Union pride

I worked in the woods during college summers as a member of the union that descended from the radical Wobblies of the early 1900s. We were hauling giant trees out of the forest, cedar and Douglas fir, some a good 12-14 feet in diameter.

Then in grad school, I worked pouring concrete with the laborers union, helping to haul a big hose spewing wet concrete across each floor of the 18-story federal building in downtown Portland, where I was the only white kid on a crew of experienced Black workers.

Both unions have been hit hard in the last few decades. The wood workers union is now a mere department in another union, their fall caused partly by environmental protections for the forest we mowed down. The laborers are also much diminished, their losses caused by non-union workers coming from south of the border.

So it was with some old pride that I saw the autoworkers file a complaint against Donald Trump earlier this month over his snickering approval, while talking with Elon Musk, of firing workers when they go out on strike. There’s not much in the UAW complaint, other than a one-day hit in the news.

But it made the unions come to life, however briefly, in the public mind. And it put a piece of rebar into the crumbling concrete of the union vote in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Still, the union members especially these days go their own ways.

I remembered a steel mill foreman I talked to in Norfolk. He was a huge guy, English. He had met an English woman online and they were on a weekend date in Norfolk near the federal courthouse where we had a First Amendment trial that was about to start.

The foreman was also plenty smart and thoughtful. He said his guys, the men that worked under him, liked Trump.

I asked why.

“They like the way he talks,” came the answer that I have remembered since then, as the best distillation of the core of Trump’s appeal to the working man. The conversation was in February 2020 at the time of the Schaefer trial over First Amendment access to new pleadings in Norfolk’s state court — where the trial judge ruled in our favor and was later affirmed by the Fourth Circuit.

So the working folks, my distantly related union brothers, like Trump’s talk.

But President Biden’s action in walking the picket line with the UAW workers will counteract some of that appeal, and the economic resurgence that has taken place in the last couple years cannot help but seep into the voting minds of working men and women.

And yet.

The youngest worker at Courthouse News, a devotee of social media, especially TikTok, has friends who are young, non-union, Latino truck drivers, hauling goods out of the port of Long Beach, delivering some of the $100 billion in trade that goes through the port. 

The Trump years were fat years for those young guys. They worked year-round, hauling goods to Phoenix, Las Vegas or Salt Lake City, making $7000 per week driving their own semis. They never had it so good, before or since.

So they are voting for those days, they are voting for Trump.

Going back to when I was working in the woods, I can just on the edge of my imagination catch the smell of sap and crisp wet on a cold morning with light rain and mist in the mountains around the Weyerhauser base in Pe Ell, Washington. We wore cut-off jeans held up by suspenders, and high, lace-up boots with spikes in the soles, to quickly navigate through fallen trees as we set chokers around the logs that were hauled away by a yarder and loaded onto logging trucks. I have an abiding memory of a beautiful old grove of giant trees with moss and shade underneath, where I went to have my sandwich at lunch time. It was cool and quiet.

It had survived but it was right next to a site that had been clear cut. All that was left of the forest that had been there was fallen logs and a giant wood igloo of sorts — big as a small house — constructed by beavers in a pond with a small creek running into and out of it. Their forest around them had been obliterated, like a bomb had flattened it.

The guys on my crew who lived off that destruction were drinkers and brawlers when they were not working out in the woods. Their information came from local news on TV. When we talked about politics, they were well on the right.

Thinking back to then, if they voted, they would probably like the way Trump talks. But they would also approve of Joe Biden’s actions during his presidency. The Democratic Party, once the party of the working man and woman, may have stopped the drift of union members over to the Republican camp. But it still has in front of it the long, slow work of pulling the rank and file back into the party, after decades of dark times, made worse by Democratic trade policy, for the union worker.

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