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 turn back the clock to 1993 and a memorable battle between open shop’s TNL Construction and the Boilermakers Union.
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 was 1993, and a moment of truth for TNL Construction. ICBA member Jim Greatbanks was anxious. His company, part of a joint venture, had landed the contract to build a massive, high-pressure wood-fired boiler in Williams Lake – a complex, highly specialized project with enormous technical challenges.
What made the job even more remarkable: it was done without the Boilermakers Union.
Thousands of intricate welds had been completed and x-rayed. Now came the “squeeze” – pressurizing the boiler well beyond normal operating levels to check for leaks. Greatbanks remembers what the experts told him: “We’ll probably have maybe a couple of dozen leaks – you always have leaks, you know.” They expected three test squeezes before the boiler would be fully sealed.
But when the pressure went up, only three leaks showed on the first test. The second revealed none. “They said they’d never had one go that well before,” said Greatbanks. “These guys, they’d built boilers all over the USA.”
It was a powerful vindication of TNL’s open shop approach. Early on, Greatbanks had met with the Boilermakers at the urging of the equipment supplier. But the union refused to come to the table with a reasonable price – and offered no guarantee they wouldn’t try to raid TNL’s crew, who had been certified to the Canadian Iron, Steel and Industrial Workers’ Union (CISIWU), an unaffiliated, alternative union.
“You will never build that boiler without my help,” the Boilermakers rep warned.
TNL proved him spectacularly wrong.
“Boiler making,” Greatbanks said, “is just all the sub-components of other normal trades.” Guided by their joint venture partner, TNL methodically worked through every step of the build. And succeeded.
This boiler job was just another step in what Greatbanks calls a steady “progression south” for TNL. Founded in the late 1980s, TNL’s first job had been on the Fibreco Mill in Taylor. The numbers on that job didn’t pencil out at union rates, so the owner went open shop. With no available mechanical piping contractor, Greatbanks took the plunge, left his job, and won the bid with a JV partner.
More projects followed: a mine in northern B.C., a mill and a gas plant in Chetwynd. But by then, TNL was facing real union resistance: walkouts, picketing, threats of violence. Even the communities around the jobs weren’t immune from the tension. Yet each job got done.
When TNL – a Richmond-based, family-owned company – dared to win heavy industrial work on Vancouver Island, the Building Trades unions tried to draw the line. Open shop contractors, they claimed, had no place in that kind of work.
It was this attitude, said Greatbanks, “[that they had] a god-given right to this work and [we] had absolutely no business being there.”
The Building Trades weren’t just targeting TNL. They were attacking the very idea of choice in industrial construction. CISIWU representation? Didn’t matter. TNL’s track record? Irrelevant. The unions were determined to keep the status quo – non-affiliation clauses and all – even as they quietly abandoned those clauses in other parts of the construction industry.
The provincial government of the day wasn’t offering much help either. As the dispute intensified, TNL was even denied access to basic public services.
It all set the stage for the largest labour clash in B.C. since Pennyfarthing and Expo.
But TNL didn’t back down. Nor did their client. And in the end, the so-called “line in the sand” drawn by the Building Trades was swept away.
The open shop movement and ICBA held firm. And progress kept moving south.
That story comes in our next two ICBA50 posts!
