Negotiations are like a game of chess. No two games are alike. Every move is important. At the negotiating table there is jockeying for position, sometimes for the benefit of the audience of either side. The real negotiations and the most productive are those off-the-record conversations, when both parties meet at a golf course or break bread together without fear of being quoted. In this setting, people open up to each other and most of the time they seek common ground. I became an expert at this and endured a multitude of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners to meet key employers in each sector to explore common ground. My tactics were simple. I would try to get each key employer to give a number of concessions I could assemble at the negotiating table into an overall package.
At the same time, I would do my homework. I would talk to a number of my own members who I thought would reflect the view of the majority. I never asked a direct question such as “What would it take to settle?” but rather asked something like “Assuming the employers propose this, what do you think?” During my thirty-two years of union work, I never signed a memorandum of settlement that was rejected by the members in a secret ballot because I always did my homework.
In the spring of 1978 I faced a new reality. No employer wanted to meet me off the record. In addition, the four contractor associations—roads, sewers, heavy construction, and utility—had bonded together and formed a common front, guided by the very able lawyer Stan Dinsdale. Stan had figured out my modus operandi and put a stop to it. As I have said, nobody wants to strike over a relatively small difference but in this case we were close to a strike and still far apart. I knew our only chance was to get an off-the-record conversation going because we did not want a weak settlement or a prolonged strike but if something did not change we were going to end up there.
In my own mind, I tried to visualize the overall strategic situation. I analyzed the so-called enemy front of the four associations, united and consolidated against us. My first task would be to break that common front. My analysis led me to the Sewer and Water-Main Association as the weakest link, and in particular one company, Con Drain, which represented 40 per cent of the sector. Fred De Gasperis and his brothers had founded the company. He was an extremely intelligent man who came here, like so many from Italy, as an eighteen-year-old and found work digging trenches. He built a business and became one of the richest men in Canada.
I knew Fred fairly well. He was a good employer who never forgot his roots. I had to talk to him and I also knew Fred was associated with Marco Muzzo, another extraordinary person and also a legend in land development. My friend Primo Di Luca was close to Marco and they had worked together to rebuild three villages destroyed in the terrible earthquake in my home area of Friuli in 1976, which killed 939 people, injured 2,400, and left 157,000 homeless. Primo received the Order of Canada for his work on the reconstruction committee and he was my best man at my wedding and godfather to my son, Mark. So on a Saturday morning, about a week before the strike deadline, I went to Primo’s house.
“Primo, please call your friend Marco and ask him to set up a meeting between me and Freddy,” I asked.
The next morning, Sunday, Primo duly called me: “Freddy will be waiting for you today at 2 p.m. in his office.”
I went and met with him and found he had taken time off from a family confirmation celebration at his company yard on Connie Street. This was a great mark of respect to me so I came directly to the point. I put forward our rock-bottom position and said: “Freddy, nobody wants a strike. It is not in the interest of anybody but if I put forward this position officially they would try to squeeze me down further.”
Freddy listened carefully and at the end, said: “Fine, I will go along with this and the other conditions but I want my three hours back.”
What he was referring to were the three hours of work which had been reduced from the work week, taking it to forty-five hours a week from the forty-eight hours in the last contract. This provision was not in effect yet because it was due to be implemented on the last day of the collective agreement. This was an important issue to me and historically for the trade union movement. The first recorded strike in history was during the construction of the pyramids when workers went on strike to have one day off a week. May 1 was International Labour Day, celebrated in memory of those shot by the police during the famous slaughterhouse strike in Chicago in 1886. They had been striking for an eight-hour day. I was also hesitant to give up those three hours because we had paid for them. When we negotiated the previous agreement the federal Anti-Inflation Board was in effect. It had been instituted by the Trudeau government to control wages and prices. It succeeded in controlling wages but not prices and in our case the AIB forced us to reduce our increase by thirty-five cents per hour (which at that time was good money) with the strange rationale that a decrease in the hours of work corresponded in higher earning by overtime pay. This bore no relation to reality because no contractor pays overtime unless forced by circumstances outside his control.
Freddy was adamant, however. “Our industry,” he said, “is subject to weather conditions. Sometimes we cannot work because it is too cold. Sometime it is too hot. Other times it is raining and during the spring thaw it is muddy. We have invested millions in equipment. The nature of the job has changed and your labourers are not doing the heavy jobs they did in the past. Today it is done by machinery. The Operating Engineers have already renewed this agreement with us for a forty-eight-hour week and they would have accepted fifty hours if we had proposed it to them.” I thought about this for a while and realized keeping the status quo around the work week was the lesser of the evils. I agreed and we shook hands.
“I will go to our association,” Freddy said. “If they don’t sign for that amount I will.” That meant the others would follow and the domino effect would prompt the other three associations to follow suit.
On Thursday of that week, the conciliation officers of the Ministry of Labour called us for another meeting, on Friday morning. As we were entering the elevator of the MOL building on University Avenue, one of the paving contractor negotiators turned to me and said: “I don’t understand what is going on. Yesterday we were marching in one direction, today the opposite!”
Nothing much happened during the day as the conciliation officer went from committee to committee and the four associations reviewed and discussed a new proposal they were to submit to us. We spent the entire night either playing cards or sleeping on the desks. Early Saturday morning, we were presented with a new proposal and, no surprise, it was what Freddy and I had agreed upon. The proposed increases and conditions were ratified by secret ballot and later I learned what the contractors had been up to. They had tried all day and night to convince Freddy not to go alone but he stuck by his commitment to me. In the end, they gave in and a fair settlement was reached and a strike was averted. Years later, Fred pulled me aside and said: “You know that even today my wife does not believe that I spent that night with you over this!”
* * *
Little by little, we had grown Local 183 from a small labourers’ union into a serious player in the construction industry, representing many different sectors and many different skill sets. We were always on the lookout for a new sector to add and while sometimes it was obvious, other times it was just serendipity.
Case in point: the Industrial Division of Local 183. Early one morning back in the 1960s, we got a phone call from some plastic pool factory workers wanting to be organized. It was completely by chance because they had called other union offices early that morning but no one had answered. We just happened to be in the office at 7 a.m. and picked up the phone. The rest is history.
Similarly, after we organized the high-rise apartment builders we started getting calls from employees working at the builder’s property management and maintenance crews. These included building superintendents, cleaners, grounds crews, and handymen. In 1975, we launched a full-on organizing campaign and brought hundreds of new members into our ranks from these sectors. The negotiations were often difficult. Building superintendents, for instance, had to be grouped into different pay scale brackets, reflecting the number of units they managed in their building. Again we were helped by Harold Green, whose property management company had the largest number of residential units. The majority of the members in the Industrial Department were office cleaners. It started with Hurley Brothers and expanded to include Lester B. Pearson International Airport terminal workers.
The largest factory we organized was Burlington Carpet in Brampton which at one point employed more than eight hundred of our members. This multinational had eight mills in North America and the Brampton Mill was the only one organized. Our efforts made quite an impression on the International. Once when we were on strike, the general secretary, Arthur E. Coia, joined me on the picket line to boost morale. It was a busy unit and the chief steward, a Jamaican man, was almost full-time on our payroll because he spent so much of his day helping members with their various and many grievances. It all ended when Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed a free trade agreement with the United States and the multinational closed down the Brampton plant and moved its operations to non-union mills in the United States.
When I left Local 183 in 1992 there were approximately 2,000 members in the Industrial Division. Not all the members we brought in stayed with Local 183, however. By 1976, we represented a lot of cement finishers working in heavy construction and residential high-rise concrete forming. I was approached by Brian Yandell, the business manager of Operative Plasterers and Cement Mason International Association Local 598, to see if we were interested in a merger with his members. Local 598 represented about five hundred steeplejacks and cement finishers working in the ICI (Industrial Commercial Institutional) sector and for four sidewalk contractors. Needless to say, I was interested. Brian invited me to speak to his membership but warned me there was a militant group among the steeplejacks who would be opposed to any change and it could get violent.
I brought two members with me, Paddy Burns and Tom O’Neil, two true fighting Irishmen. Neither man looked for trouble but if provoked, they would clean up the provocateurs. Paddy, in particular, was strong as a bull, not too tall but afraid of nothing. Both had good hearts and when I asked them to join me and explained why I needed their help, they stepped up immediately. The meeting went fairly smoothly maybe because both Paddy and Tommy were with me on the stage. I explained the advantages of joining our union, paying particular attention to the services and benefits we provided. Within a few months we had certified the four sidewalk companies and six cement finishing contractors, representing about 90 per cent of the industry, but none of the steeplejacks.
Nevertheless, we moved ahead and hired Yandell and his secretary. The cement finishing contractors mounted a strong opposition to our application for certification at the Labour Board and the case dragged on for six months. Eventually, in 1977, we negotiated our first contract in this sector.
A couple of years after, the cement finishers went to Local 506. They had a newly elected manager in the person of Mike Gargaro. He had complained constantly that the ICI sector was the jurisdiction of Local 506 and that cement finishers should be part of Local 506. We agreed to go along for two reasons: first, Arthur E. Coia, the International general secretary treasurer appealed to us to go along and we respected him; second, we wanted to get along with Local 506 and Gargaro. Unfortunately, our good faith gesture did not pay off with Gargaro, as we will see later. Quite the reverse. It only increased his appetite for more of the fruits of our labours.