Goliath At Sunset
The 1970s were a turbulent time in U.S. history. The Vietnam War was winding down while inflation was nibbling away at workers’ paychecks. The enforcement of federal civil rights laws helped to break down workplace segregation, giving African Americans, Latinos, and women their first bite at decent, union jobs. The 1950s triumvirate – big business, big government, and big labor – would soon be shaken as anti-union campaigns and trade wars weakened labor’s power and wreaked havoc on U.S. jobs. Boston – the birthplace of the American Revolution – was no exception. In the 1970s, the city was roiled with racial tension, as mandatory school busing divided the community into warring factions.
Jonathan Brandow’s first novel, Goliath at Sunset, follows a returning Vietnam War vet, Mike Shea, as he finds work as a welder in a Boston shipyard. The book explores the fraught mix of shop-floor conflict, racial tension, and union politics that defined the era, as Shea navigates a workplace where safety lapses, management pressure, and internal union divisions collide.
A child of the projects, Shea’s mother died from a police beating while trying to win a new union contract along with her Dominican electronics factory co-workers. From his mother’s experience and his own wartime service, Shea learned that racism was a false proposition. His shipyard apprenticeship classes featured diversity, and he was soon riding the bus with African American workers for their late shift clock-in.
Safety issues, race, and gender divisions soon got under his skin. Where was the union amid all of this? The union steward seemed ineffectual, and the union leaders, driven about in black Cadillacs, seemed oblivious to second shift complaints.
Shea soon wins a rebel’s reputation. He dates an African American fellow worker and crosses a racial boundary that raises eyebrows. The older, World War II-era workers seem oblivious to the younger workers’ complaints. They are content to keep their heads down, grumble, and wait for their pensions and the fabled two-week vacation.
Jonathan Brandow, by Camera Box
Shea builds a coalition and soon is elected a union steward. In this role, he roams the workplace, fights for safety enforcement, stands up for the diverse workforce, and demands that ugly racist graffiti be scrubbed from restroom walls.
For all his militance, there’s always a hard lesson awaiting. Building trust is fraught with traps and lingering resentments. Both management and union leadership are always one step ahead. There is an inevitable conflict with the rank-and-file.
The Iranian hostage crisis intervenes to change the workplace and job opportunities in a way that might be new for younger readers removed from that epic moment in American history.
Brandow captures the 1970s tension and its possibilities well. Can this young, diverse workforce, fresh off the conflicts in and over Vietnam, gain decent jobs and create a more responsive, worker-centered union?
While Shea and his cohort challenge both entrenched union leadership and the company, global capitalism has a different plan. Shea aptly captures the beginning of an era in the 1970s in which cost-cutting, offshoring, lawbreaking, safety shortcuts, and mass layoffs became a core part of American capitalism and ushered in an era of failing union power, middle-class collapse, and international corporate dominance.
Brandow weaves a telling text, capturing diverse voices, youthful energy, and a shipyard’s vocabulary and slang. The author spent nine years in a shipyard and also as a union officer. Even if the reader is not a welder, the workplace’s cadence and challenges, along with the pride in craft, shines through. The reader feels Shea’s impatience for change and his frustrations with a world that seems to be one step ahead of him. “Goliath” is the giant crane that looms over the shipyard, reflecting both the opportunities and the casualties ahead. For an authentic working-class novel, one can’t go wrong with Goliath at Sunset.
Goliath at Sunset by Jonathan Brandow is available through Hard Ball Press.
