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, we wind the clock back to the 1970s and look at far how we’ve come in the past 50 years.
The interviews and other original research on which the ICBA50 series is based were conducted by writer Kevin Hanson. We appreciate Kevin’s work capturing the people, events, and milestones that shaped ICBA’s first half-century.
It’s hard to explain to today’s construction professionals just how much of a hammerlock the building trades unions had on B.C. in the 1970s. Basically, only single-family homes were built by the open shop, with unionized contractors having a monopoly on public tenders.
This lack of competition made the union bosses ever more greedy and out-of-touch with what builders were facing. High costs and inefficiencies were baked into collective agreements, but extensive labour strife still prevailed, and labour legislation took a leftward turn. “B.C.’s 14 major trade unions and their employers were the dominant builders of apartments, banks, mills, factories, officer towers and retails stores around the province,” as BC Business described it. “Wage demands in construction, as elsewhere, tended to be met, and the costs of each successive contract casually passed on to the public or private owner.”
Peter Gall
“In that time, they had 100 per cent of the industry, except for residential construction, and the building trades were all powerful,” said Peter Gall, long-term legal counsel to ICBA and now an association life member. “And everybody accepted that was the only way to go.”
At least three-quarters of all B.C. construction work through most of the 1970s was done union. Non-affiliation clauses in collective agreements reinforced that dominance by enabling building trades union members to refuse to work alongside non-union employees. These clauses gave the building trades unions strong leverage in what were typically “top down” organizing efforts, in which it was made clear to a contractor that access to work depended on signing an agreement. Non-affiliation clauses also made it more difficult for non-union contractors to find sub-trades. “Half our job was to find companies that would actually work for us,” says early-era member Jim Hartshorne of Keycorp Developments.
From 1974 to 1976, unionized construction was further insulated from competition by the NDP’s Public Works Fair Employment Act, which required that all public works go to contractors with a building trades collective agreement. This reinforced what some saw as a cozy relationship on the union side of the industry. “Their role [large general contractors] in all this has always been under-estimated,” said former Social Credit MLA Bud Smith. “So if the rule was that you could only use union labour, then they got all the work, all the big jobs, without having to step up and say we’ve got a monopoly ourselves. They let the union do the dirty work for them and they got the benefit from it.”
In May 1972, construction projects totaling half billion dollars – a fifth of that year’s projected volume – were idled by a labour dispute affecting nearly all of B.C.’s 35,000 unionized construction employees. 1974 saw some $400 million in projects struck after electrical workers walked off in May, to be followed by 10 other unions days later. Vancouver’s Bentall Complex and Britannia Community Centre were among the major projects delayed by months as a result of that year’s disruption.
Bud Smith
Compounding all this was the industry’s need to adapt to the new realities of the NDP-created Labour Code, whose processes, adjudicators and decisions were seen by many non-union contractors as weighted against their interests. The composition of the Labour Relations Board was among the first policy issues the nascent ICBA took on, when it called for appointees who could represent non-union views.
“From 1972 to 1975 [the NDP government’s term], I truly believe there was so much chaos and costs – and changes in codes and relationships that cost just millions and millions of dollars to the province and the people,” said early-era ICBA member Larry Fisher of the Lark Group.
Today, the script has totally flipped. It is ICBA members that perform most of the work in B.C., and 85% of all construction professionals are open shop. They build everything from the single family home to the largest infrastructure projects in the province. Only a forced, unfair monopoly (in the form of so-called “Community Benefits Agreements”) in a handful of projects – forced by the NDP – have kept the building trade unions afloat in recent years.
Today, the open shop also sponsors more than 82% of all trades apprentices in B.C., and wages and benefits are routinely better in the open shop. The building trades unions cling to an outdated model of holding down young workers, tightly controlling the number of people in the workforce, and refusing to go beyond their tiny sliver of the worksite – thus continuing to make them less competitive than ever.
In fewer words: the open shop is winning big in the marketplace.
