Word: shanker
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...Sleeper, Woody Allen's film about America in the year 2173, one of the characters explains how the northeastern part of the U.S. was obliterated: "A man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." The real-life Albert Shanker, leader of New York City's public school employees, scarcely looks like an earthshaker. In fact, he could easily pass for what he once was: a full-time schoolteacher. He wears thick glasses and is virtually blind in one eye; his face droops in a hangdog expression, and a habitual slouch seems to shrink...
...president of the 81,000-member United Federation of Teachers, he not only leads the nation's largest union local but also holds considerable sway over the country's biggest local school system. During New York City's fiscal crisis, Shanker has emerged as the toughest and most intransigent of its municipal labor leaders, backed by an equally determined rank and file that deeply believe in the simple rubric he has taught them: "Power is a good thing. It is better than powerlessness...
...Under Shanker's leadership since 1964, the U.F.T. has shown that teachers could be transformed from genteel professionals who seldom raise their voices into members of an aggressive union that rarely lowers its voice...
This has won Shanker a place in the AFL-CIO hierarchy. At 47, he is the youngest member of the AFL-CIO's 35-member executive council and is reputed to want to succeed President George Meany. "Usually, white-collar union leaders don't understand trade-unionism," says New York Labor Mediator Ted Kheel. "Shanker could have been the leader of the Steelworkers...
Though Jewish, Shanker grew up in an Irish-Italian section of New York's borough of Queens. His father distributed a union newspaper; his mother was a member of two garmentworkers' unions. As a student in New York schools and later at the University of Illinois, Shanker was an active socialist who campaigned for Norman Thomas. In 1952 he became a city schoolteacher. But seven years later, he gave it up to become a full-time union organizer. On his rounds, he met a Queens teacher named Edith Gerber, whom he made a strike captain and later married...