Word: teamster
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...Orleans police shrewdly realized, closing down Mardi Gras because of inadequate police protection was their ultimate threat in negotiations with city officials-rather like canceling Christmas. For years the police had no muscle to back up such a threat, but this time Teamster officials came in, led by Joseph Valenti, a tough, cigar-smoking troubleshooter from Detroit. On Feb. 9, when Mayor Ernest Morial refused to deal with a Teamster-backed majority in the department, the police marched...
...PROFILES are shrewdly done, combining quotes and description with union history and investigative reporting on Teamster finances, graft, murder, and power struggles...
...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 can turn the Teamsters into dissidents. But at the same time, Brill entertains few illusions about the power of American Dream-style prosperity, on the order of $28,000 a year, to undercut reform and maintain the status...
...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...
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...