Abstract

What Is Labor Doing?

The teamster official's talk was marbled with obscenities, profanities and allusions to radical intellectualism and jugular-vein politics, and frosted with a heavy layer of statistics, as he finished explaining Teamsters Joint Council 16's Drive program. The official was addressing the audience standing in front of a map of New York's Queens Borough in what had once been the conference room of the Executive Board of Teamsters Joint Council 16. Basically, it consists of an elaborately methodical breakdown of the council's 165,000 members by residence and a survey of their voter registration. Drive tries to get a Teamster to act as captain in each election district. It also sends out lists of Teamsters who are not registered to vote, and local union officers are supposed to hound them into registering.