Like many of our readers, last month I followed the series of events before, during and after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Lodge 1947 votes regarding the acceptance of the proposed seven-year contract proposal at Mercury Marine.

Perhaps my deepened interest in what was going on was influenced by the fact that I have been immersing myself in decades-old issues of Corporate Report Wisconsin, many from the era when labor — for good or bad, that’s not the issue I care to debate — could force the hand of a corporation.

In this case, the union folks in Fond du Lac initially played their collective hand much like I do when I play poker. Though nobody ever acquiesces to my request, I believe that mulligans have a rightful place at the poker table. Consequently, my card-playing skills have not improved one iota since I started playing a few years ago.

This is why I rarely, if ever, sit down to play. I’m more of a sure-thing kind of person anyway, and gambling just doesn’t interest me in the least. I’m a terrible bluffer, and have never quite understood how a flush is actually worth something while “all red” and “all black” are worthless since they feel essentially equal and random in my mind.

Clearly I’m not Wisconsin’s answer to Annie Duke.

So when the union members sat down to play their own high stakes game of poker last month, I think they were much like me in that they truly didn’t understand the table they were playing at.

Oh, sure. They’d been at this table before, many times. They had their strategy, which for decades had worked just fine. It came through in the newspaper reports, with quotes from union members who voted no saying that they’d thought it would just be one of a number of rounds in a bigger, strategic game … a tournament if you will.

But the union members weren’t the only ones who went “all in” on that first hand, a bad mistake because they soon found out that their particular game of poker had changed drastically.

I don’t believe this was purely a case of Mercury Marine stacking the deck and then taking its poker chips and going home … er, to Oklahoma either. I would even venture to say that in this particular game, they weren’t Mercury Marines chips to play with in the first place.

I don’t think you can fault an aggressive approach for a company in a down industry, challenged by labor costs and with a more cost-effective Plan B waiting in the wings.

Is such a view rolling over and letting a corporation dictate the rules to their workers? Or, as some union workers noted, is the offer another promise to be broken when Mercury Marine still moves out of state? Maybe, but based on the current efforts in Fond du Lac to work with the company, I don’t thnk so. The offer was pragmatic, particularly in one of the worst economies in our recent history.

What interests me is this: Within my broad circle of acquaintances that includes union and non-union employees, the unemployed through the executive suite, the universal opinion has been that the workers were putting pride before economic practicality. They were in no position to bluff and in even less of a position to push all their chips to the center of the table.

Even so, these are people that I’d definitely play poker with. Why? Because in their poker game of choice, apparently mulligans are allowed.

By Laurie Arendt

Laurie Arendt is editor of CRW. She can be reached at crweditor@crwmag.com