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Trades jobless begin

new campaign against
anti-union contractors

Unemployed Building Trades workers
have launched a new campaign to challenge
non-union contractors and their attack on
established wages and conditions in the
construction industry.

Last week, some 25 jobless construction
workers threw up an early morning picket
line around a Gama Construction project at
Broadway and Cambie in Vancouver where
the company, a spin-off from a union con-
tractor, was violating a Labor Relations
Board decision ordering it to abide by the
Carpenters collective agreement.

And the following day, more than 50
Building Trades members demonstrated at
the site of a new wing for the Peace Arch
Hospital in White Rock where notorious
right-to-work, contractor Kerkhoff Con-
struction was awarded an $8 million con-
struction contract although he was only 2.9
per cent below the competing union bid.

The action followed organizing meetings
by unemployed tradesmen and the estab-
lishment of a steering committee made up
of members of the Carpenters, Plumbers,
Electricians, Ironworkers, Teamsters and
Laborers.

Carpenters business agent Marty Smith,
who is working with the unemployed com-
mittee, said Monday that the group had
decided to call itself the Dandelions, model-
ling itself after the group by the same name
in Alberta which has gathered considerable
support among the unemployed and the
labor movement with its flying pickets and
job-site rallies.

“T think were going to see a lot more of
these kinds of actions,” said Smith, adding
that the unemployed would be working
closely with the trade union movement
which has been the target of the contractors’
attack.

The project being put up by Gama Con-
struction was a particularly galling one for
unemployed Carpenters since the company
had successfuly evaded union action for five
years after being set up by another union
contractor.

But even when the LRBruled Feb. 6 that
Gama was bound by the Carpenters’
agreement, the company still did not
comply. Instead, it went back to the board,
together with Jordan and Gall lawyer Bill
Kaplan, who successfully applied for a
revised order. That order, issued last week
upheld the union agreement but added that
those working on the site would remain,
thus circumventing union hiring.

“It’s a totally haywire decision — and
we certainly can’t accept it,’ Smith said
following the LRB ruling. “We're certainly
not finished with this one yet.”

Another new tactic by J.C. Kerkhoff and
Sons has also fuelled the campaign against
the anti-union contractor at the Peace Arch
Hospital.

Although his wages are frequently as lit-
tle as half the standard Building Trades
rates, Kerkhoff was only 2.9 per cent below
the bid submitted by Armeco, a union con-
tractor, for the $8 million hospital addition.
But Kerkhoff has also used questionable
bidding practices to keep his price down
even lower.

“What upset us was the way Kerkhoff
used Chilliwack Building supplies as a sub-
contractor to bend the rules of bidding,”
Building Trades Council secretary-treasurer
Al McMurray told the Tribune March 10.

Under usual bidding procedures, general

contractors secure bids from sub-contractors -

on various phases of the work and then
submit their own overall bids accordingly.

Those procedures forbid contractors to
bid to themselves — to-use their own com-
panies as sub-contrators — but Kerkhoff
uses a subsidiary company, Chilliwack
Building Supplies, as a sub-contractor,
allowing him to slip around the rules.

“Once he gets the contract, Kerkhoff
goes shopping for sub-contractors,” said
McMurray. “He uses the first bid to get the
second one lower and so on. The whole
thing i is like an auction, only he keeps the
price going down instead of up.”

When a sub-contractor is secured,
McMurray noted, the arrangement is that
the contractors get shares of Chilliwack
Building supplies — but only for the dura-
tion of the job.

“Tf everybody did their bidding that way,
the industry would be in a shambles,” he
said.

What is worse is that whatever Kerkhoff
saves by paying his workers substandard
wages and by bidding his sub-contractors
down, “goes straight into his pocket as extra
profit,” said McMurray.

The Building Trades officers also noted
that Kerkhoffs bidding practices have
added “another dimension” to the attack
against the Building Trades. Already
arrayed against them are the right-to-work
contractors, combined with the low-bid,
open-site policies of the Socred government
and the changes to labor legislation and
LRB rulings.

“All these problems are right there on the
Peace Arch site,” he said. But the Trades are
going to continue to organize to turn the job
around, he added.

The project has been declared unfair by
the Vancouver, New Westminster and Dis-
trict Building Trades Council.

Members of a rank-and-file committee
running delegates to the international con-
vention of the Teamsters finally got their
election material mailed out to members of
the union’s Local 213 this week, after more
than a week’s delay caused by interference
from Teamsters international headquarters.

But the envelopes went out with one
piece of election literature removed — and
that has fuelled charges that Teamsters’
officials are directly interfering in union
elections and Canadian members of the
union are being treated like “second-class

-citizens.”

The “1986 Rank and File Election
Committee” of Local 213, headed by former
president Norm Wilkinson and former bus-
iness agent Jack Vlahovic, is running candi-
dates for 11 delegates and three alternates’
spots at the Teamsters international con-
vention in Las Vegas May 19-23.

Although most of those seated at the
convention will be paid union officials, the
elections in the 13,000-member Vancouver
local are expected to be the most closely
contested in years because of recent changes
to the local structure and because thelocal’s
most notorious member — Liberal Sena-
tor Ed Lawson, the international-appointed
director of the union’s Canadian Conference
— must himself run for election this time
around.

Under a 1959 U.S. law, Landrum-Griffin
Act, locals are required to make available
access to membership lists to enable all can-
didates to distribute whatever election
material they want to send out to union
members.

But when Rank and File Committee
members arrived at Local 213 headquar-
ters, “the postage machine conveniently
broke down,” said committee secretary
Diana Kilmury, a 12-year veteran of the
union anda rank and file delegate to the last
international convention in 1981.

When local officials continued to hold up
distribution, the committee sought through
a U'S. attorney to have the U.S. law applied
to the international which, in turn, would
instruct the local to send the material out.

But international president Jackie Presser
blocked that avenue, telling Local 213
members that the law applied only to U.S.
members of the union. “I am not aware of
any Canadian law that would so permit you
to utilize the mailing list,’ he stated in a
telegram.

(Coincidentally the same day Presser sent
the telegram, a U.S. presidential commis-
sion issued a detailed report rine: him to
organized crime.)

“What’s he’s telling us is that we’re
second class citizens,” Kilmury said.

When the material did finally go out, it
was without a card placed there by candi-
date Jack Vlahovic announcing his candi-
dacy in the fall campaign for local elections
and offering his assistance to Teamster

Local Teamsters slate |
backing Cdn. autono J

members needing help with grievances.
The arbitrary censoring of the camps
material has incensed committee mem
who called it a “serious infringement onol
rights as union members.” ‘

“What will happen if they decide th
don’t like what we’re sending out dur
local elections. It’s really a dangero
precedent,” said Kilmury, adding that
committee would be going over the
with civil liberties lawyers.

Although it was the Vlahovic card y
was ostensibly the contentious ise
mury called that a “red herring.

““What they were really concerned a
was our program on Canadian auton
which was part of the election material, >
said.

The committee platform notes t
Canadian Conference of Teamsters is
only a “paper entity” which has virtual}
authority to govern the 91,500 Can
members of the union.

It calls for the era ccaial O
appointed director — currently Ed
— by an elected director and a 10-m
board, both elected by a Canadian con
tion, and the transfer of all authority 6
Canadian affairs, including finances
and assessments, charters and the
fund, to the new Canadian conference.

Kilmury noted that the committee
had a favorable response from }
members on that issue since the
material went out.

She also noted that the autonomy i
“threatens Lawson himself’ whose
positions are both appointments
international office.

Ironically, Lawson will have to put h
self to a test of the membership for
time in a decade. He was last elected a
Local 213 trustee in 1976.

Under the Landrum-Griffin
delegates to international union co
tions must be elected by secret balle
the Teamsters Union has interpreted
mean that elected executive board m:
and elected business agents are aut
cally delegates (although that, too
soon be challenged in a U.S. suit).

As a local trustee that route had
open to Lawson in the past but this
must seek a seat asa delegate from the
He is heading up the establishmen
which also includes Teamster o
Peter Moslinger.

As a senator and international ¥
official, Lawson reportedly alls ¢
roughly $250,000 a year and has access
private jet. “Can you imagine how ft
going to sit with a lot of our unen
members — especially since he hasn't
at a local membership meeting since I
asked Kilmury.

The election results are expected |
known in mid-April.

¥