At about the same time as we were dealing with our showdown with Zanini, big trouble broke out in a subway construction project. Robert McAlpine, the British company awarded the construction of two tunnels known as Y1 and Y2 on Yonge Street north of Eglinton Avenue, locked us out of one of the two projects.
The dispute was over bonus pay. After meeting certain milestones, our miners would receive bonuses, usually on a per-foot basis. It was typical behavior for the men to take their time before they were in the bonus and then, once those milestones were met, to start working like hell. McAlpine, unhappy with the progress being made in the early days of these projects, shut down one of the tunnels. I retaliated by closing down the other tunnel, hoping to bring the issue to a quick resolution. I called a special meeting of the miners at the Maple Leaf Ballroom on St. Clair Avenue, not far from our office, to explain the situation.
That morning as I was about to leave the office to go to the meeting I found the doors to our offices blocked by a group of about fifty Italian members of Local 183 led by Biaggio Di Giovanni and Ermenegildo Di Giacomo. They had pushed in and occupied the offices and they stopped anyone from calling the police. They told us that they intended to take over the local because it was high time it was run only by Italians. This, of course, was a familiar theme with the Di Giovanni family. I shrugged and explained that I had to leave to address the miners who were waiting for me and, out of respect, they let me go.
Waiting for me at the Maple Leaf Ballroom were about 150 miners. I started my speech not by addressing the labour dispute itself but by appealing to them on an emotional level. I do not remember exactly what I said but it was something like this: “My brothers, we came to this country from many distant lands. We came here for a better future for ourselves and for our families. This union will make it possible to achieve our dreams. Our strength is in our unity.”
I went on to explain why I was late and detailed the occupation of our office. As I spoke, the room began to empty. The miners rushed to their cars and drove to the office where, apparently, the contingent occupying the offices melted away at the sight of the arriving miners. Many of the miners remained at the office all day to make sure we were protected.
McAlpine applied to the Ontario Labour Relations Board for a cease-and-desist order against our illegal strike and we went after their illegal lockout. The Board quite humorously said both of us were right and wrong, and more or less invited us to use common sense. We sat down and within a day reached an agreement on the bonus schedule, which was ratified by the miners.
The problems with Di Giovanni and Di Giacomo were smoothed over. They were good union members who had been manipulated by some militant individuals in the Italian community. The difference between their position and mine was simple. I am proud of my Italian roots but the Italian immigrants are much like other immigrant workers. They do not always speak the language or understand the labour laws and that is where their union can help them. It does not matter whether they are Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian. As much as possible, we worked with them in their own languages. Others took the view that they had to build up the Italian community at the expense of other immigrant communities. I believe that this attitude was encouraged by the federal government’s multiculturalism policies which made all immigrant communities sensitive to their own interests rather than sensitive to the good of the whole. The government separated communities into voting blocs and triggered struggles for control within them. I found this approach divisive and unhelpful. I fought to keep Local 183 unified and working for all of its members, and won. I still feel that multiculturalism is frequently misinterpreted and exploited for political gain. No matter whether we are Canadian-Italians, or Canadian-Chinese, the Canadian aspect should come first. A mosaic works only when the underlying glue is strong. Ask the Romans. Their mosaics are still there for all to see.
It was a few days after all this excitement, on a marvellous first day of fall, September 21, 1969, that we were to baptize our first son, Mark, who had been born on the Fourth of July, an auspicious day for our American friends. We had invited about forty relatives and friends to our home to celebrate the happy occasion but that morning I woke up sick with what felt like a huge pressure in my chest. I was having a hard time breathing. I told my wife to go to church for the baptism and that I would catch up with everyone later. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law took me to the emergency wing of Toronto General Hospital. The doctors wanted to keep me under observation for a few days. They thought I might be having a heart attack. I told them that they were crazy. I was twenty-eight years old. In any event, I could not stay in hospital because forty people were waiting for me at home. All the more reason to stay in the hospital, they said.
Reluctantly, I agreed, provided that I had a private room. They kept me under observation for three days before they released me. It was not a heart attack but my chest muscles had tensed and locked, making it difficult for me to breathe.
During my brief spell in hospital, the miners from the two tunnels sent me a get-well card, signed by all of them and I even got one signed by the leaders of our International union, personally delivered to me by Reilly, who had just come back from Washington. Never doubt that those flowers and letters you send to people in hospital are truly appreciated and remembered.
All of this served to make me realize that I needed to learn to deal with the enormous stress my daily work entailed. I remembered a principle learned from a book I had read in Rome on Raya Yoga: you cannot tell your brain to stop thinking about something but you can distract it by thinking of something else. From then on, every evening before falling asleep, I would distract myself from problems big or small, real or imagined, by fantasizing about winning the lottery, or about military tactics. I was always fond of history, in particular why battles were won or lost. I would think about all the moves in a battle, until I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke in the morning, I was refreshed and ready again to take on any problems.
* * *
And it was a good thing, too, that I learned to deal with stress because with all this happening and a new baby at home, I went back to work to find another battle looming. After the disastrous 1969 strike by the Toronto Building and Construction Trades Council, we had decided to renew our efforts to fight Zanini’s independent Canadian union in the concrete forming sector by revitalizing the Council of Concrete Forming Unions which I had just joined. New organizers were hired and a group coordinator was appointed, Tony Michaels from the Iron Workers Local 721. Michael was a dedicated and experienced union representative but he was from a craft union not familiar with the composite crew concept or with the Italian mentality which prevailed in the workforce and among the employers. Three of the five full-time organizers came from our rank and file and from subway construction. They were Italian miners with little understanding of high-rise forming but they knew a lot about union militancy. Another, Chester De Toni came from the Marble, Terrazzo, and Tile Helper Local.
Most of the expenses of the Council of Concrete Forming Unions were borne by Local 183, although we could hardly afford it and we were forced to make a number of sacrifices by cutting other union activities. Despite this, we were always out-voted by the other four member unions at the council’s regular meetings. The only one to support our cause from time to time was Frank Giles, president of the Operating Engineers 793.
My participation was initially slight for a number of reasons. First, our limited ability to manage the affairs of the Council of Concrete Forming Unions due to this voting structure and, second, my many duties and responsibilities to Local 183, including the Sudbury branch, as I have already explained. Additionally, all union collective agreements were being renewed in 1970, a process that occupied most of my time for half the year. By the fall of 1970, not seeing any progress in the council’s efforts to organize concrete forming—Zanini still had the lion’s share—I decided to do something about it.
I called our organizers working for the council to an off-the-record meeting and asked them the reason for our lack of progress. To my surprise, I was told that the workers did not trust the council. The few forming contractors that had agreements with our council, representing about 15 per cent of the industry, were not living up to the collective agreement. They were paying lower wages in comparison to Zanini’s collective agreement, a violation of the council’s collective agreement.
Shocked, I drafted a request for information regarding the project locations, building permits, names of builders, names of forming contactors, names of employees and their classifications, their paid hours of work, and the amounts that they should have been paid. This was quickly collected from our few projects. My plan was to apply a construction lien against any project not living up to the collective agreement, claiming the amounts that had been withheld from our workers. A regular grievance procedure would take too long. A lien would put the financing of the projects, and therefore the cash flows, on hold until the dispute was settled.
The other unions involved in the council prevented me from going forward. I was told that the contractors had been given the green light to pay whatever was necessary to compete against Zanini-organized contractors. In their opinion, this was the only way to fight the new independent union. Again, I was stunned.
In early 1971, I gave the council an ultimatum: give Local 183 full administrative control of the council with the right to organize, negotiate, and police the sector, or we would pull out and organize every worker into Local 183. If they gave us control we would commit to sending to each respective union its share of the monthly dues we received. They laughed at us. In their opinion, a local without much experience in building construction, with a young manager, could not succeed where they had already tried for many years and failed.
Still, Alex Main, the full-time manager of the Toronto Building and Construction Trades Council, understood my proposal was the only way out of the mess. He called a special meeting in the spring of 1971 at the Simcoe Hotel’s Admiral Room and made an emotional appeal to the other unions to let me try. He almost begged them, saying it was the only solution for unity and the only way to stop Zanini’s independent union. This time the other unions did not laugh but they still turned down Alex’s appeal, albeit politely.
Our next move was to have our lawyer, Ray Koskie, obtain a decision from the Ontario Labour Relations Board that Zanini’s collective agreement was illegal and thus null and void. Zanini had taken shortcuts during his organizing drive and we wanted the OLRB to decertify his group. This launched a three-way fight between Local 183, the Council of Concrete Forming Unions, and Zanini.
I put all of the Council of Concrete Forming Unions organizers on the Local 183 payroll except Tony Michaels, who had been an original ringleader of the council. Then I told our other representatives to forget any and all other problems of Local 183 except for the most serious grievances and instructed them to help these new organizers recruit the concrete formers.
Our organizers blitzed jobs sites, trying to sign up workers, while I visited forming contractors to get them to drop their opposition to our campaign. My pitch to them was that they could improve the stability of the industry by dealing with one large, well-established union that would not favour one contractor over another. Fed up with the chaos caused by inter-union fighting, they were happy to go along.
We avoided applying for certification at the OLRB so as not to give competing unions the opportunity to intervene and jam up the legal process. We chose another perfectly legal path and retained a respectable, professional, chartered accountant to audit and certify that we represented the majority of the bargaining unit employees by comparing our membership list to the contractor employees list. As soon as we reached a majority of workers in each company, we asked those companies to sign our collective agreement. Not one of our agreements was challenged by the other unions. By fall, all residential concrete forming contractors had been organized by Local 183. We added 1,000 members representing not just labourers but carpenters, rod men, cement finishers, and lay-out men.
Now, I have to say, we learned as we went along. During our concrete forming campaign, we applied to certify a company called Meridian. A few days later I got a phone call from Bruce Benning, a labour lawyer acting for the company.
“John, what do you have against our company?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, noting that we were out to organize all concrete forming contractors.
“But we are not a concrete forming contractor,” replied Benning, “we are a high-rise builder!” High-rise builders sublet concrete forming structures to concrete forming contractors (the only exception was Del Zotto, now Tridel).
I must confess that my knowledge of the high-rise residential industry was then poor, to say the least. Benning arranged a meeting with the owner of Meridian, Max Merkur, at his office on the top floor of an apartment building he owned on Erskine Avenue. Max was a canny real estate investor. He had bought up huge areas of land to build apartments and still more land in North York off Bayview Avenue to build houses. In his office he proudly displayed a painting from the Group of Seven. It turned out that collecting art was his other passion. He was also married to a woman named Rita, an artist who painted in the abstract expressionist style of Jackson Pollock. Max had a reputation for being a hard and tough man to deal with. With me, however, he was friendly. He said he had nothing against unions but he did not want to be the only high-rise builder to be organized. I knew I had to quickly expand my knowledge of the high-rise building industry so I went to work. At that time there were five major developers doing the majority of residential high-rise construction. In addition to Meridian, there was Cadillac Development (later Cadillac-Fairview) Greenwin, Belmont, and Del Zotto.
Del Zotto was not only a builder but at that time also a forming contractor. Over the years, I met many times with one of the brothers and company directors, Elvio Del Zotto, a lawyer with his own law practice. He was liberal-minded and would later be the president of the Ontario wing of the Liberal Party of Canada. Not only did he not oppose our organizing drive but within legal limits he tried to help.
Another surprise came a month after my meeting with Max Merkur. Harold Green, one of the principals with Greenwin Development invited me to a breakfast meeting at a restaurant on Wilson Avenue and Bathurst, which he claimed had the best bagels in the world. At first, I was reluctant to go. Harold was another man with a reputation for being difficult. I had met him only once, in 1969, during an event with the high-rise builders and the Toronto Building and Construction Trades Council. Anyway, the bagels sounded good so I decided to show up and after the initial ritual niceties about the weather and kids, Harold asked me point-blank: “Who is calling the shots at Local 183?”
“Harold,” I replied, “you know I am the manager.”
“We know that, but that’s not what I asked.”
It was a commonly held belief that while I was the manager in name, Gallagher was the power behind the throne. Some even thought it was Reilly. This distorted perception helped me for a number of years because being underestimated can be a blessing.
Harold was primarily concerned about Gallagher’s past history of shutting down job sites. I quickly put Harold’s fears to rest and he accepted that I was truly “calling the shots” at Local 183. A couple of weeks later, Harold invited me to lunch at a restaurant on Mount Pleasant Avenue just south of Eglinton. There I met representatives of the other high-rise builders: Ken Brokenhurst from Cadillac; Harold and Bill Proudfoot of Greenwin; Bev Howard from Meridian (later Erskine Construction); and Herb Stricken. The lunch was cordial but I was peppered with questions. I tried to answer all of them frankly and openly and at the end of the lunch, Harold, speaking on behalf of the group, said: “John, we are not against unions, but we want to deal with a union we can trust, a union that does not play games, and one with which we can have a constructive and productive relationship. It is up to our employees to decide, but we will inform our project managers and foremen not to oppose your organizing drive.”
So I directed our organizers and representatives to organize not only concrete forming workers but also apartment builders’ labourers. Within months, we signed our first collective agreement with the high-rise builders, covering a few hundred labourers, most of them employed to clean up construction materials and to perform the so-called final cleaning before people moved into the units. In time, this would prove to be Local 183’s most important agreement. With Harold’s assistance, we had been able to include a seniority clause for the builders’ employees, which was unheard of in the construction industry. Harold was tough but he was not the heartless person some people may have thought he was. I got to know him as a very enlightened and humanitarian employer who over the years became a true friend and supporter of our union.
Some concrete forming contractors were more troublesome. They played games to sabotage our organizing drive. However, I was one step ahead of them thanks to great intelligence details passed on to me from a number of sources. One of them was the owner of a large lumberyard that supplied materials to the forming contractors. Let us just say that he was a friend of a good friend of mine and he did not really know that I was the end user of this intelligence. For example, I received some intel that a major concrete forming contractor who was playing games with our union was actually being controlled by a high-profile insurance company which had invested in his company. In fact, the company had invested so much and he was so indebted to it that it was calling the shots in his business to protect its money.
With my intelligence report, I went to the CEO of the insurance company and laid the cards on the table. It was in both our interests, I said, to co-operate. The industry was in chaos, contractors were undercutting each other, and no one was making any money, least of all their guy. If he signed with us, he would help us to create a level playing field. Everyone could compete fairly, there would be more opportunity to make money, and the insurance company’s investment would be better protected. I struck a chord. Money guys understand one thing: money. They had no appetite for a construction industry fight. They just wanted to invest and mitigate risk.
This kind of intelligence was important because we were in a race against time, rushing to sign up the remaining concrete forming contractors before competing unions could do it. In September of that year, our International held its convention in Miami. I did not attend, although I was an elected delegate because our local’s drive was so critical. I also recalled three of our delegates to Toronto to speed up our organizing.
In October 1971, Zanini admitted defeat and called the last membership meeting of his independent union at the Lansdowne Theatre. He announced that he was closing shop. Someone from the floor asked him what they should do and he replied: “Don’t ask me, ask that man.” He pointed toward our organizer, Chester De Toni, sitting in the audience. He had been sent by me to observe and report back. De Toni was invited up on the stage and naturally he invited everybody to join Local 183. I called De Toni our General MacArthur because he accepted the defeat of the enemy.
Earlier in my story, I noted that after I was fired by Zanini in 1960, Charlie Irvine prophesied: “Bruno, one day you will regret it!” And there you are. Call it what you want but karma has a way of balancing the book of life. I nevertheless want to acknowledge that whatever our differences, Irvine and Zanini played an important part in impressing upon Canada’s early wave of Italian construction-working immigrants the need for unions and the necessity to fight for better conditions.