It has become one of the largest trade unions in the United States, and through chapters, and locals, there is international cooperation that poises the brotherhood for a global role.

The two men organized groups for collective bargaining, and started a newspaper called The Carpenter to facilitate their idea of a national union.

The cornerstone of local and regional affiliations in support of common goals was laid out to show ways to maximize the unions bargaining potential.

The union also faced fierce pressures from outside to exclude black carpenters: in 1919 supervisors from the Great Southern Lumber Company, the mayor of Bogalusa, Louisiana, and local businessmen affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, attacked and killed four union organizers who had attempted to organize black and white lumber mill workers.

After the death of president James Kirby in 1915, it frequently disaffiliated from the AFL's Building Trades Department to protest those decisions it lost.

While the open shop drive may have stalled the Carpenters' growth during the decade, it did not cause the severe membership losses and wage cuts that other unions suffered.

McCarthy was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1909, while unionists riding the wave of populist enthusiasm won office in many other communities.

The Carpenters fought these same open shop battles a second time, after the end of World War I, when employers tried to impose their "American Plan"[clarification needed] in the centers of union strength, such as San Francisco and Chicago.

The Union at first opposed unemployment insurance, consistent with the conservative politics of the AFL and the deep-seated opposition of its President William Hutcheson to governmental intervention of any sort in labor and employment matters.

This dispute came to a head at the AFL's convention in Atlantic City in 1935, when Hutcheson interrupted a speech by a representative of the committee that was attempting to organize tire factory workers with a point of order.

That forced marriage was not successful, as most of these workers soon bolted to form the International Woodworkers of America and to join the CIO several years later after a recognition strike.

The government claimed that the union's traditional methods of protecting its members' work — jurisdictional strikes, resistance to work-displacing technology, and featherbedding — were illegal restraints of trade.

After a long and drawn out strike caused by a divide and conquer strategy of the producers, CSU found itself forced out of Hollywood, leaving the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees as the primary representative of back lot crafts.

The 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 Federal Court of Appeals first questioned, then approved the United States Department of Labor's failure to treat these Councils as "local unions" for purposes of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act's requirements governing local union elections, the department has announced its intent to reconsider its existing regulations on this issue.

The Carpenters disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO in 2001, citing complaints about the National Federation's failure to follow up on its program to organize the unorganized.