Global Labor Strategies

Tim's Brother Sean Costello Remembers Tim's Early Yearts

      Most of you know my brother, Tim, as a writer, trucker, fisherman, political activist, neighbor, and friend.  You probably don’t know much about his childhood and early years, so I will talk briefly about our parents, growing up in Boston and Dedham, and some early experiences that shaped Tim’s thinking about economics, history, and labor.

      Tom Costello, our father, was born in Hyde Park in 1911, the youngest of six children.  His parents were Irish immigrants from Galway who met in Boston.  Our grandfather, Alexander Costello, was a groundskeeper on a large estate in Milton.  Tom and his friends had a great time playing on the estate grounds.  Most of his friends were children of the other Irish immigrants who settled in the Hyde Park neighborhood called Corriganville.  Many of the men worked on neighboring estates or in local factories.  The women worked as maids and household helpers.

      Claire MacPhee, our mother was also born in Hyde Park in 1916, the third of six children.  Her parents came from Prince Edward Island, Canada.  They met in Boston and moved to Hyde Park where her father, Jim, worked as a machinist for the Sturtevant Corporation which eventually was bought by Westinghouse, where he worked until his retirement.

      Tom graduated from Hyde Park High School an 1928 and went to work for the New Haven Railroad in the Readville car shops located on the Boston-Dedham line.  The Readville shops were the main repair facility for the northern end of the railroad.  At their peak they employed about 4000 workers – plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, upholsterers and welders.  Tom became a welder and a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, Local #102.  He was active in the Union from the start.  He became President and served for many years.  The President and other officers were full-time welders dealing with grievances and other problems as they happened.  This was a no-frills operation; no expense accounts, no business lunches, no fancy offices.  In fact, the office was in our house.

Unions call for Science-Based Reductions in Greenhouse Gasses

Unions call for Science-Based Reductions in Greenhouse Gasses
[Cross-Posted with the Labor Network for Sustainability and Huffington Post]

Over the past couple of years, the American labor movement has become an enthusiastic supporter of expanding “green jobs” that fight global warming. But policies to reduce carbon emissions scientists say are safe have been a harder pill to swallow.  Now, in a significant breakthrough, three significant unions have come out for the science-based emissions targets called for by the IPCC.

As 250 international union delegates arrived in Copenhagen for the global climate summit, a statement by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and a joint statement by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) called for a 25 to 40 percent reduction on 1990 levels for developed countries by 2020.

Sean Sweeney, director of the the Cornell University Global Labor Institute, who worked with the US labor delegation to be fully engaged in the UN process at the Copenhagen conference, said:

“The statements are a clear sign that U.S. unions want to bring scientific necessity into alignment with job creation and green economic development. Many other unions are also moving in this direction. Engaging with unions overseas has also helped U.S. unions to see support for climate protection is also an act of international solidarity.” 
 
 Unions and targets 

Both union statements gave support to the more limited climate protection measures proposed by President Barack Obama on the eve of the Copenhagen summit.  They also endorsed the climate legislation introduced by Senators Kerry and Boxer. But they argued that reductions to address the climate emergency must go substantially further.  They noted that President Obama’s commitment of 17 percent reduction on 2005 levels is only 4 percent below 1990 levels, which have been widely used as a benchmark in international scientific discussions.

Labor and Climate Change: A Briefing Paper for Activists

by Tim Costello and the Labor Network for Sustainability

["Labor and Climate Change" is a briefing paper that provides activists inside and outside the labor movement a way to understand the interests and concerns of different segments of organized labor in climate change issues.  It was the last major work by Tim Costello, who died in December, 2009.]

This briefing paper provides a strategy for addressing organized labor’s stake in climate change. Its goal is to provide activists inside and outside the labor movement with the information they need to help shape effective, worker friendly climate protection policies and garner support for them from organized labor.

The findings are based primarily on a detailed survey of the climate change record, self-interest, and decision making process of 17 labor organizations.  These unions and federations were selected to reflect the range of industries, occupations, and organizational cultures of the US trade union movement. The results of these surveys were compiled into profiles which include basic information, analysis, contact data, and other relevant information. The complete profiles are over 300 pages. They draw on both available public information and on a series of private conversations with top union officials and other knowledgeable sources.  And we have identified over 400 labor leaders at the local, regional and national level.

IN MEMORY OF TIM COSTELLO

Tim Costello, architect of innovative strategies for the labor movement and founder of Global Labor Strategies, died December 4 of pancreatic cancer at age 64.

Along with GLS, Tim's friends and colleagues are developing this memorial page as a tribute to Tim.

All who knew Tim and his work are invited to contribute to this page.

Tim in Beijing March 2008

How to Contribute to Tim's Memorial Page

Post your thoughts, memories and reflections to the GLS Blog:  Send an email to Brendan Smith (brendan (at) brendan-smith.org). Paste the title of your post in the subject line of your email and your text in the body of the email. If you want to post pictures, simply attach them to your email.

Comment on others' blog posts: Click on the title of a specific post if you would like to comment on someone else's post.  Scroll down and write in the comments box.

For donation information see Tim's Boston Globe obituary below.

Tim's Boston Globe Obituary

COSTELLO, Tim Of Cambridge, formerly of Rockport, died December 4 at age 64 of pancreatic cancer. Husband of Susanne Rasmussen of Cambridge, MA; father of Pia Costello of Cambridge, MA and Gillian Costello of Brooklyn, NY; grandfather of Evan and Cathryn Sherman of Brooklyn, NY; brother of Sean Costello of Belmont, MA; and a friend to many. Founder and partner in Global Labor Strategies, lifelong labor activist, and author of many articles and books on issues involving labor, globalization, and the environment. Memorial Service is planned for a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations in Tim's memory may be made to: VNA Care Network & Hospice, Development Office, 5 Federal Street, Danvers, MA 01923-3687.  12/06/09 Original link available here.

Tim's Family Obituary

Tim Costello, an architect of innovative strategies for the labor movement and the author of numerous articles and books on labor and globalization, died at home on December 4, 2009.  The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Tim August, 2009

Mr. Costello was born in Boston on June 13, 1945 to Thomas and Claire (MacPhee) Costello, and raised in Dedham, MA.  As a teenager he worked with his father as a construction laborer and learned from him the value of worker organization, often typing the correspondence of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the union for which his father served as president for many years.

As a young man, Mr. Costello went to work as a fuel oil delivery driver and became active in the Teamster’s union and the union reform movement.  Always an avid reader and writer, he set up an office in the back of his truck where he spent many hours in self-education.  He also studied at Goddard College in Vermont, the New School in New York, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, from which he graduated.  He gradually came to be recognized in the Boston area as an unusual combination of worker and intellectual.  In his book Taking History to Heart, James Green described Mr. Costello as “`Cosmic’ Tim, who seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”

Tim Costello, an architect of innovative strategies for the labor movement and the author of numerous articles and books on labor and globalization, died at home on December 4, 2009.  The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Tim August, 2009

Mr. Costello was born in Boston on June 13, 1945 to Thomas and Claire (MacPhee) Costello, and raised in Dedham, MA.  As a teenager he worked with his father as a construction laborer and learned from him the value of worker organization, often typing the correspondence of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the union for which his father served as president for many years.

As a young man, Mr. Costello went to work as a fuel oil delivery driver and became active in the Teamster’s union and the union reform movement.  Always an avid reader and writer, he set up an office in the back of his truck where he spent many hours in self-education.  He also studied at Goddard College in Vermont, the New School in New York, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, from which he graduated.  He gradually came to be recognized in the Boston area as an unusual combination of worker and intellectual.  In his book Taking History to Heart, James Green described Mr. Costello as “`Cosmic’ Tim, who seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”

New York Times' Article on Tim's Life and Work

Tim Costello, Trucker-Author Who Fought Globalization, Dies at 64 

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: December 26, 2009

Tim Costello, a truck driver who became a labor advocate and theorist, the co-author of four books and the founder of an organization that fought globalization, died Dec. 4 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 64.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his brother, Sean.

Mr. Costello was hailed by many academics and labor advocates as a bona fide worker-intellectual. A genial, mustached native of Boston, he drove fuel-delivery trucks, worked as a lobsterman, founded a group that battled against the fast-growing use of temporary workers and developed close links with labor advocates in China, Italy and Mexico.

His most notable book was “Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity” (2000), written with Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, which became a primer for labor advocates who argued that globalization was destroying jobs and reducing wages in the United States while exploiting workers in Asia.

The Nation Magazine Honors Tim as a "blue-collar intellectual, truck-driving internationalist"

KEEP ON TRUCKIN': Tim Costello, the blue-collar intellectual, truck-driving internationalist and globally respected author who died in December at 64 (from pancreatic cancer), fully embraced the anti-corporate globalization slogan: "Another World Is Possible." Costello was the energetic founder of groups such as the Campaign on Contingent Work, the North American Alliance for Fair Employment and Global Labor Strategies, and he wrote (with Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith) groundbreaking books like Global Village or Global Pillage (1994) and Globalization From Below (2000), which forged newer and deeper understandings of the importance of international solidarity on economic and social issues.

Costello delighted in the late '90s renewal of activism around globalization, and he celebrated the new tools available to organizers. In one of his last articles for The Nation ("Social Movements 2.0," January 15, 2009), he wrote with Brecher and Smith that the "online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter.... Instead, the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those who could not read, by spurring the Protestant reformation and scientific revolution." That was classic Costello: rooted in the old struggle between privilege and the cooperative commonwealth, yet ever at the ready to employ new technologies, adopt smarter tactics and build broader coalitions.   JOHN NICHOLS

Memorial Video of Tim by Jason Pramas

A video scrapbook of footage from a few moments in the work life of noted American labor activist and scholar Tim Costello (6/13/1945-12/4/2009). Produced by Jason Pramas for the Tim Costello Memorial event held at the Main Library of the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, MA, USA on February 1, 2010. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2009 Jason Pramas.

Memories of Tim from Jason Pramas on Vimeo.

A Condolence Ceremony for Tim From John Brown Childs

A Condolence Ceremony for Tim
From John Brown Childs
Santa Cruz, California
20 January 2010

I had the good fortune of meeting Tim many years ago through our mutual friend Jeremy Brecher.  I was immediately (and continuously) struck by the way in Tim was a compassionate world worker with a sharp intelligence, humility, powerful drive for justice, and an overall conviviality that personified and exemplified how to do and be globalization from below.

The documentary by Tim, Jeremy, and Brendan Smith, “Global Village or Global Pillage?” about globalization from below, that I have shown many times to my students, always strikes home with its clarity and deep current of social justice.  My students are always riveted by Tim’s easy to understand analysis of complex problems in that documentary.  Several thousand of my students have comment on his presentation and have benefited from it.  Many of them are now out in the world doing good work for humankind.

New York Harmon Law Firm Honors "Visionary" Tim Costello

We mourn the loss of visionary Tim Costello, a man who had prescient knowledge and understanding of the needs of hourly-wage workers and those at the lower end of the earning scale, those with little power to oppose outsourcing of jobs to other countries and the use of temporary workers - practices that eliminated jobs and job benefits for many American workers. He helped found Global Labor Strategies, "which fostered cross-boarder alliances to fight to improve wages and working conditions in the face of downward pressures from companies moving jobs over seas." Mr. Costello also founded the  North American Alliance for Fair Employment. Mr. Costello thought that "if you were on the left you will be working at it for the rest of your life, and you may not be successful, but it would be worth the effort." We are hopeful that others will step forward to fill the shoes of this exceptional advocate for the American worker.

Elance announces sad news of Tim's passing to thier membership

Sad news: Tim Costello, member of Enlace’s first Steering Committee has died: Tim Costello, an architect of innovative strategies for the labor movement and the author of numerous articles and books on labor and globalization, died at home on December 4, 2009.  The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Costello was born in Boston on June 13, 1945 to Thomas and Claire (MacPhee) Costello, and raised in Dedham, MA.  As a teenager he worked with his father as a construction laborer and learned from him the value of worker organization, often typing the correspondence of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the union for which his father served as president for many years. Read the full post here

Seattle Times Publishes a Short Obit of Tim

Tim Costello, 64, a truck driver who became a labor advocate and theorist, the co-author of four books and the founder of an organization (Global Labor Strategies) which fostered cross-border alliances to fight for better wages and working conditions in the face of downward pressures from globalization, died of pancreatic cancer Dec. 4 in Cambridge, Mass.

Admiring Tim from a Distance

I was only able to admire the man from a distance and from publicity. Sorry for this loss, Gilly. (I don't know your email address.) You have a lot to be proud of. Enver Hoxha!

Craig Segal (Chicago, IL)

Labor and Climate Change: The Legacy of Tim Costello

On DailyKos "gmoke" writes about Tim's legacy:

Tim Costello was a labor activist with a world-wide network.  He organized around contingent work and, most recently, environment and labor issues, specifically climate change as one of the founders of theGlobal Labor Strategies blog.  I met him at various enviro/eco events and would see him in the food coop or walking down the street as he lived in my neighborhood.  We would have short conversations from time to time and I always wished they were longer.  He knew so damn much.

“Looking over their shoulders” Remembering Tim Costello

Much of what I have read about Tim lately speaks to him as a “worker-intellectual.” In another time, the words “organic intellectual” would have rolled off the tongue. But this is not a synonym. In fact, it is probably a much more accurate appellation: Tim may have come up as a truck driver who went on to write about the big ticket issues of the day, but his writing had very practical purposes. Personifying the Gramscian notion, he set out to solve general concerns of humanity-as-a-whole from the perspective of real problems of (and solutions from) working class organization and working people in their everyday lives.  In this, he was a perhaps singular voice that was at once pragmatic and utopian, a labor leader who could read Sartre but also strategize about a collective bargaining agreement. This short note cannot do justice to Tim’s life, work and many contributions to our common causes. Instead it is written from the perspective of someone who has had the good fortune to work with Tim on a day-to-day basis for over three years as a fellow coordinator of the North American Alliance for Fair Employment (NAAFE) starting in 2002.

Peter Waterman - "Tim was a natural-born internationalist"

The news of Tim's death reached me when I was sorting out my computers after a three-month absence. I recall sending a short note of condolence to Jeremy and Brendan but cannot now find it. Tim has continued to be on my mind with the passage of time and I have followed the obits and condolences on the blog. I particularly appreciated Jeremy's biographical piece since, although I once stayed for a week or so with Tim and Sus in Boston, and although I heard something of his remarkable life and travels, I clearly never learned the half of it.

No one who met Tim could fail to be enchanted by this laid-back and generous personality. Nor by his hard work, mostly in the backrooms of the labour movement. But neither was I able to separate his own contribution to the jointly-authored books and the jointly-promoted Global Labor Strategies project. This was a guy without an ego. Or without an ego that he felt needed promoting.

Tim was also a natural-born internationalist. Or a man who became one through his European experience and wide travels.

I regret that in the past decade I only met up with Tim at World Social Forums and then always too briefly. I think we last met at the Belem forum. I am not entirely sure about this since I was apparently myself ill, being later operated on in Rio. Although, when we met, I must have mentioned my own past brush with cancer, he did not mention his own condition. I regret this since I profoundly value the concern and solidarity others have offered to me. But - like another friend of mine threatened by cancer - I respect his reasons for keeping quiet about this.

The response to Tim's death revealed on  the GLS blog convinces me that there will be a publication, or publications, devoted to his memory, or - perhaps one should say - inspired by his life. I would welcome the opportunity  of contributing to such.

I also would like to hope it is possible to set up a foundation or prize in his name. Given his own contribution to this, I would love to see the one or the other devoted to labour and social movement internationalism. An annual award for an internationalist campaign or publication could be an appropriate way of commemorating this unforgettable comrade and friend.

Peter Waterman
Global Labour Charter Project
The Hague

in memoriam to a trailblazer

I didn't know Mr. Costello but am grateful for Global Labor Strategies. 

BTW I sent your great globalization pdf. to colleagues at the college with whom I'm proposing a Labor Studies dept. One request/suggestion: that your main webpage begin with an explanation of your website/Mr. Costello (i.e., with the personal comments farther down the page, so that the many web surfers will not turn away.)

Adelante!

Julie

UUSC will miss brilliant Tim

It’s hard to say more than all that has been written on these pages about Tim … his friends and colleagues have truly captured the brilliant mind and wonderful spirit that was and always will be the essence of Tim.

UUSC worked closely with Tim and GLS as we delved into the complex issues of workers’ rights in China and of the nexus between climate change and labor. We learned so much both from his vision and his actions. And it was so much fun to learn from him. (I enjoyed the fact that I often had difficulty in keeping up with his lightning-quick thinking. Each time that we met, I madly scribbled in my notebook as he talked, and later couldn’t always decipher what I’d written.)

My colleague Patricia Jones in UUSC’s Environmental Justice program wrote, “This is a great, great, loss to our movement. Tim was always ready to help us, whenever we called. He gave tirelessly to the movement for social justice, and UUSC. His knowledge, experience, intellectual capacity, generosity, hopeful outlook in the face of great challenges - very sorry to hear of this loss. We had so looked for his leadership from the labor movement on climate change.” 

From all of us at UUSC, our heartfelt condolences go to Tim’s family and friends. He will be dearly missed.

Ariel Jacobson

Economic Justice program, UUSC, Cambridge, MA

Keep on Truckin': Tim's 1971 Article Published under the Name "Mac Brockway”

Keep on Truckin'

by Mac Brockway

Root & Branch No. 2 (1971), pp. 1-4

Faced with the reality of making a living most people tend to establish a certain rhythm to their lives. This often means dividing one's life into compartments; for most people there is working and there is living. On the one hand, the worker is a producer who spends most of his waking hours doing dull monotonous work, who confronts the boss daily, who may engage in strikes, who is often willing to put aside abstract notions like "patriotism" or "the national interest" if they stand in his way. Off the job, on the other hand, he may be a perfectly respectable citizen, possibly a homeowner, who believes many of the myths about the "American Way." Off the job the worker is an atom, who probably does not socialize with the people he works with even if he knows them intimately, whose life revolves around his family and a small circle of friends, especially since the decline of neighborhoods in the big cities. As long as the job delivers enough in wages to maintain a relatively high standard of living, and as long as nothing off the job invades the little niches they have found for themselves, people seem willing to live around the contradictions in their lives and forget the price they must pay for material security.

If masses of people are going to act to change things, something must happen to shake them up on the level of their daily lives forcing them to find new ways to satisfy their basic needs. Radical propaganda is not enough to convince people of the need for change. The combination of an established routine, a fairly high standard of living, and the constant exposure to the mass media is simply too strong to overcome with mere words. It seems to me that barring some kind of major political crisis, an economic crisis remains the only thing which will force people to act to change society. And yet it will not necessarily take a catastrophic crisis to prod people into action since most people's standard of living hangs on the barest thread of credit which can snap at the first sign of unemployment. A few repossessions by banks and finance companies can have a sobering effect.

A crisis tends to unify a class by enabling people within it to see clearly the overriding interest they share with each other. A worker's whole life is disrupted by a depression. Speed-up, loss of over-time, lay-offs, or partial lay-offs result in a sharp drop in the standard of living. A crisis also means further decay of the cities and a decline in the overall quality of life. This unification of the fragmented lives people live can be explosive.

In the past year the country has entered a mild crisis and already we have seen a reaction on the part of many workers. The Post Office strike and the Teamster wildcat are two dramatic examples showing that the workers are quite willing to put aside both the law and the unions to take direct action in their own interests. The concern shown by the Auto companies that Reuther's death may spark "chaos in the plants" indicates that there is a fear in business circles that the wildcat might become a common tool of the workers.

But while the Teamsters' and the Postal workers' strikes are dramatic examples of the rumblings in the working class, many less spectacular things are happening in industries across the country. A case in point is the New York fuel oil industry.

Until recently New York's oil drivers were not known for their militancy, but things have begun to change. While the shift in attitudes has translated itself into action on only one or two occasions, the general consensus of the men is that they have become more militant and that they will no longer be pushed around so easily. This change is worth discussing since it is fairly typical of what is happening in other places.

Tim and the Copenhagen Discord

Friends of Tim, friends of labor and social justice  -

I heard about Tim's death just a few days before I was about to travel to the Copenhagen climate talks with a large US and international labor delegation.  A large demonstration on Saturday, December 11, in Copenhagen reminded me of Seattle 1999, and my thoughts wandered to my first sighting of Tim - in the video Global Village, Global Pillage - an excellent piece of work that I've used many times for labor education purposes. When I first saw the video I remember saying to myself "So that's Tim Costello! What an accent!" Some years later I was fortunate enough to meet Tim and, in the past year or two, work with him and his comrades Jeremy and Brendan at GLS on labor's climate policy. But my time knowing and working with Tim was to be all too brief. We talked a lot about unions and the climate challenge, and how to move the conversation in labor towards an internationalist, science-based and forward-looking perspective. For Tim, the
Obama-brokered "Copenhagen Accord" would have provided further evidence that only a "globalization from below" and fundamental social change can address the present challenges we face as a civilization. The banners in Copenhagen like those saying "Climate Change Needs System Change" could have been designed by Tim. We have lost a real friend and champion, but Tim's contribution has made us better equipped to face the challenges ahead.


Sean Sweeney

Jeremy Recalls Forty years with Tim

I first met Tim Costello in New York around 1969. A small group of us were holding meetings to start the magazine Root & Branch.  Most of us had been influenced in one way or another by Paul Mattick, a German-born machinist and writer who for many decades had been the leading voice of Council Communism in the US.  Tim used to show up occasionally at the meetings and kind of hover around the fringes of the group.

Tim seemed like something of a mystery. We knew that he was a truck driver, that he drove a fuel oil truck, and that he worked an incredible number of hours, often twelve to fourteen a day six or seven days a week. Usually he was pretty quiet, but occasionally he would regale us with stories about the drivers’ class struggle on the job. He told us how they would steal time, often hours each day. This required cooperation among drivers to establish their own work rates for the various jobs. Tim stole his share: He set up an office in the back of his truck and spent several hours of each working day reading and writing.

You can get a sense of Tim’s approach in those days from an article he wrote for Root and Branch under the name "Mac Brockway” called "Keep on Truckin'." It provided a detailed account of informal resistance on the job at a fuel oil company. It described a threatened work stoppage that forced the rehiring of two fired militants (one of them, one might guess, the article's author).  His approach had a big influence on me; I was working on Strike!, and from Tim I got a sense of informal worker self-organization on the job that I presented as the force underlying mass strikes.

Tim was a "Lovely Human Being"

Pia and Susanne are very dear friends of ours. We didn't know Tim well, as he valued his privacy during his illness, but the times we met him we found him to be a lovely human being. We know he was a loving father and husband. Pia and Susanne -- our hearts and prayers are with you, and you know we will remain your good friends.

Love, Roger, Kittredge and Sydney White, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sending Prayers and Love to Tim's Family

Susanne and Pia: Our thoughts, prayers and love are with you during this very trying time. Tim may your soul be surrounded by the lords loving light, and Susanne and Pia may you now start to heal.

With Love,
Tracey, Maya & Gary

Tim the "finest kind"

Tim was, quite simply, the "Finest Kind." We're all heartbroken on Cape Ann - we'll miss him so very much. Love to Sus, Pia, Gilly, Peter, Sean, Snug & CC.

Linda Amero,
friend and admirer

Thinking of Tim's Family

My thoughts are with Gillie, Pia and Susanne, along with the rest of Tim's family. With special love also to Sean, Amy and Tom. Love, Shennan

From the Gloucester Days

I knew Tim best in the 80's and 90's, working together painting, lobstering and running in the woods and roads of Cape Ann. His warm heart, dry wit and keen observations made up just a few parts of this outstanding and remarkable man. He will be greatly missed and our loving thoughts go to Susanne and Pia during this time of great loss.

Sam and Luisa Cleaves, Gloucester, MA

Tim's New York Times Obituary

COSTELLO--Tim, of Cambridge, MA died December 4 of cancer. Husband of Susanne Rasmussen; father of Pia and Gillian Costello; grandfather of Evan and Cathryn Sherman; brother of Sean Costello; friend to many. Founder of Global Labor Strategies, labor activist, and author.

Tim, you will be sorely missed!

The last time I saw Tim was at the World Social Forum last January. I had no idea he was ill and his death has come as a shock. I will always remember him as a really special man -- totally committed to rank and file democracy, very smart creative and thoughtful, and a warm and wonderful person. Tim, you will be sorely missed!

Annie Zirin pays tribute to an activist dedicated to the movement from below

[Original Posted here]

December 17, 2009

LABOR AND global justice activist Tim Costello passed away on December 4 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Tim was a founding member of many activist organizations during his lifetime--among them the Massachusetts chapter of Jobs with Justice, and most recently, a project called Global Labor Strategies.

When I lived in Boston in the 1990s, Tim was a fixture in the local labor movement. Whether we were organizing a solidarity committee, holding a forum to discuss the state of our movement or a walking a picket line, you knew Tim would be there. When it came to forums about the global justice movement, Tim enriched our discussion with his knowledge of the issues, and ideas for the future.

Tim was the author of numerous books and articles, including Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity, coauthored with Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, and Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up, coauthored with Brecher.

Tim was born and raised in Boston. He worked as a fuel oil delivery driver and became active in the Teamsters Union and the union reform movement. In 1973, he met labor historian Jeremy Brecher, and became his collaborator for the next 35 years. They wrote a book together that year, called Common Sense for Hard Times, about the impact of the recession on young workers.

In an article they wrote for International Socialist Review, called "Debtors of the world, unite!" (ISR 19, August-September 2001, written at the height of the global justice movement, and just before September 11), Tim, Brecher and Smith wrote:

    But just as corporate and political elites reached across national borders to further their agendas, people at the grassroots have begun connecting their struggles around the world, to impose their needs and interests on the global economy. Globalization from above is generating a worldwide movement of resistance..."globalization from below."

Tim dedicated his life to that movement of globalization from below.

Tim was visionary, a real worker-intellectual, and very human

Although I knew Tim from my work at the Chinese Progressive Association, from the Campaign on Contingent Work, and from his global solidarity work, I saw the news of Tim's death in the King Open School list-serve, since our daughters attend the same elementary school.

I am shocked and saddened by Tim's death. He was truly a visionary who believed in global solidarity and who was able to introduce new ideas to people in a very concrete way. Just downstairs from his office when he was at 33 Harrison, we at CPA relied on his advice on a number of occasions.

Although I did not see him often in recent years, I would run into him in Chinatown or in Cambridge at our daughters' school. We would always stop to chat, because he was one of the most friendly, open, and human activists I know, who had an equal appreciation of daily family life and of major global questions.

I would like to be like Tim if I ever "grow up."

Lydia Lowe

Michael Hirsch Recalls Tim's SDS Days

I knew Tim when we were both SDS militants at the New School and later in Boston. Unlike others of us, Tim was both an active SDS member and a trucker who believed deeply in the union movement and in the possibilities for working people to change the social order and rule in their own name. When SDS occupied a building or staged a sit-in, Tim used it as an opportunity to show fellow workers what "these kids" could do. "That's my group. And if they can do it, we can do it," he'd say. And while we--at least those at the New School in the late 1960s --considered ourselves Marxists, either in our way or in his, Tim was a Marxist in Marx's way. He had read Capital and got it, while we had barely read Paul Sweezy. He is missed.

Michael Hirsch

Remembering Tim Costello

[by Jason Pramas; original posted on Open Media Boston]

Last week, only a few days after hearing that he was ill, I got word that my friend and mentor Tim Costello had passed away. He was 64. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to speak to Tim in the last few months before he died. A private person as regards health issues and family matters, he did not wish for most of his friends and acquaintances to know that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

I am told that he wanted no public funeral, and I respect that. However, I do think it's important to say a few words about Tim for the Open Media Boston audience.

For much more information about his life and works, I recommend viewers to the tribute web page put up by other friends of his at http://www.laborstrategies.blogs.com/. Suffice to say that he was a much respected labor organizer and strategist, and a well-known environmental and peace activist. Which, taken together, made him a rare labor visionary in 21st century America - a time when the labor movement has serious need of big thinkers. Even more rare was the fact that he never distanced himself from his working class roots. Wherever he went, and however much he learned and taught, he was always a working man, and a son of Boston. He never forgot his roots, and always stayed connected to old friends from various walks of life.

An angel passes from the world

I am rarely moved like this. But I miss Tim. It is not because I spent a lot of time with him. I am retired now and I would see Tim once and a while at the grocery store. We would bring each other up to date. Years ago, when I was organizing my fellow security guards at the Boston Museum of Fine arts, Tim and Jason Pramas went way out of their way to give me help and advice. Tim came to our demonstrations, too. But I don't think that is the reason I feel the way I do. I think it is because there was something so intensely human about him. A sweetness. An intrinsic, primal quality of love. He was an angel person. A saint of social action.

A good neighbor

I ran into Tim frequently around Cambridge, in the Coop or when he was walking Pia from school. Aside from his important work which clearly inspired so many, Tim was a good neighbor- a man who always had time to say hello in the most genuine way. He was never too busy or distracted to greet me or to engage in a conversation about food, immigration, his most recent trip to Brazil, fishing on Cape Ann or the weather. He was sincere, engaging; he was present. He was a good man.

He will be missed by many- from his family and close friends to those of us whose days were made brighter by bumping into his mustached smile on the street. 

Luisa Oliveira
Cambridge, MA

What we learned from Tim

We had the honour and privilege to share beautiful moments with Tim, to make common plans and to work together with him. We could not see each other often, but when we met we felt so comfortable and well with him... That was one of the many talents of Tim.

It is a great loss for us personally and for the social movements that lose his ability to keep things together, different people, different groups and ideas, make them work together looking for common grounds but always allowing everybody to make a step forward from their positions in the right direction. Because Tim had a vision of another world possible and actively has been contributing to build it. When last year the global economic crisis violently crushed on the American society, Tim used to tell us: "There's things happening here that I thought I could have never seen in my life!". There was hope in his words, he wanted us to look at the opportunities to build, as he used to say, the "globalization from below".

We will try to follow up what we learned from Tim. We will miss him.

Ciao

Bruno Ciccaglione &
Alexandra Strickner

From Primitivo Rodriguez in Mexico

My deep sentiments of solidarity for Tim Costellos's family, for you, and for all of Tim's working sisters and brothers throughout the world. 

 

Viva for ever Tim Costello!

Viva the working people's struggles everywhere!

We Shall Overcome!

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre!

Primitivo Rodriguez

North American Affairs Specialist for the Mexican Family Services Agency
Co-Founder of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

Opening the Big Door to China

A couple of years ago Tim saw and seized a moment to open a big door to China, and that gesture really did change a bit of history.

In 2006 Tim had picked-up on an unusual struggle unfolding in China – a debate about strengthening labor rights which so provoked the American and European Chambers of Commerce they virtually threatened “capital strike” if the law were to pass. Fortunately, labor’s cudgels were taken up – by Tim, through excellent and effective writing on the Global Labor Strategies site and by a labor law scholar in China named Liu Cheng of Shanghai Normal University. As the open conflict between capital and workers’ interests became pitched, Tim and his fantastic GLS sidekick Brendan Smith helped organize a speaking tour for Professor Liu in the U.S. to defend the proposed law. It worked. The exposure put some gumption into the fight for workers’ rights in China, by surfacing and mobilizing labor allies from the west. Tim helped nail down a worthy plank in the platform we all, in the labor movement, try everyday to build. 

Here (above) is a picture of Liu Cheng, me, my son Eli David Friedman (our translator and labor scholar in training) and Tim in front of the White House in March 2007… on our way to talk to someone important, no doubt!

I had surely hoped for more years of working on China labor issues with Tim. But the few are just as durable, and they are a foundation.

-- Ellen David Friedman, Montpelier VT

Mourning a loss to the movement

Dear friends,

I've been a reader and admirer of Tim's work since I came in the movement more than 25 years ago. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sitting next to him on a plane back to the U.S. from the World Social Forum in Brazil back in February. Our conversation ranged from the state of the Latin American left to the problems in the U.S. labor movement to some choice Teamster lore involving a job Tim once had driving a truck full of highly explosive materials. In just those few hours, Tim exhibited the all the warmth and that his friends and comrades will miss so much. 

I'm sorry that I met him too late to get to know him. My condolences to his friends, family and loved ones.

Lee Sustar

Tim Costello in the Food Coop

I knew Tim only a little bit. We went to a couple of meetings together and would see each other from time to time in the food coop or walk together down Pearl Street as we both headed home. He is always someone I liked to talk to because he knew so damn much. I wish we had worked together on one project or another but he had his plate full at all times and the occasion never arose.

I will miss those chance encounters which were unfailingly interesting and informative. We all will miss the wisdom, humor, and street strategy Tim brought to light.

Solar IS Civil Defense,
George Mokray

http://solarray.blogspot.com

http://gmoke.dailykos.com

http://www.youtube.com/user/gmoke

Short Video Clip of Tim in China

Tim Interviewed about Worker Protests in France

French Workers Rebel

To Tim’s Family and Friends

I have been waiting and thinking, as read the wonderful tributes to our Tim, about what I could add.  I met Tim on some picket line or at some meeting, probably in the late 1970s; and then got to know him when he became my “student” in the Labor Studies Program at UMass Boston, when the College of Public and Community Service was still downtown, and still serving as a free space for activists to connect and learn from one another.  It always made me smile, and still does, to refer to Tim as my “student.”  We were about the same age and he had a much broader and richer set of political experiences and intellectual interests than I did.  I think of the relationship we had (we also taught together) as an ideal of what folks call popular education: the students learn from the teachers.  I learned a great deal from Tim about how to think outside of some of the categories I worked in and how to think twice about some of the lessons I drew from labor movement history. Tim was a man of unfailing good cheer, even when everything around us spelled doom and gloom for the “left” and “labor.”  I guess this quality was based, in some part, on his intellectual confidence and his understanding of the well-springs of popular power. He was the most cosmopolitan Teamster I ever met and I will miss him very much.

Tim’s so-called teacher

Jim Green

Professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

bye Tim

Walking in Malmoe during the final march of ESF, speaking with my bad inglish...

We miss someone special, I was lucky knowing you, even just for few words

Anna Camposampiero, Italy

Cosmic Tim

To Tim's friends and family:

Such a shock to hear about Tim's death. Just last night I let a few friends know who hadn't heard, and the shock and sadness hit them as it hit me: Tim? Can't be! One friend is a leader of my local union who had known Tim as a dissident Teamster in the 1970s and traveled with him to TDU conventions in Detroit through Canada. Another is a city councillor in Lynn who knew him much later as a thinker and critic of free trade, and analyst and proponent of community based labor revival. How many lives did Tim touch, in how many arenas?

I first met Tim (I think--the decades stretch my memory...) in the 1980s as a part of the Thursday night crew at UMass Boston that Janet mentioned and Jim Green wrote about. That crew and our late night arguments and support remain a high point of my life. Here I am, going back to school after dropping out 15 years earlier, starved for intellectual stimulation amidst a sea of overtime grievances and diapers, and into my life walks Cosmic Tim. We could never figure out where he got all his knowledge. He seemed to have Forest Gumped his way across history and the social movements of our lifetimes, driving his truck across several continents, squeezing analysis from anecdotes and study alike. Hence, "Cosmic".

Since then we crossed paths many times, especially around globalization issues as I tried to staunch the blood of job loss in my plant and he tried to explain to the rest of us what was happening and what to do about it. Just a couple of years ago I borrowed his research on GE's and the US Chamber's lobbying against labor law reform in China to try to expose and embarass my employer of 31 years in the pages of our union newspaper. And sitting in my scattered "to read" paper mountain as I write this is "Globalization from Below" Tackles the "Great Recession".

I don't know anyone else who so combined intellectual rigor, hard work, personal warmth, professional humility, and class passion. He seemed to have no agenda other than the truth and the improvement of workers' lives: the way it should be.

Can't believe he's gone. Can't he send us one more paper?

My heartfelt sympathy to family and friends.

Jeff Crosby, President, IUE-CWA Local 201

An irreplaceable human being

Anyone who met Tim was immediately charmed by his beautiful voice (with that wonderful old-school Boston accent), his powerful intellect and his ability to tell fascinating stories. I knew him not as an activist, but as a neighbor, a fellow Red Sox devotee and as the father of my daughter’s best friend. I will sorely miss chatting with him in the backyard, him at his window, about Obama, Pedroia, Bush and Bay. I will miss hearing stories about his father, Hyde Park and the rail yards of his youth, the many years he spent on the road, the late night oil deliveries in the seediest parts of Brooklyn, the stories he brought back from his many travels, his love of Cape Anne, and his seemingly endless knowledge of politics, history and culture. I will treasure the memories of Fenway Park, the warm and relaxing days spent with Tim, Susanne and Pia in the Berkshires, and all the unique and charming mannerisms of a man who truly embodied the meaning of the Yiddish word “mensch”.

Daniel Canale-Parola, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Two More Pictures of Tim

Il Manifesto Publishes Obituary About Tim

With Tim Costello, who died a few days ago in Boston, the world of labor and the left worldwide have lost one of their keenest and most powerful voices.

Tim was born in Boston 64 years ago, the son of a construction laborer who bequeathed to him the sense and value of working-class organizing. A fuel oil delivery driver, Tim had set up an office in the back of his truck where he devoted his spare time to a serious self-education while engaging in union (first with the Teamsters, eventually with the Service Employees ) and political organizing. An insatiable reader, he had studied at the New School in New York and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where historian Jim Green described him as “’Cosmic Tim, who seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”

Italian readers learnt to appreciate him some thirty years ago, through a great book on the first oil shock recession, which appeared in Italian under the (odd) title The worse…the worse. Daily struggles in hard times (Tanto peggio tanto peggio…La lotta quotidiana in tempi difficili (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1979). The Italian title missed the connection that the book intended to establish with the artisan-thinker hero of the American Revolution Tom Paine and his emphasis on the importance of “common sense” and the concrete world. The outcome of a research trip across the country to study the impact of the crisis, the book was a treasure trove of the many inventive ways through which ordinary people managed to survive and get by in the grip of the recession. Underpinning it was the idea that “what happens day by day is the true gist of human life: if daily life is unsatisfying, artificial, poor, unfree, any political, religious or philosophical justification is nothing but platitude.”

Written with Jeremy Brecher, the book inaugurated a long-standing collaboration which has lasted until today. Such a collaboration has given us such gems of analysis and intervention as Building Bridges. The Emerging Grassroots Coalition (1990), or works on “globalization from below” (Globalization from Below, Contro il capitale globale, Feltrinelli, 2002, Come farsi un movimentog lobale, DeriveApprodi) which developed a critique of neoliberal globalization based on a “Lilliputian strategy” for change starting from the bottom up at a micro and community level and containing the seeds of the future society. A long and growing commitment to the environmental cause had led him recently to help found the Labor Network for Sustainability. 

Ferdinando Fasce

Il Manifesto

Working People in China Shall Remember Tim

I was shocked to hear that Mr. Tim Costello was died of cancer. Please convey my condolences to his family.

Mr. Costello's death is a big loss of labor movement. I will never forget his contribution to Chinese Labor Contract Law. He is a friend of Chinese working people.

The Chinese labor legislation is the turning point from deregulation to reregulation. So Mr. Costello's work is also a worldwide contribution. Working people of the world shall remember him forever.

 

Best,

Liu Cheng

Shanghai Normal University
Faculty of Law and Politics
Shanghai. China

In memory: Tim Costello, labor activist, intellectual, and bridge-builder, 1945-2009

Tim Costello, who went from being a well-read Teamster activist to authoring key books on labor and globalization and launching innovative labor strategies, died of pancreatic cancer on December 4. Costello co-authored or co-edited books including Common Sense for Hard Times, Strike!, Building Bridges: The Emerging Coalition of Labor and Community, and Globalization from Below. He led the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, which pulled together 65 organizations in the US and Canada to confront issues of contingent work, and later co-founded Global Labor Strategies, which helped labor activists across the world to build global strategies. “Tim was always a step ahead of the rest of us, on labor-community coalitions, contingent work, and global labor alliances,” said Chris Tilly, Director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “He was also a friend you could always call on for help and advice. We will miss him sorely.”

UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

On the contribution of Brother Tim

On behalf of General Federationof Nepalese Trade Uniions and nepali working mass, I express our feelings of sorrow and noncompensable loss caused by untimely passaway of Brother Tim Costello. I know late brother Tim was a dedicated mix-up of activism and Intellectualilty. His efforts to globalise working class solidarity and to influence every segment of society & state through globalised initiatives will be remembered with high appreciation for many years of future days. His contribution will guide policy work and intellectual work to build theories and shape theories in favour of working masses and also empower the activists working to change this world into a better one for working people. We extend Homage with our full heart and condolence to the family

Best regards

Umesh Upadhyaya

Secretary General, GEFONT-Nepal

Tim Costello: Labor Activist Extraordinaire!

New Orleans A week ago I was in Boston.  Knowing I would be in Cambridge at the Harvard Coop, I sent an email to my friend and colleague, Tim Costello, suggesting he come over if he had a minute and visit and pick up a book.  The weather was miserably cold and wet, so I figured he had stayed home wisely and thought no more of it.  I had visited with Tim at some length in February of this year.  He had met me at Tufts after a meeting, we had lunch and he had to drop off a lunch his youngest daughter had forgotten.

We talked about a way that we could do some joint work with our research team in Florida, our organizers in India, and all of the good relationships Tim felt had been made in China with Global Strategies.  Money was an issue.  Money always seems to be an issue, but Tim and his partners were undaunted and committed to their vision, and in Tim’s case, endlessly enthusiastic and optimistic about the impact of the work.

Tim was old school, and it was not old school meaning a couple of three or four decades ago.  Tim harkened back to the times more than 100 years ago when there were shop floor and rank-and-file intellectuals who lived and breathed as labor activists and self-made labor intellectuals.  Tim’s story was an old story of driving trucks in and around Boston as a Teamster.  The values didn’t change.  He talked about the times in between the projects, contracts, and grants when some of the team would paint houses and others would work as fishermen or pick up lobsters.  He talked about how hard it was getting, but there were no regrets.  This was the price of being both a working stiff and a totally committed activist to a vision of what lay ahead and needed to happen next.  There was no whine in the man.  His spirit was always infectious.

I had first gotten to really know Tim during the period when he was helping build an alliance dealing with contingent labor.  I can remember us eating rice and beans and getting to know each other better at an Enlace meeting in Torreon, Mexico.  A couple of years after that, I remember walking him towards the Zocalo in Mexico City and past the Alameda because I knew that city better than he did.  He always talked about organizing a meeting in Paris or Italy and that I would be on the list.  I would kid him when I would see him about the fact that I was still waiting for the call!

Good man.  Good times.

My biggest disappointment now is that we never really figured out a way to make more happen.   And, more happen together!

I got my internet feed from Global Labor Strategies and opened it this afternoon because it said something about Tim.  To my shock it was a memorial notice that he had died last Friday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts of pancreatic cancer.  I can only assume it came suddenly and felled him quickly.  I know he was good health in February except for the usual aches and pains, because we discussed it explicitly.  His family must have been devastated.  I heard him talk about them all the time.  He had told many stories of working in Denmark, his wife’s country.  He doted on his youngest daughter.

The notice included a brief obit from the Boston Globe that he was a labor activist and author of many books and articles.  All true, but none of this was the full measure of the man.  No one or two inches in the back pages can capture the rare sense that this man and the kinds of things he thought, stood for, and did were at the very heart of the most traditional and best parts of the labor movement.  What was good for workers at home and internationally was part of his blood and DNA.  There simply aren’t many Tim Costello’s anymore, and there need to be hundreds and thousands of them.  His passing may not be much noticed by many and his legacy may not be as lengthy as some, but there will always be huge debts to pay to Tim Costello and the best of the tradition of labor activism and intellectuality that he represented quietly, faithfully, and truly for all of his years.

Damn, I’ll miss the guy!  There are no replacements on the bench for Tim.

Wade Rathke

Chief Organizer of Community Organizations International