By 1987, the Canadian economy had improved and a combination of lower interest rates and a new and more generous capital gains tax regime, introduced by Brian Mulroney’s government, created a boom in the residential construction industry. I was always proud to represent the most productive workers in North America and, for that matter, in the world, and so with the reinvigorated economy and housing starts rising, I thought it was time to reward our members with some good increases in wages and benefits because we had been running tight during the recession.
Our residential construction collective agreements were expiring at the end of April that year. I had many off-the-record conversations with key employers in each industry, testing the waters at breakfasts, lunches, or simply over a cup of coffee. In addition to gathering intelligence, I was also spreading my gospel: “It is time to compensate productive workers with a good increase.”
Most of those employers I met with individually agreed with me. I took the matter further and explored a range of increases I thought would be appropriate as these casual discussions continued. The only obstacle was that none of the six employer associations in the residential sector wanted to be the first to sign, setting the pattern for the others. So I came up with an idea: no one goes first. We do all of them at the same time.
Much easier said than done. Each association had different problems, different personalities, and different lawyers. The same was true on our side with our six committees but I decided to give it a go anyway. Meetings were arranged with all of the employers on the same day, at the same time and place. We met at the Skyline Hotel on Dixon Road in Toronto in twelve different meeting rooms, one for each committee on either side of the six negotiations. I assigned a senior representative to each union committee with Reilly assigned to the house framing committee because I considered it the most complicated, even though I had already done a lot of spadework with key house framing contractors. We had agreed to a framework settlement and I briefed Reilly on the details.
I took a suite in the hotel and with me was Al Minsky, our lawyer. I had learned from bitter experience that it was important to write down, precisely, the terms of settlement. Increases are easy to remember but the language of a deal is always subject to interpretation unless clearly recorded, preferably by a lawyer. I did not have the luxury of stopping to write down the terms of every settlement because I had to move from room to room and keep the action going. My instruction to our committees was to advise me if they hit a major stumbling block at which point I could intervene personally. My big concern was that one of the six associations would bolt, creating a domino effect, so it was crucial to keep everyone talking constantly.
During the day nothing was agreed upon but there were some frank exchanges of opinion. We all enjoyed a good dinner that night and the atmosphere became more relaxed. At about 2 a.m. I went for broke and started in with the high-rise forming association and reached a deal with the contractors. One down, five to go.
I left our lawyer to write down the terms of settlement, instructing him to join me at my next stop, the house basement contractors. Bang. Another settlement was reached. I kept going, next to concrete and drain, and then to the high-rise apartment builders and on to the low-rise builders. By 8 a.m. we had signed memoranda of settlement with five employers’ associations. I was relieved—and exhausted.
There was one more contract to finish. I went to the house framing meeting room expecting that there would be a memorandum already finalized. After all, I had already done the heavy lifting with key contractors. Much to my surprise, I found the employers getting ready to leave, upset over the lack of progress and talking about some major differences which had arisen during the night. They were all exhausted and it was a bit of a problem to convince them to stay but I managed it and went into our committee’s room to be briefed on why this deal had gone off the rails. I took charge and picked up the pieces to keep the negotiations going, keeping the two sides apart to prevent a flare-up. I literally went back and forth from our committee room to the employers, exploring compromises. By 2 p.m., the time was ripe to bring them together and a tentative settlement was reached. We shook hands, with both sides relieved by the outcome and agreeing to recommend the deal to their constituents for ratification.
We were just about to leave when John Deverell, the Toronto Star labour reporter, dropped in to see how things were going. He grabbed a few quotes and took a picture of our house framing negotiating committee because they were the only ones still hanging around. The Star published a story with his byline, headlined: “The man behind bombshell pay hikes—Labour chief sets building industry precedent.”
This time, the headline was bang-on. It was truly a bombshell settlement. The increases ranged between $3 and $5 an hour, which at the time was good money. Deverell’s story ran in the Sunday Star:
John Stefanini, architect of a bombshell $3-plus hourly wage increase for 7,000 Metro construction workers, has finally revealed the union power he’s been creating for more than two decades.
The business manager of Laborers Local 183 on Wednesday summoned six groups of home and apartment building contractors to the Skyline Hotel for what some chose to call negotiations. It was the unveiling of Stefanini’s plans for the housing industry.
Within 11 hours, five contractor groups had acquiesced to big wage hikes for their Metro-area employees—a precedent which within a year may shatter the entire system of construction industry bargaining in Ontario.
After a further 19 hours of haggling over piecework rates, the house-framing carpentry contractors signed. This completed the union chief’s design for two years of stability in Metro’s overheated residential construction sector.
“It’s like going fishing,” chortled the shirt-sleeved, cigar-smoking Stefanini on Thursday morning as he manoeuvred the last group into the union’s net. “Once you’ve got the hook in, you have to keep tension on the line.”
Deverell went on to describe the thirty hours without sleep and how I went from room to room and he also noted how far we had come:
With last week’s spectacular wage increases Stefanini has reached a long-sought plateau. For the first time his residential high-rise concrete forming members will get higher pay than the labourers, carpenters, ironworkers and masons doing concrete work on projects like the Dome Stadium. Previously these industrial-commercial sector agreements have always led construction wage setting.
“They’ve always looked down on us, but those days are over,” says Stefanini, delighted that his residential sector is now well organized enough to shed its lower-wage tradition.
Deverell also described how I managed to shake up the construction union scene and I have to say he was more than complimentary in his detailing of the evolution of Local 183 and my leadership role in raising the bar for the entire construction industry:
Stefanini smiles as he contemplates the conundrum he has created for the others. Then—by describing his own union—he outlines his vision for revolutionizing construction unionism.
“Our road to higher wages has been through higher productivity,” he says. “We have built this union outside every concept of building trades unionism that came before. Instead of fighting new technology—in concrete forming, in tunneling, in pouring basements, in prefab housing—we accept it and adapt to it.”
Under Stefanini, Laborers 183, scorned by others as the lowest of the ‘mud trades,’ has responded by showing little respect for the craft jurisdiction of the other construction unions.
In another daring heresy, Laborers 183 has almost completely abolished the hiring hall, the key institution of craft unions.
Local 183 employers choose their own workers subject only to the requirement that they pay union wages and benefits. The elimination of union job dispatching allows workers to stay together and move from one job to the next as production teams.
The endless jurisdictional disputes between carpenters, labourers, masons, and ironworkers vanish when all are members of the same union. Local 183 collect 25 cents per hour in union dues, and maintains 25 business agents to enforce its contracts.
In recent years Local 183 has been spreading its multi-craft organization into the industrial-commercial-institutional sector, to the dismay and horror of the traditional craft unions.
To the accusation that he is a wage-cutter with a sweetheart philosophy, Stefanini waves his $3-an-hour settlement and replies that construction unions are mistaken to swim against the tide of technology.
Devoting the main energy of union business agents to the preservation of traditional craft boundaries is a sterile exercise, he suggests, and ultimately damaging to all construction unionism.
Instead Laborers Local 183 has been concentrating on providing benefits and services to members—grievance procedure, skills training, a pension plan, health insurance, a dental clinic, and a credit union.
Looking back on that story, I find myself nodding in agreement with my own words. They were prophetic but they also reflected my philosophy since the beginning. Time does not stand still and neither does technology or the techniques used in the construction industry. For example, drywall replaced plastering but the tradesmen shifted to become drywallers and mudders and carried on working, as they should.
Flying concrete forms became the standard in high-rise construction and we provided a single labour solution instead of having to organize crews with three or four different trade unions.
Our labourers may have been scorned as the “mud” trades at one time, those digging ditches and carrying materials, but little by little we organized them into a skilled workforce. Our union provided training to build their skills and make them an integral part of a construction project. Together with essentials like health care, a pension plan, a dental clinic and a credit union, Local 183 had truly grown to become a beneficial force to be reckoned with, always on the side of the members and striving to raise them up year after year, contract after contract.