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President James Boland, a member of the Executive Board since 1995, became President of the International Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers (BAC) in February 2010, and was elected to a five-year term in September 2010. Boland served first as an Executive Vice President until June 1999, when he was named Secretary-Treasurer, a position to which he was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2005.

BAC represents the most highly skilled trowel trades craftworkers across the United States and Canada including bricklayers, stone and marble masons, cement masons, plasterers, tilesetters, terrazzo and mosaic workers, and pointers/ cleaners/ caulkers. With over a century of protecting the rights of their workers, BAC is the oldest continuous union in North America.

Building Sustainable Infrastructure, One Brick at a Time
The crafts I represent are brick and block, and granite, marble, terrazzo and tile, and then the restoration of all those products. I think they’re sustainable and long-lasting products and the history of masonry is almost like the history of culture: you see it in buildings going back  generations.

Unions Understand Infrastructure Investment
When you are reaching out to unions, you are reaching out to our members who know—it’s not taxation, it’s dues…It should be self-evident to society in general, or to the public in general if we can just draw some nice parallels for them.

We Need Leadership
The ironic thing about this is that both parties agree on the need for improved infrastructure across the board…if they got serious to make a bipartisan effort to get this stuff rolling, I think now is an opportune time but it takes leadership.

Infrastructure & Government: Making a Plan
I think a big part of it is monitoring the infrastructure that’s in place already and making sure it’s up to snuff…Our generation and the generation before us were fully aware of the need for government spending and public spending or at least partial public spending to carry out these huge projects…

Download full transcript (PDF): James Boland on The Infra Blog

Tags: BAC, International Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers, James Boland, Union

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2015 at 11:56 am and is filed under Aging Infrastructure, Guests on The Infra Blog, National, Policy, The Infra Blog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.