Jim McNannay, who led Portland-based Bricklayers Local 1 from 1977 to 1994, died Sept. 24 at the age of 88. As business manager, McNannay helped the local survive the hard times of the early 1980s recession, and as trustee on the union’s health and retirement funds, he led changes that benefited generations of retirees.
James Duane McNannay was born Aug. 15, 1938, in Portland, where his father Francis was a state highway bridge inspector. He attended Central Catholic High School and competed in football, boxing and softball, then joined the Army in 1956 and served with the Tenth Infantry Division in Germany through 1962.
After the army, he worked at an electrical manufacturing company, then joined Bricklayers Local 1 in December 1960 as an apprentice. In 1962 he won the union’s regional apprentice competition. After completing his apprenticeship in March 1964, he was elected to the union’s executive board in 1966 and then was elected and reelected as recording secretary-treasurer and assistant business agent.
In 1977, he was elected to Local 1’s top elected office financial secretary and business manager, succeeding Al Thomas.
On March 30, 1981, McNannay was in Washington, D.C. for a legislative conference of the National Building Trades Council when he witnessed the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had just spoken to building trades delegates when McNannay and others filed out to watch his departure from the Washington Hilton Hotel. Just yards away, John Hinckley shot Reagan and his press secretary James Brady. An Ohio Carpenters union delegate grabbed Hinckley until DC police and Secret Service could detain him.
In the 1980s, a devastating national recession, compounded by difficult times in Oregon’s wood products industry, caused prolonged unemployment in construction in Oregon. With McNannay at the helm, the union resisted making contract concessions and worked to maintain relationships with employers.
Meanwhile as pension trustee McNannay led important shifts in strategy that soon had benefits for retirees. Like many union benefit funds at the time, Local 1’s pension held guaranteed investment contracts in which an insurance company would guarantee a certain return on investments and take the risk if earnings fell short. But that meant the companies kept the gains as well. McNannay pushed for a benefit fund strategy that became more common over time in which funds hired their own investment advisors and managers and did their own investing. Within a few years, that made possible big increases in benefits.
Similarly, McNannay thought the local could get better and more cost-effective results by bringing benefit administration in-house rather than relying on a third party administrator. He hired Trudy Horn as administrator to lead what became known as the Masonry Industry Trust Administration, and other trowel trades locals soon joined.
McNannay also trusted his instinct to steer clear of Capital Consultants, a local investment management company that offered too-good-to-be-true returns. In 2000 it was revealed that the firm had operated an Ponzi-like scheme, resulting in the largest employee benefit investment fraud case in U.S. history, with losses totaling $500 million across more than 65 union trusts.
In 1989, McNannay hired John Mohlis as business agent and organizer. When McNannay retired, Mohlis succeeded him and eventually became the top elected officer of the Oregon Building Trades Council. Mohlis and other union officers credit McNannay as an effective teacher and mentor who set an example of basing every decision on what was best for members and their families.
McNannay also oversaw the 1993 merger of Eugene Local 6 into Local 1.
Within the wider labor movement, McNannay was the face of Local 1 for decades. He was a delegate to local and state building trades councils and to the Northwest Oregon Labor Council and Oregon AFL-ClO. And served as president of the Oregon-Washington-Idaho Conference of Bricklayers from 1980 through retirement.
He also served on the board of the Union Labor Retirement Association, which built and ran the Union Manor apartment complexes. And he was involved with LINK Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that used union labor to build affordable housing projects in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Outside work, McNannay liked to go fast. He was a skier, a snowmobiler, a horseback rider, and a motorcycle and auto racer. He was a regular at the famed motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, but retired from motorcycle racing after taking a spill in 1992. Behind the wheel of a 1934 Ford coupe, he participated in outlaw hardtop races on dirt track around Oregon.
McNannay retired in March 1995 at the age of 56.
“A lot of people said a lot of nice things about Jim McNannay at a party marking his retirement as business manager,” the Labor Press reported in May 1994. “They praised his leadership, his integrity, his dedication to his trade and to the labor movement, and they prized his friendship.”
He is survived by family members including his sister Patricia, children Dennis and Patricia and grandchildren Milaina, Arianna, James and McKenzie.
