In the modern world, the cash you receive from your paycheque is generally just a percentage of what you are earning in terms of value. Much of the hidden paycheque comes to you in the form of benefits. It was not always this way. Over many years, unions led the long and difficult fights to bring health and dental benefits to working men and women, and to ensure they have adequate pensions to carry them in their retirement. I am proud to have played my part in winning not just basic benefits but in bringing innovative and forward-thinking benefits for our members.
In 1971, Local 183 was successful in negotiating a five-cents-per-hour contribution to a newly established benefits plan, jointly administered with employers. Initially, the benefits were modest. They provided a small amount for life insurance and prescription drugs. In subsequent negotiations, we were able to increase the contributions and as we did the benefits were increased and expanded to cover doctors and hospital care, vision care, dental, sick pay, and more.
The road was not always easy. Sometimes our best intentions were undermined by our own people. Some members abused their sick pay benefits. During periods of unemployment, they were collecting both sick pay and Unemployment Insurance (now Employment Insurance) benefits from the federal government, sometimes getting more in total than they would have received if they were working. All they needed to do was get a doctor’s certificate which was not that difficult in those days. Our benefits plan was jeopardized by this practice and we were going to have to either cut overall benefits or increase member contributions, which would have effectively reduced the hourly wages of our workers.
I went to the members and put forward this plan: we would report the name of any member collecting sick pay to the Unemployment Insurance office. “It is not fair,” I told members at a meeting. “The majority pays for the abuses of a minority.” The members approved it and this drastic action brought the benefits plan back to a healthy state.
When the Ontario government changed the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan from a monthly fee to a wholly taxpayer supported system, we used the extra money to expand our benefits even more. In the 1980s, I introduced a bereavement benefit. The ability to take paid time from work following the death of a loved one is common in many sectors but not in the construction industry. We were the first construction union to include this benefit in our plan. It provided three days off with pay for dealing with the loss of an immediate family member. In time our benefits plan became one of the best in North America.
We were always looking for ways to improve it. In 1977, while attending a seminar of the International Foundation of Employees Benefit Plans, I learned that the New York firefighters’ union, the Uniformed Fire Fighters Association, had its own dental clinic. “Why not us?” I asked. We had purchased the building next to our office on Dupont Street to renovate as a training centre. We now reserved space for a dental clinic, which was to be paid for and controlled by the benefit fund.
I consulted a dentist, Dr. Jim Lees, and our lawyer, Ray Koskie. The first issue was that we needed the approval of the Royal College of Dentistry. Accordingly, we prepared a plan and our lawyer approached the college for its blessing. It came back a clear no. The plan violated a college rule which said a dentist can only be employed by another dentist. This is perhaps the only profession in Ontario with a restriction of this nature.
At the outset, I was not going to take no for an answer. To me, it was about providing free dental care to our members and their families, most of them immigrants with many more children than the average family, and the Ontario Hospital Plan did not cover dentist’s visits, which could get quite expensive. I turned to the Ontario Minister of Health, Dennis Timbrell, who was sympathetic to our cause. He told us that his father had been a member of our sister Local 506 while working in a brick factory. He went so far as to say that if the impasse was not resolved, he would introduce special legislation to allow the opening of our clinic. What is especially interesting is that this was under the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Bill Davis.
Timbrell undertook to speak to the dentists’ college. Meanwhile, Koskie, in his legal research, pushed the opinion that the college rule was in violation of the Combines Investigation Act (now the Competition Act), a piece of federal legislation which regulated anti-competitive business practices. He said his own profession’s regulatory body, the Law Society of Upper Canada, also had a similar rule on its books but that it had been abolished because it gave lawyers a monopoly and left them open to legal challenge.
With this political backing and legal opinion in hand, we met again with the Royal College of Dentistry. It knew in advance that we were prepared to take this matter all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and it had a tough choice to make. This time, its representatives were more accommodating. They dropped their threat to suspend dentists practising at our clinic and together we found a way to operate, but they still refused to give us their official blessing. Instead, they simply turned a blind eye to our clinic.
By 1979, we were finally ready to open with the latest equipment and with good dentists and other qualified personnel standing by. The dentists were not on salaries but were paid a fee for work performed, based on a percentage of the Royal College fee schedule. All other expenses were paid by our fund. There were never any problems recruiting good dentists. Local 183 still has the only union dental clinic of this kind in Canada. The Canadian Auto Workers (now UNIFOR) established a dental clinic in Oshawa, but its structure is much different from ours, operating more as a co-op.
After health and dental benefits, the next big item for the long-term health and wellness of our members was a pension plan. In 1972, we negotiated a small contribution to be remitted by employers to the newly established Central and Eastern Canada Labourers Pension Fund. It had been set up by our International Labourers Union, and it was managed by union trustees appointed by the International. Toward the end of the 1970s, I was appointed as a trustee. Over time, pension contributions were substantially increased and so were the pension benefits to retiring members.
As a trustee, I was fascinated by the regular presentations of the money managers hired by the fund. Each had a different view of the economy and of how to invest our money. They helped me to better understand the intricate world of finance. After all, we were dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars and our decisions had a major impact on the members’ benefits so it was important to be knowledgeable on investment issues.
The first chairman was the International’s general secretary and treasurer Terrence O’Sullivan. He was succeeded by Arthur E. Coia, a former senior regional manager from New England. Arthur was from the old school. He had a disarming smile but a mind like a steel trap. He was a labour leader who truly loved his union, having started in construction at the age of twenty and then been elected to New Providence Rhode Island Local 271 two years later in 1936. He was renowned for promoting education and training for construction workers and when he retired in 1989, the 500,000 members of LIUNA honoured him by establishing a scholarship fund in his name.
He came to Toronto often where his only mistake—a common one among Americans—was to consider Canada as just another state. He meant well but he did not understand that this was an affront to Canadian sensibilities. Can you imagine if a Canadian businessman went to the U.S. and acted as though Canada was in charge of everything?
Despite his confusion around geography and history, the two of us became good friends and he provided me with counsel and support.
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It was as a trustee of the pension plan that I got myself into a pickle and it resulted in something I truly regret. After building our house in 1979, I could not manage our big mortgage. Rita, my wife, went back to work. She got a job at the pension fund. As an employee, she was represented by the Office Employee International Union. In the middle of the 1980s, during their contract negotiations, Arthur called and asked me to take over the negotiations of behalf of the plan. I refused on the grounds that it would present me with a conflict of interest. I would be negotiating against my wife. I recommended he leave negotiations in the hands of a trustee who was an International representative.
“If we leave it to him, we will have a strike for sure!” Arthur said. “We don’t want that. You are the only one that can reach a reasonable settlement on our behalf!”
Reluctantly, I accepted. It was our family practice not to talk about business at home. We wanted an oasis of tranquillity behind our doors and one of the ways to achieve it was to keep business out. On a Saturday night, during a wedding reception, I summoned enough courage to ask my wife: “What do you people really want?”
“To be covered by the pension plan,” she replied. I saw her point, and I was in agreement with what she wanted, but being obsessed with the conflict of interest, I conceded only minimal pension coverage during negotiations. A couple of years after, when our mortgage became more manageable, Rita quit her job. Unfortunately, when she reached retirement age, her pension benefits were minimal. The fact that I had used my considerable experience and knowledge in negotiations to agree to a minimal pension so as not to be perceived as doing something from which my wife could benefit made me feel terrible. I still regret it to this very day.
Still, the fund has done well for thousands of members and their families, my wife’s situation notwithstanding. It gives me great satisfaction to know our members can retire with dignity and economic security.
Of course, benefits and pensions are critical to everyone, not only in construction, but in our sector we faced additional risks because the work is physical and dangerous and there is always the threat of being injured on the job. As such, we reached another important milestone in 1976 by securing a clause for the reinstatement of injured workers.
At that time, when a member was injured and went on leave under the terms of the Workmen’s Compensation Board, he was replaced by a newly hired employee. Most employers were reluctant to rehire the injured worker when he was able to return because it meant getting rid of the new and presumably able employee. I began pushing employers to grant the right of injured workers to return to their jobs on recovery. At first, the employers thought I was using this item as a bargaining chip in negotiations to obtain some other concession. We were close to a strike deadline when Frank Giles, president of the Operating Engineers Local 793, who had already settled with the employers in question, came to see me. Frank, well respected by us and the employers, had a reputation as a straight shooter. We had coffee at a greasy spoon on Dupont Street just west of Perth Avenue.
“You are not serious about that clause,” he told me bluntly. “What do you really want?”
“Frank,” I replied, “we are deadly serious about injured workers. We want justice for them and we are ready to strike for it.”
Frank knew I meant every word. We had known each other well for some time. I had a feeling that he had been sent on a fishing expedition by some key contractors. At the next negotiating meeting, we got what we wanted. We were the first construction union to negotiate the reinstatement of injured workers and this clause was then included in many other collective agreements in the construction industry.
You see, it is not just about the money. There are so many other things that are important and vital to a working person’s health and well-being. This is why the language in collective agreements is just as important as monetary issues, and sometimes more important.
The subcontractor clause is another example. This clause requires the main contractor to sublet work only to other union contractors. When we included this clause with builders of both the low-rise and high-rise variety, it became a real strength of the local for residential construction. As a rule, builders do not do the work themselves, they sublet everything. The clause ensures that concrete forming, concrete and drain, house basement, house framing, and bricklaying were to be all subcontracted to employers who had agreements with our local. This not only blocked non-union contractors but also those competing contractors who had formed alliances with other unions.
The cross-over clause was yet another item I came up with and negotiated into all of Local 183’s collective agreements. Each union agreement specifies the type of construction to which it is applicable. The sewer and water-main agreement, for instance, is limited to sewer and water-main construction. What if a sewer and water-main company wants to build a bridge? Technically it could use non-union workers. Or it could use the hourly rates and conditions in the sewer and water-main agreement which are inferior to those in the heavy construction agreement. The cross-over clause states that if an employer is engaged in work other than the work specified in the collective agreement, but within the jurisdiction of the union local, the employer is bound by the terms and the conditions of the collective agreement applicable for that type of work.
A related and similarly important clause was the composite crew clause in the concrete forming agreement. The clause prevented forming contractors from subletting part of the work performed by the composite crew to other subcontractors, thus preserving the composite-crew concept which makes the residential forming industry in Toronto unique, productive, and more economical than this type of construction is in other North American jurisdictions.
These are just some examples of the language I negotiated in collective agreements. If you skipped some of the details here, I do not blame you. It is not the sexiest of subjects and not everyone is as passionate about it as I am but these non-cash benefits and assurances are of vital importance to workers and few workers go through their lives without at one time or another being thankful for their existence.