Brooks Bitterman

SCARBROUGH – Brooks Bitterman died in Scarborough, Maine, on April 26, 2024 from malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor, a rare, aggressive and deadly sarcoma.

Brooks was born in 1960 in New York City and spent his life battling injustice and fighting for workers’ rights. Curious, determined, creative, generous and endlessly enthusiastic, he was a realist, atheist, feminist, anti-racist – a dogged researcher and fierce campaigner who believed deeply in the power of struggle and solidarity. He had a wonderful, expansive laugh and shared it often.

Brooks attended PS166 then the Collegiate School, where he enjoyed hiking trips, poetry, math, Latin and environmental science. Beyond school, he immersed himself in the punk and rock and roll scene in clubs all over the city. He worked at the Red Cross, where he drove an ambulance, handy for giving bands, like The Cramps, rides to gigs. Brooks was a devoted fan of so many bands, from the New York Dolls, Alex Chilton, Little Richard, the Velvets, Bo Diddley, Link Wray and the Ramones to the Fleshtones, Senders, 5,6,7,8’s, Tav Falco and the Panther Burns and Sheer Mag. He was a walking encyclopedia of punk, soul, rock and roll, Motown, R and B, rockabilly, girl groups and old school country music and built an extensive vinyl collection highlighting his favorites.

After Middlebury College and the University of Pennsylvania, Brooks returned to New York City as an Urban Fellow at the department of Housing, Preservation and Development, researching and co-publishing “Explaining the Paradox of Puerto Rican Segregation.” He earned a PhD in Geography from Clark University in 1996. His dissertation was “Geography and Workers Struggles: The Strategic Use of Place and Space by Labor and Capital.” At various times in the 80’s and 90’s, he taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Connecticut and Cornell Labor School.

Hired in 1992 as a researcher at the just trusteed Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), Brooks proved extremely skillful at designing campaigns to organize workers at corporate cafeterias like Citibank, Goldman Sachs and the Met Opera. He helped win card checks for thousands of food service workers at Sodexo, Aramark and Compass dining facilities around New York and then moved as a strategist to the international union which became UNITE/HERE. There he developed a niche specialty in helping to win NLRB elections on college campuses (10 in Boston, alone) and at airline catering campaigns all over the US and in Germany. He worked for the union 32 years, recruiting and training researchers, mentoring students, building international connections, structuring campaigns – always striving to obtain and ensure job stability, respect and agency for workers. Brooks loved the union and his colleagues, who became an extended family. He approached his work with an infectious smile and, as one colleague noted, “unrelenting enthusiasm.”

Brook’s job often involved political work. He knocked on doors, talked with religious leaders, trained members on best practices for safe house visits during the 2020 election as the pandemic raged. On 9/11, he was leafleting early morning for a primary election and was able to walk home once the planes hit. It was his son’s first week of kindergarten and he and his family walked down to the new 70th Street pier and watched the smoke rising down the river. Brooks knew some of the workers at Windows on the World restaurant who died that day and worked tirelessly to get compensation for their families and to place those who survived in new jobs.

Brooks was the best kind of New Yorker, passionate about the things and people he cared about. His dedicated commitment to music and labor still left room for biking, hiking, art, trains, cities, travel, bars, nature, colleagues, friends and family. Friendly but not intrusively chatty, Brooks could tell you where to get a good slice, hear a great band and find a decent dive bar with a rocking jukebox anywhere in the city. And if he didn’t know something, he would figure out a way to find it out. Brooks was a devoted and loving father, husband and uncle, and was beloved by his wife and son, as well as many close relatives, friends and coworkers.

During the pandemic, he and his wife moved 11 times, living in upstate New York, southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Portland, Maine and finally at Prouts Neck in Scarborough, where he died nine months after his sarcoma diagnosis. In spite of two devastating rounds of chemotherapy, a drug trial in Boston, immunotherapy, radiation and targeted therapy, ultimately he had to turn to hospice as nothing stopped the spread of bone breaking tumors. He had to accept his premature death feeling he had been very very lucky until he was really really unlucky.

Brooks had always planned to be an organ donor but, since he no longer could, he donated his body to the University of New England, where it is being used for research and teaching.

He is survived by his wife, Wendy Dubin; his son Alex Bitterman; and his mother, Salli Bitterman.

Donate in his honor

and memory to:

the Brooks Bitterman

Corporate Research Scholarship Fund

(to support training researchers to do the type of work Brooks did) at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies Foundation

Donate at:

https://www.givegab.com/campaigns/the-brooks-bitterman-scholarship.com