No Time to Rest for Union Families

By PJ Delhomme

As the International BAC West Region Director, Darin Compton works to bring more union families into the fold. We did our best to catch up with him, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

At 59, Darin Compton isn’t interested in slowing down. While he waits for the results of a Wyoming mule deer tag for this coming fall, he attends shooting schools with a friend and fellow union member and hikes his Dalmatians in the mountains behind his Northern California home, looking for blacktail and tule elk sheds. A couple of years ago, he and some buddies hiked almost to the 14,000-foot summit of Mt. Shasta to ride their snowboards down. Then there’s pig hunting, fishing, and triathlons.

But all that fun takes second-chair to his role as the west region director for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC). Last year, Compton stepped into the director position after first being a regional representative and a local rep before that. But Compton certainly didn’t start behind the desk. In fact, he’s been a union tile layer for nearly three decades and a BAC Local 3 member for 36 years.

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A Union Beginning

In 1988, he worked during the evening fabricating sheet metal into what would eventually be guitar amplifiers. During the day, he worked laying tile. Some of the guys he worked with on the day shift were union members, and it didn’t take him long to realize the non-union sheet metal job was going nowhere. “Just the tile helper was making more than what I was making as manager at the sheet metal job,” Compton says. “It seemed like a no-brainer to get in with the union.”

Newly married and about to start a family, Compton says joining the union provided his family with good wages and benefits. “These benefits paid for the birth of my daughter, and the good union wages enabled me to put both my wife and daughter through college,” he says. “My wife is now a teacher and vice president of her teacher’s union here in Northern California. We’re a union family.”

When Compton became a rep for BAC Local 3, he spread the word about how the union could help other working families. “When you’re a rep, you’re working to make more money for your members to help them provide a better life for their families,” he says. Some guys are initially skeptical about the union, but then, Compton says, he’ll get a call from their wives, who are quite interested in the medical and pension benefits.

As a regional director, Compton isn’t in the field as much as he used to be and misses that interaction. Today, his role is more instructional as he works with regional reps, but he occasionally drops in on job sites. He never thought he would be a union organizer, but he enjoys bringing more workers into the union family. “To uplift a working family is the best feeling you could ever have. That’s the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my career,” he says. “It’s going to seem cliche, but I really wish everyone could be in a union.”

The Great Outdoors

When he’s not traveling for work, Compton is hardly sitting still. He’s an endurance junkie. In high school, he ran cross-country, then he got into mountaineering. There was that snowboarding trip up (and down) Mt. Shasta and climbs on Mt. Whitney and Rainier. Don’t forget about the Alcatraz Swim.

Wyoming whitetail hunt with USA.

In 2022, he traveled to Wyoming for a whitetail hunt, hosted by the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance (USA). It had been a dream of his to chase whitetails, and California doesn’t offer as many opportunities to hunt big game. He says that the hunt in Wyoming was his first real deer hunt, and he learned a lot. He thought he was a decent shot with a rifle, but Wyoming is big country and sometimes requires longer shots. Since that hunt, he and his UA union brother enrolled in local long-range shooting courses and upgraded their rifles, including a 6.5 Creedmoor that he won from the USA.

Fishing is a family pastime, too. Growing up in California, Compton fished quite a bit. He straps on a pack and hikes to the Sierra Nevada’s high mountain streams and lakes. He and his son-in-law are working toward the Royal Trout Slam, which consists of catching seven different trout species. All that they have left on the list are bull trout. He’s been known to ply the Pacific for coho and travel to Costa Rica for tuna.

In the meantime, Compton still works to improve the lives of his union brothers and sisters. “I’m so grateful that I get the opportunity to give back after all that the unions have given to me,” he says. “I’m also grateful for an organization like the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance because they’re giving back every day. They’re giving the gift of the outdoors.”

PJ DelHomme writes and edits content from his home in western Montana. He runs Crazy Canyon Media and Crazy Canyon Journal.