The Side of the Angels by Christina Bartolomeo, Kyoko Watanabe Page B

to shout into his speakerphone while scrolling down the ninety-two e-mails he got every hour, ripping open overnight-mail packages, and dictating memos to one of the three secretaries who indulged him and ran his life. Rumor had it that Wein-gould had remained on the telephone throughout his brief honeymoon, consummating his marriage only with the help of one of those headband receivers long-distance operators wear.
    Weingould was heavily built but not overweight like so many of his cohorts—the reason being that he could not eat and talk at the same time. His ties were always crooked and his shirttail was always out, but his clothes were beautiful, tailored to a perfection Ron only aspired to. His wife picked them out, for Weingould never left the office until after all the stores closed.
    Alan Weingould had grown up in the labor movement. His father, Jacob, had been an early leader of the garment workers, a man remembered both for his courage in facing down the sweatshop bosses and his early and generous assistance to Jews fleeing Hitler. Jacob Weingould had the heart of a lion. His son had the heart of a St. Bernard on acid, always bounding forward into snowdrifts too high for him. Thanks to his chaotic and devoted efforts, the Toilers had become one of the fastest-growing unions in the AFL-CIO. Driven and demanding he certainly could be, but in a town full of shills and operators, he was a refreshingly true believer.
    â€œNow, what are you here for?” he asked Ron, shifting some of the piles on his desk and putting on his reading glasses.
    â€œThe St. Francis strike,” Ron said.
    â€œSt. Francis,” said Weingould blankly, as if conjuring up visions of Assisi’s lover of wolves and sparrows and wondering what it had to do with us.
    â€œIn Winsack,” Ron said. He was accustomed to these preliminaries. “Rhode Island.”
    â€œYeah. Yeah. That’s right. The nurses.”
    The Toilers had only recently started organizing nurses in a big way. Most of their members worked in some form of civil or public service, from garbage collectors in Trenton to professors at city colleges in Philly and Queens. Jerry Goreman, the bureaucratic little man who’d succeeded the legendary Frank De Rosa as the Toilers’ president, had no fire in his belly for winning new members. Goreman’s goals were simple: he wanted to spend his years as president watching the current membership dues pile up in the Toilers’ treasury, thus funding his junkets to international labor conferences in Madrid and Tokyo.
    But Goreman had made a lot of enemies during the three years he’d played a watchful Stalin to De Rosa’s Lenin, and his political base was far from strong. Weingould wrested money from the union’s executive board by assuring them that health care was the new gold rush territory. Under the HMOs, even the American Medical Association was talking about getting doctors organized. If M.D.s were that desperate, Weingould reasoned, the time was ripe to prospect for nurses.
    And he was right. The Toilers’ nurse membership, which had once consisted of a few straggling locals in state mental hospitals, had grown to twenty thousand in the last three years. Nowhere near the size of the heavyweights, but still very respectable. Weingould had been vindicated, but he was unprepared for how tough these organizing drives were. In the public sector, workers’ rights were protected by better laws and long precedent. But in the largely unpoliced Wild West of the private sector, the hospitals had proven themselves nasty adversaries—dragging out contract negotiations for years, hiring union-busting lawyers to come up with perfectly legal schemes for intimidating employees, and delaying elections until ordered to hold them by the courts, by which time all the union’s original supporters had been fired or pressured out of their jobs.
    What Weingould really needed were seasoned