Union Shoppers

While driving along the Fort WorthDallas highway 18 months ago, Houston Insurance Man Benjack Cage jammed on his brakes as he saw a crowd of workers swarm on to the highway from the

Chance-Vought aircraft plant. He missed them, but he collided with a big idea. "Wouldn't it be terrific," he asked his companion, "if we had something that made all those people want to get their insurance from us? Before long, he thought he knew how: set up an insurance company owned by union workers. He persuaded the Texas State Federation of Labor (A.F.L.) to authorize locals to buy two-thirds of the stock in his own Insurance Co. of Texas.

Selling the plan to the union's rank & file was something else again. Several times Cage was bodily thrown out of locals' meetings. But he gradually won unionists over with his persuasive talk and flamboyant selling techniques, and some outside help. One union boss, who violently opposed the scheme, died a short time later, leaving his widow and children nothing but the $2,000 policy he had automatically received when his local signed up with Cage. Recalls Cage: "It made a big impression on his friends." After Cage had sold the unionists their two-thirds share of the stock, Texas businessmen bought the rest. Business boomed as unionists took out policies in their company. By last June, premium income had passed $6,000,000, and Cage expects it to reach $12 million by January. Then Cage sold the unionists another one of his companies, Continental Fire & Casualty Insurance Corp., which operates in 15 states from Oregon to Florida, and also added health and accident insurance. Last month his companies spread out into home mortgages and loans.

Upward & Onward. At a special meeting last week, Cage plumped for still more expansion. Said he to his stockholders: "Folks, when you buy a hog, you don't starve him. You fatten him up. It's the same with this company. We've got to fatten this hog. We've got to fatten this company." The union capitalists promptly approved his plan to buy or set up union-owned insurance companies in most of the 48 states and to build a $1,000,000, five-story office building in downtown Dallas. Cage knows there is a demand for the companies. He has already set up two insurance companies for another A.F.L. union in Alabama, and he is negotiating with others in Rhode Island and Oregon. In all the companies, Cage does not forget Cage. He gets a 15% cut of the premiums for managing them.

When he first broached his idea, Texas businessmen scoffed at it as a socialistic scheme or a fly-by-night proposition in which unions would lose money. Cage insisted that it was just the reverse; it would give workers a firsthand education in the problems--and a share in the profits--of free enterprise. Now many top Dallas bankers are Cage's and I.C.T.'s biggest boosters.

Flash & Hustle. Benjack Cage, 35, amassed Texas-size wealth in a career as flashy as the loud sport coats and massive gold ring he wears. Born in Austin, he sold insurance while attending Rice Institute. After the war, in which Cage served in the Air Force, he went back into the insurance business. He also spread out into other lines, a salvage company, a 1,200-acre ranch, bought into a small oil refinery, and other ventures.

Cage runs the union-owned companies with all the showmanship and fervor of a Billy Sunday. Though he has not been inside a church in years, he calls on the Lord frequently, has had 200,000 aluminum coins made up with the Lord's Prayer on one side and a Bible text on the other, passes them out to any & all of his acquaintances. Soon he plans to buy a twin-engine plane and spend two years stumping every union hall in the U.S. plugging union-owned insurance companies under Benjack Cage management. Says he: "I want to raise an army, not just customers. I want to make believers out of everybody."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.