ICBA celebrates 50 years of serving open shop construction this year, and we are looking back every week at some of the significant moments, milestones, and people who helped ICBA become Canada’s largest construction association.
Today, as we celebrate Open Shop Apprentices Week and host our third annual Red Seal graduation dinner, we look back at the formation of our apprenticeship program.
ICBA running its own apprenticeship program had been talked about as far back as 1977, but it was Philip Hochstein who finally got it off the ground in 1986.
Phil’s pitch to members was easy: ICBA does the hard, bureaucratic work of getting apprentices through the government’s system, and the member companies do what they do best – train young workers. The workers benefited too, with more opportunities and a network of companies they could transfer between without losing their apprenticeships.
Early association leaders such as Elmer Verigin and Christina Koechl – both of whom made large commitments to training in their own businesses – often reinforced for fellow ICBA members the need to take training seriously. “The responsibility for maintaining a skilled and efficient workforce rests on our shoulders for we have chosen not to rely on any particular union for our pool of labour,” Koechl told delegates to ICBA’s 1986 convention. There was nevertheless a lingering belief in the broader business community that the unionized side of the industry made a uniquely important contribution to apprenticeship. In its submission in the Concerned Contractors case in 1986, for example, the B.C. Business Council suggested that if the unionized construction sector withered away due to its competitive failings the whole viability of apprenticeship would be threatened.
The Business Council was dead wrong.
ICBA’s apprentice program was a smash success. Within a decade, the share of B.C. apprentices sponsored by ICBA and open shop companies was nearly 75%. Today, it’s more than 82%, and ICBA is the single largest sponsor of trades apprentices in B.C., with more than 2,500 in our network, and thousands more sponsored directly by open shop companies.
“The fact of the matter is the non-union sector was always training more people than the union sector, always,” said Hochstein. Open shop training, he said, was simply never tracked or quantified, and since the unionized sector used to dominate apprenticeship boards and advisory committees, it was assumed its actual training role was bigger than it in fact was.
In the early 2000s, ICBA’s role in apprenticeships had grown to the point that ICBA VP Gord Stewart was asked to help the new Industry Training Authority (ITA) refine the system. The building trades unions, having watched their market share of apprentices slip badly, badmouthed the ITA wherever and whenever they could.
Gord Stewart
Stewart was at an apprenticeship-related conference when a member of the Canadian Labour Congress had the podium and as Stewart put it, “created such a demonic straw man out of the ITA.” It fell to Stewart, a member of the ITA’s first board, to take the microphone and challenge the hostility and mischaracterizations. “The whole room absolutely exploded,” he recalled, including shouts of “fascist” from a particularly exercised trade union representative who initially seemed intent on rushing towards Stewart for a physical confrontation.
That was an extreme reaction on the part of interests that saw themselves losing control over apprenticeship, and that resented the central role ICBA was playing in the process. As ICBA reported to its members: “special interest groups that have long dominated the industry training infrastructure and the regulatory framework have begun to fight like cornered cats to prevent the system from evolving;” and there were hysterical reactions “ranging from tiresome to ludicrous” at a series of packed stakeholder forums in early 2003.
“I was actually shocked about how much resistance there was to what to me seemed like pretty practical, simple kinds of changes,” said Jim Utley, who also sat on the ITA’s first board. But practical though the changes may have been, collectively they amounted to a re-design of the training system. The centuries-old institution of apprenticeship – still intrinsically linked in many people’s minds to traditional craft structures and union schools – was being tampered with. As Brian Clewes, ITA’s first CEO, put it: “There was great angst about what’s going to happen next from all the different partisan people – the union associations, business, colleges, apprentices. There was great uncertainty at that particular point because they knew change was coming.”
So it fell to the new Gordon Campbell BC Liberal Government, Stewart, Clewes and the ITA Board to fix the system after the NDP’s mismanagement of it during the 1990s.
Two features of the apprenticeship system were particularly problematic. The NDP, at the behest of their union allies, had designated 11 common trades as “compulsory” – meaning that only registered apprentices and ticketed tradespeople were allowed to do work within the scope of the trade. They also brought in a requirement for a one-to-one ratio of apprentices to journeypersons. In practice, these requirements limited entry into and supply of labour within these trades and created inefficiencies. Labourers and summer students, for example, were not allowed to do the less skilled tasks within the scope of a compulsory trade, and contractors often could not hire the number of apprentices that they could have effectively deployed and trained. “For our members, particularly in the compulsory trades, where you actually had to have ticketed workers or apprentices but you could only hire so many apprentices, it restricted your ability to grow your business,” said Stewart.
The requirements also led to some absurdities, particularly in the context of public contracts where all trades were treated as compulsory. During the massive repair effort in the wake of the leaky condo crisis, for example, people doing wall demolition as part of the envelope repair process had to have a trades ticket, Stewart says, so they took interior drywall training even though it had nothing to do with what was effectively an entirely new type of work that they were performing. “We were sending guys to school to learn something they don’t need to learn for something they don’t do,” he said.
The new ITA, under the Campbell BC Liberals, got back to basics. “The group we got together was really focused on value for taxpayer dollar,” said Stewart, “and on creating market-based approaches to apprenticeship training. We were going to align the training programs with what was actually going on in the workplace.” The ITA itself was up and running by early 2004, with Clewes at its helm at CEO. Stewart said it was an intentional decision to hire someone from outside government. “We got a guy in Brian who was a change agent, and smart and courageous and he worked really well with the board to implement the vision.”
Under ITA, compulsory trades and apprenticeship ratios were no more, with public and worker safety being addressed by other agencies with more relevant mandates. ITA itself was much leaner that its NDP-dominated predecessor, with a tighter focus on credentialing, and it operated under the direction of a predominantly employer board. New structures were created for industry engagement as part of the effort to better match training outcomes with market needs. Funding to colleges and other training providers was tied to the outcomes they produced, and there was a renewed emphasis on training flexibility and innovation. Despite strong resistance from apprenticeship traditionalists, more emphasis was placed on competency-based assessment and on development of modularized and specialized programs and credentials.
The new system was quick to produce strong results. In 2008/09 the number of registered training participants and the number of apprenticeship credentials awarded were both well over double what they’d been in 2003/04, while the number of registered sponsors was up by about 60 per cent. ICBA’s own number of apprentices over the first 10 years of ITA operations grew from 365 to nearly 1,400. (Today, it’s more than 2,500.)
However, in politics no victory is ever final. The BC NDP came back to power in 2017 and to placate their building trades allies, brought back compulsory trades and ratios. The policy battle continues, but there is no denying the success of the ICBA model: ICBA is far and away the top sponsor of apprentices in B.C., and the open shop trains 82% of all trades apprentices in the province.
