SAULT STE. MARIE - In a number of ways, the 48th annual convention of the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council provided a status report on organized labor in Michigan.

"We all live and die by work hours, and we're facing high unemployment and severe unemployment pressures," said retiring Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council Secretary-Treasurer Tom Boensch, in his final address to delegates. "These have been pretty trying times for organized labor."

Short of a magic formula for making jobs appear, he said organized labor has been focusing its efforts in other areas where it may be able to do some good. These include

• Lowering health care and prescription drug costs, which are rising about 15 percent every year.
• Coping with the schisms in organized labor. "Some affiliates may decide to leave (the AFL-CIO) by this time next year," Boensch said. "It makes more of a point of the importance of regional building trades councils."
• Promoting the work of the Michigan Association of Responsible Contracting. The union-backed MARC advances the cause of hiring responsible construction contracting companies to cities, school boards and businesses, without sounding like a pro-union shill.

The goal is to introduce standards for weeding out irresponsible, low-bidding nonunion companies that perform substandard work without providing a warranty.

Delegates also got an earful about a number of other issues that directly and indirectly affect building trades workers in Michigan.

Utility restructuring.

If Michigan is going to build desperately needed powerhouses, then state utility regulations that hinder the construction of new coal-burning plants are going to have to be re-examined.

So said Consumers Energy Vice President Bob Fenech to delegates at the convention. Fenech said several new big coal-burning "baseload" power plants need to be built in Michigan, where demand for electricity keeps inching up by two percent or so every year.

State regulations must be loosened to make it feasible to build more coal-burners, Fenech said, or Michigan will have a serious crisis on its hands by 2012. He said both Consumers Energy and DTE Energy need to start building a new baseload plant every three years in Michigan. In the case of Consumers, the average age of their coal-burning plants is 45 years.

Fenech said while burning coal is not popular with environmentalists, the smaller, natural-gas burning "peaker plants" that have been built in recent years in North America to provide power during peak periods have drawbacks. Long-term, they can't cost-effectively produce the megawatts that coal-burners can. In addition, coal is more abundant in North America than natural gas, and the supply can't quickly be cut off by potential terrorists.

And importing electricity from other states via over-taxed power lines is an expensive proposition.

"From your standpoint," Fenech told building trades delegates, "construction of coal plants will provide a lot more work, plus maintenance. We need to position ourselves to get more coal plants built in Michigan."

Michigan's budget.

We reported last year on the chronically underfunded, sorry state of the state's budget. It hasn't changed.

Tom Clay, of the nonprofit, non-partisan Citizens Research Council, was invited to give building trades delegates the lowdown on Michigan's state budget problems, which have been in deficit mode for the last five years.

Clay said Michigan has used up every accounting gimmick to improve the state's "structural deficit," including spending the rainy day fund, spending the school aid fund surplus and moving up the date of tax collections.

General fund revenues in 2003, 2004 and 2005 have all been below what the state took in during 1995. Total spending in Michigan has dropped $1.2 billion, or 12 percent in the last four years. The state's workforce has dropped 14 percent over the last few years and now stands at the same number it was in 1974.

At the same time, state income has dropped: burdens on state taxpayers fell from 7.8 percent of personal income in 1995 to 6.8 percent today.

State Medicare payments, which help one in seven Michiganians (mostly children, Clay said) have risen 10 percent each year over the last four years. More than 30 percent of state workers are in Corrections - a $1.7 billion million industry projected to see an 1,800 per-year increase in prisoners through 2010.

In the future, Clay said Michigan can expect an annual deficit of 3 percent - or $300 million per year.

"The state will somehow fix the problem, the Constitution says so," Clay said, referring to rules that require a balanced state budget. He said it could come through additional budget cuts, or perhaps through "broadening" the state sales and usage tax base.

"I worked in state government from 1996 through 1997, and I never saw a situation where fiscal problems are crowding everything else out, as they are now" Clay said.

Michigan AFL-CIO.

Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney told building trades delegates that helping to pass Gov. Jennifer Granholm's $2 billion bond issue is the best way for construction workers to help themselves and the state get back on their feet. A significant portion of that bond issue - which may be whittled down to $1 billion by state Republican lawmakers - will fund construction projects.

Politically, Gaffney predicted that Granholm "will not have an easy re-election campaign" in 2006, whomever her opponent. He added that organized labor would like to help itself by not only re-electing Granholm, but by adding four Democratic seats to the state House for a majority or three seats to the state Senate to create a tie with Republicans.

Then, organized labor would be able to have a better shot at increasing unemployment benefits, or increasing the minimum wage. At $5.15 per hour, Gaffney said the state's minimum wage, which is not being increased because of Republican opposition, "is legally instituted poverty."

Gaffney pointed out another Republican deficiency. Exxon Mobil, he said, made $7.5 billion profit in a single quarter this year. The energy bill passed by the Republican Congress saw those profits and still gave Exxon-Mobil and other petroleum companies a tax break.

Another example: just after CAFTA was OKd by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, giant automotive supplier Lear opted to move some production to Honduras.

"Those are the kinds of frustrations that lead unions to diverge," Gaffney said. "We don't have the power to make changes."