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Larry Schell
Following a 46-year career with the IBEW, First District International Representative Larry Schell retired, effective Dec. 1. Employees at Electrohome, a consumer electronics firm, had only recently voted to join Kitchener, Ontario Local 804 when Schell started work there and joined the IBEW in October 1969. His father had previously served as treasurer for the company’s employee association. The younger Schell worked in Electrohome’s engineering department, using lathes and milling machines to make prototypes of new products before they went into manufacturing. “Our tolerance level was thirty-thousandths of an inch,” Schell said. “All of this is done by computers now, where we did it by hand using micrometers for our final sizing.” As a member of Local 804, Schell worked on committees dealing with organizing, leadership and negotiating. He also was active in his local’s Community Outreach program. Schell became a full-time business agent in 1973. “We had grown to 3,300 members and had 18 units with almost 30 collective-bargaining agreements,” he said, which spanned a number of utilities, manufacturing and service industries. “I was servicing and bargaining from the start.” Schell said he brought in four companies the following year. In 1978, Schell moved to Edmonton, Alberta, to work as the first full-time organizer for Local 424, which represents a number of trades in that province’s capital city. “And I never looked back,” he said. “My average was 10 new companies a year and 440 new members.” Six years later, the Alberta Government appointed Schell to its Labour Board, where he served for 27 years. In addition to presenting hearings to the board, Schell’s experience there led him into arbitration work. “I loved sitting on the Alberta Labour Board and I was on many high-profile cases,” he said. One such case — which dealt with a meat-industry employer charged with trying to take money away from his company’s defined-benefit pension plan — was found to have breached Alberta’s Labour Code. “Sitting on the Labour Board was beneficial to the IBEW and me,” Schell said. “I learned so much about the code and cases that affected labor in Canada.” Working on the board, Schell said, gave him and then-First District International Representative Vair Clendenning the chance to prepare schools designed specifically for “salts” — union members who work on non-union jobs to organize those workplaces. The schools eventually were made available for locals in all of Canada’s provinces. “People had learned why they needed to organize,” Schell said, “but they didn’t know how to organize a worksite.” Schell recalled that he and Clendenning, who retired in 2007, went on the road in the early to mid-1990s to teach locals about unfair labor practices and how to organize. The two of them prepared schools on presenting to tribunals for labor, arbitration and trial boards. “Canadian law allows our members to use lawyers if they are charged under the IBEW Constitution,” he said. “The trial board school was designed to teach executive boards how to handle lawyers.” In 1993, then-First District Vice President Ken Woods recommended Schell for appointment as an international representative. “A high point for me was organizing new members and companies,” Schell said. “That will never go away.” In his spare time, Schell was active with the Strathcona County, Alberta, Special Olympics committee, serving for a time as its president. He also has volunteered with Ride for Sight, a motorcycle charity in Canada that collects donations for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. In addition to spending more time in retirement with his wife, Jan; their children, Jason (an electrician with Local 424) and Katrina; and their four grandchildren, Schell plans to continue to conduct organizing classes, and he’s excited — on principle — to remain a dues-paying IBEW member. The officers, staff and membership thank Brother Schell for his career serving the Brotherhood and wish him a long, happy and healthy retirement.	Larry Schell
RETIRED Darrell Taylor
Forty-five years after voting to join the IBEW as a young GE appliance technician, Darrell Taylor retired Nov. 1 as the union’s professional and industrial regional organizing coordinator for western Canada. Taylor began working for GE in his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, in 1970, earning $100 a week repairing toasters, mixers and coffee makers and other small appliances that people today toss and replace. One day, a coworker asked for a raise, telling the boss that GE appliance technicians in Calgary were being paid more for the same work. “That’s because they’re union,” the boss replied. His offhand remark ignited an organizing drive that led Edmonton technicians to vote in 1972 to join Local 424. They had to revive their campaign a few years later when mergers brought two new groups of employees into the GE appliance division. Taylor, by then a journeyman repairing refrigerators, washers, dryers and other major appliances, helped organize the technicians, followed by office staff and shipping and distribution center workers. Winning them over was imperative: “We were making more money and had better benefits,” he said. “We didn’t want to go backwards.” Taylor’s smaller unit was outnumbered but won the vote. “The company fought it all the way, but we won,” he said. His coworkers elected him unit chair, a position he held for 25 years. “Darrell was huge in us being able to make contacts and persuade the folks to get on board with IBEW,” said Larry Schell, then a Local 424 organizer who’d tapped Taylor to help lead the fight. Three decades later, he urged Taylor to join the IBEW as a full-time organizer. “I recognized his talents then, and years later I knew he still had them,” said Schell, who retired recently as a First District international representative. He described Taylor as a natural, a master of the “cold call.” “He had that ability to walk up to anybody and be able to talk to them. He was so good at it. He also had that personality — people could warm up to him very quickly. He had all the ingredients we needed for a good organizer,” Schell said. “I loved working with him.” After five years as IBEW’s lead organizer in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Taylor became the regional organizing coordinator for western Canada in 2012. His territory spanned from Ontario’s western border to the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, he’s organized everyone from water treatment workers at Alberta’s oil sands and telecom workers in the Northwest Territories to tree trimmers in British Columbia — not his hardest sell, Taylor indicated with a chuckle. The Arborcare Tree Service workers had been forced to buy their own tools — even chain saws — among a long list of indignities. “These guys were so mad they were signing cards before we even got in the door,” he said. Since his retirement, Taylor and his wife have made two extended trips to Arizona in their fifth-wheel camper, trading blizzards for desert heat. He’s looking forward to summer vacations on a northern Alberta lake with their son, daughter and five grandchildren. Taylor hadn’t been looking to change jobs when Schell suggested he become an organizer in 2007 but said he’s “very happy that I did.” Hanging up his hat has been an adjustment. “I’ve missed being out in the field,” he said. “The best part of the job was getting out in the field and talking to the people.” The IBEW officers, members and staff thank Brother Taylor for his years of service and wish him health and happiness in retirement.	Darrell Taylor

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The 2018 federal budget – released Tuesday – centred around “Equality + Growth” and contained a moderate commitment to both. The budget plan delivers noteworthy progress in several priority areas for Canada’s unions.

The Canadian Labour Congress, which represents 3.3 million Canadian workers, today released a detailed budget analysis, which outlines the commitments on important issues for working Canadians.

This budget provides initial steps forward toward national pharmacare and pay equity in the federal jurisdiction, dedicated parental leave for male and non-birthing partners, action to assist seasonal Employment Insurance (EI) claimants, support for victims of domestic violence, more help for workers seeking unpaid wages from insolvent employers, and Just Transition funds for workers and communities affected by climate change policy.

However the budget’s failure to offer an expanded commitment to early learning and child care weakened the its consistent gender equity focus. The limited movement on protection for pensioners and pension plan members in the restructuring and bankruptcy process, and limited progress on the government’s tax fairness commitments also detracted from the budget’s equity goals.

Read the full analysis.

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The Women In Trades Awards/Bursaries Program was created to recognize women who are members of the Canadian Building Trades, and to bring awareness of employment opportunities for women in the skilled trades.

This annual awards/bursaries program provides 3 recipients each with $1,500, for a total of $4,500 in awards:

• 1 award of $1,500 to any woman Journeyman who is part of the Building Trades Union
• 2 bursaries of $1,500 each, to be given to 2 apprentice women who are members of the BT Unions.
  Any 1^st/2^nd/3^rd/4^th/5^th year apprentice

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Who is Eligible?

Canadian women in the trades (member of the Building Trades Unions) who demonstrate integrity, excellence, and leadership within the Maintenance/Construction trades industry.

Candidates who qualify will possess all of the below points:

• Membership with a Union under the Building Trades
• Integrity and Leadership within the industry
• Excellence in their trade
• Practice workplace safety
• 1^st/2^nd/3^rd/4^th/5^th year Apprentice Or,
• Journeyman status

Maximum of 50 applications to be received per year

If applying for the Apprentice Bursary, the applicant must not have received the “ACTIMS Women In Trades Award” in the past to be eligible

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Requirements:

Applicants must complete the application form in its entirety with attachments and mail or email to the ACTIMS office between the dates of February 1^st through till April 30^th.

Write Up: The applicant must write a page or more describing why they feel that they possess or demonstrate the below points:
• Integrity within the industry
• Leadership in the workforce
• Excellence in their trade
• Practice workplace safety

The write up must be signed off by their employer stating that the information provided by the applicant is true to the best of their knowledge.

Letter of Recommendation: The applicant must provide a signed off letter of recommendation from their current, or most recent, employer; or their local union

Copy of JM tickets or Apprentice Book (Apprenticeship papers)

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How To Apply:

To be eligible, applications and supporting documents must be received no later than April 30^th.

Completed application package must contain:

• Fully completed application form
• Write up (signed off by the applicants employer) describing why they feel that they possess or demonstrate the below points:
  • Integrity within the industry
  • Leadership in the workforce
  • Excellence in their trade
  • Practice workplace safety
• Letter of recommendation from current, or most recent, employer; or local union (signed)
• Copy of JM tickets or Apprentice Book (Apprenticeship papers)

Winning applicants will be contacted by the ACTIMS office between June 25^th – July 5^th

Click here for more information. 

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Nearly 1,776 feet above Manhattan, Joe Buonocore did something very few others would: he looked down.

Instead of vertigo, Buonocore, a journeyman inside wireman and specialist climber for New York Local 3, captured his mind-bending view of fellow Local 3 member Chris Bugeaunu hanging from the spire of One World Trade Center.

Don’t worry, the iPhone was attached to a lanyard. When you are more than a quarter-mile off the ground, everything is.

“It’s like working Pinocchio up there,” Buonocore said.

His picture was one of hundreds submitted for the 19th Annual IBEW Photo Contest, and it rose high above the other 14 finalists during the month-long online vote. It won nearly one in five of the more than 7,000 votes cast.

The finalists this year included new takes on the kind of classic subjects that show up year after year, including “power lines silhouetted against a glorious sunset,” and “members at work in staggeringly beautiful places.”

But this year’s finalists went far beyond the expected. How many of us have seen a nuclear reactor refueled or the first light of dawn reflecting off torrents of water erupting from cliff-side spillways?

More than any recent contest, however, portraits featured prominently among the finalists and two were voter favorites. Yes, first place is the view from a place as exotic as any on Earth, but the second-place winner’s subject is unmistakably an individual, Honolulu Local 1260 member Cyana Stevens, captured doing what binds the members of the IBEW together: hard work, skillfully done.

We’d love to see more. So, turn your phones to landscape, max out the resolution, and start capturing your brothers and sisters close-up. Let the world see who we are, and in our faces, our strength.

From the street, the spire atop One World Trade Center looks impossibly delicate and far away, a slender needle hung with what look like small silver spheres.

Not for Buonocore and the other eight members of the Local 3 climbing crew. For them, the 408-foot spire –which on its own would be taller than the tallest building in at least 14 states – is a vertical job site and second home. For two years they have been transforming it from a decorative flourish into the indispensable heart of New York’s media, radio, television, and communications system.

In this picture, taken in July, Buonocore and Bugeaunu were replacing HDTV antennas. On another day, they installed dishes to receive broadcasts from TV trucks or relays for the NYPD’s communications system. And most days, when they take their breaks, out come the cameras.

“We all take pictures. When we are above the clouds; when fog rolls in from Brooklyn; the sunsets and sunrises,” Buonocore said. “Our phones are full of them.”

It’s one of the advantages when your work starts where the office building ends.

Buonocore said several of the crew submitted pictures for the contest and agreed that any money they won would go to the Local 3 strike fund to support the thousands of members who have been striking against Charter Communications for nearly a year.

Here’s what we can know about Honolulu Local 1260 member Cyana Stevens. She is strong, focused and skilled. Lee, a junior control officer, took this picture while assisting Stevens, who was changing out burner guns on a generating unit at Oahu’s Kahe Power Plant. The concentrated effort resonated with hundreds of voters. Lee said the picture was about more than the work Stevens was doing, though. “I wanted to show that not only are our brothers working hard on a daily basis, but also our sisters out there in the field,” Lee said.

Disorienting may be the best word for 2017. So many things seemed unbalanced and off-kilter. Maybe that is why Miller’s near perfectly symmetrical photograph was so popular. Miller, the Local 11 press secretary, took the picture of inside wireman Alton Wilkerson holding his end of the flag during the annual May Day march from MacArthur Park in Westlake to downtown L.A. Everything outside the frame may be in flux, but Wilkerson, also national president of the Electrical Workers Minority Caucus RENEW, is a still point in the center of this image. The buildings, rigidly checked with windows, rise straight and true. The stripes of the flag flow calmly into, what we hope, is a brighter and more orderly future.

There is a remarkable stillness in Schalk’s picture of a Local 15 line crew repairing faults in a high-voltage transmission line. The reality of the midwinter shoot was the astonishing noise and power of the engine and rotors, the vibrating platform and wires and insulators swinging under the downdraft. Now look again at the picture. Each member of the three-man crew is so purposeful and concentrated that moment seems almost frozen. Schalk, the official photographer for Commonwealth Edison and Exelon for nearly four decades, now retired to warmer Arizona, assures it was not.

“The downdraft of the helicopter made for pretty cold, miserable conditions in January,” Schalk said.

Impera’s image of a Toronto streetcar in for maintenance looks like a transmission from the future. Everything is spotless, the red erupts out of the monochrome background. It looks impossible and real at the same time. In a way, both are true. Impera digitally transformed his picture of the Leslie Barns Street Car Repair facility, dimming every color but red into an industrial gray, lending a surreal air to the newly built shop.

Journeyman inside wireman Eric Mokan was standing on a ladder installing solar panels on a Princeton, N.J., office building when he caught sight of his Local 269 brother Marco Sciarrotta hovering in the clouds. Mokan was about 10 feet below the sloping solar array Sciarrotta was installing. “I saw the reflection of the sky and it looked like he was floating,” said Mokan, who grabbed his phone. As much as the reflection, though, it is Sciarotta’s shape that makes the picture special. The screwdriver is exactly vertical; his right leg and head are tilted exactly inline and his boot and thumb curve off perfectly in opposite directions.

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The following appeared in an op-ed written for The Province by IBEW International Representative, Laird Cronk, and Irene Lanzinger, President of the BC Federation of Labour. 

B.C.’s chronic shortage of skilled workers and the faults of our skills training and apprenticeship system were spotlighted recently by the results of a survey of construction companies.

Some of the survey findings were positive. Companies report optimism that their sector will continue to grow in the year ahead—and that’s positive given the important role the construction industry plays in our economy. And predicted wage increases above the inflation rate are good for workers struggling with affordability issues in B.C., the country’s most expensive place to live.

But underneath that optimism is a legitimate concern that skills shortages will worsen for the construction sector and be a brake on economic growth. In our view that pessimism reflects the failure of B.C.’s training system and our inability to produce the skilled workers required to build infrastructure to drive economic and social growth.

Other provinces are struggling with the same challenges. But the shortcomings here are a distinctly made-in-B.C. problem. It’s the legacy of 16 years of the B.C. Liberals mismanaging the system after they gambled on a risky and failed overhaul.

The B.C. Federation of Labour has just completed an analysis of the Liberal’s radical reshape (available at bcfed.ca/failedexperiment). Here’s what we found. Training for skilled trades was deregulated. Comprehensive training programs were chopped into modules. Hours of mandatory classroom learning and on-the-job practical work experience for apprentices were cut to the lowest levels in Canada.

And the requirement, called compulsory certification, that work in complex and dangerous fields like electrical, refrigeration, crane operation and plumbing be performed by a trained, certified journey person was dropped. It meant that anyone could install a complex wiring job, or operate a towering crane on a building site, or do work on refrigeration systems like ice rinks.

Similarly, rules covering the supervision of on-the-job training for apprentices were also diminished. Across Canada, only a certified journey person in a trades field can teach in the classroom and oversee the work of an apprentice. But in B.C. instruction and work supervision by uncertified tradespeople are allowed.

Overall, training became narrow and shallow. It created a workforce that lacks the depth and breadth of skills to meet current needs. Critically, while registrations in trades training and apprenticeship programs have increased, overall apprenticeship completion rates declined compared to a decade ago and relative to other provinces. And we believe the changes and their impact on health and safety training (or lack thereof) contribute to B.C.’s record as the most dangerous place for on-the-job-injuries in Canada.

It’s crucial to understand how the B.C. Liberals’ failed experiment contributed to the shortage of skilled workers. But it’s more important to find a new path forward. In the short term, there are some practical measures that will help the Horgan NDP government address the skills gaps including:

• providing more concrete work experience opportunities on public and private projects to enable current apprentices who are bottlenecked in the system to complete their training.

• setting minimum apprenticeship levels on public infrastructure projects and strengthening requirements for hands on supervision, mentorship, and training.

• returning to full scope training for all trades, and compulsory certification.

The labour movement can bring a lot to the table to help develop the substantive changes needed to solve the skills shortage. Unions in B.C. invest millions of dollars every year to deliver highly successful training programs with much higher than average completion rates. And at post-secondary institutes across the province, union members provide classroom training for thousands of apprentices in dozens of different trades.

Long-term, sustainable solutions to solve B.C.’s skilled workforce shortages can only be achieved through collaboration between government, employers and unions. Our economic and social prosperity clearly depends on investing in people to create a training culture in all our workplaces.

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Thank you to everyone who submitted their names and essays for the 2017/2018 IBEW Canada Scholarships Award; we received entries this year from 159 applicants.

A random draw was made this morning at the First District Office, and it is our pleasure to announce the following winners:

Kira Schmidt – Local Union 993, Kamloops, BC

Sharon MacLean – Local Union 37, Fredericton, NB

Alexandre Cochrane– Local Union 2228, Ottawa, ON

Lacey Anderson – Local Union 2067, Regina, SK

Erykah Verrier – Local Union 424, Edmonton, AB

We, at the First District Office, and the other sponsors (TD Insurance Meloche Monnex, MWG Apparel and AIL) wish these dedicated young people a successful year in their continued education.

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