Concert Properties is a big business. Between 1989 and 1999 it built 80 per cent of the rental housing constructed in Vancouver. With an asset base of $450 million in 2000, it's now the largest developer of rental housing in Western Canada; not bad for an enterprise completely controlled by the labour movement.
Concert, and its companion enterprise Concert Real Estate Inc., constitute one of the more visible examples of "worker capitalism", a phenomenon that had its inception in the 1980s and is now flourishing across Canada. Concert Properties was created in the late 1980's largely at the instigation of the then-president of the Telecommunication Workers' Union, Bill Clark. Clark spearheaded a process that led to 20 union pension plans pooling $30 million to get the company up and running.
Throughout its existence, Concert has been completely controlled by the trade union bureaucracy and its current board of directors continues that tradition. Of 17 directors, 12 are current or retired union full-timers, including Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.
This leads to two very uncomfortable questions:
- Why is Concert Properties a member of Canada's largest and most powerful P3 lobby group, the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships?
- Why did Concert Properties donate more than $16,000 to the Liberal Party of British Columbia last year?
The P3-Liberal Connections
Concert Properties pays $600 yearly in membership fees to be a corporate member of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, joining the ranks of some of the largest and most notorious privateers in the world, including Aramark, Sodexho and the Compass Group, all of which have been central to BC Premier Gordon Campbell's firing of thousands of HEU members and contracting out their jobs at minimum-wage levels. Former Operating Engineer leader Tony Tennessy has served both on the board of Concert and on the board of the CCPPP as well.
Concert Properties has a long history with B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell. In 1989, then-Vancouver-Mayor Campbell gave $48 million worth of public land to newly established VLC Properties Ltd, the original identity of the union-funded corporation. In exchange, VLC promised to build up to 2,000 units of "affordable housing" each year. But they only ever built 1,143 units, and none was "affordable". VLC Properties later morphed into Concert Properties. Jack Poole, VLC's main mover and now the chairman of the board of Concert Properties, is a long time backer of Gordon Campbell and once considered running for the B.C. Liberal leadership himself.
The convergences don't end there. Concert board members Jack Poole, David Podmore, Ken Georgetti and Tony Tennessy were all members of the Vancouver/Whistler 2010 Olympic Bid Committee. Poole and Podmore actually headed the committee. Premier Gordon Campbell calls the 2010 Olympic Games "the largest single public-private partnership initiative going in Canada right now."
Labour-capital collaborators
The name "Concert" appears to symbolize teamwork, mutual aid, cooperation and a vision of labour and capital working together in harmony to pursue mutually beneficial goals. Certainly the board of directors suggests teamwork that, to be quite frank, smacks of class collaboration, and the board of the 2010 Bid Committee is only one example of many:
Dave Haggard, recently appointed by Paul Martin as a candidate for the federal Liberal Party, just joined the board of Concert this year, replacing the IWA's retiring second vice-president, Harvey Arcand. As directors of the company, both of them are or have been at the same table as retired Canfor Vice-President A. Gordon Armstrong.
TWU President Rod Hiebert and Business Agent Nancy Curley sit across from Telus Vice-President Robert Beynon.
Worst of all, three UFCW representatives sit on Concert's board: Leif Hansen, just retired from his position as vice-president of UFCW local 247, Jack Allard, retired secretary treasurer of UFCW local 1518 and Bryan Wall, who is listed as a consultant to the UFCW pension plan and has served as a plan trustee.
In the summer of 1997, Jack Allard signed a concession agreement with Overwaitea Foods creating an infamous two-tier agreement that allows Overwaitea to pay new hires half what it pays employees who have the same seniority but were hired before 1997. Two years later, Leif Hansen signed a similar agreement with Overwaitea. Bryan Wall signed both of these contracts, but not on behalf of UFCW. He was, at the time, Overwaitea's vice-president of human resources. It's a comfy little club, this "workers capitalism".
"Worker Capitalism" = Corporate Unionism
This cosy relationship between bosses and bureaucrats is nothing new. BC's Working Opportunity Fund runs in the same league as Concert. With assets of nearly half a billion dollars, it's the largest venture capital corporation in Western Canada. Its board is also controlled by the trade union bureaucracy - of 15 directors, eight are current or retired union officials, including Angela Schira, Secretary-Treasurer, BC Federation of Labour.
The WOF board also includes Graeme McFarlane, a lawyer who has represented the Health Employers Association of British Columbia in opposing BC Nurses' Union cases at the Labour Relations Board. Director Dean Drysdale, a business professor, ran as a candidate of Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance in a 2000 by-election. Worst is Peter Armstrong, president of Great Canadian Railtour and - last December - a director of the BC Ferry Authority board during its unsuccessful attempt to break the ferry workers' strike. The chair of the Ferry Authority, David Emerson, was also a member of the Working Opportunity Fund Investment Advisory Committee in the late 1990s, alongside Ken Georgetti, then chair of WOF's board of directors. Emerson has since left the Ferry Authority to become a federal Liberal candidate alongside brother Haggard of the IWA.
Concert and Working Opportunities are only two examples. To get a realistic picture, we'll have to look at "worker capitalism" in all its many forms: Crocus Investment Fund, Mortgage One Corporation, Fonds Solidarite, Working Ventures, Real Assets, First Ontario Fund, Workers' Investment Fund, Social Investment Organization, Growthworks, Vengrowth Investment Fund, Trillium Growth Capital, Inc., Retrocomm Growth Fund, Capital Alliance Ventures, Working Enterprises Group of Companies, Working Enterprises Insurance Services, Working Enterprises Insurance Brokers, Working Enterprises Travel Services, Working Enterprises National, Ltd.... and dozens more.
The Face of Workers' Capitalism
Workers' capitalism may have started with the best of intentions: the preservation of union members' pension funds. Its roots may go back to the campaigns to force union pension funds to divest holdings in corporations doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa. The ethical investing movement seems to connect with the institutions of the new workers' capitalism. And whatever criticisms need to be made, the phenomenon is not without its positive aspects - for example, Concert's record in condo construction shows that it's possible to build a condominium that doesn't leak (no small accomplishment these days).
But the outlines of workers' capitalism look, more than anything else, like a form of capitalism whereby trade union leaders use the savings of their members to run a corporate empire for the accumulation of profit. It's a form of capitalism where business secrecy prevails. It's a form of capitalism in which a director can have his hands on the lever of capital through the union pension fund while controlling (directly or indirectly) the source of labour through the union hiring hall and the cost of labour through the collective agreement.
It's a system where the lines between labour and capital have blurred to the point of being indistinguishable - where labour and capital have merged into one vast endeavour, working together in harmony, moving together happily side by side into the future.
There are only a few catches.
First, labour militancy has to go. It just doesn't fit into the plan. And neither does democracy.
If you're a cleaner or kitchen worker or security guard in the BC hospital system, you'll simply have to accept that brothers Georgetti and Haggard and Neumann are working hard for our mutual gain, and that insisting the CLC expel the IWA for its raid on the HEU simply doesn't make business sense.
You'll have to agree that the 2002 BC Fed resolution calling for action 'up to and including a general strike' to defeat Premier Campbell's destruction of public services and union rights was an unfortunate bit of overstatement, although a necessary one in order to avoid the unpleasantness of the Fed convention actually having a debate on organizing a general strike.
And the end of the HEU strike? The ramrodded return to work? The refusal to allow HEU members the right to vote on whether to comply with Campbell's union-busting? Just the cost of doing business.