Remembering Tim Costello
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.
I first met Tim in 1996 when he was invited to speak at an early meeting of the Organizing Committee for a Massachusetts Employees Association at the Swedenborg Chapel near Harvard Square called by organizers from Citizens for Participation in Political Action, a Massachusetts-based group with roots in the social democratic wing of the state Democratic Party and in the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1960s. I was participating in OCMEA organizing meetings because my small national magazine, As We Are ("the magazine for working young people"), had just gone under for lack of funds. The OCMEA folks had noticed some writing I've done on the subject of temp jobs (and their effect on my then-young generation) and invited me to participate. But, despite busying myself with OCMEA and a couple of other activist side projects, I was in a fairly bad mood about the collapse of my magazine and the weak state of the progressive movements we had existed to serve.
After hearing Tim talk about the structural problems behind the global rise of contingent work, I felt he had something going on that more traditional labor movement people did not - which cheered me in a "funny kind of way" (as Tim would say). So, I decided to talk to him some more. We met for coffee at 1369 Coffee House in Inman Square a few days later, hit it off pretty well and decided to do some work together. He got me a part-time job helping him out with his project on contingent work at Northeast Action, all while I continued working the other temp and part-time jobs I had worked since I was 16 years old. A year and a half later, in January 1999, we officially launched the Campaign on Contingent Work - an organization meant to spearhead a landmark labor and community coalition that would fight statewide to challenge employers' ability to increase profits by saving money on labor costs. Which they did by destroying good stable jobs with decent pay and benefits and replacing them with bad unstable contingent jobs with bad pay and no benefits.
At the same time, since 1997 we had been holding meetings with organizations around the US and Canada to form a continental version of CCW called the North American Alliance for Fair Employment. Tim and I worked together day-to-day until NAFFE became a fully staffed independent organization with Tim at the helm in 2001. Both organizations were headquartered in the same union building in Boston's Chinatown. We continued to work in parallel until 2004 at which time the CCW board made me director (although I'd already been in functional control of the organization for a couple of years by that point). Shortly afterward, my friends and I held the Boston Social Forum, and repurposed CCW as a broader progressive organization - Massachusetts Global Action - which continues to this day.
That is a very rough sketch of 8 years that Tim and I had a mentor/student relationship before our work lives drifted apart - as I think is inevitable in such situations. We did all kinds of cool experimental organizing work in that time - running, as we did, what we considered to be the sort of strategic "SWAT team" for the local labor, immigrant and anti-poverty movements. And I think our record demonstrates that we had some positive effect on the lives of thousands of working people in Massachusetts and beyond over those years - although definitely not as much effect as we would've liked.
Perhaps I'll write more about CCW and NAFFE some day, but in this editorial I just want to focus on what I learned from Tim over the time I worked with him. It was more of a Zen thing than anything else. A way of being, if you will.
One thing I can say for sure, though. Tim taught me how to be a working-class intellectual (although I should mention that we never quite agreed on class issues). He helped train me to be capable of tangling intellectually with highly educated leaders in business, academia and government without losing touch with my own roots. Without ceasing to be, as Tim would say, a "normal person."
He also taught me how to "focus like a laser" (another Timism) on what is important in any debate and not to get caught up in the details when trying to take effective action. Not to lose sight of the forest in any group of trees, so to speak. He pointed the way towards a more natural, less forced, and less reactive way of building popular movements for social justice. And he showed me the importance of ruthlessly analyzing the activities and platforms of all such popular movements, the better to expose potentially destructive flaws, while at the same time trying to always be polite to all parties in any situation. Tim saw no need in pointless conflict. Although, when conflict was called for - usually at the street level with some mean-spirited boss - Tim had no trouble with getting right in the faces of people who richly deserved it.
Most importantly of all, Tim taught me his abiding trust in the wisdom of regular working people to do the right thing in most situations. A lifelong anti-authoritarian, he did not trust "leaders" - either self-appointed or elected - and thought that movements for social justice would only succeed if they were very democratic.
Beyond all the political activism and philosophy, Tim was just a fun guy in general. He liked to travel when he could. He was an avid (and rather accident-prone) cyclist. And he was quite the gourmand. We often talked about food and cooking. Which was another interest we had in common. He was also a family guy - frequently visiting his oldest daughter from his first marriage down in New York City whenever he could - and doting over his youngest daughter from his second marriage after her birth 9 years ago. He was very close to his second wife. He had a generally positive attitude towards life - and I think it's fair to say that he lived life to the fullest.
He wasn't a religious person as far as I'm aware, and I'm not either; so I can only hope that he was happy with what he accomplished in his lifetime, and that he shuffled off this mortal coil with some sense of contentment. Assuming that was the case, I hope his loved ones find comfort in the knowledge that he was a good person and that tales of his good deeds will live on to inspire future generations.
There's much more I could say, but I'll leave it at that for now. By way of closing, I just want to send my best wishes to his family, dedicate this week's edition of Open Media Boston to his memory ... and quote an appropriate snippet of an old Christian benediction in a way an existentialist like Tim would appreciate: "In terra, pax hominibus bonae voluntatis."
Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston
