Iwas hired as a union organizer, to sign up and unionize labourers working for non-union road, and sewer and water-main contractors. My first day on the job, Gallagher outlined my weekly pay and benefits. My salary was $90 a week plus car expenses. I must have put on a funny face because Gerry apologized and said that the local could not pay more. Inside, however, I was dancing with joy. It was like winning the lottery.
The membership in the local at that time was around 1,000, a much reduced number due mostly to its jurisdiction having been cut from province-wide to Toronto. I made myself familiar with the sewer and water-main industry—the road-building industry was shut down for the season—and got to work. I soon learned that workers for non-union contractors were afraid to join the union on the job site. They were even afraid to talk to me in the presence of their foreman, so I adopted a new strategy. Early in the morning I went to various assembly points through the city where the labourers were picked up by their bosses. Quickly, I wrote down their names and telephone numbers. In the evening I would call them, get their addresses, and pay them visits. Most of them welcomed me into their homes, unafraid since they were not being seen or heard by their bosses.
It was hard work. Everyone insisted I try some homemade wine. They were so proud of their vino! Over drinks, I would explain to them the labour laws of the country and underline the secrecy of the process. To organize a company, the law required us to sign up at least 45 per cent of the employees in its bargaining unit, and to collect at least one dollar as a membership fee from each person who signed up, to force a vote. If, however, we signed up 65 per cent of the bargaining unit, certification was automatic. The payment of one dollar was crucial. If it was proven that just one worker had not paid the dollar, all applications for certification would be jeopardized at the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB).
The first company I organized was Aprile Contracting. At the OLRB hearing, which at that time was compulsory, I was accompanied by Syd L. Robins, a well-respected lawyer with a soft side for the labour cause. He later became an Ontario Supreme Court Justice. I watched carefully, impressed by the legal ritual and the duel between the company lawyer and Robins. My second application was Marino Construction. This time, however, I found myself alone at the OLRB. Either our office or Robins’ office had got the dates wrong. Regardless, I had to press on. The company lawyer tried to oppose the certification and I did my best to put forward our position remembering the legal niceties I had heard from Robins at the previous hearing. I must have done a good job because we won the case. Here I was, just twenty years old, only eighteen months in the country, and I was winning cases at a tribunal. A few years later, at a Christmas reception by the Teamsters Union at the Westbury Hotel, the chairman of the OLRB, Bill Reid, congratulated me on that presentation.
Slowly, the number of unionized companies increased. During the early spring of 1961, I concentrated on non-union road-building companies and servicing our members who worked for paving companies. I liked to do this over lunch. I would drop by union road-building sites, sit down with the union workers to hear their grievances, and then explain to them how the union structure in Canada was different from in Italy. The workers were kind to me and each time they went out of their way to offer me part of their lunch, which, out of respect, I ate. My organizing method was slow and the opposite of the Irvine-Zanini method, but mine was the legal way, like building on rock, not on sand, and over time I was proven right.
By winter of that year, Gallagher had hired another representative, Mike Reilly, who was a lead miner and president of the local. (The position of president under the local union constitution is an honorary one. He has the authority to chair meetings and co-sign cheques but the real authority rests with the business manager.) Mike was a good family man and he did not drink, an oddity for the Irishmen I knew at the time. We formed a strong team and became friends and I was named the godfather of his first son, his sixth child after five daughters.
That same winter I met Ed Boyer, a labour member of the OLRB. Boyer was living in Kitchener and asked me if he could stay in my flat two nights per week and pay his fair share. It turned out to be a blessing. Boyer was a carpenter who had become the Ontario Secretary Treasurer of the Carpenters Union before his appointment to the OLRB. He was a strong socialist, with roots in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a left-leaning political party which was formed in Regina in 1933 and which, in 1961, would become the New Democratic Party. He knew a lot about the Canadian labour movement and he was happy to share what he knew. He told me that during the “lean years,” David Lewis, a famous labour lawyer who later became leader of the NDP, would stay at his house in Kitchener because the fledgling CCF had so little money. Lewis’s conversations with Ed were part of Ed’s education and he passed the lessons on to me. During the long winter nights, Ed would talk about politics, the Canadian labour movement, and, most of all, the Ontario Labour Relations Act, how it came into being, the reasons why many of the articles had been instituted, and the interpretation of them by the Ontario Labour Relations Board. It was like planting seeds in my mind. It took a number of years but slowly, surely, I started to understand the process. In time, with this background, I was successful in amending and promoting a number of the labour laws that the labour movement and, in particular, the building trade unions enjoy today.
At the time, I was also attending the weekly meeting of the Toronto Construction Building Trades Council, every Thursday morning at 10 a.m. at the Labour Temple on Church Street. The council was then very powerful and it coordinated the activities of construction locals of various trades, primarily in the so-called Industrial Commercial Institutional (ICI) sector, since the others were mainly non-union. The manager was Albert Hall, a very imposing figure and a dedicated trade unionist. The meetings were attended by about fifty full-time business agents from various trades, all of them grey-haired and battle hardened. I remember them looking at me with sympathy and compassion, if not commiseration. I was but twenty and had just arrived from another country. Listening to them, I learned more about the trade. They were great Canadians, true pioneers, and dedicated to the movement with a passion we do not see today. They had all taken their lumps for the cause through many years of struggle. I had been through one major strike but I was about to earn my wings in a way I never saw coming.