Labour

By SEAN GRIFFIN

When Carpenters Union organizers
Peter Norris and Carey Robson hit the jobs
sites at 5:30 a.m. last week with copies of
their hard-hitting bulletin “Straight Talk,”
construction workers got a bit of history
thrown in with the organizing pitch.

It was a century ago this month that
carpenters in Vancouver — then undergo-
ing a building boom spurred by the
railway — began organizing a branch of
the British Amalgamated Society of Car-
penters. And those early traditions have
been inherited by the current union, Local
452 of the United Brotherhood of Carpen-
ters and Joiners.

In fact, a strike launched by the newly-
organized carpenters in July, 1889 won
workers the nine-hour day — and Norris
and Robson have written it up in Straight
Talk, along with other milestones in the
union’s 100-year-old campaign for shorter
hours and better conditions.

But it’s not just a chance bit of history.
It’s all part of the major new organizing
drive launched this year by the Carpenters
Union and others among the province’s
Building Trades.

If there is another lesson from the union’s
centenary, it is the reminder that the boom
and bust cycle can hit with devastating force
in the construction industry, throwing
thousands out of work when the bust
comes.

It did that in 1893, just four years after the

GREETINGS
ON MAY DAY

United Fishermen
and Allied Workers
Union, Local 15
Nanaimo

Organizing drive moves into gear

union was organized, when building all but
stopped in Vancouver and carpenters just
weren’t needed anymore. And for Building
Trades workers, the worst bust since the
depression of the 1930s hit the unions like a
pile driver in 1982.

“Tt just crashed in 1982,” says Jeff Roger,
a co-ordinator for the Vancouver, New
Westminster District Council of Carpenters
and five of five people assigned by the union
to organizing in the Lower Mainland. “We
suddenly went from over a million hours of
work a month being recorded in our benefit
plans to just over 200,000.”

Those hard statistics also took their toll in
painful human terms, Roger recalls. “I
remember we had five guys commit suicide
in an eight-week period in 1983.”

Coming at the end of one of the longest
building booms in the century — kept
going in part by two decades of dam-
building — the bust was particularly hard-
hitting because it coincided with a new drive
by both contractors and governments to
undermine union wages and conditions and
to challenge the very existence of unions in
the construction industry.

Government-enforced low bid policies
for public agencies, amendments to labour
legislation restricting union activities and
new provisions making it easier for union
companies to spin off non-union subsidiar-
ies have all cut away at the flesh and bone of
the Building Trades unions.

That those unions have not suffered the
losses that their counterparts in the U.S. and

_ even Alberta have suffered is testimony to

the battles waged by construction workers
against such non-union contractors as J.C.
Kerkhoff and the resistance of the majority
of the trades to concession bargaining. Still,
when the first signs of an upturn came in the
industry in 1986-87, the unions had to look
seriously at renewed organizing to re-build
their ranks.

For Carpenters Local 452, the member-
ship statistics are telling. Although the
improved employment picture has pushed
membership up to 2,400, that’s still a long
way from the pre-1982 high of 3,800 and
even the historical average of about 2,900
members.

The main push came with the convention
last year when the B.C. and Yukon Building
Trades Council (BCYT) adopted a com-

May Day Greetings

_ for peace,

for unity,

for jobs,

Nanaimo, Duncan & District Labor Council

prehensive organizing program, including
new staff, educational programs and pres-
sure on financial and other institutions to
develop projects with union labour. .

BCYT secretary-treasurer Al McMurray
says that the council, following an organiz-
ing seminar in January, began putting the
pieces in place. Co-ordinators for the organ-
izing campaign have been hired in the
Lower Mainland, on Vancouver Island and
the Kamloops-Revelstoke area, and a staff
member is to be assigned soon to the
Northwest.

Some of the individual trades are also
stepping up their organizing and a few,
including Local 213 of the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have
also hired organizers.

But the biggest push so far has come from
the Carpenters.

In a program worked out worked out
between the union’s provincial and district
councils, five organizers are already in the
field in the Lower Mainland and more are
planned for other parts of the province. In
addition to Norris, Robson and Roger,
Doug Urquhart and Mike Coppock are
working from the union’s Local 1251 and
the district council.

““We’re serious about this,” says Norris,
who, together with Robson, was hired by
Local 452 as an organizer about two
months ago. “Although union business
agents do some organizing all the time,
there hasn’t been anything like this since the
1960s.”

In a makeshift office in the Carpenters
Centre — itself currently under re-construc-
tion — Norris and Robson have set up a
huge map of the city, marked like a battle
plan with a number of pins, indicating the
non-union construction sites targeted by the
local.

Most of those sites are residential high
rise apartment buildings which, only 10
years ago, would have been built by union
contractors. Now they’re nearly all going up
non-union.

And the realities of the construction
industry today has necessitated a whole new
approach to organizing, Robson notes.

“We can’t go and try and organize them
on a project-by-project basis,” he says. “In
three months, they’re up and the company’s
moved on.”

JIM RUSHTON
President

| MAY DAY GREETINGS ~—

from

PRINCE RUPERT
LABOUR COUNCIL

Instead they’re targeting the sector as a
whole, trying to win workers to the union
and to “seed” non-union companies with
signed-up members so that the contractors
themselves can be organized.

Ironically, the campaign measured
immediate results with several contractors
who responded by raising wages on their
job sites. “Some even introduced extended
health benefits, although you find that it’s
pretty hard to qualify when you examine
them,” says Norris.

Even if it’s intended to head off union

organization, the tactic has helped drive
home the Carpenters’ message. “We've
been telling workers that their rate depends
on the union rate and that if we disappear

EUR SS
Government-enforced low bid
policies, amendments to labour
legislation restricting union
activities and new provisions
making it easier for union
companies to spin off non-

union subsidiaries have all cut

away at the flesh and bone of
the Building Trades unions.

during the next recession, their rate will go

down,” he adds.

The last several years of mass unem-
ployment have also enabled employers to
make use of another divisive weapon — the
“sweetheart contract,” usually offered by

one of two unions which have emerged dur-..

ing the last few years, the General Workers
Union, led by Rocco Salituro and the Can-
adian Iron, Steel and Industrial Workers
Union, led by Frank Nolan.

Both have become notorious in the
Building Trades for their tactic of offering
employers whose companies are under an
organizing drive a cut-rate deal.

“It’s got so bad now that they go down to
the Industrial Relations Council to see
where unions are applying for certifications.
Then they’ll phone up the contractor and

JOHN KUZ
Secretary- Treasurer

to our brothers & sisters
in the labour movement
on this May Day, 1989

United Food & Commercial Workers

John Steeves, Secretary-Treasurer
379-12th Street, New Westminster, 525-8811

Best Wishes

Local 2000

Leif Hansen, President

MAY DAY
GREETINGS

To members

and supporters

of Labour

for Peace and Jobs

Steveston Shoreworkers Local 8
United Fishermen & Allied Workers Union

8 ¢ Pacific Tribune, May 1, 1989