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 1984 and the Pennyfarthing condo complex – a labour battle we first wrote about HERE.
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 the kind of meeting that happens all the time – a general contractor heading to meet his developer client.
But not in the early 1980s. And not when the GC was Bill Kerkhoff of Kerkhoff Construction. And certainly not when reaching the client’s office involved getting past a large and volatile trade union picket line, that had shut down work on the second phase of the Pennyfarthing condominium complex along Vancouver’s False Creek.
Bill Kerkhoff, ICBA Life Member
“We shouldn’t have gone in there, we were crazy,” said Kerkhoff, 30 years later. His employee Andy Krebs was driving in his vehicle, but it was Kerkhoff’s presence in the passenger seat that lit the fuse of the picketers’ anger. “They saw me in the car,” Kerkhoff recalled. “They were pounding on the car and all four tires were flat in like seconds.” Krebs gunned the car, the picketers moved, and they were inside the site – although not out of peril. “When you get this mob attitude, it’s scary, it really is,” said Kerkhoff.
The vehicle was badly damaged – in addition to the flat tires, it had the “shit kicked out of it” while breaking through the picket, Krebs said – but got them close enough to the developer’s office to take shelter inside. “They were on our tail, we had to get out of there,” Krebs said. “We ran out of that car into that building and went upstairs into the office.” Once there, they called the police.
“And the cops said, ‘what are you talking about? You just walk out of there,’” Krebs recalled. “I said, ‘are you crazy?’”. The police were eventually convinced to come, and Krebs says they cut the power to the building and took the two builders out a darkened stairwell and an emergency exit to where a police car was waiting. It was a pathway to safety, but they didn’t manage to escape the picketers’ notice – the union men kicked the cop car too.
Both men felt fear that day, but neither were shaken in their determination to see the job through to completion. This time, though, they were up against the largest, angriest and most-concerted effort on the part of the building trades unions and their supporters to halt open-shop progress – one that the entire B.C. labour movement threw its muscle behind. Construction work on the site gave way to an intense weeks-long standoff, punctuated by occasional confrontation and violence. It took multiple court and labour board orders and a scathing contempt finding before the unions reluctantly climbed down and allowed order to be restored.
Pennyfarthing became the most dramatic display of the lengths unionized construction interests were prepared to go to try to maintain their privileged access to major urban projects. The ultimate outcome, however, accelerated the already well-underway transformation of the B.C. construction industry.
Pennyfarthing sits on the south shore of False Creek, a short distance from downtown Vancouver. As was the norm at the time, the first phase was done by a unionized contractor (whose controlling shareholder was also a joint venture partner in the development). But the developers were “aghast at the price” the unionized contractor submitted for the next phase, and Kerkhoff Construction came in with a lower bid. A deadlock on the management committee was broken by arbitration and the job was awarded to Kerkhoff Construction on February 7, 1984. Problems with the unions were fully expected. “They made it clear that downtown was going to be off-limits for us,” Bill Kerkhoff said. But the intensity came as a surprise even to him, as it no doubt did to British Columbians generally.
On March 5, 1984, Kerkhoff crews were ready to get started, but were turned away by mass pickets, marking the beginning of a round-the-clock occupation of the site, as union workers massed outside, refusing to allow Kerkhoff employees in – illegally.
Pennyfarthing today
Violence flared as early as March 6, when use of a hose to move pickets back from the property line resulted in a rock thrown in the face of a non-union worker, who required hospitalization and plastic surgery. By March 8, Bill Kerkhoff had a court order limiting pickets to 12 people per entrance – to which the picketers responded the next day by ensuring only 12 of them wore signs, while another 50 or so milled about as “spectators”. On March 12, the Labour Relations Board rejected a common-employer argument the Building Trades had made in an effort to invalidate the contract award, and also prohibited picketing. But despite the legal setbacks, the B.C. labour movement doubled down. The B.C. Federation of Labour declared the Pennyfarthing site “hot”, and voted to support the mass pickets, as well as to pressure the B.C. Central Credit Union to withdraw project financing.
Monday, March 19 was the deadline for compliance with the Labour Relations Board’s cease-and-desist order, but that was not what was on the mind of union leaders. On the Saturday before, Building Trades Council President Roy Gauthier exhorted a gathering of 2,000 members and supporters to “be down here Monday morning”. A thousand or more of them answered the call, on a day when the on-site confrontation peaked (this was described in ICBA 50 #1 HERE). Hundreds of protestors began arriving at dawn, with representatives from virtually every union in the city.
The tone, as least as set by union leaders, was initially somewhat measured. “We’ll obey the law but there will be passive resistance,” Gauthier said, as he walked across the site. “There will be no violence, no provocation.” Al McMurray, secretary-treasurer of the Building Trades Council, was a little more equivocal: “Generally speaking, we do not condone violence nor trespass, arson, thievery, anything like that. What we have here is a passive demonstration.”
Those words were quickly eaten as the unions turned the temperature up.
Two vehicles attempted to enter the site, one belonging to Ewald Rempel of Rempel Bros. Concrete, a Kerkhoff sub-contractor, and one belonging to Kerkhoff Construction itself. They were surrounded by angry mobs of picketers, who aggressively confronted the occupants with taunts and abuse, and were eager to do damage. Rempel was pelted with a mix of “rotten meat, eggs and human waste,” as reported by The Vancouver Sun, and had to be escorted to safety by the police.
Gauthier would later acknowledge that the crowd was beyond control: “I don’t know what will turn those people off at this point in time.” At the end of the volatile and troubling day – a powder keg situation as BCTV described it – the site remained besieged, and the contractors who had a legal right to be working on it had been repelled again.
Picketing also spilled over to other Kerkhoff construction projects during the Pennyfarthing dispute, at which times the determination and commitment of open shop employees was on full display. Some 50 picketers showed up at a Kerkhoff armoury project in Kamloops one day, aggressively blocking access and demanding identification from people wanting to cross. “Because you guys priced yourselves out of work doesn’t mean that I’m not gonna go to work,” one non-union employee told them from behind the wheel of his vehicle. “I’m gonna get in there I just don’t know how.” The picketers told another employee that they’re there to help him, to which he replies simply, “No, I don’t think you are.” Bill Kerkhoff and his employees also endured a broken office window and obscene telephone calls. His project files still contain an anonymous note threatening that the rock through his window would soon by followed by a bomb in his home, although Kerkhoff said he never took such threats seriously.
“I still like to think we live in a reasonably civilized country,” he says, “even though you question it.”
Check back next week for more on the Pennyfarthing saga.
