Richard Ryan--raised on a union paycheck but wants to deny that same security to the families of electricians today.
Union pride no longer all in the family
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: April 5, 2005)
Richard Ryan knew he wanted to be an electrician the day his uncle William brought home a bucket truck and took him up in the aerial lift.
Richard, who was about 7 the day he stood in the bucket and scanned the rooftops in his Yonkers neighborhood, grew up hearing the uncle who raised him speak proudly of what it meant to be a union electrician.
William Ryan, a devout member of Local 501 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, taught his nephew that union electricians got great training, earned good money and worked on important jobs.
"He appreciated the freedom and the opportunities we have in this country and the union was a huge part of that," Richard Ryan said, referring to his late uncle. "The union provided us with everything that we had."
But today, Ryan, the president of Yonkers Electric, is engaged in a long-running war with the union, now Local 3, and its political allies.
Ryan, 41, tenacious and brawny like the amateur boxer he used to be, brings the same never-back-down mentality to the union fights that he brought to the ring.
He once spent $10,000 in legal fees contesting a $200 fine the county's Electrical Licensing Board charged his company for having a truck without the address on its side.
Ryan argued the fine should have been $50 and that the board imposed an excessive fine because his company does not use union workers.
A judge agreed the fine was too heavy and ordered the county to return $150 and also give Ryan $729 to cover his court costs.
Ryan even named his daughter, born in 2003, "Brooklyn" as a reminder of the lessons he learned from a $10 million project completed in 2000 at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Yonkers Electric finished the job with non-union workers after Ryan duped the union workers who had been on the job into believing he was going out of business and fired them.
He is currently fighting an order from the state that he pay $46,000 in back wages to three electricians who worked on a school project for him.
The state says the three were not apprentices and therefore should be paid as experienced electricians. But Ryan said he has presented documentation showing that the union told him the men were apprentices.
Ryan, whose shock of red hair and beefy arms and chest make him look the part of a guy who doesn't run from a fight, insists he's not stubborn.
"I think of stubborn as meaning unreasonable," he said during an interview at his company's offices in an industrial section of Yonkers. "I don't think I'm unreasonable. They're unreasonable. I'm feisty."
His disputes put him at odds with a family tradition. Think of a kid from a family of Yankees fans who grows up to root for the Red Sox and you have Ryan.
Uncle William was a shop steward. Ryan's biological father, Russ Ryan, who turned Richard over to his brother William after his own wife died, was an electrician and member of the local.
Ryan's three older brothers, all raised by Russ, are also electricians and members of Local 3. The oldest, Paul, is even a business agent for the local. Ryan said he and his brothers steer carefully around the topic of his union fights when they speak.
But there's no such cautious diplomacy in the relationship between Ryan and Local 3, an organization he alleges acts nefariously to beat non-union contractors like his company.
Michael Whalen, a Local 3 business representative in White Plains, said he would not comment on anything having to do with Ryan. Several other Local 3 officials did not return calls to talk about Ryan. Jim Spellane, an IBEW spokesman in Washington, said he could not comment on matters involving a local chapter.
Ryan's latest fight is over the local's failure to give him a copy of its collective bargaining agreement.
Ryan wanted a copy so he could bid on the next phase of work at the county courthouse in White Plains. Though Yonkers Electric is not a party to the agreement, the company would have had to pay union wages and benefits for the court work.
Without those figures Ryan could not estimate what his costs would be and thus could not bid. He said that based on what he believes the union electricians make he could have saved the taxpayers $300,000 if he had bid.
Ryan alleges that Edward Doyle Sr., the head of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Westchester and Putnam, even sent him the wrong wage figures in order to mislead him into submitting a high bid so that a union contractor would get the job. Doyle has refused to comment and has not returned subsequent calls.
Pro-union politicians also do not escape Ryan's blasts when he thinks they're not playing fair.
Last September, he led a group of non-union contractors and workers to a meeting of county legislators to protest a proposal that would require a company bidding on a public job to have an apprenticeship training program.
Ryan and other non-union contractors said the requirement would hurt small non-union contractors who could not afford the training programs.
Ryan had members of his group attend the meeting in T-shirts with a red Ghostbusters-style slash across a picture of Legislator Richard Wishnie, a supporter of the proposal. Wishnie, a retired electrician, is a former Local 3 member.
Wishnie said last week that he believes Ryan's ire was misdirected and that Yonkers Electric has had trouble keeping up with the schedule for the ongoing second phase of work at the county courthouse.
"Mr. Ryan has some serious conflicts with Local 3 and he has a problem with anybody and anything associated with Local 3," he said.
He makes it clear, though, that Ryan's style grates on him.
"It's sad," Wishnie said. "I think he has a lot of energy. If he'd only put that energy in a positive place, he'd be so much better off."
Ryan did not always feel harshly about the union. He recalled joining the local as an apprentice after high school and being accepted by veteran members.
The relationship became rocky in the late 1980s when the union threatened to yank his membership because Ryan was running his own small company while also working as a union electrician. His company did work in houses and small businesses, but did not pay union benefits or wages.
Ryan recalls feeling deeply conflicted. The pro-union values imbued by William and the heat from the local pushed him one way.
But mathematics and ambition pulled him the other way. He knew his company could not compete with small non-union contractors if it had to pay union wages and benefits.
When leaders were about to throw him out of the local, Ryan saved them the trouble. He pulled out a letter of resignation and walked out.
A few years later it was the union asking Ryan to come back.
Several things had changed. Local 501 had merged with Local 3, forming a new organization. Also, by now Ryan's business was prospering.
Most importantly, he said, the union now had a separate wage and benefits scale for workers doing residential and other small jobs. Those wages and benefits were more modest than those union workers got on larger jobs, making it easier for union contractors to compete with non-union shops for small jobs.
Ryan agreed to return and his business boomed for the next five years as the longest economic expansion in history rolled. Yonkers Electric landed lucrative work in public housing projects, schools, office buildings and wastewater plants, among others.
But the marriage soured after Yonkers Electric was chosen to build a substation at the Brooklyn Naval Yard.
At first, Ryan was thrilled to have the job, his first in New York City, but his excitement turned to concern when he met Howard Cohen, a powerful union business agent in Brooklyn. He said Cohen told him he had to hire a foreman from the city.
Ryan wanted his brother Russ and another man he trusted, Bob Haulser, to be foremen. Cohen finally agreed but only after Ryan promised that his brother and Haulser would not touch the tools or speak directly to the workers.
Ryan said he is convinced that Cohen wanted to turn the project into a fiasco and force him out because he did not want a non-New York contractor working in the city.
Cohen did not return calls seeking comment.
But Ryan said Cohen rarely sent enough men to the site. The workers he did send included an electrician who was afraid of electricity.
At one point, a union steward stopped the job because he decided Ryan did not have the proper eyewashing kit available in case a worker got something in his eye. Ryan sent someone to a store in Albany to get the right kit.
Then the steward stopped the job again, saying that the manholes where crews would work needed to be cleaned to be safe. Ryan hired a contractor to clean the holes, adding to the project's costs.
By late summer 2000 the job was behind schedule and the owner told Ryan he had three days to make changes or his company, which had posted a $10 million bond, would be fired.
A distraught Ryan thought his business was wrecked. He went that night to drown his sorrows at a Yonkers bar and restaurant.
But while Ryan drank "like there was no tomorrow, like there would be no more beer tomorrow" his luck changed, he said. He rubbed elbows with a man who said he was a high-voltage cabling professional looking for work.
Even better, the man told Ryan he had friends with the same skills and were looking for work.
"He does exactly what I needed to get done!" Ryan said, his voice rising in excitement. "It was a miracle!"
But first he had to get rid of the union workers. He went to the site the next day and ranted that the union had won and he was going out of business — even though he knew he wasn't.
Soon, the non-union workers finished the work ahead of schedule.
Two years later, when Local 3's collective bargaining agreement was about to expire, Ryan decided he wanted to negotiate his own contract with the union, rather than be a party to the one that covered other union contractors.
His said he asked in negotiations that he be able to hire workers from any source and not have to rely on the union to send him workers.
The union refused and Yonkers Electric was once again a non-union contractor.
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