Tim Costello, Truck Driver, Labor Activist, Intellectual

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Tim Costello, a truck driver who became a labor advocate and theorist, the co-author of four books and the founder of an organization that fought globalization, died Dec. 4 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 64.

Mr. Costello was hailed by many academics and labor advocates as a bona fide worker-intellectual. A genial, mustached native of Boston, he drove fuel-delivery trucks, worked as a lobsterman, founded a group that battled against the fast-growing use of temporary workers and developed close links with labor advocates in China, Italy and Mexico.

His most notable book was “Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity” (2000), written with Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, which became a primer for labor advocates who argued that globalization was destroying jobs and reducing wages in the United States while exploiting workers in Asia.

During his two decades driving trucks — he was also a long-haul driver — Mr. Costello often used the back of his truck as a private study to read and write.

Mr. Costello was often several steps ahead of the rest of the labor movement. In 2005, he helped found Global Labor Strategies, which fostered cross-border alliances to fight to improve wages and working conditions in the face of downward pressures from companies moving jobs overseas. In 2007, when American and European business groups were battling China’s plans to adopt a law strengthening workers’ rights, Mr. Costello was a leading voice in countering corporate efforts to block the law.

“We called him Cosmic Tim because he seemed to be everywhere in the universe,” said James Green, a labor historian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who was a friend and professor of Mr. Costello. “He seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/us/26costello.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=tim%20costello&st=cse