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Union Foe Forecasts Organized Doom

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By TOM JACKSON

@tampatrib.com

Published: October 17, 2008

ZEPHYRHILLS - Amid economic turmoil and a fast-approaching date with Election Day, some 500 members representing organized labor in Florida will fan out through Lakeland on Saturday. Their goal: Flip a traditional Republican hotbed on the pivotal Interstate 4 corridor by invading neighborhoods with odes of praise to the most pro-union major party presidential candidate in 40 years.

Meanwhile, a pair of down-ballot measures in purplish Colorado targeting certain common union practices are attracting national attention; and chats between General Motors and Chrysler about a survivalist merger earned a swift rebuke from United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, who decried the plan as a job killer.

Howard Upcraft, child of Great Depression 1.0, observes all this from the Allen Road single-wide mobile home he shares with his wife, Audrey - "She's a doll," he says - on the television that serves as his window to the world, and sighs. Two decades since his retirement as a boom-and-bust seat-of-the-pants entrepreneur, the Old School old guy agonizes over an apparent resurgence of organized labor in the American economy.

Whether his concern is widely and passionately embraced will be at least partially revealed Nov. 5.

Bliss At A Buck An Hour

Upcraft, born on Valentine's Day 85 years ago in Flint, Mich., came to his opinion through personal experience and predisposition. Having bounced among a dozen schools in three states as his father pursued business opportunities, Upcraft knew upon high school graduation that he wanted no part of the uncertainties in the occupations - building contractor, farmer, sawmill operator - to which he'd been exposed through his dad's fancies.

But when his first job after World War II, loading box cars for Chevrolet back in his hometown, was interrupted after five weeks by a five-month strike - "Why? I was making a dollar an hour; I was happy" - he left and never looked back.

Thereafter, his union encounters involved bottom-up dictates that he says compromised his ability to earn a living while forcing up the prices he had to charge clients. One example among several: He operated an excavation service in southeast Michigan, mostly digging holes for septic tanks, until union bosses started ordering him out of his dump truck; that's a union job, they'd bark.

Worse, he says, every occupation he took up thereafter ground to a halt every three years, with the approach of contract negotiations among Detroit's big automakers.

When, at last, he fled with Audrey to Sarasota to become a small-time real estate developer, he was stunned to discover substantial organized labor entanglements despite Florida's status as a right-to-work state. He made a list of 25 trade unions connected to the construction of every little house he built, each inflating the bottom line.

"If this keeps up, how are young people ever going to afford a house?" he says now.

Waiting For The Pendulum

Well. Upcraft concedes that, after a working lifetime as his own boss, he and Audrey live modestly and exclusively on Social Security checks.

Meanwhile, the coworkers he left behind at the Chevy plant, the guys who long ago commandeered his dump truck and who extracted an extra dime, quarter or half-buck an hour to pound nails in Upcraft's bungalows can point to hard-won pensions that, without unions, almost certainly wouldn't exist.

The pendulum swings, as pendulums do, and, after being whipsawed by financial conditions everyone feels but few understand, Americans may well choose a path that leads back toward greater labor influence in the workplace. If it accompanies a 1950s-style boom and a new proliferation of bowling leagues, few will fuss. Rising tides and all that.

Other outcomes are possible, but This Space doubts the union-linked Armageddon forecast by Upcraft. That said, his remarks are on the record; if the occasion arises, Upcraft will be within his rights to say he told us so.

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