The strike of 1960 was a major victory but it was just one battle in a still raging war. Irvine succeeded in getting the majority of contractors in each trade to sign a collective agreement but failed to get the house and apartment builders to do the same. The hourly rates and working conditions were improved, although perhaps too fast for comfort. The builders continued to sublet their work to cheaper bids, most of them submitted by non-union contractors. Many union contractors learned to simply change their names and become non-union shops, or they just ignored the collective agreement.
At the time, before Ontario labour legislation was amended, shutting down one company and emerging with a new company under a different name was an easy dodge to avoid a collective agreement. To start a new business in the residential construction industry required little capital. All you needed was an old pickup truck, a few wheelbarrows, some shovels and other tools. The upshot was that the progress made after a long and bitter strike was fading within a year. The fatal mistake Irvine and the Brandon Hall Group made was a lack of flexibility and an inability to listen to the other side. The union contractors pleaded with them to reopen the collective agreements because they felt the newly established rates were too high and they could not compete against the non-union employers. They were asking for more flexibility but the answer was always no. Instead, in the spring of 1961, Irvine and Zanini called for weekly evening meetings to prepare the workers for another strike. Gallagher asked me to participate in these meetings, both to observe and to assist.
I invited Ed Boyer to come along with me to one of these assemblies and he was disappointed at what we saw and heard. One night after we got home he said, “They will end up going nowhere and they will have a sad end.” I asked why and he said because they were acting outside the law. “The law is the law even if we don’t like it and it is necessary to know how to use it to one’s advantage,” said Boyer.
At the end of May 1961, Irvine and Zanini called a second strike, hoping a new show of force would solve a situation that was degenerating rapidly. Gallagher asked me once again to give a hand but I was firmly against the Brandon Hall Group’s program and I explained to him that I had no trust in the Irvine-Zanini method. I tried to make him understand that, all things considered, Local 183 had nothing to do with the dispute or with the group and we could stay out of it. Moreover, I had always acted according to the law and our employers lived up to our collective agreements. Contractors respected our collective agreements because they were realistic. We never tried to catch up to the higher rates of the ICI. We reflected the reality of our industry. Gallagher agreed but was adamant: “You’re right. But we have to make the effort to help out the workers.” Since the majority of those workers were Italian, I felt I had to accept that decision.
And so it began again. At 6 a.m., I would go to Brandon Hall and join the convoys going to various job sites to picket. At one point, Gallagher tasked Reilly and me to stop the subway construction, a job at the time being run by the Perini-Kiewit company which was doing the open cuts, with Robert McAlpine Ltd. doing the tunnelling.
Reilly went to the tunnel section and I went to the open cut. At 7 a.m., I walked from Union Station up University Avenue to Dundas Street, along the way asking our members to stop working in solidarity with the residential construction workers. Most of them were new to Canada and felt a stoppage was against their interest since the labour dispute had nothing to do with them. Still, out of loyalty to the local union, they obliged, laid down their tools, and walked off the job. The general superintendent of the subway project, Ettore Faccini, an older Italian immigrant with great skills, was well respected by the workers. He tried to intervene and stop the walkout. Many of them were his friends and paesani, or countrymen, but my plea prevailed. Gallagher’s tactic generated big publicity in the news media because the subway construction was the most important project in Toronto.
On the morning of June 1, 1961, I was in a strikers’ convoy, as usual, heading off to do what had become routine. Another member of Local 183, Angelo Scopelliti, who was working in the subway tunnel, joined me. I was driving my own car and there were two other strikers with us. We left from the Brandon Hall office at St. Clair and Lansdowne, heading east towards the various rendezvous points where the workers waited for the company vehicles to pick them up.
This strike was not like the one a year earlier. It had become nasty and there was violence on both sides. Sometimes the strikers would physically block workers from going to work, or working construction workers would throw bricks and two-by-fours at the strikers. As we drove along, I noticed a police cruiser coming up on us and I told Scopelliti that I was breaking away from the main group, going my own way. While the main group went east on St. Clair Avenue, I headed north on Dufferin Street where we came upon a small group on their way to work. We stopped. Without getting out of the car, I asked them why they had not joined the strike in progress. They said they were members of the Bricklayers Local 2, a group from the commercial construction sector which was not involved in the strike.
I asked for their union membership cards and they produced them and everything was good so we were saying “Ciao” when suddenly we were surrounded by three police cruisers. A police officer pulled me out of the car, illegally searched me, and made me open the trunk. Now, this kind of action by the police was and still is illegal but, of course, then and now, police simply deny that they do such things. They made me open up the trunk and they searched the vehicle as a big group of workers who were going to their factory jobs gathered around us, watching the scene. The sergeant gave me an order which I did not quite understand at first because of the general confusion around us and the fear that had overwhelmed me. I had never been confronted by the cops before and my English was not perfect. As I asked for clarifications about what I was supposed to do, the sergeant, a huge man, well built, grabbed me by the lapels and flung me into his cruiser and I found myself under arrest for obstructing the police.
I was taken to the police station and released on bail with the assistance of a union lawyer. The judge ordered me to keep away from the strike but there was no way I was going to follow orders, especially after that incident, and so I continued the struggle. It was only later when I went to court that I realized how serious my situation was.
The strike went on for six weeks and it was front-page news every day in the Toronto Star, the Telegram, and the Globe and Mail. Many of these stories talked about the strike’s violence, which was not as serious as they described it. Mostly the incidents were confrontations of angry men. Some wanted to work and, like most of us, needed the money to support their families. On the other hand, the strikers were passionately striving to improve everyone’s wages and working conditions and they were angry that those who continued to work would themselves benefit from the improvements eventually but were prolonging the strike. The home builders’ groups, who were politically well connected at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels, called on the government to deport non-Canadian strikers involved in violent actions. These outrageous comments naturally made headlines. The situation was tense and there were still a minority of workers, non-Italians mostly, who did not adhere to the strike.
While the violence was generally overstated, there were several serious incidents. One morning, at around 11 a.m., I found myself at Brandon Hall when one of the strikers, Albino Petta, came in with his head gushing blood. A Polish bricklayer had cracked his head with a brick, he said, but he refused to go to the hospital or see a doctor because he was afraid of being deported. I told him not to worry and took him to a doctor immediately. At the end of the strike, I transferred Albino from the Local Union 811 to our Local Union 183 and I sent him to work on the construction of the subway where the work was safer and better paid. He remained there for many years. Albino was a good man from the Abruzzi region of Italy and, in gratitude, he asked me to be the godfather at the baptism of his first-born son.
Back to the summer of 1961. It was a rough six weeks. More than a hundred people were arrested over the duration and in just one day police arrested forty strikers. The day after that mass arrest I had to go to court for my hearing. Instead of having my case put over until the strike ended to let emotions subside, my lawyer made the mistake of pressing ahead. The police officer who testified against me in court shamelessly lied. The sergeant insisted he had heard me incite forty strikers to violence and said that on being told to disperse I yelled at the group to ignore him. My lawyer asked how forty people could have travelled in two cars. The sergeant could not answer. Nor could he remember if I was talking to them in English or Italian. Finally, he blurted out that I was speaking in Italian.
So, my lawyer asked the sergeant, do you speak Italian? No, he did not.
“Then how do you know what Stefanini said?” my lawyer demanded. Again, the policeman could not explain.
I clearly remember the judge nodding off even as my lawyer was summarizing my case in his final address. As soon as we wrapped up our defence, the judge perked up. He had clearly made up his mind: “The purpose of the jail term is to deter others. Six months of jail time.”
I was stunned. Even the Crown Attorney came over and shook both my hand and his head: “I’m sorry, a two-weeks jail sentence would have been good enough for me.”
The next thing I knew, I was off to jail where, on the second day, a federal immigration official came to see me and made no secret of why he was there. “We don’t want people like you in this country,” he snarled at me. “We will send you back to Italy.” The next day, I was moved to the maximum security section where the most dangerous criminals were locked up because, with deportation hanging over me, I was now a flight risk.
Sadness assailed me in jail. I felt alone. On my second day, I was sitting on a bench along the corridor of the dormitory when I was approached by somebody saying something to me. In my state of mind, I did not even listen to what he was saying and I did not answer. This made him angrier and he loomed over me as if to attack me. Suddenly, a voice from the other end of the corridor thundered: “Dumb nigger, leave the kid alone!”
While this kind of language would probably trigger a race riot in a jail today, back then it was commonplace. Just as we were called wops and dagos, blacks were openly called niggers. It was not right but it was the way it was. The man stopped instantly and walked away without protest. I figured I should go and at least meet and thank my protector. He was a medium-built man, about forty years old and, as it turned out, Italian. He spoke to me cordially: “Don’t worry, kid, nobody will touch you as long as you are here.”
I thanked him, adding that I did not know his name. “But I know you,” he replied, and he showed me the newspaper from a couple of days before where on the front page was my photograph and a big headline: “Strike-Union Leader Jailed Six Months.” He had just received the newspaper. To get a newspaper in jail, detainees had to order it a few days in advance and their name would be written at the top of the paper. And that is how I figured out my protector’s name was John Papalia, also known as Johnny Pops. I still have that newspaper today. Now, this was a big deal both inside and outside the joint. Johnny Pops was a Hamilton-based organized-crime boss. The man was connected, and the kind of guy you respected and did not mess with. I had never heard of him and I never met him again because in a few days I was granted bail, pending my appeal.
While I was in jail there had been a mass rally of 16,000 construction workers from all sectors at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. It was organized by the Toronto Building and Construction Trades Council and the Brandon Hall Group as a show of strength to get the government’s attention and urge its intervention. Gallagher took advantage of the rally and spoke of my case with words to this effect: “It’s a shame that this poor Italian boy, who is just twenty years old, has been sentenced to six months in jail just for having defended his people.”
Gallagher’s oration inflamed the crowd and when he finished everyone stood up and applauded for a long time, screaming for my release. With me having become a popular cause, the union hired Arthur Maloney, considered to be one of the best defence lawyers money could buy, to defend me. He had defended members of the notorious Boyd Gang. He went on to be both a Member of Parliament and an Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament and he was the first Ontario Ombudsman, from 1975 to 1979.
Maloney’s first move was to get me released on bail. Two Canadian trade unionists whom I did not know and who were extraneous to the dispute—Scotty Lines, the president of the Labourers Local 506, and Stan Newmarch, the business manager of the Plumbers Local 46 in Toronto—mortgaged their houses in order to post my bail. The Crown demanded property as an assurance since a cash bail would just have been a deposit with the rest owed. Given that I faced deportation, they wanted to make sure I did not take off—although how could I? Canada was now my home. Later, when I found out what the two men had done for me, I was very grateful and I continue to be grateful to this day to these two outstanding trade unionists.
Eventually I learned why I had been jailed. It turned out that Irvine and Zanini had met with Premier Leslie Frost. They had reached a general agreement: in exchange for an end to the strike, the government would set up a Royal Commission to identify the problems faced by construction workers in the residential sector and to propose new legislation. Despite this agreement being in place, Irvine and Zanini went from the premier’s office to a members’ meeting at the Lansdowne Theatre and urged the strikers to intensify their actions. The retribution was swift. The following day, forty strikers were arrested, and the day after that was my court appearance. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a strong message was about to be delivered.
While the union supported me, the harshness of my sentence was a cold shower for the strikers. They feared that if they continued to picket, they, too, would be arrested. They were scared to go on. As a result, the strike dissolved and within two years the Brandon Hall Group no longer existed. The Bricklayers Local Union 40 detached itself. Administrative control of the Labourers Local 811 was taken over by the International Union due to irregularities around the use of funds and after a few more years it disappeared. The residential Carpenters Local Union of the Brandon Hall Group lost a lot of members and was transferred to the Carpenters Union Toronto office. The painters left the Brandon Hall Group and later, led by Armando Colafranceschi, slowly recovered and flourished again after a few years.
An unrelated but similarly devastating development for the Brandon Hall Group was that Irvine’s plasterers were annihilated by the introduction of drywall into construction technology. In those days, walls were framed with wooden two-by-four studs. Then a system of thin wood strips or metal mesh was tacked to the studs. With that in place, up to three coats of plaster would be put on, like icing a cake. It was labour intensive but it allowed for more creative décor, such as round shapes or arches. It was also slightly better for soundproofing. Drywall, made of gypsum sandwiched between sheets of paper, had been introduced in the 1960s and it was faster, smoother, and more efficient to work with. It took over the business, meaning the old lathe and plaster guys either adapted to the new materials or they did not find much work. Seeing the threat to his plasterers, Irvine fought tooth and nail against drywall. He soon found, though, that you cannot stop progress and that one man’s misfortune is another’s gain. Seeing the future, a small trade union headed by a young Italian named Agostino (Gus) Simone jumped on the drywallers’ trade and organized it. Simone was another good man from the Abruzzi region of Italy. He had originally represented the lathers. Drywall, however, was going to be big and he knew it.
The Government of Ontario kept its commitment and appointed the Royal Commission on Labour-Management Relations in the Construction Industry under H. Carl Goldenberg. He was assisted by a University of Toronto professor, John Crispo, who to my great surprise, on an autumn evening in 1961, invited me to his house on Avenue Road, north of Eglinton Avenue West, to chat informally. We talked extensively about problems in the residential construction industry and I immediately felt at ease. He asked me a lot of questions and I did my best to make him understand the conditions that workers toiled under. I had just turned twenty-one and I did not know the Canadian legislative system well enough to suggest how to modify the law. Still, bit by bit, I was learning and when I managed to master it, I would be in a position to propose a number of laws and to change others to the benefit of the workers’ cause.
In 1962, the Goldenberg Commission presented its report. It had heard extensive evidence on how owners used shell companies to circumvent the Labour Relations Act. As I noted earlier, they would just change the name of the front company, leave the same people running things, and void the collective agreement. The workers were left with no union and no protection. Goldenberg got right to the point: “It is clear that the situation as described, and which I find to be a correct statement of the facts, is not conducive to peaceful industrial relations.” He made a specific recommendation to amend the Ontario Labour Relations Act: “Consideration should be given to measures for the protection of acquired bargaining rights in situations arising from certain types of business practices which may affect such rights, for example, where a contractor, engaged on a number of projects in each of which he has a different partner, is in a position to shift employees from a project with respect to which certification has been granted to another.”
This was finally done but it took nine more years. In 1971, the Ontario Labour Relations Act was changed through the Davis Amendments. Ultimately, however, nothing really changed for the workingman.