[3] Those locals, and others established later, often protected their own autonomy jealously, rejecting at least one national contract with the American Bridge Company because it would have reduced their power.

The internal divisions also led the union, which had affiliated with the American Federation of Labor shortly after its formation, to disaffiliate in 1901, only to reaffiliate two years later.

The Iron Workers had successfully repelled the open shop demands of American Bridge Company (or "Ambridge"), an arm of the United States Steel Corporation, in 1903.

When the Iron Workers struck in response, the employers obtained injunctions and local ordinances that barred picketing or limited it to an ineffective display.

Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis was a staunch opponent of labor unions, and the main supporter for the open shop movement in Los Angeles.

Their guilty pleas effectively defeated the campaign of Job Harriman, then running for mayor of Los Angeles as a socialist, and nearly destroyed Darrow's career and reputation.

The federal government then indicted dozens of other Iron Worker officers for conspiring to transport dynamite as part of this campaign; the International's current President, Frank M. Ryan, and one of its future Presidents, Paul "Paddy" Morrin, were convicted along with several other defendants on December 31, 1912, after a trial in which Herbert Hockin, the International Secretary-Treasurer, testified against them.

The Carpenters claimed that pile-driving work, which was done primarily by Iron Workers in many areas, belonged to them and convinced the Building Trades Department to go along with them.

While the passage of the Davis–Bacon Act required payment of the prevailing wage on federal construction projects, the desperate shortage of work allowed some employers to force their employees to pay kickbacks to them to hold on to their jobs.

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, limited construction unions' rights to picket worksites at which non-union contractors were working by barring secondary boycotts.

The Iron Workers and other building trades, caught off guard and used to organizing from the top down, lost large amounts of work to non-union contractors in the decades that followed.

A number of lower-level officers and the union's accounting firm likewise pleaded guilty to related embezzlement and disclosure charges.

Fitch described West's guilty plea as part of a pattern of corruption in the Ironworkers, as he was one of "nine top officials" investigated or indicted for crimes between 1999 and 2002.

Members classified as "apprentices," "probationary," "trainees," "retired shopmen" and "navy retirees" are ineligible to vote in the union.