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 beginning and how the building trades unions’ attacks on the ICBA founders only knit those open shop icons more closely together.
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.
You ask any of the founders about those early days in ICBA and they all say the same thing: this became a close-knit group. Almost family.
They had all joined for their own reasons, of course. Equality of opportunity was one of them. Remembered Elmer Verigin’s wife, Marilyn: “I believe in fairness… so I believe in what Elmer started, in making sure that everybody gets a chance to work on any project. We were taught that by our parents, and we were trying to teach it to our kids.” Bill Kerkhoff echoed the sentiment, when asked what united the ICBA’s founders: “Fairness. Why do we not have the right to equal treatment as the union contractors?”
The Verigins
Free choice was also among the principles that inspired ICBA’s founding. “Unions have had their place, and we respect those that want to have a union, but don’t try to put it down my throat when my people don’t want it,” said Larry Fisher. “So it was just that free spirit really and the need – seeing what was happening in the construction industry, that there wasn’t the ability to go out and do construction as an open shop person.” Jim Hartshorne put it similarly: “If they could sell my guys that they could do a better job with joining the union, well that’s fine. But don’t beat them up or beat me up or stop my job or let me lay my guys off because they weren’t in the union.”
Early members quickly became very fond of one another and the support they received. “They’re just salt of the earth people,” reflected Fisher. “They had good principles, they believed in things and they were willing to fight for things that they believed in. So there was a camaraderie and a spirit there – there was nothing better.”
“In a way all of us at the time, we were of a special mould,” said Axel Gringmuth. “There was something in us, you know, where we felt you have to fight, you have to be involved. It’s your civic duty in a way and we will manage it and we will put in the effort.”
A quilt put together for the 1980 convention
That resolve was heightened by the collective strength ICBA helped its members gain. “They didn’t like the fact that they didn’t have a choice,” said Myrtle-Anne Rempel. “And when people would attack them, they became stronger instead of giving in. And because there were like-minded people around them, they just felt they had a group that would be there for them.”
Despite the scope of the challenges early members faced, it “wasn’t all tears and fighting,” as Gringmuth put it. Conventions and other ICBA meetings were also social affairs. “In the early days at the conventions there’d always be a guitar out and we’d be whooping and hollering and singing songs,” recalled Don Weitzel.
For the Koechls, Rempels, Kerkhoffs, Remples and many others, the 1970s would test but never break the strength of their commitments to equal opportunity and free choice – for both themselves and their employees.
“Convictions were so strong that, you know, they just believed in what they were doing and if you ran across the concrete wall you’d step back, go sideways and find a hole in the wall and just keep marching on,” said Fisher.
