WASHINGTON — Six years ago, Sen. Charles E. Schumer urged company site selectors to take a fresh look at upstate New York. He said Buffalo and Rochester were among the best places in the country to build a factory.

What would those private sector decision- makers think now of the campaign that Schumer and the rest of the state’s Democratic notables are making to muscle a national company into making a deal with its labor union?

The dispute — a knot in the state’s shredding business climate — centers on a Motts apple juice factory in the hamlet of Williamson. It sidles up to Lake Ontario east of Rochester in apple country.

It’s owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Group, a new conglomerate spun off from a British firm. It makes 7-Up and dozens of other non-cola drinks. The new owners told 300 stunned workers at the juice plant they would have to accept

harsh take-backs if they wanted a new contract. Union bargainers heard these include pension freezes, a wage cut, reduced company payments to 401(k)s, higher contributions for health insurance and other big sacrifices.

There was a day when even Democratic officials kept their mitts off a private labor dispute where there was no finding of unfair labor practices, and no violence.

But the Retail Wholesale&Department Store Union called in its chits with state Democrats early in the game. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reacted with an astonishing letter to Dr Pepper offices on his official stationery.

DiNapoli said he controls $33 million in Dr Pepper stock as trustee of the state employees’ retirement fund. He warned the company against being seen as “anti-labor” and then said an unhappy work force might cut profitability and the value of the stock. It looked like a threat he might dump 938,000 shares if Dr Pepper didn’t knuckle under.

DiNapoli’s menacing letter reached Dr Pepper offices in Plano, Texas, six weeks before the union struck Motts on May 23.

After Motts hired temporary workers to keep the plant running, Schumer, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sean Coffey, the party’s candidate for attorney general, all joined in. They urged Dr Pepper to “return to the bargaining table,” which is code for softening their demands for take-backs. The letter from Schumer, influential on the Senate panel dealing with anti-trust, said it was in Dr Pepper’s “best interest.”

The letters from Schumer and others raised a myth that the region’s economy would be hurt by the strike. The plant is still running. Apples are being bought and processed.

It is dumb for an outsider like me to take sides in a labor dispute, but this hasn’t stopped Schumer, DiNapoli, Cuomo and Gillibrand from interfering, although none has any experience in any industry whatsoever.

Rep. Dan Maffei, D-Syracuse, heroically insists the dispute “is about working people in Wayne County versus corporate greed in Texas.”

It may also be about whether the plant winds up shuttered. It is about whether Maffei and the others are kidding the locals into thinking they can hold back the eternal night of wage competition from China, where half the apple juice consumed in the United States is made.

“We have to protect our people,” a Cuomo partisan said. Which people: the union members or the temps?

Hardly anyone’s eyebrows are raised these days when the state’s top Democrats seek to set wages and benefits in private companies. Which tells you about the upstate mind-set and where it leads. Here is where upstate is now with that world view: the worst business climate in the country; the slowest income growth except Michigan and Ohio; the nation’s lowest population growth; and an average 8 percent manufacturing job loss in the Buffalo and Rochester areas.