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 and the fight to reform the B.C. Labour Code.
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.
One of the longest running advocacy files for ICBA has been fighting for fairness in the B.C. Labour Relations Code.
In 1982, Ralph Purdy appeared before the Labour Relations Board in Re Dover Corp. (Canada) Ltd. ICBA wasn’t a party to the case, but Purdy made submissions on its behalf – a non-lawyer doing so alongside prominent members of the labour bar – and presented a petition signed by 186 independent businesspeople. The case involved an attempt by the International Union of Elevator Constructors to force employees of Richmond Elevator to become part of a multi-employer bargaining unit, even though it had failed in its attempt to organize them.
In a significant decision – in which Purdy no doubt took considerable satisfaction – the board dismissed the application, finding that it was “obliged to give consideration to the desires of employees who do not wish to bargain collectively, just as it is required to give weight to the desires of those who do.”
Lawyer Don Jordan acted pro bono for employees of Richmond Elevator. He says the Code provision that the union relied on had always horrified him, and he focused on freedom of association arguments based on the brand new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was through this case that he got to know Purdy, and that he and his law partner, Peter Gall, first became associated with ICBA.
Peter Gall
Purdy’s presence on the list of appearances in Dover Corp. indicates the strong interest ICBA took from its earliest days in B.C.’s Labour Relations Code. That might seem counterintuitive, since the Code regulates collective bargaining relationships, which in the early 1980s most ICBA members studiously avoided becoming part of. But ICBA had recognized the huge impact the Code could have both on the rights of individual employees – as in the Dover case – and on the broader evolution of the construction sector.
The Labour Relations Code is a legacy of the Dave Barrett NDP government, and was unlike anything else in Canada when it was enacted in 1973. It removed labour disputes from the jurisdiction of the courts, altered the thresholds of support and procedures relating to unionization, and allowed for first contracts to be imposed.
It made British Columbia one of the most dynamic places to practice labour law. Peter Gall first came to the province at the encouragement of his teacher and mentor Paul Weiler, who was the first chair of the Labour Relations Board and highly influential in the early interpretation of the Code. “The labour field in the ’70s was where all of the intellectual legal action was, particularly in B.C. with the brand new Labour Code,” Gall says. “It was all about policy and developing policy and thinking through policy. And so young lawyers coming out of law school in those days, that’s the field they gravitated to.”
While it was an NDP creation, commentators credit the Barrett Government and Labour Minister Bill King for at least trying to strike a balance. Neither were prepared to “simply toss the keys over to the trade union movement to determine how labour relations should be run in the province,” as labour activists Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh wrote in their history of the era.
That assessment is borne out by the fact a rift opened up on this issue between the government on the one hand, and the party and the B.C. Federation of Labour on the other. The NDP convention in November 1973 passed a resolution critical of the Code, with a member of its executive stating bluntly: “We did not elect a government to sit as a referee between management and labour. We elected a government to legislate on the side of labour,” (as recorded in a book by Lorne Kavic). When the Socred Party returned to government in 1975, it too tried to take the stance of neutral referee, and largely left the Code intact while also asking Paul Weiler to remain as chair. The B.C. Fed had come around by this time and a consensus had developed, at least among big labour and big business interests, that the basic framework of the Code was sound.
The Labour Code was, however – and arguably remains – consistent with a broader premise in Canadian public policy that Weiler described: “a choice in favour of collective bargaining is more worthwhile than the decision to reject it.” For smaller and non-union contractors the Code was often a significant irritant. There was concern with lack of open-shop representation on the Board, and a sense that the playing field wasn’t level when unions targeted contractors with harassment and certification drives. As Weiler put it, with the Socreds in office, ICBA and its members “had much the same kind of great expectations as had the B.C. Federation of Labour in the early days of the NDP government.
In March 1977, for example, ICBA issued its “Penticton Petition”, calling for the appointment a judicial commission to investigate the Code since its passage, with a particular focus on the resulting “erosion of justice and impact on prices.” That call went unheeded, however, in the face of the widening sentiment that the Code was a sacred cow. Code-related issues nevertheless remained among the most frequent topics of discussion at ICBA meetings, and one of the most common reasons for requests for assistance from members.
The competitive challenge of operating under a Building Trades agreement continued to grow. The introductory remarks at an ICBA client dinner in the late 1980s described the changing landscape: “In the last few years, most of the old established companies have disappeared, for one reason or another, and have been replaced by a whole galaxy of new and rising stars,” the clients were told. “The real victim of the previous labour laws was the union employer, who did not have the legal freedom to take the steps necessary for his survival.”
Ron Karras lived this reality while he was employed in the unionized sector, and it was his motivation for setting up open-shop Micron Construction in 1985 – even though he faced significant union harassment after doing so. “Besides the burdens and costs unions were imposing on their labour packages, there were these jurisdictional things that were driving us crazy as we tried to be efficient,” he says, referring to the complexity of assigning work among members of different unions. Karras says that in more recent years he’s heard an acknowledgement, from people he knows within the union movement, that the hardline they took in the 1980s “drove us to open shop”, but such recognition of economic realities was slow to take root.
