membership began to feel the impact of surging unemployment as it crept into the Fort Worth area, Local 146 was initially able to offer a measure of assistance. By 1931, the local had given loans of $12 each to up to 14 of its members, and during its general membership meeting that January, the local began providing loans of $50 and also voted to make $500 available for additional financial assistance to members.
While the economic turmoil soon after caught up to the local and its city, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federal “New Deal” programs to create jobs and reverse the effects of the Great Depression provided needed relief to the U.A. membership, as well as the country. Among numerous job-creating projects financed by the legislation’s agencies that put union tradesmen to work in the Local 146 jurisdiction was Fort Worth’s Frontier Centennial in 1936, new city hall in 1938 and new main public library in 1939; Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum in 1936; John Peter Smith City-County Hospital in 1939; buildings at North Texas Agricultural College (now the University of Texas at Arlington); several public-housing projects; and multiple new school buildings including five monumental senior high schools: Amon Carter-Riverside, Arlington Heights, I. M. Terrell, North Side and Polytechnic.
During that time, the local also established Gasfitters Auxiliary Local No. 146 when it organized employees of Lone Star Gas Company in Fort Worth on April 8, 1937, after the firm discharged 26 union plumbers a week earlier. The new group, along with workers who had been organized into International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers’ Local No. 859, soon after went on strike for contracts that recognized the union representation for workers, which the company granted on April 16, 1937.
As Local 146 and its city, state and country were finally emerging from the desolation of the Great Depression during the late 1930s, the local’s longtime business manager and financial secretary Brother Broyles, who had served in those positions since 1917, passed away while still in office on March 9, 1939, at age 58 after a brief illness. Two weeks later on March 24, the local’s membership elected Brother Edward A. Smith, who had been a plumber in Fort Worth since 1902, as its next business manager.
With its headquarters by that time at the Labor Temple at 211-1/2 West Thirteenth Street and the Depression winding down as it entered the 1940s, the local gained a new agreement with its employing contractors that restored its wage rate to the early-1930s level of $12 per day for journeyman plumbers and steamfitters for 1941. The two-year pact also provided a $13-per-day pay scale for its second year beginning December 14, 1941.
By that time, U.A. locals nationwide were being employed on an influx of work that resulted from the outbreak of World War II in Europe and Asia, which the United States officially entered on the side of the Allies, who were already fighting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, following the Japanese attack on U.S. Naval Base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. As the busy wartime economy pulled the nation and unions completely out of the Great Depression, U.A. membership across North America swelled from 81,000 in 1941 to 210,000 members, many of whom worked in shipyards, weapons plants, aircraft factories and other facilities to support the war.
The “dramatic increase in construction work” that “continued undiminished throughout the first half of the decade,” as local historian Dr. George Green described, put Local 146 members to work at defense plants in the Fort Worth area that built jeeps, tanks, planes and military parts. “Almost all the construction work in the 1940s was done by union members,” according to Dr. Green, “and there was a relatively harmonious environment enjoyed by labor and management, though there were still some jurisdictional fights.”
Among the significant military construction projects in North Texas on which union plumbers and steamfitters worked were major airfields and air bases built in Fort Worth, as well as Dallas, Mineral Wells, Waco, Abilene and Wichita Falls. The members of Local 146 also helped build Army training and encampment facilities at Fort Worth; many additional auxiliary airfields throughout the area; and several new industrial plants that would produce military materiel.
In particular, the local’s members and other union building tradesmen erected the massive, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Plant No. 4 B-24 bomber production facility at Fort Worth, which included installing sewer piping under new runways being constructed as late as April 1945. Once the plant was initially completed, thousands of workers went to the city beginning in the spring of 1941 to work in the factory.
While also constructing the new Will Rogers Memorial War Training School at the Will Rogers Coliseum in Fort Worth, where Consolidated Vultee (which is now Lockheed) would school up to 1,600 employees – many of whom were women that were joining the workforce after men had gone off to the war’s battlefields – in making parts for bombers and other aircraft, Local 146 plumbers stayed off the job beginning October 12, 1942, to protest the use of non-union carpenters on the project. Four days later, the union members returned to the job on October 16 after the “problems involved have been settled,” Local 146 Business Manager Joe Lahey announced in that day’s Star-Telegram.
After World War II ended with the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7, 1945, and the Japanese Empire on September 2 to the Allies, the Fort Worth Building and Construction Trades Council, of which Local 146 was a member, and the Fort Worth Chapter of Associated General Contractors (A.G.C.), with which the local’s employing contractors were affiliated, enjoyed an amicable working relationship throughout the second half of the decade, helping to keep Local 146 members employed. What’s more, by 1948 when Fort Worth was in the midst of another construction “boom,” a large number of union plumbers and steamfitters were employed on numerous jobs that included major expansions at Boswell Dairies and department stores for retailers such as R. E. Cox and Leonard Brothers.
During that time, Local 146 voted on December 4, 1948, to renew its working agreement with contractors for a $2.25-per-hour (or $18-per-day) wage scale, which would carry the local through the remainder of the decade before the contract expired on December 31, 1949.
A new decade began for Local 146 and its 400 members with a new, collectively bargained agreement, which the local reached with the Associated Plumbing Contractors on December 28, 1950, that provided a 25-cent raise – the first in two years for the local – for journeymen to $2.50 per hour beginning January 1, 1951. Another new pact increased the scale to $2.62-1/2 per hour for all of 1952 before expiring on December 31 of that year.
Out in the field meanwhile, among projects employing Local 146 plumbers and steamfitters was the construction of the North Main Power Plant with its steam-powered turbine generator for the Texas Electric Service Company in 1951 and 1952. By that time and throughout the decade, the local’s plumbers, steamfitters and pipeline welders were engaged primarily on large construction projects in its jurisdiction as a majority of the plumbing shops that were serving homeowners and homebuilders in the area were non-union.
Also in 1952, during which the local reached a membership of nearly 600 plumbers, fitters and apprentices as the result of continued rapid development within North Texas, the local built the first-ever headquarters of its own, into which it moved on September 29, 1952. The $70,000, 7,250-square-foot, two-story Local 146 Union Hall at 2640 East Lancaster Avenue in Fort Worth, which was erected by the Childs Construction Company, contained two offices, a meeting hall for up to 350 occupants and a recreation area and classrooms for the local’s apprentice school in the basement.
The following year, however, the local’s roughly 700 members went on strike beginning August 15, 1953, after the Fort Worth Associated Mechanical Contractors rejected the union’s request for a 25-cent hourly pay hike to $3, double-time pay for overtime and 7-cents-per-mile travel reimbursement for journeymen working outside the City of Fort Worth. The union plumbers and steamfitters ended their walkout and returned to work on August 28 after the two sides re-opened negotiations for a new contract that day, after which they reached accord on an agreement that would ultimately provide a $2.90-per-hour wage for journeymen through July 31, 1955.
But after that contract expired on August 1 of that year and its contractors refused to request a $3.25-per-hour wage in a new, one-year contract, Local 146 struck again that day. During the contentious work stoppage, Local 146 Business Agent Marvin E. Youngblood responded in the August 2 Star-Telegram that an offer of a 2-1/2-cent hourly raise from the contractors association as “an insult to the plumbers” before the two sides settled on August 10 on a one-year contract that gave plumbers a pay scale of $3 per hour retroactive to August 1 and a scale of $3.02-1/2 effective October 1, 1955.
Perhaps a more significant gain for the local was a clause in the agreement that called for contractors to contribute 1 cent per hour worked by the local’s members into a Training Fund that helped finance the local’s apprentice program and school. Previously, the Associated Mechanical Contractors was setting aside one-tenth of 1 percent of gross journeymen’s earnings and Local 146 was paying half the costs of all apprenticeship activities.
During the second half of the decade, Local 146 members continued to work on numerous large projects that included the new Continental National Bank Building, which when completed in 1957 was the tallest building in Fort Worth until the completion of The Fort Worth Tower in 1974 (after which the Continental Building was abandoned in 1990 then demolished in 2006). The local’s tradesmen also helped build a new hospital at Carswell Air Force Base, an addition to Texas Christian University’s Amon Carter Stadium and the Eagle Mountain Power Plant, a steam-powered generating station at Eagle Mountain Lake just northwest of Fort Worth being erected for the Texas Electric Services Company.
Those jobs and others came to a halt, however, when nearly 540 union plumbers and steamfitters of Local 146 did not report for work on July 25, 1956, to enforce their demand for a new, two-year contract from the Associated Mechanical Contractors that would contain an immediate 12-1/2cent raise and three incremental increases of 10 cents over the two-year period. After working without a contract since the previous agreement expired on June 30, the local subsequently remained on strike for nearly 40 days until the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service helped negotiate a new contract that the two sides signed on August 21. The two-year pact provided raises of 15 cents retroactive to July 1; 5 cents on January 1, 1957; 10 cents on July 1, 1957; and 5 cents on January 1, 1958, before expiring on June 30, 1958, by which time the local’s journeyman wage reached $3.37-1/2 per hour.
Two years later, more-amicable negotiations between the local and its contractors, conducted under federal-mediation supervision, resulted in an agreement being signed by both sides just before the previous contract expired at midnight on June 30. The new, two-year agreement included hourly pay raises of 7-1/2 cents on July 1 and 5 cents on January 1, 1959, that increased the local’s scale to $3.50 per hour over the final six months of the pact.
Having grown over that time to about 1,000 member plumbers and steamfitters serving the northern Texas counties of Tarrant, Johnson, Denton, Wise, Parker, Hood, Erath, Palo Pinto and Comanche, Local 146 and the Associated Mechanical Contractors reached a two-year agreement on June 27, 1959, that gave the union tradesmen a total, incremental 25-cent-per-hour pay increase that would take its hourly journeyman pay to $3.75 beginning January 1, 1961. The increase was a compromise reached after the union had entered negotiations seeking a 50-cent boost while the contractors “sought to hold the line at the present pay” of $3.50 per hour, according to an article in the June 27 Star-Telegram.
But before the decade was out, on October 16, 1959, a jury found Charles Ray Armstrong guilty of embezzling funds from Local 146 during a period between 1952 and 1958 while he was serving as the local’s bookkeeper. While he was sentenced to three years in prison specifically for embezzling $108 from the local, the next day’s Star-Telegram reported that Armstrong faced six other indictments charging him with embezzlement after an audit of the local’s books “showed a shortage of $32,250 had accumulated between September 1952 and July 31, 1958.
True to the tumultuous 1960s, which was marked by its anti-establishment counterculture movement, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Local 146 likewise experienced internal turmoil at the onset of the decade. From the onset, the local experienced financial difficulties resulting from the theft of its funds by its former bookkeeper to the point at which it had to withdraw from the Tarrant County Central Labor Council on February 17, 1960, after the council increased assessments on members of its affiliated locals (although the local would reaffiliate with the council in December 1966).
The local’s election of officers that year also turned out to be a source of drama when its seat for business manager went to a runoff following initial voting. After an election judge checked member votes from the July 2 runoff three times, Brother Youngblood was declared the winner by a single vote, 96 to 93, over incumbent Business Manager Walter L. Lewis, who had held the post since 1957.
Then Local 146 went on strike beginning August 21, 1961, for 23 days before reaching an agreement on a new contract with the Associated Mechanical Contractors of Fort Worth on September 13 that the membership approved the following day. The three-year pact would eventually increase its journeyman wage scale to $4.05 per hour on July 1, 1963, with raises of 7-1/2 cents retroactive to July 1; 5 cents on January 1, 1962; another 5 cents on January 1, 1963; and 12-1/2 cents on July 1, 1963.
Notably, the contract also established a first-ever Health and Welfare Fund to provide healthcare insurance for its nearly 400 members. With the fringe benefit, beginning July 1, 1962, contractors would pay 10 cents per hour worked by members into the fund, which would be administered by a joint committee from the local and the contractors association.
True to the tumultuous 1960s, which was marked by its anti-establishment counterculture movement, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Local 146 likewise experienced internal turmoil at the onset of the decade. From the onset, the local experienced financial difficulties resulting from the theft of its funds by its former bookkeeper to the point at which it had to withdraw from the Tarrant County Central Labor Council on February 17, 1960, after the council increased assessments on members of its affiliated locals (although the local would reaffiliate with the council in December 1966).
The local’s election of officers that year also turned out to be a source of drama when its seat for business manager went to a runoff following initial voting. After an election judge checked member votes from the July 2 runoff three times, Brother Youngblood was declared the winner by a single vote, 96 to 93, over incumbent Business Manager Walter L. Lewis, who had held the post since 1957.
Then Local 146 went on strike beginning August 21, 1961, for 23 days before reaching an agreement on a new contract with the Associated Mechanical Contractors of Fort Worth on September 13 that the membership approved the following day. The three-year pact would eventually increase its journeyman wage scale to $4.05 per hour on July 1, 1963, with raises of 7-1/2 cents retroactive to July 1; 5 cents on January 1, 1962; another 5 cents on January 1, 1963; and 12-1/2 cents on July 1, 1963.
Notably, the contract also established a first-ever Health and Welfare Fund to provide healthcare insurance for its nearly 400 members. With the fringe benefit, beginning July 1, 1962, contractors would pay 10 cents per hour worked by members into the fund, which would be administered by a joint committee from the local and the contractors association.
Last-minute negotiations between Local 146 local and contractors averted a work stoppage before that contract expired when the two parties agreed to a new, two-year contract on June 30, 1964, “only hours ahead of the midnight expiration date of the old contract,” after which the local had threatened to go on strike, the Star-Telegram reported the following day. Among other features, the agreement instituted the new, first-ever Local No. 146 Pension Plan retirement benefit for the local’s members, which would initially be funded by a 7-1/2-cent-per-hour-worked contribution from contractors beginning January 1, 1965.
The contract overall resulted in 35 cents more in pay and benefits for the union plumbers and pipefitters (the local having been re-designated by this time from “steamfitters” to “pipefitters”), with 10 cents added immediately to the wage scale. Along with healthcare and pension contributions, it further added another 10 cents to either wages or the pension fund on July 1, 1965, and an additional 7-1/2 cents for wages on January 1, 1965.
A 14-day strike beginning July 1, 1966, by the Local 146 membership, which by that time had expanded back up to about 600 plumbers and pipefitters, resulted in another new, two-year agreement that immediately raised the local’s journeyman wage rate from $4.22-1/2 to $4.50 an hour. While holding Health and Welfare Fund contributions at 10 cents per hour and Pension Plan contributions at 17-1/2 cents per hour for the duration of the deal, three additional incremental raises boosted the wage scale to $5 per hour beginning January 1, 1968, for its final six months.
That contract further set up the Fort Worth Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry Fund, a joint labor-management tool to bolster the union piping industry’s participation in civic projects, upgrade industry standards and improve the union’s image. The fund was initially financed with employer contributions of 2-cent-per-hour-worked by the local’s journeymen and apprentices.
Meanwhile, construction within the local’s jurisdiction in the mid- and late-1960s, particularly in the City of Fort Worth, proceeded at a rapid pace with new office buildings and cultural projects, which provided ample manhours for the local’s members – and even resulted in a shortage of plumbers in the area by 1969. Major jobs that kept members busy during that time included construction of the $16-million Tarrant County Convention Center (now the Fort Worth Convention Center) in the city’s Sundance Square beginning in January 1966 until it was completed in September 1968; expansion of the South Campus of Tarrant County Junior College (now Tarrant County College); and construction of the 10-story Mallick Tower high-rise office building in downtown Fort Worth in 1968.
The local and the Mechanical Contractors Association also built the new Fort Worth Plumbers and Pipefitters Joint Apprenticeship Training Center on Anglin Road for their apprentice training program beginning in January 1969. Opened that April, the facility’s construction was financed with 2 cents of the contractors’ contribution of 5 cents per hour worked by Local 146 members into the Training Fund that had been designated in the most recent contract between the union and the contractors association.
One of only three unions in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Denton area that did not participate in a multicraft agreement negotiated in March 1971 that gave 25 other locals a $1.40-per-hour total pay increase over a 22-month period, according to an article in that year’s June 29 Star-Telegram, Local 146 was compelled yet again to go on strike after its contract with the North Texas Contractors Association expired on June 30 and no new contract had been signed. As the walkout commenced, “government projects ground to a halt (including the new Fort Worth City Hall that would be completed later that year), along with bank buildings and entertainment projects” on which the local’s plumbers and pipefitters had been working, the newspaper later reported on August 19.
It was not until September 4 that the local’s membership approved a new agreement, by a 25-to-1 margin, that would ultimately provide it with salary increases totaling $1.40 per hour over the 22month life of the contract, raising its wage scale to $7.40 per hour and employers’ healthcare, retirement, training and industry fund contributions $1.12 per hour. The members of sister U.A. Local No. 100 of Dallas also approved the joint agreement between both locals and about 90 contractors of the contractors association.
Continuing to benefit from work on larger projects in the area such as a $52.2-million, 400,000square-foot addition to the Miller Brewing Company plant in Fort Worth and construction of the Fort Worth State School for Mental Health and Mental Retardation in 1974 and 1975, the local also gained another new contract that ultimately pushed its wage scale to $8 per hour beginning May 1, 1974. By that time, the local was also receiving hourly fringe-benefit contributions from contractors of 38 cents for health and welfare, 90 cents for pensions and 8 cents for training.
A three-month-long strike that began May 1, 1975, slowed those jobs and others being manned by many of the local’s 600 members, including expansions and upgrades to the John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth and Tarrant County Junior College’s Northwest Campus, while negotiations with the North Texas Contractors Association for a new contract stalled. “They wanted to do away with our pension program, our health insurance and our double-time and time-and-a-half,” Local 146 Business Manager Nelson B. Fortner declared in that day’s StarTelegram. “We have 85 people on pensions, and they just wanted to cut it out. We’re not going to let them take advantage of these old folks.”
Unlike most other unions, Local 146 and Local 100 again did not sign onto the multiple-craft negotiations with the contractors association until August 7, 1975, instead holding out for a higher pay scale they had been demanding. After a federal mediator entered the contract talks, the two plumbers and fitters locals agreed to a three-year contract that gave their journeymen a total $2.40 per hour raise, which the Local 146 membership ratified on August 11. Subsequently, for the third and final year of the agreement that would expire on April 30, 1978, according to an article in the May 2, 1977, Star-Telegram, the plumbers and fitters received the largest salary boost of all the building trades, with their base wage rate rising 70 cents from $9.53 to $10.23 per hour and their total hourly rate including fringe benefits increasing from $11 to $11.80.
Even before that contract ended – in sharp contrast to previous contract negotiations that had produced two strikes during the decade – Local 146 and Local 100 agreed to a new, three-year contract on December 5, 1977, that contractors said “will encourage construction in North Texas,” that day’s Star-Telegram reported. The agreement with the North Texas Contractors Association, which Fort Worth plumbers and pipefitters approved by a 2-to-1 margin and would go into effect on May 1, 1978, retained existing wages for the first year and called for cost-of-living adjustments for the next two years.
As building in the Fort Worth area began to significantly increase during the late 1970s, union signatory contractors benefitted from the willingness of Local 146 and other unions to hold down their wages in an effort to encourage more commercial construction such as offices, apartment complexes and other commercial space, most of which was performed by organized trades (in contrast to residential construction that almost totally utilized non-union labor). Local 146 President Nelson Portner even remarked in the November 21, 1978, Star-Telegram on the unions freezing their pay scales, “It puts the Fort Worth contractors in a better competitive position.”
The resultant large amount of construction work in the Fort Worth area during the late 1970s, which involved new industrial, commercial and downtown high-rises, produced a historic number of manhours for the local’s membership. Projects that employed significant numbers of members included expansions, upgrades and maintenance to multiple plants in the local’s jurisdiction, such as General Dynamics Plant No. 4 (the former Consolidated Vultee facility that Lockheed would purchase in 1993 and is now Air Force Plant No. 4), where groundbreaking F-16 fighter jets were produced beginning in the late 1970s and into 2017; the ConAgra Foods bean-processing plant in Fort Worth; and the Miller Brewery.
The Local 146 wage scale continued to fluctuate during the early 1990s, with base journeyman increasing to $16.02 per hour on May 1, 1990, and $16.48 per hour on November 1, 1990, before being reduced to $16.24 per hour on January 1, 1991, for the final six months of the local’s existing contract. The local’s total wage-and-benefits package during that time increased to $18.21 per hour May 1, 1990, and then to $18.67 per hour on November 1, 1990, where it remained for the final eight months of the agreement.
Then a new, three-year contract with the North Texas Contractors Association that began on June 1, 1992, contained no base wage increases throughout the time before it expired on April 30, 1995. As work steadily picked up during the second half of the decade after the previous contract expired, however, the local and its contractors reached an agreement on another three-year deal that went into effect on May 1, 1996, and provided increases in pay for each year. The contract raised the base journeyman hourly rate to $17.98, $18.48 and 18.98, respectively, on May 1 of 1996, 1997 and 1998, while increasing the total pay package including fringe benefits on those dates to $20.87, $21.42 and 21.92 per hour, respectively.
Meanwhile, a flurry of new projects in the Fort Worth area helped fuel the local’s increasing manhours during that time, including the expansion of a plant operated by Alcon, an American-Swiss medical company specializing in eye care products, in 1995. “There’s so much work, in fact, that area contractors are now worried about maintaining an adequate supply of tradespeople to do it all,” an article in the April 05, 1996, Star-Telegram reported – while also noting that when the economy slowed down in the late 1980s and the number of construction jobs dwindled, many veteran tradespeople chose to retire or to move on to new careers.
With employment conditions remaining steady, Local 146 received a new, three-year contract that went into effect on May 1, 1999, with a new base pay of 19.83 per hour and a total package rate, including $1.60 for healthcare and $1.15 for pensions, of $23.07 per hour. One year later, the contract called for a $20.28-per-hour base wage and $23.77-per-hour total package on May 1, 2000, after which it provided for a $20.43-per-hour wage and $24.42-per-hour package on May 1, 2021, for the ensuing final year.
Before the close of the decade, the century and the millennium, work on which Local 146 members were employed included the construction of a new body shop at the General Motors automobile factory in Arlington, where union pipe-trades labor had not been used in decades. To the contrary, the $450-million, 750,000-square-foot body shop, which would open in September 2000 to produce full-size trucks and SUVs, provided hundreds of union tradespeople with jobs during and after its construction, as Local 146 members remained at the plant performing maintenance, retooling and upgrade work. “We did such a good job,” Local 146 retiree and former business manager Brother Tom Parrott later recalled in 2021, “we just stayed.”
The dawn of the new “Y2K” millennium was the beginning of a two-decade period of mostly steady and at-times abundant work before a worldwide pandemic stifled Local 146 beginning in early 2020, just as it was preparing to mark the 125th anniversary since receiving its charter from the United Association later that year.
But first, while battling through relatively sluggish employment during the early years of the 2000s as a recession in 2001 hindered construction, projects on which Local 146 members worked included the new Terminal D at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, which was used for international flights after it opened in 2005. Senior Vice President Mark Kelly of Dynamic Systems, the contractor on the job, later remarked about the terminal in the January 2016 Journal, “It’s the crown jewel of the airport – a very successful project for Dynamic Systems, Local 100, Local 146 and the Dallas/Fort Worth community.”
The local and the North Texas Contractors Association also agreed to a new, four-year contract that began on May 1, 2002, and ran until April 30, 2006. The pact set the local’s new journeyman wage rate at $21.43 per hour and its full pay package at $25.52 per hour for the first year, and eventually raised the base pay through cost-of-living adjustments to $21.76 per hour plus an additional $5.66 per hour for benefits beginning May 1, 2005, for the final year of the contract.
Through that contract, the local initiated a Market Recovery Program on May 1, 2002, through the contract to help its contractors regain work that had been going to non-union employers by subsidizing wages for key projects. The effort was initially funded through weekly payroll contributions by the local’s members of 43 cents from journeymen, 30 cents from fourth- and fifth-year apprentices, 45 cents from job foremen and 51 cents for general foremen (while first-, second- and third-year apprentices were excluded). Each succeeding May 1, or “applicable wage-rate change date thereafter,” the amount deducted would be 2 percent of each employee’s base wage rate.
Employment of Local 146 plumbers and pipefitters remained steady for the most part from 2004 through 2013, despite the so-called “Great Recession” has produced a marked economic decline throughout the nation from late 2007 into 2009. Notably, it was during that period that union labor including the local’s members performed a large amount of repair work on the new, $1.3-billion Dallas Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium) after non-union labor initially built the retractable-roof facility in Arlington before it was completed in May 2009.
Work picked back up that year and remained steady throughout 2013 while the local’s members were employed on numerous industrial and commercial projects both inside and outside of its jurisdiction. Those jobs included a Texas Instruments facility within the Dallas-based Local 100 jurisdiction and the $534-million Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, Texas, under U.A. Plumbers and Pipefitters Local No. 529 in 2012 and 2013.
However, residential work in its own area continued to elude the Fort Worth local.
But the Local 146 wage scale was increased to $25.51 per hour in base pay and $32.42 per hour for its total wage-and-benefits package on May 1, 2009. One year later on May 1, 2010, base pay was raised to $26.01 per hour and the package to $33.02 per hour, after which annual increases continued until the local’s base wage reached $27.13 per hour and its total wage-and-benefits package reached $35.13 per hour on May 1, 2013, for the following year.
During that time, after six decades in the same location, the local moved its offices and union hall from their longtime place on East Lancaster Avenue and its training center into a new facility at 9920 White Settlement Road in Fort Worth. For its new headquarters, the local had purchased and completely renovated a former Nelson’s IGA grocery store.
Favorable employment conditions and stable work for the local’s members from 2015 through 2018 included a host of industrial and commercial projects, in addition to work at two of the major universities within the region, the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Dallas. Members also worked on complete renovations of the 1970s-era Terminal B and Terminal E of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, both of which were four-year projects before being completed in late 2017.
Sadly, a downturn in construction in North Texas in 2019 was immediately followed by the onset of the lethal coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that struck the United States beginning in January 2020. Statewide and national responses to the outbreak included prohibition and cancellation of large-scale gatherings, stay-at-home orders and school closures.
For Local 146, the pandemic brought significant change for its more than 460 members, including retirees and about 100 apprentices, such as canceled union meetings and training sessions; the postponement of some jobs on which they had been employed; social-distancing and virus-testing on job sites; and online and virtual schoolwork for apprentices. The pandemic also forced the local to cancel its 125th-anniversary celebration event it had planned for 2020.
Regardless, Local 146 and its officers looked to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic just as the local had conquered a myriad of challenges throughout its 125 years of serving the plumbing and piping needs of the Greater Fort Worth Area and its membership as a whole. To those ends, the local has remained dedicated to providing tradesmen and tradeswomen with high-quality training and representation in contract negotiations and on jobsites, which are enhanced through the local’s affiliations with the U.A. and the Southwest Pipe Trades Association, a professional organization of U.A. locals and Mechanical Contractors Association member firms in the region that was founded in 1914. As such, Local 146 has been and continues to be able to fight for better working conditions, pay and benefits and, as a result, improve the standard of living of its members.
