Unlike in the organized sector, we don't spend a lot of time tooting our horn and telling everybody we're the best, the most efficient, better trained, and this, that, and the other thing, but I would certainly say we are.
It goes back to my auto industry analysis. Forty years ago the CAW and the Big Three had a monopoly over car production in North America. Competition came into the market. All of a sudden other people were producing better cars, safer cars, cheaper cars. The CAW and the Big Three both got together and realized they had to compete, increase their standards, improve the quality of their work, and they have done so.
In the construction sector in Quebec that hasn't happened at all. It is happening in certain sectors in Ontario, such as in the road building, and sewer and water main sector, which is dominated by one union, the Laborers' International Union. That union in construction in Ontario is competitive. They don't have any of these monopoly contracts, or whatever else, and they compete quite fairly.
The biggest thing you would like to know, probably, is about wages. I managed a workforce of 200 open-shop people. On average our people made more than a unionized person, based upon the fact that an open-shop general contractor or subcontractor has to have more loyalty to his employees and guarantee them more hours. Otherwise, they will be lost. We can't call up a hiring hall and get more people.
The same thing when winter comes. If we lay them all off, they will go get some other job. They may like it somewhere else and they won't come back. So what we do is find work for them. We don't make as much money over the winter, but we keep a lot more of them. We create loyalty among them.
My policy was always basically to pay a few dollars less than the published union wage. The productivity I gained out of the loyalty of our crew made us unbeatable in terms of open competition against organized—