Mission: To unify truckers serving Port Metro Vancouver through the recently formed Metro Vancouver Container Drayage Association (MVCDA)
Assets: Four decades of labour relations and problem-solving experience
Yield: A MVCDA memorandum of understanding with Port Metro Vancouver and the BC Trucking Association addressing trucking efficiency
By Jenny Wagler
Frank Pasacreta still remembers when he lost faith in no-compromise union labour negotiations.
It was the early 1970s and Pasacreta was 25. He was working in Ottawa for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), which at the time had an acrimonious union relationship with Canada Post.
As his union stewed and simmered in its discontent, Pasacreta watched the letter carriers’ union host a Christmas cocktail party with Canada Post senior management. And there, amid the drinks and hors d’oeuvres and the spirit of the season, Pasacreta saw the letter carriers strike up conversations with management and, ever so convivially, advance their cause.
“You watch all of this go on and you go, ‘Geez, here we are over in our building, we wouldn’t have a coffee with these guys to save our lives, and there’s the letter carriers, they’ve got this working like a science,’” Pasacreta, now 62 and retired, recounted. “They get a meal into them, they get a drink into them [and] ‘You know, it’s Christmastime, let’s do the right thing.’ And things are getting done.”
As he watched the letter carriers’ success, Pasacreta saw the value of socializing labour-relations relationships, and the value of constructive rather than hostile problem solving – a belief he still holds and an approach that has marked his long and successful career in labour relations.
“Maybe I don’t want to have a Christmas party, but you can accomplish more over a cup of coffee than you can across the table throwing darts at each other.”
In his most recent role as president of the Metro Vancouver Container Drayage Association (MVCDA), which represents trucking companies that serve Port Metro Vancouver, Pasacreta said he’s using his labour-relations savvy to unify the truckers with common goals and build effective relationships with organizations that can help resolve their top gripe: Port Metro Vancouver inefficiency.
At the heart of the truckers’ concerns, he said, is a reservation system that co-ordinates port container drop off and pickup times.
“We can’t get enough [reservations]; we can’t get right ones,” he said.
When the reservation system doesn’t allow truckers to come and go with full loads,
Pasacreta said it not only affects truckers’ livelihoods, but it also burdens the port with double the truck traffic that it needs. He added that if it remains unresolved that inefficiency could impede the port’s growth and send business to rival American ports.
And Pasacreta is no stranger to local port and waterfront issues.
Not only did he grow up in an East Vancouver longshore household, where the dinnertime talk centred around the waterfront, but after his labour-relations career took him from CUPW to the BC Ministry of Labour to the BC Labour Relations Board to the Construction Labour Relations Association of BC (CLRABC) and Canada Post, he was recruited by the BC Marine Employers’ Association (BCMEA) as vice-president, operations.
It was 1987; he was 39.
The organization’s then-president and CEO Bob Wilds previously worked with Pasacreta at CLRABC. Wilds said he wanted Pasacreta on his team to help turn around waterfront labour relations.
“He had a down-to-earth approach, having worked on both sides of the table, and he had experience as a third party with the labour-relations board in British Columbia,” Wilds said.
“So he had a fairly good knowledge of the folks on both sides of the table, which was a real advantage.”
The situation called for all possible advantages. Waterfront labour relations were acrimonious and volatile, with frequent illegal work stoppages and an arbitrator on 24-hour call.
Pasacreta set about thawing that icy relationship, approaching the problem obliquely by focusing on training and health and safety.
On the labour-relations front, he said, change occurred in small steps – such as getting both sides to agree, in the event of a nighttime dispute, to hold off on arbitration until first thing in the morning.
“You try to make incremental changes in enough places so those changes start to have an effect overall in a relationship.”
But Pasacreta said those changes did eventually add up – as did his promotions.
In 2003, with Pasacreta heading up the organization as president and CEO, the BCMEA negotiated a 51-month collective agreement – the longest in the organization’s history and the only one where mediators weren’t called in for assistance.
Besides helping to improve the tenor of waterfront labour relations, Pasacreta said his roles at the BCMEA honed his ability to reason with government and effect policy change – another skill he’s already using with the MVCDA, which launched last May.
At the BCMEA, for example, he lobbied Transport Canada to reduce the impact on port performance of the marine facilities restricted area access clearance program.
The post-9-11 security legislation required extensive background checks for port workers. Pasacreta deemed the original legislation “extraordinarily intrusive” and “ill-conceived.”
As part of that lobbying process, Pasacreta said he spoke with politicians and enlisted numerous experts to mount a persuasive argument – efforts that paid off in reducing the legislation’s intrusiveness.
“You think about how much information does it take to change opinions and help people understand things better,” he said. “So you learn those lessons.”
Pasacreta is leveraging his political and lobbying skills to get his association accepted and to build key agreements – such as a memorandum of understanding (MOU), signed in December 2010 with Port Metro Vancouver and the BC Trucking Association. The MOU promotes the efficient and reliable movement of goods by truck to and from the port.
Pasacreta also wants a clear answer to the question of where the buck stops on port-efficiency questions.
“Someone clearly – [Port Metro Vancouver], Transport Canada or the government of Canada – is responsible for the port’s performance,” he said, adding that his goals are not adversarial, but simply to establish a clear, responsive mechanism to solve port-efficiency problems.
But while Pasacreta is still diligently doing what he does best – working with people and solving problems constructively – he said he enjoys the fact that his post-retirement work is limited to seven to 10 days a month, many of which he works from his home in Kelowna. Just now, he’s spending six weeks in the Mediterranean.
“It’s almost the perfect life,” he said. “I wish I could have done it sooner.”