December 11, 2009
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