(The following column appeared on the Indianapolis Star website on March 15, 2011.)
INDIANAPOLIS — Frank DeGraw is a burly, sun-baked blue-collar union man who isn’t going anywhere any time soon when he takes a seat across the table from management.
These days, he’s going back to his coworkers after hard bargaining with hard realities to convey.
The other week, he arrived at another contract in his role as Indiana business manager for Laborers International Union of North America.
No raises. And that was good news.
“I’d been negotiating concessions the last two years,” he said. “If a company has financial problems, we have as much at stake as they do.”
He has lots of company. To name some familiar sharers of misery, there are the Ohio public employees who gave back $300 million last year. And their Wisconsin counterparts, who agreed to 8 percent cuts and still couldn’t satisfy the Republicans.
Nobody’s crying about it. Union people just want it known that they’re not getting fat, not blind to the big picture and not the enemy of the average American.
How best to get that across? Get treated as the enemy by friends of big business.
A national assault on unionism has turned Democrats in Indiana and elsewhere into marchers and brought throngs of angry supporters to capitols, where kindergarten teachers and laborers have found common cause. All of them, and their Democratic allies, have come in for plenty of opprobrium; but sympathy has abounded as well, and polls show strong popular backing for collective bargaining.
The full story is at www.indystar.com.