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Shareholders, Workers and Homeowners Protest Sour Pulte Practices |
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Robert Masciola, deputy director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research, describes this week’s Pulte shareholder meeting in the Detroit area.
Some 100 activists gathered on May 15 in Birmingham, Mich., at the annual shareholder meeting of Pulte Homes, with a straightforward message: Pulte must be held accountable for the conditions on its job sites!
Dissatisfied homeowners and workers were joined at the rally by supporters from the Detroit union movement, including many members of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) and the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), along with members of the Detroit Metropolitan Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues and community supporters. Saundra Williams, president of the Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO, emceed the rally.
Protestors dressed as giant lemons drew attention to complaints of poor quality in homes built by Pulte, the third largest home builder in the United States. Banners waved with the message Poorly Built by Pulte, in connection with a recent report by the Building Justice Campaign that documented construction defects in Pulte and Del Webb homes throughout the Phoenix Valley.
Gilberto Lopez, a sheet metal worker from Phoenix, pointedly asked senior executives and board members how they would better monitor subcontractors on Pulte job sites. As Lopez said:
In my opinion, some of the contractors hired to help build houses for your company do not meet the standards they should. When this happens, workers cannot do a proper job.
The Pulte board and executives also heard from Vanessa Trujillo, a painter from Las Vegas. Trujillo told the company that when it bought out Del Webb, many workers were forced to speed up production. As a result, she said:
We had to do twice as much work in the same amount of time.
Terry Templeton, a disgruntled homeowner from Arizona dressed as a giant lemon, stood before Pulte CEO Richard Dugas and asked him to describe the policies and procedures in place to remedy construction defects. Templeton referenced the Poorly Built by Pulte report, which she happily provided to the top executives of the company, and asked:
Would these conditions exist in a high-quality home?
What a shame she didn’t get an answer.
3 Comments
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Privatized home sonstruction, as in every for-profit business, is legally bound to reward it’s owners and shareholders maximize profits. In labor intensive industries, such as construction, where the companies can’t go to China, the only places left to make a big buck is to cut corners on quality and materials or to screw the workers. The usual practise has also been to focus on building expensive homes ( over a half a million dollars and more) where greater profit is possible, and not build lower cost but affordable homes for working class people
It is past time for the labor movement to think beyond the traditional practises and modes of action.
1. Why not organize worker-owned and managed construction companies in different areas to produce lower income and affordable housing? By eliminating the profit of the investors and million dollar income of the CE0s, and working with the potential customers to determine what housing is needed and how to mazimize modern technologies, the housing crisis could be solved to everyone’s advantage except perhaps corrupt and greedy contractors.
2. Architectural competitions could be organized nationwide for architects to come up with new modern housing designs. Manufactured housing companies could be established by unions with employ architects, etc, union menbers for the manufacuture and installation of such homes.
3. Apartment complexes with the full ammenities needed by families with children, or for seniors in retirement (with different needs) could be built
around the country. In Europe (especially Scandanavian countries) comlete eco-villages already exist). A humanistic and socialist solution to end the speculation and corruption in the housing business, provide jobs for many thousands of workers. Every new apartment/condo/house needs all the new appliances, wiring, plumbing, etc.etc employing many thousands more people.
4. The federal, state, and local governments could help finance these projects with long-term, low interest or no-interest loans, that are fixed interest and perhaps cannot be used for speculative purposes. People who retire or want
to change residence would have to sell first to other people willing to pay for housing under these terms.
5. To do this we must end the wars in the middle-east, cut the war budget by 50 percent or more, re-instate taxes on the wealthy etc.
In other words tax monies should be used to provide for the needs of the people, not just to fill the pockets of the billionaires who now own and control just about everything needed by people to live.
Jerry Wells has it diced correctly. If everything has to be produced for maximum and ever-increasing profits and shareholder returns, at the expense of labor, the community and the greater common good, then the entire economy, military production included, will collapse on itself, as production is offshored, monopolized or simply abandoned. When working people anywhere can’t afford to consume that which they produce, without the indentured servanthood of usurious credit, then the so-called “free” market beast will ravenously destroy local and national economies, and eventually, even the global economy. The “free” market is a predatory and uncivilized creature gamed by the few for the benefit of even fewer at the expense of the many. Hedge Funds are the current sovereigns of the “free” market, and none are controlled. They can’t even be taxed to help pay for the military budgets required to protect them. And their shareholders have the most to protect. What we have here is a Pharoah’s pyramid of wealth and income. Only the breadth of the degradation and poverty at the bottom, keeps the topmost strata and pinnacle from tumbling down. Think about it, as you hunker down in the current Warfare State.
JerryWells hit the nail on the head! The needs of the American people must take priority over the selfish, unquenchable lust for profits by corporations!
Unfortunatley our labor movement is still very much attached to the concept of so-called “free enterprise.” The only thing free is the right of corporations to abuse us, exploit us and then abandon us!
The need for a major change in our way of thinking is long over due! This holds especially true in face of the damage done to our nation by Bush and his cronies in corporate America!