Glionna Plumbing Local 12 Massachusetts

Glionna Plumbing grows with Local 12

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When people consider the plumbing contractors that work with Local 12, they often think of the larger shops working at job sites for high-rise towers and other signature projects under construction in and around Boston. For good reason. Members of the Greater Boston Plumbing Contractors Association, which employ Local 12 plumbers, build virtually every major new project in the city. But that’s only part of the story.

There are shops of all sizes, doing a wide variety of work, which are affiliated with Local 12. Shops such as Glionna Plumbing and Heating.

Mike Glionna started the business in 2010 with himself and one employee. Initially, he focused on residential service and light commercial work. Glionna hired two additional plumbers as he developed new clients, including property managers in downtown Boston. The Saugus-based shop also worked on new construction throughout the region, much of it based on the North Shore.

In 2014, Glionna wanted to expand and go after larger projects, especially prevailing-wage, public-bid work. To help grow the business, he brought in Anthony Pitrone to serve as the company’s director of operations. The two friends have known each other for 25 years, dating back to high school when they were classmates at Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational School in Wakefield. After graduating, they apprenticed together for a plumbing contractor. Pitrone worked his way up to foreman at the shop after Glionna left to start his own business.

As part of the company’s expansion, Glionna partnered with his aunt, Mary Jo Mathews. With a background in architectural engineering and experience in the construction industry, Mathews focuses on management issues and keeps the office humming.

Among the projects Glionna and Pitrone were able to land after joining forces was a 10,000-square-foot dialysis clinic in Danvers. That led to more new clinics in Fairhaven and Westborough. The shop also got a project renovating an old public school in Lynn that was converted into Aspire Developmental Services, a private, nonprofit healthcare and educational agency. After bidding public construction jobs, Glionna got its feet wet in the sector with projects for the Mashpee and North Reading housing authorities. The shop also got some bigger projects, including a 32-unit, mixed-use building in South Boston.

“We knew what the endgame was,” Pitrone says. “We always had the idea to go with the union.” He notes that his dad worked for the city of Revere doing maintenance, and Glionna’s father was an operating engineer. “We came from the union world in our families.”

In 2018, Glionna got to work alongside a number of Local 12-affiliated shops when he and a four-person crew helped the recovery efforts in the wake of the natural gas disaster that rocked Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover and disrupted service to about 8,500 Columbia Gas customers.

“Mike and his crew worked incredibly hard and put in a ton of systems in the Merrimack Valley,” says Pitrone. “He bought a box truck and basically lived in it up there for three months.”

At the end of 2018, as the initial recovery efforts were winding down, Glionna became a signatory contractor with Local 12. “We wanted to sign with the union, because we knew it would help us grow our business,” Pitrone explains. “If we had Local 12 behind us, we knew we could get the trained, high-quality plumbers we needed to do any kind of work. There’d be no limit.”

With the union’s backing, Glionna, which is now based in Middleton, has expanded to a 13-member crew and is bidding and securing a lot of new work. One of its public-bid projects is a three-story addition to the McCall Middle School in Winchester. The expansion includes four classrooms, three science labs, gang bathrooms, two locker rooms, and a roof drainage system. Projects under contract include a public safety building in Essex, fire stations in Dracut and Waltham, and Excel Academy, a charter school in East Boston.

Tim Fandel, Local 12’s business manager is thrilled to have Glionna in the fold. “We need to reengage in the public sector,” he says, citing his plans to focus more on municipal and state-funded projects. “We like to take a contractor like Glionna and help them position themselves for the next level of public work.”

Partnering with Local 12 has helped the shop in a number of ways. Pitrone says that the plumbers who work for them are getting great benefits and pay and their morale and happiness has never been better. Also, the training they are receiving through the local is helping them learn and hone skills and enabling the company to go after different types of jobs.

Pitrone says the future is bright and that Glionna Plumbing hopes to double in size over the next few years.

What is a project labor agreement?

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Representing 16 million square feet of development across 161 acres that will span two communities and require 14,000 construction workers over the course of 15 to 20 years, the project labor agreement for the construction of the Suffolk Downs redevelopment will be the largest agreement of its kind for a private-sector project ever in the region. But what is a project labor agreement, exactly?

“Project labor agreements are good, sound public policy,” says Brian Doherty, secretary treasurer and general agent of the Building and Construction Trades Council of the Metropolitan District. “They ensure that all stakeholders involved with construction projects benefit. PLAs are good for developers, contractors, workers, and surrounding communities.”

The concept of a project labor agreement (PLA) dates back to the 1930s, when it was first introduced to help guide complex and massive public projects such as the Hoover Dam in Nevada and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. A PLA establishes the terms and conditions of employment for construction workers prior to breaking ground on a project. It defines a set of agreed-upon expectations for all parties.

To draft a PLA, union labor organizations negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the owner of a project, whether it is a public or private entity. In some cases, general contractors and/or representatives of the communities in which projects are based are also involved in the negotiations. For the Suffolk Downs PLA, general contractor John Moriarty & Associates participated in the development of the agreement along with the project’s owner, the HYM Investment Group, and the building trades unions.

Included among agreements’ terms are elements such as employee wages and benefits, budgets, timelines, accountability and transparency provisions, and community benefits. More recently, issues such as pay equity, gender equity, and diversity equity have been addressed in PLAs, including the one negotiated for the Suffolk Downs project.

By considering and standardizing terms and conditions up front, PLAs help promote productivity, efficiencies, and stability, which engender the quality of the work and the timely completion of projects. The agreements dictate minimum standards that translate into fair treatment for workers, including assurances that they will not be locked out of their jobs. In exchange, workers agree not to strike or picket during the term of the PLA. Should disputes arise, resolution mechanisms are included in the agreement.

“The best way to develop a PLA–and it’s worked for nearly 100 years now–is to anticipate any issues that might come up and resolve them before the project starts,” Doherty says.

The benefits flow in all directions. “The PLA gives us predictability in terms of cost, schedule, and quality,” says Tom O’Brien, HYM founding partner and managing director. “We build all of our jobs with union construction trades.”

While Suffolk Downs is enormous, PLAs are not necessarily used just for large projects. The advantages that they bring can be scaled for projects of any size.

Through the years, PLAs have weathered some storms. In the 1980s and 1990s, anti-worker forces challenged their legality. The issue made its way through the judicial system, ending with the Supreme Court hearing a case regarding the Boston Harbor cleanup in 1993. The court voted unanimously to uphold the use of PLAs on public projects based on the fact that they make sense for both business and labor.

“PLAs just make sense,” Doherty says when asked why the agreements have stood the test of time and remain vital today. “They’re critical to the democratic process. They ensure that when there is economic development, everyone has a seat at the table and shares in economic prosperity.”

Day care that works for parents in the trades

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–Suffolk Downs redevelopment PLA to support new program

Interested in early-morning childcare? Indicate your interest at the Care that Works site.

For any parents of young children, finding good, affordable day care can be a challenge. For plumbers and other people working in the building trades, it can be especially difficult to locate providers that can care for their children. That’s because their workday begins much earlier than most other people in the workforce, and the day care industry just isn’t designed to accommodate them.

What if there was a network of family childcare providers ready to welcome kids into their homes starting at 5 a.m.? Parents would be able to drop off their children and make it to the job site on time. That’s the idea behind Care that Works, a new program developed by Community Labor United. Part of the funds that HYM Investment Group is targeting to equity and inclusion initiatives in the Suffolk Downs project labor agreement will support Care that Works.

“For women in particular, childcare can be a barrier to getting access to good union jobs,” says Lindsay McCluskey, deputy director at Community Labor United. It’s a problem for people currently working in the trades as well as for people wanting to get into the trades. The problem boils down to who is going to watch their kids in the early morning, or what the day care industry refers to as “nonstandard hours.”

To address the issue, Community Labor United formed a coalition of community organizations concerned about childcare, including the apprentice preparedness program, Building Pathways, and unions representing childcare providers. “Together, we thought these groups could really make an impact and come up with solutions,” McCluskey says.

Caring for kids–and childcare providers

Care that Works is assembling a group of family childcare providers that would agree to accept children beginning in the early morning each day. As opposed to large group childcare facilities, family childcare providers are licensed by the state to care for up to 10 children in their home. This spring, Care that Works plans to launch a pilot program that would include five to ten family childcare providers.

At the same time, the organization is reaching out to construction workers and people enrolled in union-affiliated training programs to determine the need for early-morning childcare. To find out more information and to indicate your interest, go to carethatworks.org.

Once it has gathered families seeking childcare and providers that want to offer early-morning care, it will match them up.

“It‘s both about making sure that families working in construction have access to the childcare they need and recognizing that childcare workers deserve to have a living wage,” says McCluskey about the goals of the program. In recognition of the sacrifices that family childcare providers would make in changing their schedules and waking up earlier, Care that Works would compensate them with a rate differential. “Our campaign has a workers-rights perspective for childcare providers,” McCluskey adds.

In addition to the Suffolk Downs redevelopment PLA, other projects are supporting Care that Works. For example, MP Boston will be providing funds to the program through the project labor agreement it signed with the building trades unions for Winthrop Center, a building now under construction in downtown Boston.

Community Labor United works with grassroots organizations and labor unions on a variety of campaigns and initiatives. Among its programs is the Green Justice Campaign, which brings energy efficiency upgrades and jobs to Boston’s low-income communities and communities of color, and Public Transit, Public Good, which advocates for an affordable and efficient public transportation system that invests in workers and meets the needs of riders.

America’s most famous tool was invented here

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The next time you reach for a pipe wrench, you might want to consider that you owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Stillson. He was an engineer at the Boston company, J.J. Walworth Manufacturing, and invented the Stillson wrench in 1869. Some 150 years after he helped revolutionize plumbing, modern-day versions of Stillson’s ubiquitous tool remain virtually unchanged.

A recent Boston Globe article written by Michael Fitzgerald featured the Stillson wrench. Bearing the headline, “The best local invention we’ve forgotten,” Fitzgerald traced the tool’s development. He indicated that the wrench gained such currency, people referred to it generically as a “Stillson,” much the same way that we use the term “Google” today. According to the writer, it became America’s most famous tool.

Stillson did not invent the first adjustable wrench. Credit for that goes to Solyman Merrick of Springfield, Massachusetts, who, in 1835, patented a wrench with jaws that could be moved by turning a screw. What Stillson did was add angled teeth to the jaws and make the head loose. Those two innovations enabled his wrench to more firmly grip metal pipes, which were replacing wooden pipes in the plumbing trade. The versatile tool allowed plumbers to work with a variety of pipes and fasteners, including ones that were worn. Because of its flexibility, plumbers could replace whole sets of fixed wrenches with a single Stillson.

According to Fitzgerald, “In the mid-19th century, there was no more exciting place to work in the plumbing industry than Boston.” In addition to the Stillson wrench, the Walworth company also developed the concept of steam heating systems and manufactured the Walworth radiator. The Trimont Company, based in Roxbury from 1902 to 1954, was also known for its wrenches as well as other pipefitting tools.

Following the conventions of the day, when Stillson brought the prototype of his wrench to his bosses at Walworth for consideration, they insisted that the inventor apply for the patent and own the tool. Through a licensing arrangement with the Boston company to manufacture and sell the wrench, Stillson earned fees estimated at $100,000 throughout the course of his life. That’s equivalent to $3 million in 2020.

Walworth relocated to Texas in the 1950s and then to Mexico in the 1970s. After the patent expired, other companies issued their own versions of the Stillson.

Interestingly, Walworth’s factory was located in Cambridge in a building that had previously housed a horse-drawn carriage manufacturer. Later, Edwin Land bought the building and used it to develop his Polaroid instant camera. Today, MIT owns the space and runs a company known as the Engine there. It welcomes tech startups in the energy, biotech, and manufacturing fields.

Who knows? One of them may develop something as game changing as the Stillson wrench.