Barbeque honours immigrant workers

For 41-year-old Frank Bieschke, the bold move he and wife Heke made from their German homeland to Canada has been the right one.

International Workers

For 41-year-old Frank Bieschke, the bold move he and wife Heke made from their German homeland to Canada has been the right one.

He has a steady bricklaying job with Mid-Island Construction of Ladysmith with about a 50-per-cent pay raise, nice accommodations in scenic Brentwood Bay near Victoria and a cost of living comparable to what he had in Germany.

“For me, it’s a nice country,” he said of Canada during a barbeque held in honour of immigrant construction trades workers hosted by Wayne Pye, owner of Pye Construction, at his suburban Victoria home. “The people are friendly here.”

Bieschke said the problem back in Germany, where he had been a bricklayer for 20 years, was that construction companies were hiring cheaper labour from Eastern Europe, leaving German trades workers such as himself under-employed.

So, in the spring of 2006, Bieschke started looking to North America for steady work.

Through television programs and searching the Internet, Bieschke began seriously looking at Canada and the B.C. cities of Vancouver and Victoria in particular.

He got in touch with Regina Brodersen, director of human resources for the B.C. Construction Association based in Victoria and the year-long immigration process began.

Brodersen, who came from Germany herself on May 31, 2006, has been the biggest conduit for skilled Western European construction workers to smoothly migrate to B.C.

She estimated that two-thirds of those she comes into contact with wind up in the province but only half of those stay for any length of time.

“Some don’t find what they expected,” Brodersen said.

Others, such as three Finnish carpenters who were at the barbeque which the B.C. Construction Association hopes will become an annual event, have a wanderlust and will probably pull up stakes and move on to Australia, where work is also plentiful.

She has placed about 90 from Germany, Finland, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico and Ireland in B.C. construction jobs so far and is looking to expand her recruiting horizons to Albania and the Ukraine. Her biggest competition comes from the other labour-starved Canadian provinces as well as Australia and New Zealand.

So far, she has placed 65 Germans, 11 Finns and the rest from other countries in B.C. construction jobs, 56 in the Vancouver area, 30 (20 in place with another 10 to come) in Victoria and four in Kelowna. Of the 90, 32 are carpenters, 17 roofers, 14 bricklayers and 10 rebar installers. The rest are in associated trades.

She was also able to recruit eight immigrants from a German job fair for a roofing company in Dawson Creek. Brodersen has lured another 50 to 60 workers from foreign job fairs which are not counted in her official statistics.

She had been an au pair in England and worked five years in the United States for a German chemical company before she returned home to Germany to work for the Alberta government’s trade and investment office. But Brodersen liked North America and came to Canada where she found the job with the B.C. construction agency.

Manley McLachlan, president of the B.C. Construction Association which represents about 1,800 companies including 500 in the manufacturing and supply fields, said 70,000 new workers have entered the province’s construction industry in the last three years, bringing the total workers to 190,000. By 2014, McLachlan said the industry will need 17,000 more, not including the 20,000 who are expected to retire in the next seven years.

He estimated that there are approximately 120,000 immigrant workers presently in Canada.

Bieschke was one immigrant worker who dove into the assimilation process shortly after his plane landed at Vancouver International Airport in the late afternoon of March 31. He immediately rented a car and drove to downtown Vancouver to look for hotel accommodations and then drove to the BC Ferries’ Horseshoe Bay terminal in North Vancouver the next morning for the ferry ride to Nanaimo. From there, he drove south to Ladysmith and phoned his prospective employer from a pay phone.

He and his wife have found that food and rent are cheaper in Canada but gas and cigarettes are more expensive. His employer has made life easier for Bieschke by assigning him to construction jobs in the Greater Victoria area.

For employers such as Pye, immigrant workers have been a positive experience for his company, which hires about 80 trades workers.

“Good attitude, real good work ethics,” he said of the Europeans on his payroll. “The skills that they lack, we can teach.”

Pye said his workers are all paid equally according to skill level and he has not heard of any animosity between Canadian and non-Canadian employees.

“There’s a lot more work coming on stream,” said Pye. “We could use another five or six guys.”