If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Dan McNulty, Director of Operations for the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions Recovery Council, who is in recovery, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast for Trades Day to discuss the Recovery Council. The organization grew from individual Locals doing their own informal recovery work into a statewide model that is being studied by other state building trades councils across the country.
The council's core principle is that a member who fears losing work will never seek help until they hit rock bottom. As such, the union's role is to stand between the member and that outcome by providing peer support, business agent advocacy with contractors, a path back to work and a community that does not give up on them.
McNulty described stand-downs where union peers tell their stories to construction crews. He also spoke about a contractor roundtable held every six months to align union and employer recovery practices. Further discussion included free Narcan distribution to trades and apprenticeship programs. He also had a message for every state building trades council considering this work: your Local already has the people; you just need to unearth them.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988.
Dan McNulty came to the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions from community organizing and the Labor Guild, a labor education program in Braintree, Mass. He has been with the state council for approximately eight years. He is also in recovery himself, which is why, when the national building trades asked Massachusetts to study the informal recovery networks that had grown up within individual Locals, he jumped at the opportunity to help people.
What he found was that virtually every trade in Massachusetts was doing something on recovery: in some Locals, it is a full-time position, other Locals have a business agent who is in the field and also in recovery, and there are also small meetings in Union Halls drawing on AA traditions and building something specific to the union culture. No one was coordinating. No one was sharing what was working. Sadly, every union was losing members to the same crisis.
The Massachusetts Building Trades Recovery Council was born around five years ago from a simple idea: get those people in a room to talk and learn from each other. Let them leverage the collective power of union benefits and union relationships to build something none of them could build alone. The motto on the website says it plainly: no stigma, no shame, only solidarity.
McNulty said the Recovery Council's work is built on one key insight: members who believe that seeking help will cost them their jobs will avoid asking for it until they hit rock bottom. In construction, the consequences of hitting rock bottom can be permanent.
The Recovery Council addresses that fear directly. A member in crisis does not have to face their contractor alone. A business agent who is publicly in recovery will intercede on their behalf, advocate with the contractor for a path back to work and stay connected through the process. The member knows that before they pick up the phone, their union has their back. This changes the calculus entirely as members seek help earlier and the outcomes are better.
McNulty said the best union members the Recovery Council has seen are members in recovery, because for them, the union became something more than a job. It became a community. It became hope. When they got better, they wanted to give back, which is how the peer support network sustains itself.
One of the council's primary tools is the stand-down: a contractor stops a job, and union peers, including business agents and rank-and-file members, stand up in front of the crew and tell their stories. These stories are raw and personal. McNulty said he has been in rooms with hundreds of workers who did not want to be there for a presentation, and watched the room go completely silent when a 60-year-old electrician started describing the same experience the person next to him was living through and had never told anyone about.
The recognition of hearing your own words come out of someone else's mouth is the same mechanism that makes AA effective. It tells people they are not uniquely broken. It tells them that someone got through it. It tells them that the union will not abandon them if they ask for help. McNulty said the phone rings a dozen times the day after a stand-down, with members saying they think they need help.
Stand-downs also take place on mixed job sites, with non-union workers in the crowd alongside union members. The Recovery Council debated whether to limit this work to union jobsites, but the decision was unanimous, of course not. A non-union worker who hears a union member's story and sees union members nod and say it helped them is the most powerful organizing the Council does. It shows, in the most personal way possible, what it means to belong to a union.
Every six months, the Massachusetts Building Trades Recovery Council holds a contractor roundtable. Union peer supports, employee assistance program representatives and general and subcontractors sit in the same room and talk. They discuss the programs, how they work, what contractors are seeing on jobsites and how to build more success stories. The goal is to close the aftercare gap.
McNulty explained that detox and treatment are only part of the equation. The weeks and months after a member returns to work are often the most vulnerable. If the union is not following up and the contractor is not keeping the member connected, relapse will likely occur. The partner contractors understand that aftercare is not charity; it is an investment in workers they trained and want to keep. They do walkthroughs and ask the union to do follow-up stand-downs. They treat the member's return as something to support, not just tolerate.
McNulty said Greater Boston has several general contractor partners who have made this work genuinely collaborative. He described it as labor-management cooperation being built at scale.
The Massachusetts Building Trades Recovery Council works through a nonprofit, the Building Trades Unions Recovery Fund, to distribute free, fully subsidized Narcan. Not only is the opioid overdose reversal medication given to all trades at jobsites, but it is also distributed to Registered Apprenticeship Programs. McNulty said the response surprised everyone who expected stigma to create hesitation. He said that when Narcan is put in front of apprentices, they grab it like seagulls. There is no shame, no reluctance. The attitude is: why would I not have this tool?
McNulty explained that this reaction captures something important about where the culture in the trades is moving. Young people joining Registered Apprenticeship Programs are not embarrassed by the conversation. They understand the reality of the industry. What they need is to know that their Local Union will be there if they need it, and the Recovery Council is building exactly that message into the apprenticeship experience.
Five or six states, including New Mexico, Wisconsin and New York, have already contacted the Massachusetts Recovery Council for guidance. McNulty said the model is not complicated and does not require doing everything at once. The starting point is getting the Locals together to find out what each one is doing on recovery. They share information about which treatment facilities are trustworthy and which are not, plus identify members who are publicly in recovery and willing to step up and help.
He said the biggest surprise for state councils considering this work is how many members are ready to put their cell phone number on a website and be available to a Brother or Sister in crisis. Those people are already in every Local. They are waiting to be asked.
McNulty presented the Massachusetts model at a national building trades gathering alongside John Dowd of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and said he has materials available for any state council that wants to understand what a recovery council does in plain terms. The contact information is at massbuildingtrades.org/recovery.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or a mental health crisis, call or text 988. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across all 50 states and US territories.
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