Word: brill
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York, see, in July 1976, and Steve Brill was taking a shower. He was a successful young magazine writer for Clay Felker's New York (remember "The Pathetic Lies of Jimmy Carter"?), and the top non-fiction editor at Simon & Schuster wanted him to do a book. It was pickyer-topic time, but a succession of three-martini business lunches with the editor had elicited only a few "Gee, that'd make a great magazine article" ideas. Then, a radio announcer droned through the suds of Brill's quiet shower with a "piddling little item" about some Teamsters' local striking...
...Brill went at the Teamsters in the manner of a magazine writer. The book consists of nine profiles of Teamsters and associates--looking at the institution through the people in it. The characters include Fitzsimmons, Tony Provenzano (the New Jersey Teamster/mobster who Brill says orchestrated Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance), Jimmy Hoffa Jr. (a Detroit labor lawyer outsider, waiting for his father to float to the top), Ron Carey (a rare, honest Teamster local president in New York), Allen Dorfman (who made millions from his insurance monopoly with the Teamsters, then helped loot the pension funds), Jackie Presser (Cleveland Teamster boss...
...chapters for Brill are the two on rank'n'filers and the profile of Harold Gibbons. Charlie McGuire works as a refrigeration warehouseman in New Jersey--he finally got so fed up with his local leadership that he joined the Nader-originated reform group PROD. Al Barkett works as an over-the-road driver in Ohio--he makes $28,000 a year, and as Brill says, "You give a guy that kind of money and you sure don't get a dissident." Brill understands as well as anyone the litanies of corruption, intimidation, and dictatorial control by Teamster bosses that...
...Brill, the Teamsters are a metaphor for American society. The Harold Gibbons chapter that closes the book brings this out even more than the stories of the two rank'n'filer Teamsters. Gibbons was a socialist St. Louis Teamster leader, who pioneered in providing his members with a food co-op, his retirees with low-cost subsidized housing, St. Louis with mass transit, and who even supported busing to help eliminate segregated schools before the 1954 Supreme Court decision. And Gibbons supported McGovern in 1972 against the Teamster tide for Nixon. But he backed down when it came to challenging...
...MAJOR CRITICISM of the book has come from the PROD and TDU dissidents, who claim that Brill just doesn't deal with the possibilities for reform in the union. The dissidents would rather Brill had looked into reform movements in other unions, the Mineworkers' anti-Tony Boyle campaign, say, or the Sadlowski insurgency in the Steelworkers, to figure out why such movements succeed or fail. That kind of analysis would have been much more useful than any series of profiles of the bosses, the dissidents...