Early Life and Career
Born in San Francisco, California in 1952, Hawkins became politically active as a teenager, protesting against the Vietnam War, the military draft, and racial discrimination. After graduating from Burlingame High School, he attended Dartmouth College. Hawkins worked as a carpenter, logger, and cooperative business developer. He was a co-developer and co-owner of a construction workers cooperative that specialized in solar and wind energy systems.
Hawkins came to Syracuse in 1991 to be Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for a cooperatively owned and ecologically sustainable economy. For the last decade, Hawkins has worked as a truck unloader at UPS, where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, as well as US Labor Against the War and the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.
Read more about this topic: Howie Hawkins
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