An Open And Shut Case
Monday, February 3, 2014
(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
In
early December, Eric Gulan
strode across a drop cloth on the carpeted
office floor of AFL-CIO
Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler,
overlooking Lafayette Park across from
the White House in Washington, D.C. He and
three of his fellow union glaziers
hammered out caulking to remove the room’s
old windows—original quarter-inch
panes from the building’s 1953 construction.
Another three glaziers drilled
through the solid steel of the window frames to
prepare for the installation of
new aluminum frames and a set of
energy-efficient double-paned windows. The
AFL-CIO headquarters building is in the midst
of an eight-month energy-saving
retrofit project to not only replace its 525
windows but also upgrade 4,300 light
fixtures, place high-efficiency faucets in
every sink and add new CO2 sensors
to regulate air flow and temperature only when
rooms are in use and new
energy-efficient controls on the building’s
heating and air conditioning units.
And it creates good new jobs for the Glaziers,
IBEW, Steamfitters, Painters,
IUOE, Plumbers and Carpenters…CLICK HERE for Robert
Struckman’s complete
report on
the AFL-CIO Now blog.