Review of Backroom Bargaining: Racketeering and Rebellion in New York City’s Labor Unions by Jane LaTour (University of Illinois Press, 2026)
My first contact with labor reformers in New York City was nearly fifty years ago. Like many rank-and-file dissidents before and since, these critics of union corruption were prophets without honor in their own union local.
Teamsters Local 282 was at the time one of the most mobbed-up affiliates of a national union, then rightly notorious for its organized crime ties. Its members drove trucks full of cement or other building materials to local construction sites, while Local 282 leaders like Bobby Sasso extorted bribes to insure labor peace or allow nonunion operations.
Sasso held various union jobs for twenty-five years, but his real boss was not the drivers, whose dues paid his salary. It was a wise guy from Howard Beach in Queens named John Gotti. As head the Gambino family, Gotti siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the local, until a hit man responsible for nineteen murders — Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano — became an FBI informant and helped put the “Teflon Don” behind bars for the rest of his life.
Rank-and-filers critical of employer shakedowns, no-show jobs for mob associates, and other crooked schemes in Local 282 exhibited enormous courage in the 1970s and ’80s. They called their dissident caucus “Fear of Reprisal Ends” (FORE) — and suffered retaliation in multiple forms for organizing it. FORE was affiliated with the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), a Ralph Nader–inspired advocacy group that I worked for at the time and helped merge with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in 1979.
Most of the five thousand “ready-mix” drivers in 282 steered clear of FORE, because its key activists were so regularly threatened, harassed, or blacklisted. Nevertheless, a FORE candidate who ran for local union president in 1978 got 42 percent of the vote in a low-turnout election…
Auteur: Steve Early
