R.I. labor guru George Nee cut his teeth on grape boycott and caught the union bug

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.projo.com/news/content/GEORGE_NEE_PROFILE_06-08-08_A6AE4T6_v16.33c0b92.html

01:37 PM EDT on Monday, June 9, 2008

By STEVE PEOPLES
Journal State House Bureau

He is a onetime college dropout, a former bodyguard, a shrewd political strategist and the face of Rhode Island’s labor movement.

George Nee, the AFL-CIO of Rhode Island’s secretary-treasurer, may be known these days as the silver-haired, back-slapping lobbyist who spends most afternoons patrolling State House hallways. But this union leader has four decades of experience marching and campaigning and sleeping on floors to expand labor’s influence.

He has been versed in the teachings of Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers of America. He has faced shotguns. And he has devoted his life to work, even as many people his age were reveling in the carefree lifestyles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“The hippies never had the work ethic. You didn’t work for the farm workers if you were a hippie.We were very, very disciplined,” says Nee, a Boston native, reflecting on his early days in the labor movement.

Nee, 58, can’t put his finger on what drew him to the labor unions. His father worked in insurance. His mother was a homemaker.

He met a few farm workers from California at an event at Boston College, where he was a student. And before he knew it, a 21-year-old Nee was moving out of the dorm and into St. Leo’s parish in Dorchester, Mass., where a handful of uneducated farm workers who spoke little English helped coordinate Boston’s grape boycott of the late 1960s. He left college behind.

FULL story at link.