🔒Q&A: Fred Taylor strives for progress

In both of his roles, Fred Taylor seeks to improve the lives of people in Worcester. As the leader of the carpenters union Local 336, he works with developers and large organizations to have union labor on construction projects. At the NAACP, he advocates behind the scenes and publicly to ensure public institutions are inclusive to people of color. 

How’s everything been going with the union?

It’s been going alright. There’s a lot of building happening in the city of Worcester. We have gotten a few major construction projects, but there’s been some major construction projects we haven’t been a part of. We would like that to change.

When you are in a union, you have a better opportunity to move into the middle class with safe jobs and good benefits you can retire on. To achieve that for our workers, we are always advocating to have more of a local workforce on projects.

What are some of the union projects?

The new $325-million research building at UMass Chan Medical School and the $300-million new Doherty Memorial High School are being worked on by our union labor. We have a number of major construction projects in Worcester, but we also have contractors who can do projects as low as $500,000.

On Main Street, we were hoping to have union labor be part of the Silverbrick Group’s project to put 312 apartments downtown, but they ran into some supply issues and that project has been stalled. The Menkiti Group has been doing a number of projects downtown, and we were hoping to get a number of those projects; but we haven’t had much luck so far.

Are developers receptive to using union labor?

One thing people know they can count on us for is workforce, as they know we have the capacity to put the manpower on the project to get the job done. That becomes a problem for the non-unionized contractors, because they can then have reliability issues.

A lot of developers are starting to learn, too, the union is the smart way to spend money. A lot of developers look strictly at the bottom line, and if we’re offering $10 and a non-union shop is offering $7, they go with the $7. Yet, that ends up costing them more in change orders running up the cost. In general, people are viewing unions in more favorable terms.

How about the various efforts by the NAACP? In the two years since George Floyd’s murder, do you see much substantive change, or has it been mostly window dressing?

A little bit of both. Things are improving because the spotlight is on a lot of issues over lack of diversity and inclusion. However, even in the last year, the spotlight has died down a little bit, which makes things harder.

Thank God there haven’t been a lot of major issues like there were two years ago. People realize everyone has cameras now, so they tend to behave better.

The NAACP doesn't seem to be in the spotlight the same way it was in 2020.

I try not to get in a position where I have to make big public statements. Instead, we much prefer to work behind the scenes to fix issues before they become major problems. In Worcester, the mayor and the City Council have started to be more engaged with us as community leaders.

Most notably, the City has removed the police from the public schools. This shows they have been listening, which was a good move forward. Starting in January, there weren’t any police in the schools. Since that time, there have been only 12 felony arrests in the schools. Given there are about 25,000 Worcester Public School students, that is really low, and especially helpful when the people who were against taking the police out of the schools were acting like the sky was going to fall.

The NAACP was very vocal about the resignation of the City of Worcester’s chief diversity officer in March, since it was the third CDO departure since 2016. How do you feel the replacement search is going?

It is too soon to say. The thing that troubled us the most is the short tenure of the people in that position. The City can’t just rush to put someone in that position. The City’s leadership has to give the person in that position the tools to succeed.

Frankly, the person they hire should be a person of color, particularly a Black person. We don’t have any Black people in appointed City leadership. You shouldn’t give them the job just because they are Black, but your leadership needs to reflect the community; and Black people are underrepresented in City leadership.

This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by Brad Kane, WBJ editor.