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 early 1980s, when a terrible recession highlighted the need for open shop options in B.C.
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.
The early 1980s were grim economically. British Columbia was gripped by a severe, causing unemployment to nearly double and a multi-year decline in construction volumes. It was incredibly tough for company owners to stay afloat.
But the Building Trades Unions grossly misread the circumstances. Unionized contractors found themselves increasingly squeezed between clients who needed cost efficiencies more than ever, and unions that continued to insist on significant wage increases. Craft union wages and benefits jumped more than 12 per cent in 1983 alone. It was an increasingly impossible position for many unionized contractors.
As early as 1980, the Victoria Times reported that “use of non-union workers in the B.C. construction industry is increasing and industry officials say this will continue to grow as long as developers and contractors seek ways to reduce expenses.”
Wilson M. Beck
The unions noticed, but didn’t adapt. Construction Labour Relations Association President Chuck McVeigh called the trend “rampant”, and even Building Trades Council President Roy Gauthier was willing to concede “unionism is suffering” at least outside the Lower Mainland. Tellingly though, Gauthier dismissed the warnings about growing non-union market share as a mere “tactical position” in the context of that year’s bargaining.
ICBA members, on the other hand, saw that competition was fierce for sparse work and moved quickly to find ways to deliver better value for their project owners.
“The economic downturn affected the decisions that people were making regarding construction,” said Wilson Beck of Wilson M. Beck Insurance, an ICBA Life Member. “And for every tender that came out, there was a list of bidders that were into the high teens.”
ICBA member and former director Ron Karras worked in the unionized sector in the early 1980s, before establishing his own open shop formwork company in 1985, and recalls it as a difficult period. He remembers an Amalgamated Construction Association – the precursor to the Vancouver Regional Construction Association – hosting a Christmas lunch that featured two female mud-wrestlers – one representing unionized contractors and the other open shop. He didn’t find it particularly funny. “It was making a joke out of our livelihood,” he says. “The union guys, we were under the gun. We were losing jobs left, right and centre.”
In retrospect, Philip Hochstein – who became ICBA executive vice president in the mid-1980s – believes the economic downturn may well have been instrumental in launching the open shop sector towards dominance. “The market was ready for a change to end a monopoly because the monopoly was abused,” he said. Happily, though, the economic downturn proved to be a crisis that wasn’t wasted. Open shop contractors saw the client demand and did what was needed to build up their capacity and portfolio of projects.
Wilson Beck’s company was equally open to working with union and non-union construction clients, and therefore played an important role in this regard. “To me, there was no difference,” he said. “They were businesspeople. They were trying to succeed in what they were doing. I was trying to succeed in what I was doing.” He was also willing to invest the effort to help smaller and emerging contractors: “We took the time to spend with these guys saying, ‘you don’t qualify for surety now, you don’t qualify to get a bond now, but this is what you have to do to be qualified.’”
Many non-union contractors had already made significant progress by the mid-1980s, albeit at an incremental pace. But circumstances were aligning that would create more dramatic change, and forever alter perceptions of what open shop contractors were capable of.
The construction market was about to tip heavily to open shop.
*Wilson Beck passed away in 2022. His son, Dave Beck, runs WMB Insurance Services and is a member of the ICBA Board of Directors.
