Large-scale construction projects, even when they involve massive amounts of public money have been notorious for the overwhelmingly “white, male” face of the workforce.  While governments profess to be committed to equal opportunity in employment, making the labour force more inclusive on public construction projects has not been a high priority, particularly when the large project is highway construction. One exception to this pattern of highway building is the $1.2 billion Vancouver Island Highway Project in British Columbia which was started in 1994.

In B.C., as elsewhere in Canada, women's work in highway construction has been confined almost exclusively to traffic management; also, construction workers tended to come from contractors’ urban workforces even when highways were built in rural areas.  This practice has resulted in the exclusion of local labour as well as aboriginal groups, women and other minorities.  A survey of unionized workers in B.C. in 1990 indicated that women accounted for less than three-tenths of one percent of all highway workers employed by trade contractors.  Aboriginal workers fared slightly better, making up about one percent, and the total for visible minorities was 2.67%.

The equity initiatives for the Island Highway Project (IHP) represent the first time equity  measures were a specific requirement in a project agreement in highway construction in Canada. This contract was negotiated through a specific type of Project/Labour agreement in which a Crown Corporation, Highway Constructors Ltd. (HCL) was set up as the exclusive employer for all labour used on the highway.  While individual (mostly local) contractors bid for work on the highway, HCL provided labour to the contractors and contractors reimbursed HCL.  The intent was that HCL control the labour supply so that specific initiatives could be undertaken, specifically with regard to hiring labour from local communities and from targeted equity groups.

The equity component of the project agreement was difficult to negotiate primarily because the major participants to the agreement, the building trade unions and the highway building contractors, were opposed to equity measures.  Ultimately these parties were convinced that they could live with the project agreement's stipulations, if not evade them, and agreed to the equity provisions.   The hostility of the building trades and the contractors cannot be underestimated, because ultimately it did affect the outcomes of the project.  But despite this hostility, equity initiatives were surprising successful.  Numbers employed from the equity target groups were dramatically higher than was normally the case for their representation in construction projects altogether, and diverged wildly from the normal statistics on highway construction.

Each year of the project the numbers of workers and the proportion of hours worked by members of equity groups increased.  The equity component of the IHP workforce, calculated by hours worked, was over 16% of the total in 1997, the peak year of hiring.  The proportion of women reached 6.5% and aboriginal workers accounted for 7.5% of the total hours worked. These figures may appear to be modest, but when compared with the starting point, which was virtually zero for each of the two groups, they indicate significant gains.  At various times during the project, particularly during summer months the numbers of equity workers could climb to over 23%, with women representing about 9% of the total and aboriginal workers representing 11%.
The intention of this study of the equity provisions of the IHP is to analyze the features of the initial project agreement which permitted equity initiatives to be implemented, to evaluate the quality and quantity of training received by members of equity target groups, and to assess the experience of the people affected by the conditions of the project.  Bi-weekly labour-force statistics throughout the life of the IHP were provided by the employer, Highway Constructors Ltd., which included information on the number of people employed, the hours they worked, and the type of job performed.  This information was detailed by the “equity” classification of the employee, so that one could tell in any two-week period, for example, how many women were working as operating engineers, or how many visible minorities were working as teamsters.

This aggregate data (which is unusual in its detail) gives a good general overview of the success of the project, at least as far as numbers were concerned.  But how these numbers played out in the actual implementation of the project required knowledge of the experience of those involved.  Over the course of a year, we conducted extensive interviews with workers who participated in the training process.  These interviews occurred at the worksite and in other locations, and were invaluable in understanding not only the success of the training itself, but also the nature of subsequent experiences of the trainees with racism, sexual harassment, and other barriers to the full participation of these workers in the highway workforce.

We also interviewed the contractors, trainers, trade union representatives and government and HCL personnel responsible for the project at various stages.  These interviews yielded information which greatly affected our ultimate assessment of why certain aspects of the project were more or less successful.  In particular, while our original tendency was to see contractors and other workers as an inherent obstacle simply because they rejected “equity” initiatives altogether, we came to understand that some specific features of the training program itself contributed to the negative reaction of contractors.  In total, thirty-eight people were interviewed.

Our overall assessment is that the IHP is a good model to use as a generic approach for training and integrating people from traditionally excluded groups into the workforce of large-scale construction projects.  The potential for substantial and lucrative work for both the trade unions and the contractors is a powerful incentive to achieve the compliance of these groups.  But this does not mean that good-will was bought with the compliance and, as could be expected on any new initiative of this kind, many things did go wrong.  Some of them were the result of poor initial planning or of a poor selection of people to carry out the project.  But these problems were relatively minor and most of them can be rectified, with sufficient planning, in future projects.  The more important insights gained from this study relate to the very nature of the construction industry itself and the ways in which people generally receive training and gain entry into this workforce.    The authors of this study, Kate Braid (journey carpenter and Malaspina University College Instructor) and Marjorie Griffin Cohen (professor, Simon Fraser University) intend to make public policy recommendations to deal with these issues.

-- Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Vancouver