Chicago Teamsters are Still Stuck in the Past

BY JOE ALLEN

 MARCH 18, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photo: Joe Allen.

The Chicago Teamsters are, once again, disappointing those who still hope for a more progressive change in the political direction of the union. With the upcoming Tuesday, March 19th primaries for congressional and Cook County offices, the Chicago Teamsters are largely supporting the incumbent political establishment, opposing a referendum to combat homelessness, and, in the case of the race for Cook County State’s Attorney, supporting a stalking horse for rolling back criminal justice reform.

Teamsters Joint Council 25 (JC25), which acts as the umbrella organization for all of its twenty-five affiliated local unions in the greater Chicago area, represents over one hundred thousand workers throughout Illinois. JC 25 plays an important part in local, county, and statewide politics, and had a notorious reputation for corruption, and ties to organized crime in years’ past, along with supporting the worst political practices in Cook County. Last year I surveyed, the JC 25’s endorsements in the city council race, and found, not to my surprise, that they endorsed some of the worst aldermen for re-election on the city council.

New Leadership — Old Ways

Screen shot from the Teamsters Joint Council 25 Facebook page.

Since then, there have been some changes in the leadership of JC 25. Terry Hancock was removed as president because of financial irregularities in his local union by Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien. JC 25 elected a new executive board and president earlier this year. Tom Stiede, of Teamster 703, was elected president. Teamsters 705, largest UPS affiliated local based in Chicago, for the time in many years is represented on its executive board by Juan Campos, its Secretary-Treasurer and an International Vice-President. It appears that JC 25 is now largely in the hands of those who supported the Sean O’Brien-Fred Zuckerman’s Teamsters United slate in the 2021 Teamster elections.

Despite some changes, the JC 25 remains pretty wedded to the old ways of doing things in their own unions and in city and county politics. For example, last year the largely immigrant, non-English speaking members of Tom Stiede’s Local had to overcome the retaliatory behavior of their employer, the Anthony Marano Company, a major produce distributor in the Chicago area, and the hostility of their union as over wage and working conditions documented by Labor Notes’ Luis Feliz Leon, here. With this kind of record, how is someone elected to a leadership position in the Chicago Teamsters?

While James T. Glimco, President of Local 777, whose grandfather, Joey Glimco, was a frightening figure in Chicago Outfit, is no longer on the executive board of JC 25, John Coli, Jr., Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters 727, the son of convicted extortionist John T. Coli, was elected to the executive board. The grandfather of the Coli clan, Eco James Coli was a notorious labor racketeer. The Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the former reform group, posted several years ago, “The Colis have run the Teamsters in Chicago as a family business for decades.” TDU has, yet to say, anything about the appearance of another Coli.

I’m not arguing that there is any evidence currently that younger Glimco or Coli are mobbed-up or corrupt, simply the point that TDU made of running the Teamsters like a family business still holds true too much of the time. Bill Hogan, Jr., another notorious Chicago Teamster official, later barred-for-life the union, boasted in 1990, “I am living proof that nepotism works.” Family dynasties have been a declining feature of the Teamsters during the past three decades, they should be buried forever, but still clinging to life in Chicago.

Bring Chicago Home

Screen shot from the Teamsters JC 25 Facebook page.

JC 25’s new executive board unfortunately continues to find itself on the wrong side of many crucial political issues, especially when it comes to housing and criminal justice issues. The “Bring Chicago Home” referendum, championed Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose progressive reputation has been severely tarnished by his handling of the migrant crisis, as well as other issues, is a small initiative to raise the transfer tax, one-time, on the sale of property over $1 million, while lowering it on sales under a million.

The goal is to fund permanent housing for the unhoused in Chicago, which is at a crisis level. It has been vigorously opposed by the city’s real estate lobby. Teamsters JC 25 has called for its members to vote No on the referendum, without any explanation of why it would oppose this small initiative. The Teamsters find themselves on the same side as those who have made Chicago increasingly unaffordable for its working class residents. To my surprise, Teamsters Local 700, which is heavily made up of Cook County Corrections officers and deputies, have called for a Yes vote on the referendum. Why the divergent endorsements?

The Change We Need?

John Catanzara. Screen shot from the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, YouTube hannel.

When it comes to the race to succeed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, JC 25 has endorsed retired judge Eileen O’Neill-Burke to replace her. O’Neill-Burke’s rival is Clayton Harris III, who was a corporate lawyer for Lyft. Harris has the official endorsement by the Cook County Democratic Party. O’Neill-Burke and Harris have both attacked each other for receiving money from far right and anti-abortion sources. O’Neill-Burke’s role in the false murder conviction of a ten year old African-American boy in the 1990s‚ later overturned, should alone make her toxic for any union endorsement. If anything is clear from their attack ads is that neither candidate deserves the support of Chicago unions. Harris and O’Neill-Burke campaigns have split the labor movement so much that the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) has decided to withhold any endorsement, and has remained neutral in the contest.

O’Neill-Burke touts that she is “The Change We Need.” What is the change she’s campaigning for? Foxx garnered the wrath of the criminal justice establishment in Cook County and throughout Illinois by her advocacy of criminal justice reform, especially ending cash bail, having a $1,000 minimum for felony prosecution for retail theft, and releasing 250 wrongly convicted from prison. While O’Neill-Burke has pledged to keep some of Foxx’s progressive program, she has also promised to lower felony retail prosecutions to $300. But, it is who is supporting her that is the most revealing.

The O’Neill-Burke panicked when Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President John Catanzara urged his members to vote for her in near apocalyptic terms. “We have an opportunity, a once in a very long-time opportunity to affect our professional well-being,” he told his members in a video announcement. Catanzara even called on his Republican members to “hold their noses” and vote in the Democratic Primary for O’Neill-Burke. Catanzara’s is a notorious Trump supporter and his endorsement can only lose her votes. Yet, his endorsement is only the froth on the reactionary wave of campaign cash supporting her. A joint study by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, the National Public Radio affiliate in Chicago, reported:

“The top 25 individual funders of Eileen O’Neill Burke’s bid to be Cook County’s top prosecutor include no African Americans and no women, a WBEZ analysis of her Illinois campaign filings has found. Those 25 donors — venture capitalists, investment managers, traders, real estate developers, upscale restaurant chain owners, personal-injury lawyers, and so on — account for about half of the $3.1 million in campaign fundraising that O’Neill Burke had reported to the state by Thursday afternoon, just a few days before the end of voting Tuesday.”

In early March, in another study of campaign funding, the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ reported:

“O’Neill Burke reported $236,200 from frequent Republican donor Daniel O’Keefe, who helps lead the investment management firm Artisan Partners, raising his family’s total for her to $250,000. O’Neill Burke reported another $175,000 from Gerald Beeson and Matthew Simon, executives of Citadel LLC, a hedge fund founded by billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin, lifting to $195,700 the total from their families to her. Beeson, like Griffin, has funded numerous Republican campaigns. Simon in January contributed $200,000 to Paul Vallas’s unsuccessful Chicago mayoral campaign.”

Why would the Teamsters want to be on the same political side as some of the worst Republican campaign donors in the country, unless this mirrors what the Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien is doing nationally by courting far right senators and Donald Trump? The Teamsters also have a vested interest in the criminal justice system across Illinois, which has been discredited for decades by revelations of racism, corruption, and false convictions. Instead of being on the side of justice, they find themselves on the side of defending it. Sweeping changes in the political direction of the Teamsters has to come from the bottom up.

JOE ALLEN is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.

Joe Sacco and Palestine

BY PAUL BUHLE - RAYMOND TYLER

 MARCH 18, 2024Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Sacco in Iraq in 2005 with the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marines inside the Haditha Dam – CC BY-SA 3.0

Comic artist Joe Sacco’s work has reached millions of readers for the past thirty years or so because his descriptions of wartime scenes, from Gaza and the West Bank to the Balkans, have so effectively captured the voices of those struggling to survive. Famously and notoriously, he has planted himself on the scenes, interviewing, observing and sketching. Comics scholar Hillary Chute, in her Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form, has placed him alongside Goya and Art Spiegelman, among others, in the depiction of civilian suffering amidst brutal warfare. Readers watch him in his books wondering to himself if the stories he is told and the view of things he takes in can really be trusted. He’s very much an oral historian as artist, quizzical and even self-doubting.

And now he is very much back in the news. Palestine, a volume created from his 1990s visual journalism and first reprinted in 2001 with a stunning introduction by Edward Said, has never stopped selling. And for good reason. There are so many stories in its 285 pages that the sheer detail is staggering. The stories are told straight-faced, despite Sacco’s occasional interjection of his own opinions. No one could say that he romanticizes Palestinians and their suffering. Indeed, again and again, the male ethos of male protagonists, young or old, comes out worst, an uncomfortable and sometimes murderous macho that results only in making the victims’ cause into something less supportable. Like Maus in this respect (but without Art Spiegelman turning the humans into animals of his own creation), Palestine is a comics document of stunning significance: it reveals what comics might do, rising a thousand miles above what most American adults, among others, have thought fo comic art, even the comic art that adults used to enjoy on the Funny pages.

From its publication, Palestine could be found in any comic bookstores in many parts of the world, with multiple translations. European shops, to take an example, for decades carried among its American artists only Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and old hippie favorite Gilbert Shelton… and Joe Sacco, the adopted American raised in Gibralter. These days, to no surprise, the US edition is flying off the shelves, as its publisher, Fantagraphics, recently announced with understandable fanfare. The horrors of Gaza today look like an intensified version of yesteryear, and his version drawing, decades ago) has stuck home to a new generation of comic readers. It also seems to have struck, with new force, those closer to scholars and readers of his own generation, now coming to terms with the artistic and even scholarly significance of his work. The strength of this remarkable appeal goes back to what the great cultural scholar Edward Said wrote, in his introduction to the 2001 edition published by Fantagraphics:

“Without losing the comics’ unique capacity for delivering a kind of surreal world as animated and in its own way as arrestingly violent as a poet’s vision of things, Joe Sacco can also unostentatiously transmit a great deal of information…Nowhere does Sacco come closer to the existential lived reality of the average Palestinian than in this depiction of life in Gaza…Joe the character is there sympathetically to understand and try to experience not only why Gaza is so representative a place in its hopelessly overcrowded and yet rootless spaces of Palestinian dispossession, but also to affirm that it is there, and must somehow be accounted for in human terms. “ (Iv-v).

About this sudden return to mega-popularity, something very rare in the nonfiction comic art world, Sacco has made a unique public statement.

Palestine, the comic, centers the artist narratively in its first pages as he—both narrator and comic character—expresses his anxieties about the trip. If the Israeli perspective is already well-established and prominently featured in Western media, he will offer first-hand versions of real people’s individual perceptions and add a credible commentary of his own making.

Knowing that he willl sell the drawings as journalism, Sacco asks himself the inevitable, existential question. “Why am I here? Why am I telling this story?” He even feels bad that in some ways he’s benefiting from the suffering of Palestinians by telling the stories. Notwithstanding anxieties, he handles his interactions and portrayals in the fashion of a serious, honest journalist. Listening carefully to the Palestinian perspective, giving the reader a recounting of the terrors they have gone through, he captures best, if not without humor, the asymmetrical power dynamics of the scene.

To take a single example, he titles a rightly famous section of Palestine “The Boys.” Here, Sacco accompanies two key characters and journalistic subjects, Mohammed and Hussein, as they traverse the perimeter of the Jabalia refugee camp, recounting the events of the 1987 Intifada. As they walk, Mohammed and Hussein vividly recall the circumstances leading up to the spontaneous uprising. They describe Israeli soldiers playing cards nonchalantly while protesters marched in the streets, the simmering anger, and the subsequent eruption of protests. They vividly remember the gunfire aimed at them and the resilience of the protesters in the face of adversity, refusing to retreat even when fellow demonstrators were injured or killed.

Words alone cannot express the artistic or political achievement in a single page like this. The reader “lives,” in a certain way, the experiences of the Palestinian people he meets and sees. He explores their personal history with the land, revealing how poorly all the talk of maps, UN agreements, and international relations match up against the human reality. Throughout Palestine, the overwhelming impression is of ordinary people at all ages trying pick up the pieces and live their lives, but failing at every turn. The subjugation they face is too much.

Hillary Chute insists that Sacco most uniquely (but among comic artists, along with Art Spiegelman) “often uses the verb ‘inhabit’ to describe his experience of drawing,” inhabiting in particular “how traumatized people in their acts of memory, inhabit their own past selves.” (249-50) Thus, he “visualizes on the page and processes and effects of history…bringing memory forcefully into public discourse…” (p.254).

What is the value of this artistic effort? The political importance today is overwhelming: crowds across the world are marching for lives to be saved from the approaching apoclypse or genocide. But this effort rests upon another.

Memory, public memory, has perhaps never been employed with as much force as the memory of the (Jewish) Holocaust for something like four generations.To have accomplished something akin to this effort but with a different ending, to have created it within comic art, to have created an art equal to the task, seems to have been Joe Sacco’s destiny.

Paul Buhle is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. Raymond Tyler is a radical comics writer; his newest book, “Black Coal and Red Bandanas: A Graphic History of the WV Mine Wars,” is forthcoming with PM Press.