Inside IUEC Local 82's hard road to a first contract at BC's largest independent elevator company

First published June 6, 2026

After fifty years operating outside the union framework, Richmond Elevator Maintenance Ltd. became IUEC Local 82's newest BC bargaining unit in September 2024. Twenty months on, a first collective agreement is still nowhere in sight — and the dispute has drawn in both the BC Labour Relations Board and the province's pension regulator.

In British Columbia's elevator trade, the union map is straightforward at the top end. The Big Four global manufacturers — Otis, Schindler, KONE, and TK Elevator — are all longtime IUEC signatory contractors, bound to industry-wide collective agreements that cover their construction, service, and modernization workforces across Canada. Below the OEMs, the picture has historically been more varied. Independent BC contractors have ranged from small two-truck shops to large multi-location operators, with mixed union status.

For five decades, the largest of those independents — Richmond Elevator Maintenance Ltd. — sat outside the union framework. That changed on September 23, 2024, when the BC Labour Relations Board certified the International Union of Elevator Constructors Local 82 as the exclusive bargaining agent for Richmond Elevator's BC mechanics, helpers, apprentices, car cab technicians, and their supervisors.

What has followed is, by every public indicator, a difficult first-contract bargaining process. As of this writing, no collective agreement has been ratified, two BC Labour Relations Board proceedings are scheduled for June 1, 2026 (visible on the Board's public hearings calendar), and the dispute has spilled into a parallel proceeding before the BC Superintendent of Pensions in which Richmond Elevator was fined for separate pension-administration violations.

This is what's on the public record. It is, in places, less than what the company's workers or the union may know. We have flagged in the text below where we have not been able to verify something independently.

A Zachata family business since 1974

Richmond Elevator was established January 1, 1974 by Walter and Irene Zachata as a source of elevator installation and maintenance for low-rise apartments, per the company's own published history. The corporate entity, Richmond Elevator Maintenance Ltd., was formally incorporated in British Columbia on June 8, 1976 — a roughly two-year gap that's common when a founding sole-proprietorship converts to a limited company.

Today Richmond Elevator describes itself on its website as "the largest independent elevator company in Canada" and a "third generation business" run by the Zachata family. Industry sources independently corroborate the generational succession but no published third-party ranking of Canadian independent elevator companies exists, so the "largest independent" claim should be read as the company's own attribution. Elevator World's In Memoriam piece for Irene Zachata confirms her role as co-founder and her continued involvement in the business until her passing.

By the company's own figures, Richmond Elevator has completed over 9,000 new elevator installations and holds "thousands of units under active contract maintenance" across BC. The product line spans low-rise hydraulic, high-rise traction, commercial, freight, service, hospital, and residential applications. The firm operates from a 30,000 sq ft head office in Richmond, BC, plus a Vancouver Island office in Victoria — both addresses verified via the company's contact page and LinkedIn.

The company has visible footprint within Canada's elevator-industry trade community. The Canadian Elevator Contractors Association (CECA) has named Richmond Elevator and Garaventa Lift as the joint hosts of the 52nd Annual CECA Convention, scheduled for June 15–18, 2026 in Victoria, BC — an industry positioning that signals Richmond Elevator's recognized standing among Canadian elevator contractors.

What is not publicly disclosed is the company's headcount. LinkedIn lists Richmond Elevator in the "201–500 employees" band; third-party aggregators report substantially lower numbers. The company itself has not published a precise figure, so the actual size of the bargaining unit covered by the 2024 certification remains an open question from the public record.

The BC elevator labour landscape

To understand what the Richmond Elevator certification represents within the broader Canadian elevator industry, it helps to know how IUEC organizes its employer relationships. The International Union of Elevator Constructors bargains nationally through two distinct cooperating employer associations:

• The National Elevator Bargaining Association (NEBA) — generally associated with the major signatory OEM contractors. The current NEBA agreement runs 2022–2027.
• The Elevator Contractors of America (ECA) — an employer group of independent signatory contractors, also with a 2022–2027 agreement.

IUEC Local 82 is the BC and Yukon chartered local. In October 2023, public coverage of an anticipated industry lockout reported Local 82 as representing approximately 900 unionized elevator workers in BC, with the lockout-notice scope projected to potentially impact "tens of thousands of buildings and construction sites" province-wide. Business Manager Mike Funk was quoted in that coverage. The 900-worker figure represents Local 82's pre-Richmond Elevator footprint.

In that context, the September 2024 Richmond Elevator certification was meaningful: not a vote at one of the Big Four OEMs (already union), but a new certification at one of the larger BC-based independents. Public reporting on the lead-up to that certification — organizers, the campaign timeline, the certification-application vote count — is not available in the Board's public-facing materials or in the trade press we reviewed. We were not able to confirm whether the certification was contested by the employer, granted via card-check or representation vote, or how many workers it covered. Those details exist in the Board's certification application file but are not surfaced in the public summary.

Earlier organizing attempts: the chapters before 2024

The 2024 certification was not the first time Richmond Elevator workers tried to organize. The BC Labour Relations Board's public records show no certification applications involving the company before 2024 — but that absence is itself part of the story.

A worker involved in a mid-2000s organizing effort at Richmond Elevator (who asked not to be identified for this article) recalls that employees signed cards in support of IUEC certification, but the drive did not reach the threshold of support required to trigger a representation vote, and the campaign ended without a formal application to the Board. The same source indicated that similar informal organizing activity may have occurred at other points in the company's history; specific dates and outcomes from those earlier moments are not on the public record.

This is consistent with how BC's certification framework worked in that era. Under the Labour Relations Code as it stood through 2022, a union needed cards from a minimum percentage of workers (45%) just to apply to the Board for a representation vote — and a separate majority on the secret ballot to actually be certified. (BC restored single-step card-check certification in 2022, which is the framework under which the 2024 certification was granted.) Drives that collapsed before reaching the application threshold produced no Board filing, no published decision, and no news coverage — they exist only in the memories of the people who lived them.

On sourcing for this section: the firsthand recollection above comes from one participant who requested anonymity. We were unable to corroborate the account with public documentary sources (BC LRB filings, news coverage, trade press, or IUEC publications). The absence of public documentation is, however, exactly what would be expected for a pre-Board-filing organizing campaign. If you participated in or have firsthand knowledge of any earlier organizing at Richmond Elevator, the forum discussion thread attached to this article is the place to add to the historical record.

The September 2024 certification

In the BC Labour Relations Board's public certifications database, the Richmond Elevator record shows that on September 23, 2024 the Board certified IUEC Local 82 as the exclusive bargaining agent for "elevator constructor mechanics, helpers and apprentices employed on construction, maintenance and service and their supervisors, and car cab technicians and their supervisors, in British Columbia" — i.e., effectively all of Richmond Elevator's BC field workforce. (The Board's database is the primary public source; it does not provide a permanent URL or downloadable PDF for individual certification orders.)

That is the entirety of what the Board's public certifications database surfaces. Beyond it, no IUEC Local 82 announcement, IUEC national news item, Elevator World story, Richmond News article, Vancouver Sun report, CBC BC coverage, or Elevator World Canada news item referencing the Richmond Elevator certification was located in our research. The certification was almost certainly covered in IUEC Local 82 internal communications, but those have not surfaced in indexed public channels.

Bargaining gets contentious — and the pension regulator gets involved

What happened between September 2024 and the present is — on the public record — a story told primarily through regulatory filings, in two parallel tracks that happened to converge on the same subject: the Richmond Elevator pension plan.

Track one: the BC Superintendent of Pensions

Richmond Elevator is the administrator of its employees' BC-registered pension plan. On June 26, 2025, the BC Superintendent of Pensions issued a Notice of Administrative Penalty finding that Richmond Elevator had contravened its statutory obligations under BC's Pension Benefits Standards Act by failing to file required pension Statements by their deadlines. The initial penalty was $10,000.

The matter was reconsidered. On December 8, 2025, the Superintendent varied the penalty downward to $5,000.

This is a discrete regulatory matter about pension plan administration — but it overlaps with the labour-relations track in a critical way, as the next section describes.

Track two: the BC Labour Relations Board

On January 5, 2026, the Canadian employment-law publication HR Law Canada reported that the BC Labour Relations Board had found Richmond Elevator breached its duty to bargain in good faith under the Labour Relations Code by failing to provide pension plan information to IUEC Local 82 during collective bargaining. The Board, per the report, rejected broader claims that Richmond Elevator had engaged in obstructionist bargaining tactics — that is, the bad-faith finding was narrow and specifically tied to the pension information disclosure.

We have not yet retrieved the underlying primary BC LRB decision document; the HR Law Canada coverage above is a secondary source. What it confirms by legal definition is that as of the ruling, no first collective agreement had been ratified — a duty-to-bargain breach presupposes active, ongoing bargaining.

The structural irony is hard to miss: a pension plan whose administration was simultaneously the subject of a pension-regulator penalty (Track one) was also the subject of an information-disclosure obligation that the same employer was found to have breached in collective bargaining (Track two).

What's next: two hearings on June 1, 2026

The BC Labour Relations Board's hearings calendar lists two scheduled proceedings between Richmond Elevator and IUEC Local 82, both on June 1, 2026 at the LRB Offices: an informal hearing and a separate settlement conference. The pairing — an informal hearing and a settlement conference on the same day — is consistent with a Board attempt to move a stalled first-contract negotiation forward without escalating to first-contract arbitration, but the scheduling alone does not tell us which way the matter is heading. We will update this article after the June 1 proceedings.

What's still not public

In writing this piece we deliberately excluded several claims that have circulated informally but that we could not verify in any indexed public source. We list them here for transparency and as open questions for any reader with primary information to share in the forum thread:

1. Has a first collective agreement been signed? Public sources indicate it has not. The BC Bargaining Database returns no Richmond Elevator agreement; the January 2026 bad-faith ruling and the upcoming June 2026 hearings both presuppose ongoing bargaining. If a CBA has been signed in the very recent past, it has not yet been publicly published or registered.
2. Has there been a "swearing-in" ceremony for Richmond Elevator workers into IUEC Local 82? No public coverage of such a ceremony — by IUEC Local 82, IUEC national, the trade press, or local BC press — was located in our research.
3. Documentary record of earlier organizing attempts. As described in the "Earlier organizing attempts" section above, we have one firsthand (anonymous) source describing a mid-2000s organizing drive that did not reach a formal Board filing. We were unable to corroborate that account with any public documentary source — no BC LRB filing, no IUEC publication, no trade press, no Reddit or CanLII result. That gap is consistent with the nature of a pre-filing campaign and consistent with how 2005–era trade organizing was conducted (largely offline). If documentary sources do exist, they have not yet surfaced in indexed public channels.
4. Names of the IUEC Local 82 business representatives or organizers who led the campaign, and of the Richmond Elevator management figures at the bargaining table, are not on the public record we reviewed. (Mike Funk is publicly identified as Local 82's Business Manager but his direct role, if any, in the Richmond Elevator file is not established in the sources we located.)
5. The certification application's contested-or-uncontested status and the size of the bargaining unit, while presumably documented in the Board's case file, are not in its public-facing summary.

If you have direct knowledge of any of these and are willing to share what you can, the forum discussion attached to this article is the place. We will update the article with any verifiable new information.

Why this matters

For BC's elevator trade, the Richmond Elevator certification is the kind of file that other independents and their workforces will be watching. Whether the first contract is reached at the bargaining table, through Board-assisted settlement, or via first-contract arbitration; whether the wage scale and pension provisions align with IUEC's industry standard or carve out independent-contractor terms; and how the company's regulatory and labour-tribunal trajectories interact — all of those outcomes will be precedents the next BC independent certification campaign will look back to.

In an industry where the major OEMs have been union for decades and labour relations are largely a settled question, the action is at the independents. Richmond Elevator's first contract, when it lands, will be a meaningful data point.

Sources

Every link above goes to the primary or secondary source for the surrounding claim. For convenience, here is a consolidated reference list:

• BC Labour Relations Board — certifications database · decisions portal · hearings calendar
• BC OrgBook — Richmond Elevator Maintenance Ltd. corporate record
• Richmond Elevator Maintenance Ltd. — company website · contact page · LinkedIn
• IUEC — 2022–2027 NEBA Agreement · 2022–2027 ECA Agreement
• HR Law Canada — Employer breached duty to bargain in good faith by withholding pension info
• Richmond News — Job action poised to put brakes on elevator service (Oct 2023, IUEC Local 82 context)
• Elevator World — In Memoriam: Irene Zachata · Richmond Elevator Maintenance directory entry
• BC Superintendent of Pensions — Initial Notice of Administrative Penalty, June 26, 2025 · Reconsideration decision, December 8, 2025
• 2026 CECA Convention — joint hosts: Garaventa Lift and Richmond Elevator

On our sources

Every document this article links to is publicly hosted by the organization that owns it — none was obtained through a leak, a confidential channel, or any URL we believe was supposed to be private. A few notes for readers who may wonder:

• The NEBA and ECA collective bargaining agreements are published by the International Union of Elevator Constructors on its own website — and have been for decades. Predecessor agreements (e.g. the 2017–2022 NEBA agreement) are mirrored on multiple IUEC local websites. The 2022–2027 NEBA agreement is also archived on the federal-procurement tracking site govtribe.com, because federal contractors covered by the agreement disclose it under U.S. procurement rules. CBAs at this level have a long tradition of open publication: members need easy access to their wage scales, benefits, and grievance procedures, and federal-contractor disclosure rules put them in the public record regardless. Linking the IUEC's own copy is simply citing the original.
• BC Labour Relations Board records — certifications, decisions, hearings calendar — are public government records, queryable by anyone with a browser.
• BC Superintendent of Pensions decisions are published as government records of administrative penalty proceedings, downloadable from the BC Financial Services Authority website.
• BC OrgBook is the public corporate registry maintained by the Government of British Columbia.
• HR Law Canada, Richmond News, Elevator World, the 2026 CECA Convention site, the Richmond Elevator company website, and LinkedIn company pages — all public web pages on the publishers' own infrastructure.

The standard we apply: a link must point to a URL that the source organization either intentionally publishes or has chosen not to restrict. We will not link to leaked, sealed, confidentially-obtained, or genuinely-private material — even if we have access to it through other channels.

If you believe any document we've linked is improperly public (for example, a regulatory file released by mistake), please flag it in the discussion thread and we will review.

This is an ongoing story and the article will be updated as the public record develops, including after the June 1, 2026 BC LRB hearings. If you have direct knowledge of the Richmond Elevator–IUEC Local 82 file and can share what you're able to, the discussion thread attached to this article on Escalift is the place — we will source-check any new information before incorporating it.