The Sheet Metal & Roofing Contractors Association of Miami Valley (Dayton) and Local 24’s joint marketing/recruiting committee has developed a social media footprint that has attracted many qualified applicants. From left to right: SMRCA Designer and Print Manager Joe Williams; Local 24 Business Representative Mike Tipton; SMRCA Managing Director Rachel Pinkus; Local 24 JATC Administrator Eugene Frazier; SMRCA Managing Director Megan Miller; Local 24 Business Representative Rick Perdue; Kathy Kerber, President of KSM, Inc. and a member of the joint Best Practices Market Expansion Task Force; and SMRCA Executive Vice President Bob Pope.
Cooperation is King By Don Procter • Photos courtesy of Sheet Metal & Roofing Contractors Association, Miami Valley Labor-management relationships in the sheet metal industry have come a long way from when the “us versus them” philosophy was the norm. Those divided attitudes might have worked in the 20th century, but times are different. Cooperative relationships are proving to get things done these days. A good example is the partnership between the Sheet Metal & Roofing Contractors Association (SMRCA) of Miami Valley (Dayton) and Local 24, which covers 88 counties in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. It was actually at the 2018 Partners in Progress Conference where these labor-management partners established a key initiative to raise apprentices’ wages for the first two years in order to increase retention. SMRCA Executive Vice President Bob Pope and Local 24 Business Representative Mike Tipton worked together and managed to accomplish the goal without raising the costs of the total contract package. They moved a small portion of the apprentices’ pension contribution to their hourly rate. The move has proven successful. Tipton says the retention rate of first- and second-year apprentices has increased by more than 50% since the wage hikes of a $1.25 an hour in year one and $1 an hour in year two. “It transitions those apprentices to where they were supposed to be by their third year,” Tipton says. 12 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
Fifteen years ago the two sides would have been at loggerheads, Pope says. “We would have ended up going to the bargaining table to figure it out. I guess we let personalities get in the way. Instead of cooperating, we thought we could punch each other in the nose and win.” That adversarial relationship might have worked during better times—the 1990s, for example—but since that time, both sides have lost a big chunk of the market to the nonunion sector, Pope says. Attitudes between the two sides had to change to try to make up lost ground. “Our relationship went from strained to good.” Pope says that new leadership in Local 24 and SMRCA helped bring about the change. “The main thing we learned at the Partners in Progress Conference is that we needed to formalize our cooperation and get together more often,” he says. The two sides came up with new marketing strategies for recruitment, and now they meet quarterly to review social media initiatives that target young people most likely to enter the trade. Nowadays, contractors and their union partners attend job fairs together, says Rodney French, business manager and financial secretary-treasurer for Local 24. “The union can
