Vigilance Helps Bring a Contractor in Ontario Back to the IBEW

*This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of The Electrical Worker Online

Several years ago, members of Kitchener, Ontario, Local 804 started taking notice of a nonunion contractor doing business in the local’s jurisdiction, and they had a hunch.

“Our organizers kept seeing this company showing up more and more on resumes, LinkedIn and social media,” Business Manager Derek Brooks said. And as local leaders did some digging, “it all started to line up.”

The contractor, Brooks said, appeared to have many of the same traits as one where Local 804 had conducted a successful card-certification campaign in 2013, an organizing win that brought the workers of a small residential and industrial-commercial-institutional electrical contractor into the IBEW.

Brooks recalled that the firm’s owners had not welcomed the local’s organizing effort. “During the campaign, they threatened to close up shop,” he said.

Almost immediately after the certifying agreement was signed, the seven-year-old company “disappeared,” Brooks said. Four of the workers remained IBEW members, he noted, and went on to become general foremen for other contractors.

Whether this new company was truly the old one operating under a new name was important for Local 804 to find out: The previous firm’s owners had also signed an agreement stating that if they got involved in another electrical business, the local could extend IBEW membership to those workers, as well.

In November 2020, the local filed a formal request with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, seeking to confirm the suspicions. Preliminary evidence supporting the local’s claim was reviewed at a mediation meeting the following February, and the case was sent to a formal hearing scheduled for January 2022.

The local took advantage of the intervening months to secure a labour board order compelling the contractor to produce paperwork that the IBEW believed would prove that the former company and the current one were the same and that only the name had been changed.

The hearing date also was far enough away to allow the local’s leaders to work through the documents while also managing the day-to-day duties of leading a busy 1,200-member local, whose inside and outside construction jurisdiction runs from the greater Kitchener and Waterloo area north to the Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.

“We went through thousands of documents,” said Brooks, a 30-year IBEW member. “Without this confidential information, we had no way to fully prove our case.”

Local 804’s leadership team reviewed and cataloged such items as government filings and corporate financial records, as well as business communications and lists of projects, assets and customers.

“It was a long game of sifting,” Brooks said. It was necessary work, too: “The pertinent information can be well hidden.”

The vigilance paid off when, more than two years after the hearing, the labour board in February handed down several decisions in Local 804’s favour.

The board agreed that the local successfully established that a business sale had, in fact, occurred. It also ruled that the new company’s relationship with a separate, companion firm that does related electronics work is a 50-50 partnership, meaning that its workers also were able to be organized by Local 804.

“We were within our rights to force them to lay off all of their existing workers and hire from us,” Brooks said. “But what type of union message would that send? It’s not what we stand for.”

Brooks said that 12 new members were brought into Local 804 as a result, and that the working relationship with the signatory contractor was a good one.

“They started hiring from us,” he said, using the local’s dispatch system, “and they’re sending people in for training.”

The business manager gave kudos to Local 804 organizer Dave Graham for staying on top of things.

“Organizing is the key to market share,” Brooks said. “It can turn into a long game.”

“All of us must stay as vigilant and persistent like the men and women of Local 804,” said First District International Vice President Russ Shewchuk. “That’s a proven way to grow our ranks and capture more work.”