Sweet Smell of Success Goes Sour

San Francisco —  The window of the cab was rolled down, and I could smell the bakery from a block away -- a buttery, yeasty seduction that descended from the heavens and took me back to my childhood.

My dad drove a Wonder Bread truck for 13 years and brought this very essence home in his clothes and his skin. Once in a while I got to sneak aboard the truck on his delivery route through Contra Costa County. The bread racks rattled on bumpy streets, and in those glorious days before national hysteria over carbohydrates, I was hypnotized by the sweet scent of butter-top bread and fresh Ho-Ho’s.

Wonder Bread had a family-day tour back then, and I remember piling into the car with the extended clan to tour the factory-size bakery in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. Forty years later, I was back, but not to celebrate the glories of sliced bread.

In mid-August, after a 75-year run, the Wonder Bread bakery here will shut its doors. Its parent company, Interstate Bakeries, filed for bankruptcy last fall and has already closed several operations around the country in a reorganization.

The company’s Parisian Bakery, also in San Francisco, has its last loaves in the oven too. Come Aug. 19, 650 Wonder and Parisian employees will be out of work in San Francisco, and the ranks of the blue-collar union crowd will have dwindled yet again.

“Do me a favor,” said Elvis Asuncion, 37, a six-year Wonder employee taking a break out front of the bakery. “Put my number in the paper, in case anybody can help me out. It’s (415) 370-4965.”

Asuncion, who works on assembly machinery in a two-story bakery that takes up half a city block, was a year from becoming a journeyman engineer. The father of four, he made $25 an hour with medical benefits, and would have made more when he hit journeyman. There might be work at other bakeries, he said, but competition will be stiff. And if he settles for a nonunion job somewhere, regardless of the field, he figures to take a big cut in pay.

“Some of my co-workers thought it would be easy to find something else, but you go apply for one job, and seven or eight other people are there,” said Asuncion, whose wife is a secretary with the city of San Francisco. “And a lot of what’s available pays $10 or $12 an hour. I don’t know if I can live with that.”

He may have no choice. In the new economy, finding work isn’t the problem. But the odds on finding work that keeps you in the middle class -- and able to handle those little necessities like paying the kids’ doctors’ bills -- aren’t much better than the odds on winning at “American Idol.”

“We have a proliferation of low-wage jobs,” says Kent Wong of UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education. “The changes in the economy have had a devastating effect on middle-class jobs and communities, and this is compounded by the problem of troubled public schools that aren’t preparing people for the future.”

I never had a clue as a lad, but I was growing up in a golden era in California -- a time when upward mobility was there for the taking. My parents hadn’t gone to college, but California made cars and steel and aerospace equipment along with sliced bread.

With hustle and sweat, you had a shot at building a better life for yourself and your children. My father fed the family with one blue-collar union job after another -- jobs that offered some security and came with pensions.

The other ticket to a better life was an education, and back then, California’s public schools and the state college and university systems were the envy of much of the nation. They were built by dreamers with a grand vision, and I used them as a path to a 30-year career in journalism.

And half a century later, where are we?

The grand vision for schools is mediocrity.

And labor continues its national death march, as witnessed last week when the AFL-CIO’s two biggest unions bolted, spooked by declining national membership.

California’s unions have fared much better, says UCLA’s Wong, with lots of growth in healthcare and service industries. Still, union members are publicly ridiculed by Gov. Arnold “Fantastic Jobs for Everyone” Schwarzenegger, and business leaders are trying to take away their pensions, their job security and even their right to campaign against such thievery.

I’m not here to tell you there’s no good job but a union job. Unions have always created many of their own worst problems. But there’s a flood of money in this economy, all of it flowing uphill toward the already rich, while the middle class shrinks as fast as the unions that used to fight for a fair share.

“At the very top, the champagne is tastier than ever. But for everyone else, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty,” says UC Berkeley labor and economics professor Harley Shaiken.

“For your dad and millions of others, a competitive firm meant one that offered good health benefits and a pension. Today, a competitive firm offers no health benefits and no pension. And class and connections have replaced hard work as a means to doing better.”

The story of Wonder Bread’s fall isn’t about corporate profiteering. It’s more about a saturated market, rising fuel costs, skyrocketing healthcare premiums, and the public’s regrettable decision to start reading the ingredients on packs of Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s.

Forklift operators Leroy Stubbles (27 years with Wonder Bread) and Dave Hayhurst (16 years) said they had no idea where to begin looking for work. Even on his current salary, Stubbles, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives south of the city, couldn’t afford to buy a shack in the city of his birth.

“There’s nothing out there that pays $20 an hour,” said Stubbles, who hopes to get by on his severance pay while looking for a job. After he clocks out for the last time, he said, he knows just where to find the courage to face the future.

“I’ll probably go to a bar and get drunk.”

I was allowed one last tour of the factory because I was family, in a manner of speaking.

The scent, unchanged in 40 years, enveloped me. Loaves of bread and Ho-Ho’s by the hundreds moved along the assembly line in perfect formation, shepherded by hair-netted employees with very short shelf lives of their own.