Mission: To increase the size of B.C.’s unionized construction sector
Assets: Experience at unions, as an NDP MLA and at the building trades council
Yield: Another crack at heading the organization that oversees 14 unions
By Glen Korstrom
BC’s construction sector is about to get more fractious as quarrels between its private and unionized factions increase.
That’s what employers in B.C.’s building trades industry fear following a shake-up atop the British Columbia and Yukon Building and Construction Trades Council (BCYBCTC).
On January 1, Tom Sigurdson returned as the council’s executive director – a post he left in 2004 after seven years on the job.
“He’s very ideological, and I don’t think he will serve his constituency well,” said Philip Hochstein, who is president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of British Columbia (ICBA).
“[Sigurdson] has an old vision of the construction industry, how it operates and how the economy operates.”
That “old vision,” Hochstein said, is preoccupied with splitting the wealth of construction jobs instead of determining how to increase the overall pool of construction work in B.C.
The two men are ideological opposites. Hochstein is a cheerleader for independent contractors and privatized work sites; Sigurdson is in charge of an organization that co-ordinates activities for a council that represents 14 construction unions.
Between sips of peppermint tea in a Vancouver café, 53-year-old Sigurdson reveals that his life’s mission until retirement is to raise the percentage of construction work performed in B.C. by unionized workers.
“The organized [union] sector was about 80% of the work in the late 1970s and 1980s in B.C.,” Sigurdson said. “Today, it’s about 25% to 30%.”
Hochstein estimates that unionized jobs are now less than that – a mere 15% of the construction sector. Both men agree that Sigurdson will have a tough task returning the unionized construction sector to anywhere near the prominence it had in the early 1980s.
Regardless of Hochstein’s characterizations, Sigurdson is no angry blow-hard.
Quick to smile and joke, the man was elected to the Alberta legislature in 1986 and 1989 as a New Democratic Party (NDP) representative – no easy feat in a province famous for being conservative.
Sigurdson also ran for the BC NDP nomination in Burnaby Willingdon in 2005 before backing out of the race that Gabriel Yiu won. Yiu then narrowly lost that year’s provincial election to Liberal John Nuraney.
Sigurdson claims that experience purged the political animal within so he can now live what he describes as “the softer side of life.”
Politicians, by necessity, develop thick skin, Sigurdson said.
During the divisive 1992 Charlottetown Accord referendum, which Sigurdson supported, some of his constituents chased him. One spat on him. Another cornered him in a Safeway and harangued him for 45 minutes.
“I love to engage in debate and discourse when it’s constructive,” he said. “But not when it’s emotional and people are angry at you and they don’t know why they’re angry. Someone has just told them that you did something wrong and there’s nothing you can do to disabuse them of that notion.”
Sigurdson believes that political thick skin kept outgoing BC NDP leader Carole James from accepting, after a second election loss, that her leadership was not inspiring B.C. voters and that it was time to step down.
Sigurdson declined to say who he supports in the current leadership race, although he expects that the BC Liberals’ choice could affect the outcome.
He agrees with B.C. NDP cabinet minister Ian Waddell (see “Liberal leadership winner will determine NDP pick: Waddell” – BIV daily news; January 12; http://bit.ly/dIV3fb) that if the BC Liberals select Kevin Falcon as leader, the NDP will be more likely to select Adrian Dix as its head.
But Sigurdson said the thousands of new NDP members signed up in the recent membership drive are unlikely to be swayed by the Liberals’ choice because they’re probably die-hard supporters of a specific NDP candidate.
His analysis comes from a lifetime of watching politics.
The East Vancouver-bred Vancouver College high-school graduate went to Langara College and then the University of Victoria to get a degree in political science and history in 1980.
Jobless, Sigurdson visited friends in Edmonton for what he thought would be 14 days. It turned out to be 14 years.
Fundraising projects in Alberta morphed into political organizing for that province’s NDP and, finally, election to the legislature.
Losing the 1993 election was only the start of a rough patch in Sigurdson’s life. While he was adjusting to life after politics, his wife, Cindy, was diagnosed with a terminal illness and died in 1994.
At loose ends, he returned to Vancouver and wrote health and safety programs for various unions until 1997, when he started his first stint as BCYBCTC’s executive director.
His decision to leave in 2004 to go to Ottawa to do be the director of political and legislative affairs at the Canadian office of the Building and Construction Trades Department turned out to be less fun than he had envisioned.
Sigurdson missed Vancouver almost from the day he arrived in the Canadian capital. He returned to the Lower Mainland the next year and, after his failed bid at a return to politics, he joined the Teamsters to assist them with training programs.
At the BCYBCTC, he continues to focus on such issues as:
- alleged mistreatment of foreign workers;
- health and safety of all workers; and
- recruitment of new workers into the trades.
“We have a huge skill shortage coming,” he said. “Too many training centres are based in the Lower Mainland. When you have people who are First Nations or who are rural folk, coming down to the city is a big thing.”
Various truck-driving schools are scattered across the province, but Sigurdson said the same thing can’t be said of schools for crane operators.
He wants that training offered in smaller centres. Still, his primary goal is to boost the construction sector’s unionized workforce.
“Workers will be exploited if they’re not in unions,” he said, “especially in the construction industry. You’re only as good as your last job and there’s no seniority. Companies crew up and then crew down. When you get laid off, there’s no severance pay – nothing.
“Do they need a union? You bet. Many employers say they will give cash at the end of the day. Too often guys who work a couple weeks only to find that it was two weeks of donated labour.”