Word: prods
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...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...
...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...
Brill responds that the press over-covers the dissidents anyway, far out of proportion to their number (PROD and TDU combined have roughly 10,000 members out of 2.3 million Teamsters). Brill says the dissidents really wanted him to make a hero, "a new Sylvester Stallone," out of Pete Camerata, the TDU leader whose microphone was cut off and head beat in for trying to criticize the Teamster leadership at the 1976 convention in Las Vegas. Instead, Brill let the chips fall, pointing out that PROD's newsletter in the early days carried a false union label, even though...
...Neither TDU nor PROD is going to get the support of the Al Barketts of the world, unless they become so bourgeois that they decimate their purpose," Brill says. "Same with the tax revolt business, the middle class is saying we want more for us, screw the poor. That same attitude is why you won't have reform in the Teamsters." Brill points out that the course was set long ago, when Jimmy Hoffa cooperated with organized crime to achieve power in the union, when he acquiesced and participated in the corruption, extortion, and violence that cemented his power...
...real gross national product -total output of goods and services, discounted for inflation-probably rose only 3.8%. But consumer prices jumped so rapidly that in December they are likely to average 9.5% higher than at the end of last year. Result: the President, who began the year trying to prod the economy to faster growth, shifted gradually to a tight-budget policy and proclaimed wage-price guidelines that stop just short of mandatory controls. When even those measures failed to stop inflation and the sickening plunge of the dollar, President Carter on Nov. 1 welcomed a sharp increase in interest...