Time did not stand still during the Waisberg Commission. Local 183 was busily expanding into both the high-rise and low-rise residential housing sectors. Our big break came when we succeeded in organizing companies like Cadillac Development that operated in both high-rise and low-rise projects. We expanded our collective agreement that governed their high-rise work to their low-rise townhouses, detached, and semi-detached dwellings. There was strong resistance from these big firms because they did not want to be the only house builders unionized. Most Ontario home builders were non-union at the time so we had to commit to organizing all GTA house builders to put everyone on a level playing field. It was not easy but over the years we succeeded in organizing most of the sector.
Having established a beachhead in low-rise housing, we noticed another sector that needed to be organized: house basement construction. In the 1960s, house basement construction changed from blocks to concrete forming with poured concrete. Low-rise concrete forming is different from high-rise, in terms of skill, materials, and method. In a house basement there is no steel reinforcing. It consists of assembling forms, usually four feet by eight feet, which are placed on footings to create the house walls. Then you pour concrete, letting it set. Afterwards, you dismantle the forms to use again. It is heavy, hard work, and more so back then because the forms were carried manually, often in adverse conditions such as rain or sleet, which would create mud that added to the weight.
The industry employed between eight hundred and a thousand workers, mostly Portuguese immigrants. When we started our campaign, we had a few successes but also some failures. The biggest company by far was Tru-Wall Concrete Forming, which was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It alone employed more than three hundred workers. We signed up 45 per cent of Tru-Wall employees, enough for a vote, perhaps, but only if we considered the foremen to be management and excluded them from the bargaining unit. The company, of course, maintained that these were working foremen and, as such, they had to be included in the bargaining list. This was the first battle to be fought.
When a job category is in dispute, the OLRB appoints an officer to verify the function of the employee. Our strategy was to prolong the questioning of each employee in the process. There were more than forty foremen. The longer they were tied up in questioning, the more expensive it was in time for the company. Without their foremen on-site, crews were idle. I then called the company’s owner, Leonard Ursini, a sharp businessman with a great sense of humour. “Lenny,” I said, “if we carry on with these procedures, the only winners are the lawyers.” Both of us had a lawyer present during the questioning of each foreman. “Why don’t you give us voluntary recognition?” I asked. “You know we have signed a majority of your employees.”
It was a bit of a bluff. The number of employees who have joined a union is kept secret by the OLRB. All the same, Lenny did not know how many we had signed. He looked at me and then wrote the names of all sixteen Toronto-area house basement contractors on a sheet of paper and said: “When you have organized these sixteen contractors, come back to me and I will give you voluntary recognition.”
I accepted the challenge although, truthfully, I had no choice. And it was not as dire as it looked. We had already signed half of them. A few months later, I returned to Lenny and told him that I had been able to sign all but three companies on the list. He took a look, deleted two out of the three, and said: “These two are not that important but this one, Star Wall, is my major competition.”
Without Lenny’s company we could not establish a collective agreement for the house basement sector because he represented about half of the industry and other contractors would vigorously oppose unionization as putting them at a competitive disadvantage. So I personally dug into Star Wall and found out that one of its biggest clients was Academy Homes, at the time the fourth largest house builder in the region. It so happened that one of the owners of Academy Homes was my good friend and best man, Primo Di Luca. Naturally, I went over to see Primo to ask for his help. It did not start well.
“Are you crazy?” Primo yelled at me. “Every time you people organize an industry it costs us more to build.”
I kept at him, however, and a few days later Primo organized a dinner at the Henry VIII restaurant in the old Skyline Hotel. Joining us was Luigi Aceto, the owner of Star Wall and one of his associates. It was cordial and we spoke about everything except union business. At the end of the evening, after taking care of the bill, Primo turned to Luigi and said: “Luigi, are you happy working for me?”
“You are the best builder we are working for!” stated Luigi.
“Do we pay you on time?” he asked.
“No complaints,” Luigi replied.
“Well,” Primo continued, “if you like to work for me, I am afraid that you also have to get along with my friend John.”
Luigi understood immediately and asked me what he was supposed to do. “It’s simple,” I said. “Just make clear to your employees that you have nothing against our union.”
This was important. He was not telling them that they had to join our union, just not to be afraid of the union. You see, many Portuguese immigrants had lived under António de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968, a rigid authoritarian who despised communism and socialism, and by extension, trade unions. In fact, he was the reason many Portuguese workingmen fled their native land for a better life in Canada, and many of these men had little experience of democracy, let alone labour organization. Most were afraid to join a union. Aceto’s endorsement would clear that hurdle.
“I will send my organizers to your yard,” I said, it being the place where all the men would assemble before going to various projects. “Just let them in and tell your superintendent to get lost for a while.”
“Tomorrow morning?” Luigi asked me, which caught me by surprise because I was not ready to roll yet.
“No, no, the morning after,” I replied. It was late at night and I would not be able to get anyone down there on time.
After that it was easy. We signed up almost all of the crews and we were subsequently certified by the OLRB. I brought that certificate to Lenny and he kept his word. Early in 1974, we started negotiations and by the spring of 1974, after my return from Harvard, we were able to reach an industry-wide agreement which was five cents an hour below the high-rise forming rate but double the average hourly rate of the house basement workers, meaning we added another eight hundred members to Local 183.
Lenny’s company had, among his many crews, two that were composed entirely of hard-working Jamaicans. One of the Jamaicans, whom we used to call Brother Brown (Brown was his last name), served on a number of House Basement Negotiating Committees. He was always in a good humour and I enjoyed chatting with him during breaks in bargaining sessions. His life’s dream was to save enough money to build a motel in Jamaica and retire there. He told me that I had a standing invitation to be his guest at any time. He also ran for election as a Local 183 executive board member. His campaign literature read: “Don’t vote for black—vote for Brown”!
One time Lenny fired an employee from one of his Jamaican crews for allegedly making physical threats and running after his foreman with an axe. We took the matter to the OLRB and, understandably, Lenny was not pleased. He felt he was fully justified in discharging the employee for such a serious offence. The employee in question admitted on the stand that he had, in fact, run after the foreman with an axe. “But I did not hurt him,” he said in his own defence. When asked why, he replied: “Because he ran faster than me.”
Due to the brilliant defence advanced by the lawyer who represented us, Bernie Fishbein, now the chairman of the OLRB, we won the case. You can imagine Lenny’s screams when he learned that not only did he have to reinstate the employee who ran after his foreman with an axe but he also had to pay him for time lost. I took Lenny to lunch and, as he was a gentleman and a progressive employer, he calmed down and did not appeal the case. Lenny continued to be fair with us and he was the lead representative of the house basement contractors’ associations during future negotiations.
With our increased membership, it became almost impossible to operate from our St. Clair Avenue offices. We looked for a place to build a new office suitable for our expanded operations and bought an empty lot on the north side of Dupont Street just east of Dufferin. We engaged an architect, got a building permit, and called for tenders. The low bidder was Dineen Construction, a good union company. The sod-turning ceremony took place on May 15, 1974, and by Christmas we were operating from this new facility. It would take that long today just to get the paperwork processed.
The new three-storey building was 16,500 square feet with a meeting hall able to accommodate more than three hundred members. To us it was a palace and we were proud of it. Not in our wildest dreams could we have imagined that we would need a much bigger building in just a few more years.
As soon as we moved into our new building we computerized our office operations. I was prompted to adopt this new technology due to the fact that at the end of each month, the office staff went into a panic to report the per capita tax to the International. With our constant increase in membership it became a real challenge to comply on time. We were among the first, if not the first, Canadian labour union to install a computer system. In those days, computers were just beginning to be used. At first we engaged a British company known as Basic Four but it went bankrupt shortly thereafter, delaying our computing program for a few months. Not all our office staff were thrilled about this innovation. Some of them continued for a few years to use their old typewriters. In those days such resistance was quite common. Eventually many other union locals followed our example.
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In 1975, the Italian government called the first conference for Italian immigrants spread around the globe. I was invited to participate as a delegate from an Italian-founded trade union, although I knew very little about unions in Italy. While I was there, I was approached by a functionary of the Italian consulate in Toronto, whom I knew. He asked me to assist the son of a friend in immigrating to Canada. His friend was Luigi (Gigi) Sturam, the director of the Post and Telegraph Office of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. This was a prestigious position, giving him access to many high-powered people in Italy. At that time, there was no Internet or e-mail. Members of Parliament in Rome had to rely on his office for communication. I said I knew very little about how to go about it but with me was another delegate from Toronto, Lorenzo Petricone, a sewer and water-main contractor who overheard the conversation. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think I can help you.”
Petricone was also an immigration consultant for the Italian government, an unpaid position. Italy used to have a number of so-called consultants around the world and they were pulled back to Rome a few times a year to report on the conditions of Italian emigrants. Petricone had forged a good friendship with the Canadian immigration offices in Rome and, in particular, with the woman in charge, so he did the standard Italian thing and arranged a lunch date. The woman in charge was a second-generation Italian from Quebec and she told us about Ottawa’s restrictive policy regarding prospective Italian immigrants to Canada. The bottom line, her office had been told, verbally, so as not to leave a paper trail, was that it should grant visas to as few people as possible. (I feel a bit uneasy about disclosing what was definitely a confidential discussion but after fifty years I believe I can be forgiven for bringing it to light.) I could not believe her. Italian immigrants were nation builders. We had brought so much, contributed so much to Canada, and now to be rejected? It was too much.
Such is the nature of politics. On the one hand, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was pushing a multicultural policy and encouraging immigration to Canada, but on the other hand, he was breaking away from traditional sources of immigration in Western Europe. While his government maintained that the new policy was all about fairness, it had a clear political dimension. It served to smooth feathers ruffled by other issues such as the enforced policy of bilingualism. The multicultural policy was, in my opinion, a clever idea. It encouraged Anglophone Canada to support ethnic groups yet at the same time it maintained the solid support of Francophones who were the most resistant to erosion of their culture especially by so-called “allophones,” those who spoke neither English nor French. Multiculturalism also provided the party in power with the opportunity to use taxpayer money to give generously and often to ethnic festivals, newspapers, folk-dance troupes, and similar organizations to curry favour and buy votes.
Most Italians in Canada believed, and some still do, that new-found prosperity in Italy negated emigration, and Trudeau was quite popular in the Italian community. But that masks the real reason why Italian immigration to Canada fell. The rule changes brought in by Trudeau made it much more difficult for Italians or any European immigrants to be welcomed in Canada. The new rules required a prospective immigrant to have a good knowledge of one of the two official languages and a degree from a recognized university. Quite simply, they put the bar so high that most Italians did not qualify to immigrate to Canada, even those with university degrees, because those degrees were often not recognized. In his book, The Truth About Trudeau, Bob Plamondon outlines the reality of Trudeau’s immigration policies. There were 183,974 immigrants to Canada in 1968 when he took power, representing about 1 per cent of the population. By 1984, that number was down to 0.3 per cent of the population. Also, Plamondon notes, 87 per cent of immigrants in the 1960s were of European origin. By 1979, Europe supplied a mere 30 per cent with the rest coming from Asia. The year before Trudeau’s immigration law, 16,400 Italians arrived in Canada. The following year, eight hundred came, and by 1978 only two received an immigration visa.
Why was this? I think it was simply to protect the French language in Quebec. There were too many Italians in the province and the Italian language was widely used in commerce. I remember in the late 1960s buying an Ontario lottery ticket where the rules were explained in English and Italian. In Quebec, Italian immigrants refused to send their children to French school as demanded by the Quebec government.
There was a mini-revolt over the school issue in a suburb of Montreal heavy with Italian immigrants. It is recorded as the Battle of Saint Léonard. Forty per cent of the population were of Italian heritage and most sent their kids to English schools. Francophones, fearing their culture and language would be shoved aside, pushed for and got the school board to adopt a policy requiring all incoming elementary school students in September 1968 to enrol in a French school, regardless of parental wishes. This caused no end of upset among the Italians who resorted to setting up secret schools in their homes. A grassroots movement organized private schools that began operating in former French schools that were now under-utilized. The dissension spread across Montreal with other English-rights groups taking up the cause. Both French and English militants objected and there were protests in the street. Despite attempts to legislate an end to the dispute, it dragged on until 1977 when René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government imposed French as the language of education under Bill 101. To this day, resentment lingers.
This subtle discrimination against Italians is ongoing. In 2002, a young Italian mechanical engineer paid good money to study English at York University. He was the best in his class. He also attended a computer engineering program at a Jewish Vocational School, again paying good money. Although he was one of the youngest in the class, he was such a good student his instructor offered him a position as a teacher’s assistant. Upon his return to Italy he applied to immigrate to Canada. Three years later, the Canadian Embassy in Rome rejected his application on the grounds that his command of the English language was insufficient. They did this without even speaking to him. Sure, they gave him points for his education and job experience but they scored him low enough in language to ensure he did not qualify.
The irony is that while the young man was waiting for his visa in Italy, he was transferred by his employer, a multinational corporation, to Thailand where he became the sales manager for their operations in the Far East, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Burma, mostly because of his ability to speak English. Yet he was not good enough for Canada. He was later promoted to vice-president of his company.
Going back to our lunch in Rome, our immigration contact at the Canadian Embassy promised to help and that son of a friend of a friend was allowed into Canada. As the son of a high-ranking Italian civil servant, well-educated with a degree in economics, he could have landed a great job in Italy. He emigrated because he wanted a different life. I was happy for him.
The conference in Rome was attended by more than 1,000 delegates representing Italian emigrants from all over the world. It was held at the headquarters of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Speaker after speaker, mostly Italian politicians, talked at length of concern for “our workers overseas.” I got fed up with this patronization and when I went to the podium emphasized that “our workers overseas” were Italians who had chosen to emigrate and that their problems were the concern of each of their chosen nations and, in our case, the Canadian trade union movement. I do not know if they were just being polite but I got loud applause from the delegates.
I mention all of this background because Trudeau’s new immigration policies had a profound effect on Local 183. With Italian immigration blocked, the demand for workers was filled by illegal immigrants, primarily Portuguese. Regardless, they came to work even if they came illegally. It was easy to get around the immigration policies at that time and they were well instructed on how to jump the line by unscrupulous immigration consultants. The Portuguese were and are very good workers and vital to the construction industry and, in turn, to the Canadian and Ontario economies. Without them, the residential construction industry would have suffered greatly for lack of manpower. That holds true today and it is an issue I will delve into later.