Ifinished school in the spring of 1960 just after the Hogg’s Hollow disaster. My uncle Angelo found me a job as a labourer for a plastering company owned by another Italian. The plan was for it to be a temporary placement until I found a better job.
So each day I showed up 6:00 a.m. at St. Clair Avenue West at Landsdowne Avenue, one of the major gathering points of the city where workers would wait for the arrival of the company pickup trucks. I traveled in the pickup truck’s cabin for the first two days, next to the driver, but later on I was assigned to the back of the vehicle with the rest of the workers.
It was not comfortable. We sat on wooden benches under one of those dangerous plywood canopies with job tools like wheelbarrows and shovels loaded on the other half. These days, transportation of tools and passengers in unsegregated compartments is not allowed but back then it was the rule. On the first day I was assigned to the hod: a V-shaped mortar carrier with a long handle. The V-shaped load was held on the shoulder, with the handle in your hands in front of your body. It was some of the heaviest and most tiring work you could do but it was a commonplace job on a site, which is why the Labourers Union was initially called the Hod Carriers Union. By the middle of the 1960s, hod transportation made way for mechanized means and today the term “hod” is unknown to most people.
The plasterers came mainly from the Friuli–Venezia Giulia region of Italy, which is where I was born. Despite our common roots, they were merciless on the job, furiously yelling “mortar, mortar” when supplies ran low, and throwing in sonorous swear words in the Friulian dialect. The pace they set was backbreaking. It was as if they were machines. I doubt you could find men with that kind of stamina today. After two hours humping that hod the foreman had pity on me. I was a skinny boy, weighing just 145 pounds on a beanpole frame, standing about six feet tall. They assigned me to clean up debris.
Over my first two weeks on the job I continued to participate in Irvine’s union meetings, which were open to all construction workers. One Sunday, Irvine thundered from the stage: “Tomorrow we go on strike, boys!”
Both Irvine and the Italian workers, who were not aware of Canadian regulations, could not have cared less whether the strike was legal or not. In Ontario, a strike can be declared only when a collective agreement has expired or a certification is granted by the Ontario Labour Relations Board. In both cases, a government conciliation procedure, which can last many months, must take place before authorization for the strike is received from the Ministry of Labour. Still, this was no time for rules. Italian workers would descend into the streets because they were tired of being exploited, working in precarious conditions with serious safety problems and meagre salaries. This action had been brewing for months and the deaths of the Hogg’s Hollow workers merely accelerated things.
Thousands backed the strike declared by Irvine, despite their need to pay their mortgages, feed their families, and meet other financial burdens. It was a huge risk. The workers were new to Canada, and they were just coming off winter unemployment when the strike began. It would require enormous personal sacrifices to see it through.
In his book, The Italians Who Built Toronto: Italian Workers and Contractors in the City’s Housebuilding Industry, 1950–1980, Stefano Agnoletto, a Milanese professor who studied at the University of Toronto, noted that in the 1950s and ’60s between 50 and 60 per cent of the construction workers in Toronto had Italian roots. Italians were the lowest-paid ethnic group in Toronto, with the men making an average wage of about $4,520 a year while Italian women earned only half of that.
Every morning during the dispute, Brandon Hall’s flying squads of one or two hundred strikers would go to various rendezvous points to convince other workers to abstain from working. Later in the day, these same teams would go from job site to job site, trying to convince those who were working to join the strike. Some, mainly non-Italians, opposed the action and on more than one occasion bricks and two-by-fours were used against the flying squads. Police were often called to restore order and sometimes to make arrests.
The strike was front-page news for weeks. The Telegram’s Frank Drea, who had whipped up passions with his crusade following the Hogg’s Hollow disaster, was again out front on this story, helping to rally public opinion to our cause. I was nineteen years old and leading one of the flying squads. I had also signed up more than 2,000 labourers for the new Local Union 811 of the Hod Carriers and Common Labourers International Union during the meetings at Brandon Hall. I was one of the ten founding members of that local, the eighth signature. The head was my uncle Angelo’s old friend Bruno Zanini. All that was required to join was a dollar and a signature. During that period, other trade unionists were also making headway. Nick Gileno of the labourers, Frank Colantonio of the carpenters, Marino Toppan and Mike Hammer of the bricklayers, Tony Mariano of the cement finishers, and many others belonging to various trades were all signing up new members from a workforce sick of being exploited.
The strike required our full commitment for seven weeks, day and night. Irvine paid each one of us $80 out of his own pocket but for only a week. After seven weeks of hard struggle and continuous confrontation on the job sites and in the face of the great solidarity of the strikers, the employers gave in. By that time, residential construction had practically come to a standstill. The majority of the contractors in each trade (bricklayers, carpenters, cement finishers, painters) signed a collective agreement with the locals representing their trades. The new hourly rate and working conditions were close to those in the commercial sector. It was a great conquest, although, as we will see later on, it lasted like the snow in an April sun. Within a few years, everything fell apart.
There were, however, palpable benefits which laid the groundwork for future unionization and contracts. Many of these immigrant workers were for the first time represented by a union, their hourly rate greatly improved, and reasonable working hours finally established in a collective agreement. There was also a grievance process to remedy employers’ violations and to protect employers from employees who broke the terms of the collective agreement. The strike of 1960 was not a strike as we know it. The Italian immigrants did not fight just for money or better working conditions. They fought primarily for their dignity. They wanted respect. They were tired of being pushed around by almost everybody, including the police, who treated us like animals. They wanted to be treated as Canadian citizens. Irvine decided he wanted the new union members to march in the Labour Day Parade at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in 1960. I have to give him credit for the idea, because I acted as a marshal for the event and I still remember the pride in the workers’ faces as they marched for the first time as equals.
Shortly after the Labour Day weekend, Zanini told me he no longer needed me. The strike was over and he gave my job as secretary of Local 811 to a relative, even though this man had never worked in the industry: he had been a window cleaner and continued to work as one during the strike. I was upset and I went to Irvine asking for his intervention. Irvine spoke to Zanini, asking him to explain his decision and reconsider. We were in the small library of Brandon Hall and Irvine and Zanini were standing in a corner of the room. I was at the other end. After a long conversation, Irvine said in a loud voice: “Okay, Bruno, do whatever you want, but one day you will regret it,” a prophecy that would come true.
Nevertheless, I was now out of a job. I got by when Charles Caccia, who went on to be elected to Parliament, lent me $25 to carry me over. The months of October and November were very hard. I had no work, no money, and I was alone since my sister had married and moved to North Bay. I was too proud to ask my brother or sister for money and so at the end of November I went to the Labourers headquarters, Local 183, run by Gerry Gallagher. I had never met Gallagher before. He was an Irish immigrant and a militant from the ranks of the Labour Party in England, and a great speaker.
In Toronto, there were two other Labourers locals besides Gallagher’s Local 183, which had about 1,000 members. The new Local 811, with Zanini at its head, had about 2,000 members, and Local 506, which represented the labourers of the commercial and residential sectors, had almost 5,000 members. The three locals were branches of the Labourers International Union of North America.
Local 183 had been founded in 1952, during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear attack by Communist Russia was alive in everyone’s minds. Left-leaning unions were viewed unfavourably by governments because they seemed to be linked to the ideas of the Communist Party and were thus taken as a threat to national security. It was in this context that the Seafarers’ International Union had conspired with the federal government in 1949 to purge the ranks of the Communist-dominated Canadian Seamen’s Union. The man they tasked with the job was an American, Hal C. Banks. Using muscle, intimidation, beatings, and murder, Banks and his goons eliminated the CSU and brought in the SIU. The Canadian labour movement was shocked and outraged. The SIU was expelled from the Canadian Labour Congress and condemned by a Royal Commission. (Banks was eventually indicted for assaulting a rival leader and forced to flee Canada for the United States where he was sheltered by Washington. President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to honour an extradition request from the Lester B. Pearson government.) According to Gerry Gallagher, Ontario Hydro officials went to Washington in the early 1950s to meet with the Building Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Hydro wanted help setting up a construction union that would have no communists in its ranks. As a result, the Laborers International Union, a member of the AFL-CIO, was invited to represent construction workers in Ontario under LIUNA charter Local 183.
Gallagher, a labourer working for Ontario Hydro in the Burlington area, was hired as a full-time union representative for Local 183. He traveled to all projects of Ontario Hydro in the province, regardless of how remote, and signed up close to 2,000 laborers employed by the utility. He appointed union stewards at every “line and station” to better service the members. Before long he was elected as secretary treasurer of the local, which at that time was the top position. Gallagher was no patsy. When Ontario Hydro started to sublet work to cable-laying contractors, taking away work from union members, Gallagher successfully organized a number of cable-laying firms as “utilities contractors.” This also covered contractors primarily laying cable for Bell Telephone.
The advent of Local 183 caused problems with other labourer locals in Ontario, all of which were protective of their jurisdiction. After a long period of infighting and complaints to their international parent, Local 183 traded its provincial mandate for a reduced Toronto mandate, but in return it was granted jurisdiction over all subway and road sewer and water-main construction. Gallagher knew from his experience in London, England, that subway construction was not a one-time project but a perennial job creator. Toronto’s University line subway construction started shortly afterwards as a union project. Local 183 represented both the labourers in the so-called open-cut subway construction and the muckers and miners in the tunnel sections. All the other trades were represented by other construction unions.
The problem with Gallagher’s deal was that roads, and sewer and water-main construction companies were mainly non-union. Most labourers were Italian immigrants and Gallagher needed to organize them. Serendipitously, this was right about the time I showed up. After my bitter experience with Bruno Zanini, I was flat broke and unable to pay rent. Somebody told me about Local 183 so I went to the local office on Bond Street, just north of Queen Street in Toronto. It was a three-room office, one room for Gerry Gallagher, another for the two secretaries and record keeping, and a third that served as a small reception area for members.
Gallagher welcomed me and asked me all sorts of questions, in particular about my experience with the Brandon Hall Group and Zanini. I was open and frank with Gallagher. At the end he said that he would recommend hiring me as a union organizer to the local executive board, which had the hiring authority, at a meeting the following week. At the time the board was composed of mostly Irish miners working in subway construction.
A week after my conversation with Gallagher, I read my horoscope in the Toronto Daily Star; it told me: “Tomorrow you will begin work for a social organization.” The phone rang half an hour later. It was Gallagher: “You can start tomorrow.” I still remember that “tomorrow” was December 6, 1960. Years later, Gallagher told me he had received a number of phone calls from the Brandon Hall representatives asking him not to hire me because I was a troublemaker and a communist. I had no idea where they got that from. Luckily, Gallagher did not trust them and, in particular, he did not like Zanini.