JACKKNIFED ...the collapse of the Teamsters in the freight industry

[GREGORYABUTLER]

JACKKNIFED

…the collapse of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the freight industry

On Tuesday, February 24, James P. “Junior” Hoffa, the General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Change To Win (CTW)/Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), hailed Section 136 of the Omnibus Spending Bill, an amendment that would order the defunding of a small scale program that lets a few handpicked Mexican freight lines haul freight into the United States.

The program, which allows 500 carefully inspected, fully insured trucks, driven by union truckers who are paid American-level per diems in addition to their Mexican hourly wages and mileage rate pay, to cross into the US.

Most of the cargo is agricultural products - mostly fruit baskets hauled from Baja California Norte state in Mexico to rural California’s Imperial Valley area.

And, international law-wise, the program barely complies with the North American Free Trade Agreement that President Bill Clinton signed with the Commonwealth of Canada and the United States of Mexico back in 1994.

Canadian carriers have been hauling into 49 of America’s 50 states (every state save Hawaii – for obvious geographic reasons) and the District of Columbia since 1992, 2 years before NAFTA was signed – and American carriers can transport freight into all 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada.

American carriers can freely haul into all 31 Mexican states and the Distrito Federal de Mexico too – all the way from the Rio Grande to the Guatemalan border.

But Mexican trucking lines can only haul into a 20 mile strip of California, New Mexico and Texas and a 75 mile strip of Arizona - both immediately adjacent to the Mexican border - and that’s it, they are barred entirely from the roads of the other 46 states.

Needless to say, Section 136 is in blatant violation of the NAFTA treaty.

Now I’m sure that Junior Hoffa would object here, and quite correctly, that labor rights are far more important than a treaty between governments.

And he has a point.

Indeed, Mexico has the lowest wage scale in the NAFTA Zone – specifically in the case of freight workers, the highest paid unionized Mexican truckers are paid about half what the average American teamster freight hauler is paid (the equivalent of $ 19,000 a year for the Mexican drivers to the American teamster’s $ 47,000 a year)

And those are the best paid union drivers in Northern Mexico – truck drivers in the Distrito Federal/Central Mexico area get paid less, and drivers in Southern Mexico are paid the least.

That follows a general pattern of almost all Mexican wages, including the minimum wage – Northern is highest, D.F./Central is lower, and Southern is the lowest.

Considering how much Mexican road freight is destined for the American market (the freight corridor running from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico to Chicago is the busiest road freight route on the planet) that would be a good argument for demanding that Mexican freight drivers (Northern, Distrito Federal/Central and Southern alike) all get that same 56 cents per mile and $ 22.65/hr for non driving work their unionized American brothers and sisters are paid.

An argument that Junior Hoffa should definitely bring up the next time he meets with the leaders of Mexico’s trucking industry unions.

Then again, Junior might have to do more listening than talking.

Mexico’s transportation unions have 27% of the country’s trucking industry unionized.

By contrast, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters only represents 4% of this country’s over the road truck drivers – only 88,000 out of 2 million workers!

Back in 1966, he last full year that Junior’s dad, James R. “Jimmy” Hoffa, ran the union, the Teamsters represented 400,000 of this country’s half million road freight workers.

But then Hoffa Senior went to prison – and Jimmy’s hand picked successor, Frank “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, signed an agreement letting unionized trucking companies hire an unlimited number of non union drivers back in 1973.

That so called ‘Special Commodities Rider’ was intended to break the militancy of American truckers, who had carried out the largest wildcat strike in American history in 1970 – 200,000 of them walked off the job because they didn’t like the contract Fitz had negotiated for them.

The trucking companies represented by the Motor Freight Carriers Association had gotten a solemn promise from Hoffa Senior back in 1964 that the IBT leadership of would never ever allow truck drivers to call a national freight strike.

That promise to the bosses was why the MFCA even agreed to one national union agreement in the first place.

Fitzsimmons broke that promise when he didn’t crush the wildcat strike – so the carriers demanded – and got - the right to hire an unlimited number of non union workers and to deunionize as many of their freight runs as they wished, to calm trucker labor militancy with the threat of permanent layoffs and deunionization.

And the Special Commodities Rider and the resultant union trucker job loss did indeed help to crush the militancy of American truckers.

It also broke the Teamsters as a freight union – within a decade, the majority of the industry was non union, as it remains to this day.

It also transformed over the road trucking from being a very well paid job with one of the best union contracts in the nation into a low paying non union job with wages that, on an hourly wage basis, are only slightly higher than McDonalds.

The big “DRIVERS WANTED” signs permanently painted on the backs of many non union trucking companies rigs are mute testimony to the low pay and miserable working conditions of the post 1973 trucking industry.

The job – once a career occupation that people got into right out of high school and stayed with until retirement – now has a very high employee turnover rate and a revolving door of drivers who get hired, and then quit or get fired, and replaced by other drivers, who quit or get fired ect ect ect.

Some drivers get so disgusted that they literally abandon their rigs by the roadside and the big non union carriers have to keep drivers on standby to pick up the trucks and finish their routes.

In light of that history, perhaps Junior should spent a little less time worrying about 500 unionized truckers from Mexico hauling across the border, and start seriously trying to organize 1.9 million non union American truckers (many of whom, like the Mexican drivers, have to get by on $ 19,000 a year….or less).

Not to mention all those low paid Canadian drivers who carry freight all over this country as well – for similarly minimal wages.

As for the Mexicans – perhaps they can handle their labor struggles on their own quite nicely without Brother Hoffa’s assistance.

After all, the truck and bus drivers unions affiliated to the CTM [Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico “Confederation of Mexican Workers”] did manage to call a one day national truck and bus drivers strike back in February 2008, in protest of skyrocketing diesel fuel prices – with over 500,000 truckers and bus drivers parking their rigs for the day.

The only truckers strikes against the fuel price increases on this side of the border were wildcat strikes by drivers in Virginia, Washington State and California – and none of those strikes were official International Brotherhood of Teamsters walkouts, they were independent strikes by non IBT-affiliated truckers organizations.

The Teamsters didn’t do anything to protest against fuel price increases – even though that’s a bread and butter issue for owner operator drivers (workers who own their own trucks and trailers and haul freight for carriers on a fee per trip basis) – and even the employee drivers’ incomes are threatened by fuel price increases.

And, in terms of strikes in general, the Teamsters has never been able to lead a half million worker walkout in it’s 106 year history.

The biggest officially sanctioned IBT strike ever was the 185,000 UPS worker strike back in 1997.

The biggest Teamster strike period was the 200,000 worker freight wildcat strike of 1970 (a walkout that the Teamsters union leaders of the day were very aggressively and quite violently OPPOSED TO!).

Before that, the only really big teamster strikes were the big freight driver strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Omaha in the 1930’s that unionized road freight in the first place.

In terms of freight worker organizing, the IBT has done a poor job.

Other than the campaign to unionize UPS’s non union freight subsidiary, UPS Freight, and the organizing drive at Airborne Express/DHL Express’ non union delivery subcontractors, and the very much partial success of the USF Reddaway organizing campaign, every other Teamsters Union trucker organizing drive in the US and Canada for the last 20 years has been a failure; the port trucker organizing campaign, Pony Express, Central Freight, USF Red Star, Overnite Transportation [until it was purchased by UPS and became UPS Freight].

The tiny Industrial Workers of the World has actually done a better job of truck driver organizing than the IBT!

Almost all Teamster membership increases over the past two decades have come from the IBT taking over smaller unions – only one of which, the 1,500 member New York City Newspaper Drivers and Mail Deliverers Union, was an actual truck driver union (the rest were various collapsing railroad worker or printers unions who joined the Teamsters to keep from disbanding entirely).

Of course, the Teamsters leadership might be a little too busy to ask the Mexican freight union leaders for labor struggle advice (no matter how badly they might actually need to!)

The IBT has been extremely occupied with negotiating pay cuts for the handful of freight drivers who are still union represented in this country – Yellow Roadway, which employs 40,000 of the 88,000 road freight drivers left in the Teamsters, got a 10% pay cut and a 4 year pay freeze from Hoffa just last month.

Double breasted carrier and Yellow Roadway subsidiary USF Reddaway is asking for the same pay cuts for the half of it’s workers who are Teamsters (with no wage cuts for the non union half of their freight workforce).

Perhaps all of the Teamsters Union’s Lou Dobbsean ranting and raving about “the Mexicans” and their “Dangerous Trucks” is intended as a distraction?

Maybe, the intent is to make American freight drivers and dockworkers forget the fact that it is the Teamsters and the American freight industry who have butchered their standard of living, not their brothers and sisters behind the wheel south of the border?

In any case, not only is the Teamsters Union all but irrelevant in the freight industry today, but the union has also been under the yoke of a federal court monitorship for the last 21 years.

And that two decades of massive federal meddling in Teamsters Union internal affairs would never have happened but for 85 years of collaboration between local, regional and national IBT officers and various and sundry organized crime groups.

In any case, the anti racketeering monitorship – and all the day to day Department of Justice and FBI interference in Teamsters Union business certainly puts a crimp in the IBT’s independent activities as a labor union.

The question is, how did a union that was once so strong and powerful get into it’s present state of decay?

And what does it mean for the rest of the working class – in particular blue collar workers, who’s wages are directly or indirectly pegged to Teamster pay and benefits – that such a decisive union get into it’s present state of collapse?

And what can be done to rebuild unionism in the road freight industry?

To understand the crisis in the Teamsters, we need to start at the beginning.

Back in 1903, delegates from several “team drivers” unions (motor trucks were an expensive novelty back then – local freight was still delivered in wagons drawn by teams of horses…which were driven by “teamsters” – the occupational name stuck even after they switched from horses to diesel engine-powered motor trucks in the 1920’s) met in Niagara Falls, NY, with the intent of founding one unified national labor organization.

They organized the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, which immediately affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and the Trades & Labour Congress of Canada.

The Teamsters was one of the last major national craft unions to be founded – their skilled trades counterparts in construction and the metal trades had built national unions two or three decades earlier. On the other side of the working class, unskilled blue collar workers were still a generation away from founding their unions.

Unlike earlier unions, which, at first, were more or less socialist oriented, the IBT was founded in a time when the right wing of the labor movement was dominant.

The socialists, communists and anarchists who’d given birth to the early unions, and who saw labor organizing as the first step towards what they called a “Cooperative Commonwealth” [that is, a vision of a nation and a world ruled by workers, not by capitalists and financiers] were pushed aside by conservative pro-employer oriented business unionists, labor racketeers and racists.

The “labor statesmen”, gangster unionists and bigots reoriented American labor away from class struggle and a vision of an equal society to a view of labor as the representative of a narrow, privileged layer of relatively well paid American-born White workers, who saw themselves as junior partners to the capitalist system.

The Teamsters union was born after this decisive turning point had been reached – and that reflected itself in many ways.

Initially, the Teamsters included the owners of small trucking companies and self employed drivers side by side with employee drivers – a very controversial matter that caused much internal conflict in the early IBT.

There was also the matter of warehouse and truck terminal workers.

Many of the better off team drivers (ESPECIALLY the owner operators and small fleet owners) looked down on the loading dock workers, and wanted to keep them out of the union entirely.

Some of more far sighted Teamsters Union leaders saw that this was a really dumb idea – since the union would be far more secure if it included all workers in the local drayage [freight delivery] industry, not just the guys who drove the horses and their helpers.

There was also the matter of racketeering.

The strongest local Teamsters Unions were in Boston, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Chicago – all areas with a heavy organized crime presence.

Particularly in Chicago, the birth of the Teamsters was intimately tied with the rise of organized crime, and it’s transition away from petty street gang activity into what would come to be called “racketeering” (gangsters helping legitimate businesses do illegal things for commercial gain, in return for bribes and/or tribute).

At least one Chicago Teamsters local, the meat wagon drivers union, was created explicitly as part of a conspiracy by a Chicago gangster to help protect major meat dealers in the Chicago Stockyards from competition from smaller dealers

The Teamsters Union was a junior partner in this – it’s role was to enforce union rules on weaker companies, but not on the dominant firms, so as to prevent those little companies from breaking into the meat wholesaling market.

That particular scam would become the template for labor racketeering for the next 100 years – it was probably the first such racket, unfortunately it was not the last.

The first major strike by the IBT had similar underworld origins.

In 1905, just 2 years after the IBT’s founding, Teamsters General President Cornelius “Con” Shea, called a strike against the Montgomery Ward Co.

Montgomery Ward was a mail order house – a company that sold various types of consumer goods via catalogues sent to customers all over the country, who mailed in their orders and had the goods shipped to them by parcel post.

Like most mail order houses of the day, they were headquartered in Chicago, then as now the main hub of land freight transportation in the United States.

In 1904, the workers in Montgomery Ward’s in house garment factory had gone on strike and their union, the United Garment Workers of America, asked the IBT and the other unions at the company to carry out a sympathy strike – a call that fell on deaf ears.

Six months later, the UGWA was still, officially, on strike – and then, at that point, the Teamsters decided to call a sympathy strike (after the striking seamstresses and garment cutters had long since been fired and replaced by scabs).

It would later come out that Montgomery Ward’s commercial rivals in the mail order business had bribed Teamsters General President Con Shea to call the strike, so they could take market share away from the strike idled company.

As if that wasn’t ugly enough, the strike soon took a vicious racial turn.

Montgomery Ward had maintained a jim crow hiring policy at it’s Chicago mail order house, so the teamster workforce there were all White.

Once the strike began, the company went out and hired several hundred African American scabs from the South, and brought them in to do the work of the strikers.

The Teamsters Union took the racial bait – and upped the ante, by hiring White street gang members to attack Black scabs.

The gangbangers took the Teamsters Union’s money, but they weren’t at all particular about which African Americans they attacked – they launched a generalized race war against Chicago’s entire African American community.

20 African Americans (none of whom were scabs at Montgomery Ward) were murdered and over 450 were injured.

Some were victims of the White gangbangers, others were attacked by the Chicago Police, who intervened on the gang member’s side when Black Chicagoans tried to defend themselves against their terrorist attackers.

And every Black Chicagoan learned to hate AFofL unions in general and the Teamsters Union in particular– a sentiment that would last for many years.

In the end, the Teamsters were defeated – and the Black scabs were fired and replaced by the White strikers, who had to quit the union to get their jobs back.

And Con Shea was indicted for crimes that would now be called labor racketeering – but, racketeering as such wasn’t illegal at that time (the first state racketeering law wouldn’t be passed until 1930 – and that was a New York State law, not valid in Illinois - and the federal anti racketeering law wouldn’t be passed until 1971) so Con’s lawyers were able to beat the case – but he did lose his job as head of the IBT.

The Teamsters Union underwent a split as a result of the Montgomery Ward disaster – it would take a decade to reunite most of the locals, but one Chicago Teamsters union, the Chicago Truck Drivers Union, stayed outside of the IBT’s ranks for the next 95 years, not coming back to the Teamsters until 2000.

And the IBT got a new general president, one Daniel J. Tobin, who would run the union for the next 48 years.

Tobin backed out of local governance – he let the locals and “joint councils” (bodies that represented all of the Teamsters Union locals in a state or region) do whatever they wanted, as long as they paid their per capita taxes to the IBT general office in Indianapolis on a timely fashion and didn’t tread on the toes of other IBT locals.

This basically let the gangsters in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown do whatever they wanted in the Teamsters locals they ran, as long as they didn’t interfere with other gangster run unions, or with the non mobbed up IBT locals in other areas.

Tobin also made it very difficult for Teamsters locals to go on sanctioned strikes. He required that IBT locals get 2/3rds majority votes to even call a strike and even then they had to get his official permission or they wouldn’t get a penny from the general office of the IBT – nor would they be allowed to ask other locals or joint councils for strike assistance.

Tobin, a former butter and egg wagon team driver from Boston, also abandoned warehouse worker and loading dockworker organizing. He regarded those unskilled workers as “trash” (yes, he actually called them that…in print…in the pages of the International Teamster, the union’s official magazine!) who didn’t deserve to be in a skilled horse drawn wagon drivers union like the Teamsters.

Dan Tobin’s horse and buggy unionism was soon in for a big challenge – something called Prohibition.

A motley coalition of conservative Republicans, racist Southern Democrats, anti alcoholism campaigners, fundamentalist Christians, anti immigrant bigots and the Ku Klux Klan had gotten the US Constitution amended in 1918 to prohibit the sale and transportation of alcohol across state lines.

This immediately made 6 major American industries (brewing, distilling, beer wholesaling, liquor distributing, liquor stores and bars) into criminal enterprises.

Those industries all happened to be heavily unionized – which made Prohibition a disaster for the American Federation of Labor in general, and specifically for the United Brewery Workers Union, Distillery Workers International Union, Hotel and Restaurant Employees & Bartenders Union…and for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who’s members delivered wine, liquor and beer to bars, restaurants and liquor stores.

It was great for organized crime – legitimate business owners who wanted to stay in these now illegal industries needed protection from law enforcement (and from the criminal underworld, who now had free reign to victimize these newly criminalized business owners, who were no longer able to call the cops).

Some alcohol industry related business owners sold their businesses outright to the mobsters – some were willing to be brought out of their now illegal businesses, while others were forced out of their companies at gunpoint.

It’s safe to say that Prohibition gave birth to modern American organized crime.

Gangsters had been transitioning from street crime to racketeering for a number of years – particularly in the construction, sea freight, wholesaling and local drayage industries – but Prohibition took things to a whole other level.

Prohibition also gave birth to a whole new industry – over the road motor freight hauling.

Railroads had dominated intercity shipping for most of the previous 80 years – but they were useless to “bootleggers” (gangsters who smuggled illegal booze) because railroads had been endowed with police powers by 19th century state legislators.

Almost all railroads had their own in-house police departments, and therefore they would not transport illegal cargo (and were likely to arrest anybody who tried to get them to do so).

However, bootleggers could hire a trucking company, or an independent driver with their own truck, or buy or rent their own truck, and haul their illegal liquor at will.

Trucks had been around since the 1890’s, but, thanks to War Department inspired technological innovations (windshields, enclosed driver cabins, pneumatic tires, the shock absorber, the key controlled ignition ect) designed during World War I, they had finally become competitive with the horse drawn wagon.

Also, while it took tens of millions of dollars to start up a railroad (which closed that industry to all but the wealthiest Wall Street billionaires) just about anybody with a few thousand dollars could buy a truck on credit from Ford, Mack, Diamond Reo, White Motors, GMC or Freightliner and set up a trucking company.

Trucks also required a hell of a lot less care than horses – even the poorly built motor trucks of the day really didn’t need that much maintenance work done, and unlike horses they didn’t require daily exercise, monthly horseshoe repair work or periodic visits to the veterinarian!

The cost savings from abandoning horse power for diesel power greatly lowered the barriers to entry to the road freight industry.

Lots of drayage firms – and individual teamsters with an entrepreneurial streak – tried their hands at motor freight…as did some of the bootleggers.

In that era of a lightly patrolled Canadian border (booze was still perfectly legal up there) and small, weak and underfunded state police departments, liquor smuggling was easy.

The only hard part was the occasional hijacking attempt by rival gangsters, and a Colt .45 tucked in the driver’s waistband and/or a sawed off 12 gauge under the driver’s seat and/or a gangster in the passenger seat with a Thompson submachine gun generally solved that problem.

Overnight, a whole new industry sprung up – and began to compete successfully with the railroads for long distance freight. Because nobody had a monopoly, rates were low, they were far more attentive to customer service (a far cry from the “the public be damned” arrogance of the railroad barons) and they were far more able to provide flexible service, because the trucking companies could go anywhere that had roads, instead of only being able to serve places that had train stations.

This could have, and should have, been a golden opportunity for organizing for the IBT.

It wasn’t.

Dan Tobin, still a horse and buggy man at heart, said that over the road drivers, like warehouse helpers and loading dock workers, were “trash” who didn’t belong in the Teamsters Union.

Perhaps Tobin had other motives here too – maybe he wanted to avoid antagonizing the gangsters who’s liquor was being hauled on those trucks?

After all, the wiseguys controlled most of the union’s bigger locals – Tobin only stayed in office because those local’s officers voted for him at the international convention every five years – he couldn’t afford to upset those hoodlums by trying to unionize the men who carried their illegal alcohol!

And Tobin could have lost more than his job – in Chicago, the more aggressive of these bootleggers (in particular, a brash young florist shop owner from Brooklyn named Alfonse Capone) had been known to beat and even murder union officials who defied the will of organized crime.

In any case the IBT as an international union did nothing to organize the over the road truckers.

The only locals that did anything about road freight drivers were the general drivers locals in New York City and Chicago.

On paper, those locals represented drivers for “common carriers” – freight companies that hauled all kinds of goods, rather than just specific products for specific industries.

The over the road freight industry fell in their jurisdiction, so they were the logical local unions to organize that teamster craft.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Problem was, the guys who ran locals 707 and 807 in New York and locals 705 and 710 in Chicago were labor racketeers, rather than committed unionists.

And their idea of “organizing” was nothing more than cold blunt extortion.

They would send “organizers” [that is to say, thugs and hitmen who were on the union payroll] to meet out of town drivers at the city line, where they would force those drivers to join the union or they wouldn’t be allowed to drive into the city to deliver their freight.

The Teamster locals who these workers were forced to join wouldn’t bargain for those drivers, or in any way protect them from on the job abuse – they just shook those drivers down for union dues, more or less at gunpoint.

This brutal “organizing” tactic not only failed to unionize the road freight industry it also alienated the drivers from the IBT, because it made the Teamsters Union look like nothing more than a shakedown scam designed to rob truck drivers (which, in a real way, it basically was).

But Tobin and the other Teamsters leaders didn’t care about those guys.

The union’s bread and butter was drayage (an archaic horse and buggy era term for local delivery) …soda, bread, fresh fish, meat, wholesale grocery products, coal, ice, moving vans – and, above all, the big cash cow, building materials delivery.

The construction teamsters were the core of the union – and their industry, with it’s time sensitive deadlines and marginal profit margins for the contractors, created many opportunities for theft, graft, extortion, bid rigging, and various other kinds of criminal activity.

The building materials teamster locals were the most gangster ridden, the most openly corrupt – and the ones who’s leaders had most abandoned just about every moral principle of unionism in exchange for cold hard cash.

They also represented workers who made up the core of the union’s membership, and consequently those locals were the financial backbone of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as an institution.

This all worked very well (at least for the IBT, it’s leaders and the gangsters they worked so closely with) until the Great Depression hit.

The depression caused construction activity to come to an almost complete halt – a disaster for the building materials teamsters who were the heart of the union.

Consumer goods sales fell sharply – including even staple goods like bread, milk, butter and eggs – which caused a lot of job loss for many local drivers.

Union membership began to drop rapidly – with a slight lag, since IBT bylaws let members go 6 months without dues payment before suspension, and it took another 6 months of non payment for them to be expelled.

The early 1930’s were years of misery for all American workers – and teamsters suffered along with the rest of the class. For many of the better off drivers, the crash of 1929 led to a sharp fall in income - from middle class to near poverty – almost overnight.

Dan Tobin enthusiastically supported Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, in part because the Democrats had promised the AFofL that they would repeal Prohibition if elected (relegalizing booze was a major part of the AFofL’s economic recovery program).

As promised FDR did indeed lean on Congress and the states to repeal Prohibition.

Unfortunately, that move didn’t create any new jobs – it just legalized already existing illegal jobs, and ended persecution of alcohol industry workers.

For a lot of the bartenders, brewery workers, distillery workers and beer truck drivers who’s jobs were suddenly legalized found that they had a sudden drop in income.

They’d commanded top dollar back when their jobs held the risk of getting arrested or shot – but now that their jobs were legal, their bosses cut their pay very sharply.

Another part of FDR’s economic recovery program did actually help the unions.

Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act repealed the anti trust laws, and let employers associations conspire with the big companies in a particular industry to drive their smaller and weaker competitors out of business.

The NIRA also required that these employers associations impose Labor Codes for each industry that would be binding on all their member firms – and that these associations agree to bargain with labor unions in their industries.

That latter clause - NIRA Section 7(a) – a rule intended to legalize company unions – instead encouraged hundreds of thousands of workers to join the AFofL unions, or to build completely new unions from scratch.

Among those workers flooding into the labor movement was a very young dock worker at Kroger’s grocery warehouse in Detroit, the son of a single mom who migrated from Southern Indiana to Michigan, a kid named James Riddle Hoffa.

Hoffa and some of the other teenagers on the loading dock at Kroger’s built their own union, called a strike, got Kroger’s to bargain with them and were persuaded to affiliate their small union with the Teamsters.

Their union became Teamsters local 337, which still exists to this very day and still represents supermarket warehouse workers in Southeastern Michigan.

Hoffa so impressed the leaders of IBT Joint Council # 43 in Detroit that they hired him as an organizer – he was put on the payroll of another Teamsters local, Detroit General Drivers local 299, given a Cadillac and was sent out on the road to sign up carhaulers, the over the road truck drivers who delivered new cars from the auto plants to the dealerships.

Along with the legions of workers rushing into the unions, many communist labor activists came along too – in many cases coming back to unions that had expelled them for political reasons during the 1920’s.

The Teamsters was no exception here.

In particular, in Minneapolis, a number of Marxist radical coal delivery drivers entered the IBT’s ranks in 1933.

They were members of the Socialist Workers Party, a group of former Communist Party, USA members who’d left that group because the CPUSA supported Soviet leader Josef Stalin while the SWP supported exiled dissident Soviet communist Leon Trotsky (similar splits happened in every Communist Party in the world – in the USSR itself, Trotsky’s supporters were jailed – and in many cases shot – by Soviet police for their political beliefs).

It wasn’t that surprising that the Minneapolis Teamsters Union was a hotbed of such radicalism – Minnesota’s working class had a long left wing history dating back to before World War I.

At the onset of the depression, the state Farmer Labor Party had succeeded in electing one of it’s members as mayor of Minneapolis and another as governor of Minnesota.

Most of the Trotskyist teamsters in Minneapolis were coal or ice truck drivers, and they aggressively encouraged their coworkers to join the Teamsters.

The IBT was more than willing to accept the new members – after all, everywhere else in the country the union was shrinking rapidly due to mass unemployment in the local delivery business.

The next year, 1934, the economy picked up – in large part due to Roosevelt’s government spending programs – and union activism picked up too.

Many workers really believed FDR and the Democratic Party when they claimed to be on the side of the working man.

In Minneapolis, those Trotskyist coal drivers reenergized the small teamster local they joined, and launched a strike that quickly organized all of the coal and ice delivery drivers in the city.

That was a jumping off point for an organizing campaign that summer, which signed up just about every truck driver in the city – and many of the warehouse workers and dockworkers as well.

This triggered a strike in July 1934 that rapidly evolved from a narrow truck drivers strike into a broad, working class-wide insurrection against the capitalist class of Minnesota.

At one point, the militant Minneapolis truckers, and their allies from the building trades and from the city’s unemployed – who had built their own army to fight the Minneapolis PD, the local sheriffs department and a private militia of rich men and upscale students from the University of Minnesota – were prepared to take on the Minneapolis Police in the streets, guns in hand (this was in the wake of the murder of several strikers by the cops).

The Trotskyist Teamster leaders, who had long preached revolution, got cold feet when they found themselves in the frightening position of actually leading one!

So, those erstwhile revolutionaries, terrified to be actually leading a revolution, did their level best to ratchet the working class-wide revolt back down to a regular craft union labor strike - and actively fought to prevent workers from other trades - and even other teamsters from other cities in Minnesota and North Dakota from joining in the strike.

Dan Tobin was alarmed that the joint council in the Twin Cities had been taken over by Trotskyists.

So he reached out to his friends in the Chicago Outfit (Al Capone’s Midwestern branch of the Italian American crime syndicate known as cosa nostra - “this thing of ours”) who sent up a crew of hitmen and thugs – along with some legitimate union organizers (including Jimmy Hoffa).

After a brief terror campaign by the wiseguys against the radicals and the workers who supported them, Farrell Dobbs, the leader of the Minnesota Trotskyists, came to a truce with Dan Tobin and the Chicago wiseguys.

They would help the gangsters with new organizing in the locals they controlled in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and other parts of the Midwest (and would in no way challenge them politically in their local unions – or Dan Tobin in the international) and in return, the wiseguys would stop their war against the reds in Minnesota and would lend the Trotskyists some of their musclemen to aid their organizing drives.

Thus began a bizarre 5 year unlikely coalition between Leon Trotsky’s American followers and Al Capone’s gunmen that succeeded in unionizing the freight industry in the Midwest.

The Trotskyists in Minneapolis - and their allies in Fargo, North Dakota and in Omaha, Nebraska - and the wiseguys in Detroit and Chicago launched an areawide organizing campaign.

The reds and the goodfellas built a new type of teamster intermediate body – the area conference, to unify all the locals and joint councils in that vast area.

The wiseguys even let one of the Minnesota Trotskyists – one Farrell Dobbs, a former Republican telephone company engineer who became a coal wagon driver and a Trotskyist because of the depression – run this new union body.

Building off of the existing IBT base in local delivery, the leaders of the North Central District Drivers Council organized the local terminals of over the road freight carriers across the Midwest.

Once organized, the dockworkers in local freight terminals would refuse to unload trucks with non union drivers. This compelled freight carriers to unionize drivers from their other terminals – who, in turn, would demand that the non union dock workers in those terminals be unionized.

Omaha carriers put up the most resistance – so leftist Teamster locals in the Twin Cities, Des Moines and Fargo, and mobbed up Teamster locals in St Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit organized a boycott – union drivers from those cities refused to drive to Nebraska, and terminal workers in those towns would not unload freight inbound from Omaha.

This forced the Nebraska carriers to sign with the union.

The odd goodfella-radical alliance worked – for a while…

The Trotskyists in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska built their unions based on rank and file activism and a strong shop steward system in the terminals.

The wiseguys in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland organized “the old fashioned way”.

They relied on full time paid organizers, many of whom were career criminals or professional boxers rather than sincere labor activists.

These wiseguy “organizers” would sign up members (often by coercive “lead pipe” methods) and organizing carriers with the enticement of dealing with a pro business union – balanced out with the threat of beatings and firebombings for those carriers who chose to be uncooperative.

The Chicago freight locals had long been accustomed to this type of organizing – they had a long tradition of using thugs to stop trucks on the outskirts of the city and forcing them to join the union.

The only difference was now, the newly unionized drivers were actually getting real union representation, instead of just a shakedown.

Organizers in Michigan and Ohio used similar tactics to unionize the carhaulers, steelhaulers and coal truck drivers who hauled the products of American industry crosscountry.

The grocery industry was organized the same way – chains like Kroger had their delivery drivers and warehouse workers organized by the Teamsters, who would then refuse to deliver to the stores unless the butchers were organized into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen and the cashiers, stock clerks and other workers were signed up into the Retail Clerks International Association.

In many areas, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the Retail Clerks had to create new local unions to take in all the new members.

Many of these locals were virtual satellites of Teamsters warehouse worker locals – often literally run by the same people and operating out of the same offices.

Meanwhile, at the same time on the West Coast, another group of radicals were organizing in the freight industry – and the business unionists of that area had to come up with a response as well.

A group of merchant seamen and longshoremen, members of the pro Josef Stalin Communist Party, USA, had launched a coast-wide maritime workers strike in California, Oregon and Washington State.

The strike was centered in San Francisco – and at the exact same time as the red Minnesota Teamsters were on strike, the radical longshoremen of the Bay Area called an areawide general strike (which, among other unions, also included the Teamsters who hauled sea freight to and from the piers).

There was actually a third Marxist-led general strike going on at the exact same time as the Minneapolis and San Francisco walkouts– a strike that started in the Auto Lite plant in Toledo, Ohio but soon spread to every worker and unemployed person in that city. That was led by the American Workers Party – which soon merged with the Socialist Workers Party that had led the strike in Minnesota.

Those were radical times in America – as well as the rest of the world - workers were revolting in Austria, Spain and France at the same time as those 3 general strikes were in progress in America.

It’s very possible that if those socialists and communists leading those strikes had not channeled the workers they led into pro Democratic Party unions, there might very well have been a revolution here.

In any case, the conservative Teamster business agents who ran the IBT locals in the West Coast ports found themselves suddenly forced to organize their jurisdiction by the communist led sailors and longshoremen.

Dan Tobin – very uncomfortable and frankly terrified by what had happened in Minneapolis – needed a stable, conservative business unionist to control the West Coast teamsters that were flooding into the union.

He picked one Dave Beck for that responsibility – and put him in charge of what came to be known as the Western Conference of Teamsters, an areawide body like the NCDDC that unified all the Teamster locals and joint councils in the Pacific and Intermountain Western states.

Beck was the son of a single mom who worked in a commercial laundry. His mother got him a job as a laundry wagon driver when he came home from the Navy after World War I.

Beck’s first involvement with the Teamsters Union was his organizing of unionized laundry wagon drivers to scab on the Seattle general strike of 1919.

That reactionary start was the beginning of a long career as a right wing business unionist, who desperately wanted to be liked by the bosses he bargained with and who had nothing but sneering contempt for the “pot and bottle washers” (that’s what he actually called his members – in a public statement quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer!) who he nominally represented.

Beck, lacking the easy access to cosa nostra thugs that his East Coast and Midwest Teamster officer counterparts had, ended up having to organize an army of hitmen and leg breakers of his own.

A newspaper in Grays Harbor, Washington State, compared Beck’s hoodlums to the bizarre, musclebound and obnoxious “Alice the Goon” character in the Popeye the Sailor cartoon – and the name stuck….Beck’s thugs came to be known as the “Goon Squad”.

Beck’s goons – and his legitimate organizers – signed up truck drivers all over the western states (and Beck immediately stripped them of their democratic rights by placing their locals in trusteeships, run by flunkies personally appointed by him instead of elected officers).

In the East, the cosa nostra gangsters (and their Irish and Jewish allies) who ran the Teamster locals also got heavily into organizing – very much in the Chicago fashion, stopping drivers on the road and making them sign up (and compelling the new members to refuse to let their trucks be unloaded non union, thus forcing the freight lines to sign up – with, of course, the promise that the IBT would be reasonable with the bosses, and the threat that the union’s gorillas would come back at night with firebombs if the bosses didn’t sign up with the IBT).

Teamsters local 807, the Manhattan/Bronx general drivers local, used to have it’s organizers patrol the New Jersey approaches to the George Washington Bridge, the main road freight route into New York City from points west, where they would intercept non union truckers and force them to join the union on the spot to enter the city.

In the East and the West, a whole bunch of local agreements were signed, with wages, mileage rates, seniority rules and conditions all over the map – and in many cases, carriers with cosa nostra ties – or those willing to pay bribes – got special sweetheart deals with the IBT.

In the Midwest, the Trotskyists persuaded their cosa nostra allies to allow one multi state union contract to be negotiated.

The Central States agreement set an hourly wage for dockworkers and other freight barn workers – and for non-driving work and local deliveries done by drivers, and set a mileage rate for drivers when they were on the highway.

The agreement also set up seniority rules – basically so there would be a fair way of dividing up work opportunities between freight workers.

The Central States Freight Agreement was a giant step forward for freight workers.

This was a giant concession on the part of the carriers – but they really didn’t have much of a choice.

With the massive wave of unionization that swept American industry, like many bosses, it wasn’t a question of being union, but of which union they’d have to deal with.

By the mid 1930’s, many of the AFofL’s manufacturing and transport workers unions had seceded into a body known as the Congress of Industrial Organization.

Many of these CIO unions were run by members of the Communist Party, USA – and even the ones that weren’t were pushed to militancy by the ones that were.

In the road transportation industry, the CIO’s communist led Transport Workers Union was something of a threat to the IBT.

It was primarily a New York City subway workers union, but there was TWU local 206, a communist led all Black TWU truckers local on the New Orleans waterfront (those port truckers were sick of being jim crowed in the segregated Teamsters local they’d been in since 1892, so they gave the CIO a try).

The CIO’s Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (like the TWU also a communist led New York City based union) was a major threat to the IBT in the warehouse industry – with RWDSU local 65 directly competing with the various New York Teamster warehouse worker locals for members.

It didn’t help the IBT’s cause that RWDSU local 65 was militant, democratic, non racist and totally devoid of gangsterism – everything that Teamsters Joint Council # 16 (the IBT’s New York City and Long Island council) was not.

The International Longshoremens and Warehousemen’s Union, the former Pacific Coast District of the AFofL’s International Longshoremen’s Association (until the communist led district seceded from the New York Irish gangster-run international union in 1938) had a coast-wide warehouse worker organizing drive (known by the rather militaristic name of “The March Inland”) that was also a major threat to the IBT’s warehouse jurisdiction.

Dave Beck’s Western Conference of Teamsters had to put up with the ILWU on the docks – but, Beck attacked the CIO from the back door, by sending his goon squad to help the AFofL’s United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America wage a full scale war on the CIO’s International Woodworkers of America, a communist led lumberjacks and sawmill workers union that had seceded from the UBCJA.

The big sawmills of Seattle and Portland, and lumber towns all over Washington State, Oregon and Northern California were terrorized by Beck’s goons, who tried to baseball bat pro IWA woodworkers back into the UBCJA.

Beck even sent his goons across the border into British Columbia, Canada (with the blessings of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to attack the radical wood workers union there.

And, all over the country, Teamsters building materials locals ordered their lumber yard members to refuse to handle or deliver lumber with the IWA-CIO union label, and to demand their bosses only stock wood carrying the UBCJA-AFofL label.

This was an extreme case – but nationally, the IBT was on the front lines of the AFofL’s battle against the CIO.

Basically, the wiseguys presented the IBT as a responsible, conservative, racist and pro capitalist AFofL business union, as opposed to the communist, integrationist, militant and radical CIO class struggle-oriented unions.

The Trotskyists had their own reasons for sticking with the American Federation of Labor – they hated the CIO because it had such strong ties to the CPUSA, their pro-Stalin enemies, so the SWP championed the AFofL, despite it’s open gangsterism, in-your-face racism and pro employer approach to unionism.

The Trotskyist-led North Central District Drivers Council even helped the AFofL’s International Association of Machinists and Aircraft Workers defeat a revolt of Minneapolis iron foundry and machine shop workers who wanted to quit the IAM and join the CIO’s communist led United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.

It didn’t even matter to these socialists that the IAM was the most reactionary and openly racist union in the AFofL and the UE was the most radical and militant union in the CIO – nor did the desire of those ironworkers and machinists to quit the AFofL and join the CIO matter either!

The Teamsters became the fastest growing AFofL affiliate – ballooning from barely 75,000 members in 1934 to over 400,000 by 1939.

The core of these workers was still the local delivery drivers who’d always been the IBT’s bread and butter – but now freight workers and other over the road truckers made up a large proportion of the membership, and grocery warehouse workers were a major component of IBT membership as well.

The Teamsters also had lots of “general” workers – non freight related members, mostly workers in small factories who’s owners had no choice but to sign a contract with a union, but who would rather have the Teamsters than a CIO union.

Some of these “industrial teamsters” worked in the food processing industry, where the IBT had long had a presence – dairy workers, soda bottling plant workers, fruit and vegetable packing shed hands, frozen food workers ect.

Others were employed in random factories where the boss, facing a pro CIO workforce, brought in the IBT as a “respectable” alternative.

This is also how the Teamsters got their first civil service members.

The workers at the New York City Department of Sanitation wanted to join District Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, CIO.

But the city’s pro New Deal Liberal Republican mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, would not allow them join a CIO union with close ties to the communists and radical Irish nationalist exiles who ran Transport Workers Union local 100.

He would let them join a respectable pro capitalist AFofL union though.

So, the Teamsters set up local 883, the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, and the Department of Sanitation recognized that union, instead of DC 37, the union the sanitationmen actually wanted!

By the end of the 1930’s, the Teamsters was, after the United Mine Workers, the biggest union in the nation.

Dan Tobin and the joint council and local leaders were very happy at what they’d built – and the local Teamster officers had found that they could coordinate their locals and still have autonomy to run their individual units as they saw fit.

There was only one problem – Farrell Dobbs and his Trotskyists.

They had turned their backs on their fellow radicals in the CPUSA, and had fought hard against the CIO, but they were still revolutionaries, and that just would not do.

Especially since the new area conferences created an obvious power base for taking over Dan Tobin’s job.

Tobin could see having a conservative business unionist like Dave Beck as his successor someday.

But not Farrell Dobbs!

Tobin had tried very hard to convince Dobbs to abandon his socialist politics and become a respectable pro corporate business unionist.

When it was clear that this was not going to happen, Tobin expelled all of the Trotskyist union leaders from the posts they held in the North Central District Drivers Council and in locals in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska.

The teamsters in Minneapolis, St Paul, Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines and Omaha did not like seeing their leaders being abused like that – and, had they been asked to do so by Dobbs and his comrades, they would have left the Teamsters as a block and gone to the CIO.

But Dobbs did the “responsible” thing – he refused to call any strikes or job actions against Tobin and delayed calling for disaffiliation until it was way too late.

By the time Dobbs group tried to join the CIO, their members had been baseball batted by goons from Chicago and Detroit into joining newly chartered Teamster locals that were run by wiseguys and thugs.

Even when they went in the CIO, the Trotskyists didn’t affiliate with the CIO Transport Workers Union, that federation’s road transportation union (mainly because the TWU was run by the Trotskyists’ arch enemies, the CPUSA).

And they might have had their reasons – after all, Josef Stalin, the CPUSA’s Russian political mentor, had just had his secret agents assassinate the SWP’s Russian political mentor, Leon Trotsky (who was living in exile in Mexico).

So there was more than a little bit of bad blood between the two groups.

Instead, the Minneapolis Trotskyist Teamsters hooked up with the CIO’s United Construction Workers Organizing Committee.

The UCWOC was a small right wing low wage construction union run by one A.D. Lewis, the brother of John L. Lewis, the very well known president of the United Mine Workers of America (he was a labor celebrity of the day, frequently quoted in the newspapers, on the radio and in the newsreels and by far the best known union officer in America at the time).

A.D Lewis’ union was run a whole lot like the more gangster-ridden Teamster locals were – they used goons and thugs to force construction workers to join, and then approached their bosses with promises of a compliant union with substandard pay scales and weak sweetheart contracts.

The brief marriage between the Trotskyists and the CIO thugs ended quickly, and Dobbs group ended up disbanding.

UCWOC disbanded too – with A.D. Lewis going to work for his niece, John L’s daughter Katherine, the head of another low wage gangster union, United Mine Workers of America District 50 (which was set up by her dad to sign low wage sweetheart contracts with sweatshops in big cities outside of the coalfields)

Dobbs was replaced as head of the North Central District Drivers Council by that hardcore teenage loading dock militant from Detroit, who had grown up into a tough young organizer and a responsible business unionist, Jimmy Hoffa.

Hoffa immediately changed the NCDDC’s name to Central States Conference of Teamsters.

Within a year, Dobbs and a dozen of his Socialist Workers Party comrades would be under federal indictment for their politics and their opposition to US participation in World War II. Most of them did jail time, one got deported to Sweden and two of them killed themselves rather than go to prison.

Now, Tobin’s position was secure – no matter who succeeded him, Beck or Hoffa, the IBT presidency would go to a respectable conservative business unionist.

The AFofL as a whole had greatly prospered during the 1930’s

Most of the several million workers who had flooded the ranks of the unions in that tumultuous decade had ended up being organized into AFofL affiliates – often with the active intervention of their bosses against the CIO and in favor of the AFofL.

With the exception of the UMWA, the Teamsters had prospered most out of all the AFofL affiliates.

The other AFofL unions only signed up workers who had some connection with the union’s core jurisdictions, which limited their membership growth.

The Teamsters Union leadership would organize anybody, no matter how little their job had to do with trucking and warehousing.

As late as 1934 the IBT was a union of local delivery wagon and truck drivers and their helpers, that was really strict about keeping non road freight-related workers out of the union.

By the end of the decade, the IBT was a ‘conglomerate union’ representing workers in all segments of trucking, from local to cross county, from common carriers that hauled all kinds of cargo to rigs that only hauled one particular type of freight for only one client.

The union had also become the dominant warehouse workers union in the nation

And the Teamsters also had lots of members who had absolutely nothing to do with trucking at all – including lots of workers who’s bosses had brought in the IBT as the least worse alternative to a CIO union.

The IBT was now the second largest union in the American Federation of Labor – second only to the United Mine Workers of America, which had grown to 600,000 members by following a Teamster-like path of organizing lots of workers who had absolutely nothing to do with coal mining, and specifically marketing their union’s low wage District 50 to bosses who faced CIO organizing drives and wanted a right wing pro boss union as an alternative.

World War II greatly calmed the militancy of the official labor movement.

It didn’t stop struggles on the jobsites, but increasingly unions helped corporations and the feds break wildcat strikes and identify strike leaders for firing, blacklisting and, in many cases, drafting into the Army.

The CIO had become increasingly more conservative and AFofL-like, and the right wing CIO leaders began aggressively purging communists from their unions, just as Dan Tobin had expelled Trotskyists from his at the beginning of the decade.

The CIO went even further than the AFofL, and actually pledged to not go on strike for the duration of the war, no matter what the bosses did – with the promise that if workers did go on strike on a wildcat basis, the CIO unions would break the strikes on behalf of the bosses and the government (a promise the CIO unions kept).

This collapse of union militancy stalled union growth - except for the increase in factory worker union membership – which was entirely caused by increasing war orders and the extra hiring that had to be done to produce the massive amount of military materiel necessary for the war.

The Teamsters had another major growth spurt in the 1950’s, on the trucking side because of major changes in American industry and society, and on the non truck side thanks to the union’s willingness to sign sweetheart contracts.

Large suburbs had been built on the outskirts of America’s cities, to house the country’s growing working class (or at least it’s White segment).

New types of commercial development emerged to serve the needs of those communities – the supermarket and the shopping mall.

The trucking and warehousing industries rapidly expanded to service all these new far flung stores.

Also, the trucking industry, thanks to it’s flexibility, it’s lower labor costs, and the willingness of emerging road freight carriers to charge low rates to get new business, was rapidly taking market share away from the railroads.

The railroads- who had been the main transporters of interstate freight from the 1830’s until WW II - lost most of their business to the trucking fleets.

Having had a monopoly for so long, the railroads had failed to modernize their businesses, on the assumption that they would always be top dogs in the freight business, so why reinvest their profits in improving their businesses, when they could just pocket the money – or put it into more profitable investments, like real estate in the downtown areas of big cities?

Also, the railroads had much higher labor costs than the trucking companies – and, thanks to their monopoly, no real reason to reduce them, when it was so much easier to just buy labor peace from the 15 railroad unions.

The railroads unions and the carriers had maintained the same workrules for almost 30 years – 1 locomotive engineer to drive the train, 2 locomotive firemen to shovel coal into the firebox (even on diesel electric locomotives that didn’t have a firebox or any coal) and 2 brakemen and 1 conductor in the caboose.

And those 6 guys (who were in 4 different unions) got paid a days wages for every 100 miles the train ran down the track (even if it took way less than 8 hours to go that 100 miles).

And all of those labor costs got passed directly on to the shippers in the form of high freight rates.

The trucking companies only had one union – the Teamsters – for all their workers, on the truck and on the loading dock, and the Teamsters Union had already proved to be very compliant when it came to labor cost control.

The railroads nearly died in the 1950’s – it would take another 40 years for them to be able to compete with the trucking business.

The road freight industry picked up the slack – by the end of the decade, most US freight was hauled by truck (and that is still the case to this very day).

The non trucking side of the IBT prospered too – for somewhat more nefarious reasons.

Labor racketeers like New York City’s John “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, Bernard Adelstein and Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianello (he is said to have gotten his nickname from the two horses heads on the Teamsters logo), Chicago’s “Red” Dorfman and his son Alan, Cleveland’s Bill Presser and his son Jackie and New Jersey’s Provenzano brothers signed sweetheart contracts with low wage sweatshops in various industries, putting a union seal of approval on their abusive conditions, and enabling those low wage bosses to keep out legitimate unions.

Johnny Dio, Bernard Adelstein and Red Dorfman also engaged in various types of insurance fraud, using the Teamster benefits funds for the enrichment of themselves and the bosses of the crime families they were affiliated with.

William Presser, a businessman who had never been an actual union member until he became an IBT official, simultaneously ran the employers association and the Teamsters Union local in the Cleveland candy and cigarette wholesaling industry.

His son, Jackie Presser, a very energetic labor racketeer, simultaneously ran the employers association and the Teamsters local in the jukebox sales and service industry, simultaneously ran the local bartenders union and owned a unionized bar, also had a sideline in arson for hire (specializing in firebombing corrupt businesses who didn’t make their payoffs on time) and he dabbled in extortion, loansharking, running a supermarket clerks union and a laundry workers union in his spare time.

Basically, Presser the younger was a walking talking violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

In New Jersey, Joint Council # 70 and it’s largest affiliate, local 560, were run by the Provenzanos – Anthony (“Tony Pro”), his brother Salvatore (“Sammy Pro”) and his other brother Nunzio (who didn’t have a nickname), all of whom were members of the Genovese family of cosa nostra (Tony Pro was a captain, who ran the family’s North Jersey crew – Sammy Pro and Nunzio were soldiers in that crew).

The Pro’s specialized in selling sweetheart contracts to freight carriers and grocery warehouses in Northern New Jersey, with wages, benefits and working conditions inferior to national or regional agreements.

If a carrier or warehouse paid enough to the brothers Provenzano, they could go completely non union.

And any teamster who dared disagree would get hurt.

Like dissident truck driver George Phillips.

He was attacked by baseball bat wielding thugs on his delivery route – in broad daylight in front of witnesses - for daring to challenge the Provenzanos in a union election.

Or they might even get killed

Like local 560’s Secretary Treasurer, Anthony Castellito.

He was a long time supporter of the Provenzanos who mysteriously “disappeared” – and was presumed to have been murdered - because the Provenzanos feared he would testify against them.

Or Walter Glockner, a shop steward at Dorn Trucking Co., a firm that was paying the Pros $ 1,500 a week in tribute.

He was shot in the back 3 times in front of his own home – and the only eyewitness to the murder mysteriously “disappeared” before he could testify, never to be seen again.

With leaders like these, the Teamsters Union was well on it’s way to becoming the largest union in America (1.4 million members – one out of every 10 union members in the country was a Teamster)…and the most blatantly corrupt.

Which didn’t bother the employers in their industries one little bit.

The labor racketeers didn’t ask for much – the cosa nostra standard 2% “tribute” in most cases – they would keep the workers in line, and by and large they were men of their word who kept their promises to the bosses.

The IBT’s corruption was actually a stabilizing force in the trucking industry.

Trucking was filled with small marginal businesses, and even more marginal independent “gypsy” truckers, each one trying their damnedest to get as much freight as possible.

This meant that the big freight carriers always had to worry about some random guy with a truck coming along and taking their freight by undercutting their prices.

There were federal regulations on freight rates and routes - but the Interstate Commerce Commission was weak and underfunded, so those could be easily evaded.

The Teamsters Union, by contrast, was far less easily defied – ESPECIALLY the more openly gangster-dominated Teamster locals.

The IBT guaranteed a sort of stability to the larger carriers – they put a floor under labor costs, aggressively enforced labor standards on the more marginal firms that might otherwise try and undercharge the big carriers and in general did their best to limit competition between carriers.

This created a huge problem for the Fortune 500 companies who’s freight was hauled by these carriers.

The big capitalists wanted and needed competition in freight rates to bring their costs down – a freight monopoly hurt their bottom line.

The big corporations approached the federal government – and since they were far higher up on the capitalist class food chain than even the biggest trucking company, their concerns were listened to.

The feds were limited in what they could do – racketeering wasn’t even a federal crime at that time (and wouldn’t be until the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971).

But the government did try and go after the Teamsters.

Teamsters General President Dan Tobin was planning to retire in 1952, after almost a half century in office, and he had designated Western Conference Chairman Dave Beck as his successor.

Beck wasn’t as openly corrupt as the Eastern and Midwestern Teamster leaders were – but he had become a millionaire thanks to his union posts, and a lot of that income was less than 100% legitimate.

The feds also had a psychological advantage with Beck – he had grown up very poor, in a single parent household (at a time when that was considered to be very shameful in this country) so he desperately wanted to be liked and accepted by upper class people in his native Seattle, as a way of validating himself.

So, the feds indicted Beck in a very high profile way on some relatively minor tax violations the very day that he was appointed Teamsters general president in 1952.

Beck, utterly humiliated on the very day that should have been the greatest triumph in his life, spent his entire 5 year term of office dodging subpoenas and grand juries, at one point literally getting on a boat and fleeing to Europe, another time escaping to the Bahamas and claming he was too sick to come back to America, before he finally went to prison in 1957.

Beck’s successor as general president, Jimmy Hoffa, faced similar criminal justice issues from the day he was appointed to office – but he was much better equipped mentally to handle the challenge.

Hoffa didn’t dodge subpoenas – far from it, he’d show up and openly defy his prosecutors (even when he was hauled before the US Senate, he didn’t hide his contempt for the feds – in particular young congressional attorney Robert F. Kennedy, the architect of the federal campaign against the Teamsters).

Even when the feds got the recently merged American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations to challenge the Teamsters, Hoffa called their bluff too – and pulled the IBT out of the AFL-CIO rather than submit to the labor federation’s new government-dictated ethical practices rules.

There wasn’t anything the government could do to get Hoffa to bow down to them.

Beyond character, Hoffa also had the advantage that the trucking companies really loved him, and they very much wanted to have him continue running the Teamsters no matter what the government (or the rest of the capitalist class) wanted.

Hoffa saw the world the way the trucking company owners did – and with good reason, because he was one of them!

During the 1940’s and 50’s, Hoffa had started a number of transportation related businesses in and around Detroit, including the car service at Detroit Airport and a company called Test Fleet that leased trucks and union drivers out to other firms.

For legal reasons (the Department of Labor’s ban on employers being union officials being the primary one) Hoffa concealed his ownership of these firms by having them incorporated in the names of his wife, or other relatives, or close friends.

Hoffa also had a vision of what the trucking industry could be, and he used the union and his relationship with the carriers to develop the industry’s potential.

He also saw the union’s new but rapidly growing pension funds as a significant alternative source of capital for marginal industries like construction and trucking and, with the aid of college professor turned labor racketeer Alan Dorfman, he did his best to invest those funds accordingly (the casinos of Las Vegas were initially financed by Central States Conference Pension Fund loans).

He didn’t let little trifles like the needs and grievances of truck drivers and loading dock workers get in the way of that grand vision.

Hoffa did improve drivers’ pay and benefits where he could – but he would turn around and take those same improvements away from drivers if a trucking firm claimed they needed those concessions to stay profitable.

The trucking industry bosses saw Hoffa as one of their own, and they did their level best to defend him from prosecution to the extent they could.

Freight teamsters also saw Hoffa as one of their own, and loved him just as deeply as their bosses did.

Despite the fact that Hoffa would think nothing of sacrificing their interests if it served the carriers, he simultaneously aggressively cultivated a “man of the people” image among his members.

Hoffa still lived pretty much like he had when he was a warehouse worker – he wore cheap off the rack suits, he, his wife, his two kids and his foster son lived in a small house in Detroit (he shared a small apartment with another Teamsters official when he was in Washington DC working at IBT international headquarters).

Hoffa had also traded in his business agent’s Cadillac for a far more humble Pontiac sedan.

Despite the simple lifestyle, Hoffa was actually a millionaire at this point – but, unlike other affluent IBT officers, Hoffa did not flaunt his wealth in the face of his members.

Most of his money was either quietly invested through fronts and facemen – or used to finance the college educations of his two biological children, James and Barbara (his foster son, Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, followed in Hoffa’s footsteps as a union official).

Unlike his predecessors Dan Tobin and Dave Beck, who rarely left their offices, and who avoided the company of truckers and warehouse workers like the plague even when they were on the road, Hoffa spent as much time as possible out in the field, traveling to trucking terminals and warehouses and meeting regular teamsters.

He gave out his office phone number to every teamster he met – and if they called his office, he would come to the phone, speak to them directly – often pleasantly surprising them by actually remembering their names - and he would either solve their personal grievance or give them a good sounding reason why it could not be solved.

Consequently, the truckers saw Hoffa as one of their own made good – and admired him for being a loading dock millionaire who was living the “American dream”.

This enormous political capital enabled Hoffa to get away with many betrayals of the interests of freight workers. It also made it very difficult for the feds to go after him, since it was clear he had a huge mass base among freight workers – and those workers had the social power to shut down around 80% of the freight industry in the United States.

Not that Hoffa would ever mobilize them to do that – he had repeatedly assured the carriers that he would never ever call a national strike.

Hoffa would allow local strikes over grievances - particularly against the marginal carriers – especially the small time outfits that a) didn’t pay tribute to cosa nostra and b) were trying to undercut the carriers that did and/or the major carriers in the industry.

But Hoffa and the conference, joint council and local officers underneath him would almost always settle the local strikes within 3 days time.

Hoffa was also quick to offer “white paper agreements” – special union contracts with substandard wages, benefits and work rules, for companies who claimed that they had some sort of financial hardship and/or were willing to pay bribes for the privilege of having a low wage contract.

A common form those bribes took in the Detroit area was for firms to lease trucks and teamster drivers from Test Fleet, a trucking company owned by Hoffa but listed in his wife’s maiden name.

The labor stability of the Hoffa era enabled the modern trucking industry to take form.

Some carriers (the Less Than Truckload or LTL outfits) built networks of terminals across the country. They would have city drivers pick up small loads from many customers. Those loads would then be consolidated by destination at the terminals by the dockworkers, and road drivers would take those loads to other terminals in that carrier’s network. The city drivers, dockworkers and other terminal workers were paid by the hour, the road drivers were paid by the mile on the road, and by the hour for all of their non driving related work.

Other carriers (Truckload companies) would pick up complete truckloads of goods from their customers, and then deliver those loads to wherever it was they needed to go to.

Still other carriers only carried particular commodities – steel, coal, cars, oil, chemicals, ect ect ect.

Even with Hoffa’s white paper deals, freight teamsters were among the best paid workers in the union - some construction drivers and movie set teamsters made more money, but that was about it.

Meanwhile, as Hoffa simultaneously served the interests of the freight carriers and convinced freight workers that he was their best friend and struggled to stay out of prison, cosa nostra sunk it’s teeth deeper into non over the road freight related IBT crafts in the big Eastern and Central States cities.

The Justice Department’s “Get Hoffa” prosecution effort (yes, they actually called it that) didn’t deter the goodfellas – if anything, it emboldened them!

In New York City, Matty the Horse Ianello, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso and Bernard Adelstein (a one legged gangster who never let his disability limit him from being a fully functional labor racketeer) organized a cartel in the commercial waste hauling industry.

First, they were able to get New York City Mayor Robert Wagner to privatize commercial waste hauling.

Second, they got the construction, ash and waste paper hauling firms to monopolize the industry. Using the three employers associations that represented every union private waste hauling company in the city, they assigned every single commercial building and store in the city to one of 300 firms in those associations.

Those assignments were permanent – if a customer wanted to change waste haulers, they’d have to ask Matty the Horse, Gaspipe or Adelstein for permission to switch - and pay a bribe in return for that favor.

And if a waste hauling company was foolish enough to try and break into the industry without permission, Adelstein’s union, Teamsters local 813, would shut that wastehauler down with a strike and/or arson, beatings, truck vandalism or other types of violence.

But if the wastehaulers went along with the program, they were guaranteed to make a handsome profit, with no fear of competitors coming in undercharging them.

The wastehaulers also got sweetheart contracts for the workers in their truck terminals and garbage dumps.

They were excluded from Teamsters local 813 and parceled out to locals 445, 958 or 970 of the Mason Tenders District Council, a cosa nostra dominated umbrella group of construction laborers local unions affiliated to the Laborers International Union of North America, the nation’s most heavily mobbed up international union.

The garbage racket was so big, it took three different mob families to run it – the Genovese, Gambino and Lucchese families jointly ran the waste hauling rackets.

Adelstein also had a side racket – through another Teamsters local he ran, local 1034, he sold sweetheart union contracts to funeral homes and oil barrel factories.

Between Adelstein, Matty the Horse and Johnny Dio, most of the Teamster factory worker locals in New York City were in the sweetheart contract racket (very few of the IBT represented manufacturing workers in the city had anything even remotely resembling legitimate union representation in those years).

Teamsters local 966 was a good example – it signed sweetheart contracts with printing shops that needed to have a union label on their products for business reasons, but who didn’t want to pay Allied Printing Trades Council wages and benefits.

Local 966’s specialty was blueprint printing shops – they needed a union label on their products (which were used in the then 100% unionized New York construction industry) – but they didn’t want to pay the labor costs that went with a legit union label.

Local 966 solved that problem for them – they got a union label on their blueprints, and non union level pay and benefits in the shops.

Teamster locals 210 and 240 provided similar services for garment shops that had to have a union contract, but who didn’t want to have to provide International Ladies Garment Workers Union or Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union wage scales and benefit coverage.

Teamsters local 810 served machine shops that needed to be unionized but who did not want to live up to the wage and benefits standards of Machinists District 15 or Sheet Metal Workers local 28 or Ironworkers local 455.

Johnny Dio eventually “retired” – he got life in a federal prison, for having a hitman pour acid in the eyes of New York Times labor reporter Victor Riesel

Riesel lived – and even though he’d been blinded he kept on writing about thugs like Johnny Dio.

Johnny Dio spent the rest of his life behind bars, and died a convict’s death in a federal prison infirmary.

As for the New York City Teamsters?

Of the 49 IBT locals in the city in the late 1950’s, 31 had ties to organized crime.

All 5 of New York City’s cosa nostra families (Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonnano) plus the De Cavalcante family from New Jersey, plus various independent gangsters all got a piece of the action.

Most locals only had one set of wiseguys feeding on the union.

Some unfortunate unions had multiple racketeers preying on them.

Like Teamsters local 295, which represented air freight drivers at Idlewild Field (the city’s international airport – it was renamed after President John F Kennedy after his 1963 assassination)

IBT local 295 chief Harry Davidoff, Lucchese family captain Paul Vario, Gambino family captain Aniello “Mr Neil” Dellacroche and truck hijacker James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke worked together to organize the air freight forwarding rackets.

All of the freight forwarders (trucking companies that carried freight between the airports and the shippers) were required to join a cosa nostra-controlled employers association, the Metropolitan Import Truckmen’s Association (MITA).

Like in the carting industry, MITA required that all the carriers have IBT local 295 union contracts (although a modest payoff to Davidoff could guarantee a low wage sweetheart contract) and MITA assigned which company was allowed to pick up freight from particular customers and haul it to particular airlines.

Trucking companies who went along with the deal were guaranteed high freight rates and no competition.

Those carriers who didn’t would have serious problems – not only from Davidoff’s Teamsters local, but from hijackers who operated under the protection of Vario, Mr Neil and Jimmy the Gent, who would ambush their trucks on the more isolated side roads in Howard Beach or South Jamaica, Queens and steal their cargo.

Of course, even the companies that went along with the racket had to give up a part of their freight to the truck hijackers.

Vario, Mr. Neil and Jimmy the Gent – in league with local bar owners near the airport, many of whom were gangsters in their own right – also ran illegal betting and loansharking rings preying on air freight teamsters.

They would get guys hooked on betting, lend them gambling money at extremely high interest rates, get them deep in debt and then force them to pay off their debts by helping the wiseguys to steal cargo.

Davidoff’s IBT local 295 would make sure that they didn’t get fired for their thefts – so they could keep paying off their debts with stolen freight.

Incidentally, those luckless gamblers were just about the only Idlewild Field air freight teamsters who got any sort of protection from local 295 in those days.

The freight carriers didn’t really give a damn about the hijackings – they were making money hand over fist thanks to the MITA’s air freight cartel and, after all, the freight was insured and it wasn’t their property anyway.

The shippers and the airlines DID care very much about the hijackings.

But they didn’t want to risk a strike from Davidoff’s Teamsters local.

More importantly they were terrified of Vario, Mr Neil and Jimmy the Gent.

All three of those guys were notorious killers in their own right.

Jimmy the Gent in particular was a ferocious figure – he allegedly carried out his first killing at age 11, was a full time hitman in his early teens and was still killing people himself on a regular basis (often over personal slights that had nothing to do with racketeering) even after he became a major organized crime figure.

Vario and Mr. Neil, while nowhere near as personally violent as Jimmy the Gent, had also murdered people themselves as well.

They also had hitmen ready and willing to murder their enemies and make their bodies disappear into the swamps of South Queens or under the waters of Jamaica Bay on a phone call’s notice.

In the face of malevolent enemies like that, the airlines and the customers who shipped freight on their planes could do nothing but sit still and take it.

Rackets like that were precisely the reason why the feds were going after Hoffa.

Those rackets were very good for the trucking companies – in particular the more established carriers, who wanted to protect their businesses from competition from new entrants to the market who might try to undercut their prices.

But it was that freight price stability – and the subpar service that was the inevitable result of freight service monopolization - that hurt the profits of the corporations who’s freight was being hauled to market by these carriers.

The feds were fighting for the interests of those big capitalists, against the small trucking companies that they felt were overcharging them, thanks to the Teamsters and cosa nostra.

But they were having a very difficult time prosecuting Hoffa (and an even harder time going after all the local labor racketeers across the Eastern and Central States conferences who ran those rackets on the ground).

While the corrupt local Teamsters officials ran their rackets in local trucking and non-freight related IBT industries, Hoffa continued his efforts to centralize over the road freight bargaining.

Almost as soon as he came into office, Hoffa centralized grievance handling in the freight industry. All grievances that couldn’t be settled at either at the terminals by shop stewards and terminal managers or at the local union level by business agents and trucking company personnel managers went to panels at the conference level.

Hoffa co-chaired all of these panels, and he was responsible for every major ruling by the grievance panels. Hoffa (an insomniac workaholic who’s normal work day began at 6AM and ended after midnight every day of the week) personally wrote many of the opinions – and approved every word of the ones he didn’t.

Hoffa thus became the central arbiter of all major disputes in the American road freight industry. The high level of trust that both truckers and bosses had in him (both groups thought he was on their side 100%) was what made this possible.

Meanwhile, the IBT was expanding far beyond trucking.

In part this was because the union had an aggressive organizing culture, made even bolder by the withdrawal from the AFL-CIO.

Now Article XX, the “no raiding clause” of the AFL-CIO constitution, no longer applied, so IBT organizers could, and did, go after all sorts of workers (literally from apple juice cannery workers to zookeepers).

The Teamsters began to unionize public workers aggressively – in large part coasting on major victories won by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Building Service Employees International Union that compelled several states – starting with New York – to legalize civil service worker labor unions.

The IBT’s flagship public employees union, City Employees Union local 237 in New York City, became the Teamsters single largest affiliate, with over 25,000 members, when it organized several large groups of New York City civil servants

AFSCME District Council 37 only narrowly beat them in the election to be the primary municipal clerical and service workers union in NYC.

Local 237 ended up with numerous miscellaneous bargaining units – housing authority janitors and maintenance workers were, by far, the largest group, but local 237 also got bridge tenders, public hospital cooks and security guards for municipal buildings and public schools among other titles.

At least they got decent pay (in large part because DC 37, as the main City of New York civil service labor organization, was the lead union in municipal bargaining – the local 237 agreement was a me-too contract based on the DC 37 agreement).

Most other non trucking teamsters – especially factory workers in big cities – had low wage sweetheart contracts.

The Teamsters became the fastest growing union in the country.

And the sweetheart ‘white paper agreements’ began to seep even more aggressively into trucking.

For example, a department store delivery firm called United Parcel Service.

In 1964, UPS founder and principal owner Jim Casey decided to shift the firm’s core business from department store delivery to parcel post service.

The old UPS was based on it’s trucks waiting outside downtown department stores in big cities, picking up packages from carless shoppers, and delivering their goods to their home.

That business model no longer made sense.

Most Americans had cars now, and a majority of US residents were suburbanites who drove to far flung shopping malls. They didn’t need anybody to deliver their packages – because they carried them in the trunk or the backseat!

But, mail order shopping was on the rise – and those companies did need somebody to haul their packages from their warehouses to the homes of their customers.

The US Post Office Department had a virtual monopoly on that business – and, like all monopolies, their prices were high and their service was poor.

Casey wanted to go head to head with the US Post Office.

He wanted to set up a network of “service centers” (UPS internal corporate jargon for what other firms called terminals or freight barns), similar to the ones used by less than truckload (LTL) carriers.

UPS local “package cars” (delivery vans) would pick up packages from customers, ferry them to the service center, “sorters” (loading dockworkers and warehouse workers) would sort the packages, put the out of town packages in “feeder trucks” (over the road tractor trailers) bound for other UPS service centers, unload feeder trucks from those centers, load up the package cars with the next day’s deliveries and send them on their way in the morning.

The LTL carriers did this with a largely full time workforce, supplemented by casual teamster dockworkers hired by the day.

UPS wanted to have a part time workforce do this work, for maximal flexibility and minimum labor costs – and they needed a special deal from Hoffa to do that.

UPS had been a union carrier since 1907 – back before they even had trucks (they were a bike messenger firm back then) – so Hoffa would have a hard time changing their older local agreements (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City ect).

But UPS had regional agreements with the IBT- in the Southern Conference, the Western Conference outside of Seattle and Portland, the Central States Conference outside of Chicago and the Eastern Conference outside of New York City.

Hoffa personally negotiated those contracts, so he could – and did – change those agreements in 1964, letting UPS hire an unlimited number of part timers.

UPS could – and did – pressure the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City locals to go along with the program and the IBT backed up UPS on that every step of the way.

Hoffa had shown the Motor Freight Carriers Association that he would look out for them – and when he promised that there would never be a national truckers strike, they believed him.

So, in April 1964, MFCA and the Teamsters signed the National Master Freight Agreement – covering 15,000 trucking lines with 400,000 road drivers, city drivers, dockworkers, casuals, mechanics, clericals, yard drivers, truck washers ect ect ect and expiring in March 1967.

The independent Chicago Truck Drivers Union and Teamsters Joint Council # 25 signed a parallel “me too” NMFA-patterned agreement for 20,000 Chicago-area freight workers, 30,000 teamsters covered by “white paper agreements” in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Detroit, Ohio and other areas also had their agreements tied to the NMFA and a few small units of diesel mechanics and helpers represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers also had contracts that followed the NMFA pattern.

Hoffa had brought order to the industry – and he was trusted by the bosses to keep competition at bay, keep the truckers in line, and guarantee stable profits for freight industry bosses (especially the big trucking lines who needed protection from all the small outfits and the independent “gypsy truckers”).

Hoffa was also facing more legal troubles – he’d beaten the Test Fleet corruption case (by bribing a juror), but now he was being tried for jury tampering!

This time, the feds got Hoffa – he was convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Hoffa and his lawyers launched a blizzard of motions and filed the necessary appeals, but that only delayed his eventual incarceration by a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the modest pay increases in the NMFA were swallowed up by the galloping inflation touched off by the Vietnam War – causing quite a bit of dissention at the truck terminals.

Also, the steelhaulers were very dissatisfied by the kind of representation they were getting from the IBT. These drivers were owner operators who owned their own trucks and flatbed chassis, and who contracted with the steel hauling carriers on a per load basis (with the mileage rates set by Teamster contract).

They had special issues related to the fees they got for the rental of their trucks, plus the matter of unpaid waiting time at the steel mills.

The union, which had always treated them as stepchildren, ignored them.

Plus the UPS workers in Teamsters local 804 in New York City had issues – they were under a lot of pressure to allow unlimited part timers, as was permitted in the national UPS agreement, and UPS was even routing work out of New Jersey (where Teamsters local 177 worked under that inferior pact) to evade the higher New York City labor costs.

Hoffa was able to keep a lid on these issues – and even to negotiate a new 1967-1970 NMFA with the same inadequate economic package as the first NMFA – because of the illusions that most teamsters still had in him.

But in January 1967 Hoffa’s appeals came to an end, and he was ordered to report to the United States Prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania to do his time.

Hoffa appointed International Vice President Frank “Fitz” Fitzsimmons as his temporary replacement as IBT general president.

Fitz, a former Detroit city bus driver who’d been a Hoffa aide since the late 1940’s, was widely believed by many Teamsters Union leaders to be a really dumb guy and an absolute yes man to Hoffa.

Hoffa himself had that view of Fitz – and didn’t try and hide his contempt for the man (even after Fitz became an international vice president, Hoffa would still send him out to the store to get coffee for the general executive board meetings – and he would frequently berate Fitz in front of the other VP’s if Fitz didn’t make his coffee just right!)

That’s exactly why he appointed Fitz as his acting president.

Hoffa felt that Fitz would follow orders cause he was too stupid to make his own policy decisions.

Jimmy Hoffa was totally wrong about his one-time aide.

Fitz didn’t have Hoffa’s flair for public relations, or his ability to make teamsters think he cared about their needs (while selling out their interests behind their backs) or his workaholism (Fitz was strictly a 9 to 5 guy who took every day of his vacation time and spent his weekends and holidays playing golf).

Nor did Fitz bother to conceal his personal wealth from the members, as Hoffa always had.

He made no effort to hide his mansion in the Detroit suburbs – his other mansion in the Washington DC suburbs – or his luxury condo at the La Costa Country Club in Palm Springs – or the union supplied chauffeured Cadillac limousine he used in DC – or the Cadillac limo he had in Detroit – or the Cadillac he had in California – or the union supplied Gulfstream jet he used to commute between his three luxurious homes.

But he was as committed to labor peace with the trucking companies at any price as Hoffa was – even if he wasn’t as good at making truck drivers think that those deals were in their interests when they in fact were not.

Fitz was also a consensus builder – he avoided Hoffa’s micromanagement of freight labor relations, and much preferred to leave the day to day details of those special deals with the trucking companies to local Teamster officers on the scene.

The Genovese family and the Chicago Outfit liked Fitz’s low key decentralized style, and decided that maybe they were better off with him than with Hoffa.

Fitzsimmons, feeling the political heat from the increasingly militant freight barns, had to be a whole lot more liberal than Hoffa – in particular, Fitz had to at least go through the motions of dealing with the concerns of African American Teamsters.

He had seen the July 1967 Detroit uprising up close and personal (Joint Council # 43’s offices were right in the middle of the East Side, the largest African American neighborhood in Detroit at that time – and the fires had burned right outside of the union hall) and he knew that the IBT couldn’t keep on just ignoring the concerns of it’s Black members.

When Dr Martin Luther King was killed the next year, Fitzsimmons and United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther were the only White union officers who even bothered to come to the funeral.

Fitz, who shared Reuther’s opposition to the Vietnam War, (which had led to the UAW’s disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO) formed an independent labor federation between the UAW and the IBT, the Alliance for Labor Action, and launched a joint UAW/IBT organizing drive among African American workers in Atlanta.

None of this stuff was cleared with Hoffa – but it really didn’t matter, because Fitz was the general president (his temporary appointment was confirmed by an IBT international convention) and Hoffa was just some guy in a jail cell.

But Fitz had other problems – like the wildcat strikes that were sweeping the auto plants – especially in his home city of Detroit – and were giving radical ideas to blue collar workers all over the country.

Three day strikes over grievances were increasingly breaking out in the truck terminals – and it was harder and harder for Teamster business agents to get the trucks rolling again.

The militant owner operator steelhaulers actually forced the IBT to call an official national strike (while simultaneously setting up their own parallel union, FASH, the Federation of American Steel Haulers, and making serious noises about pulling out of the IBT)

Fitz went oldschool on the steelhaulers – FASH leaders in Youngstown, Ohio, Gary, Indiana, Cleveland and Detroit had their homes firebombed by mysterious person or persons unknown – but it didn’t stop the movement.

Things came to a head in 1970.

There had been a massive upsurge in wildcat strike activity in all the blue collar unions – and the United Auto Workers, International Union of Electrical Workers and United Mine Workers of America had been forced to call official strikes that their leaders had not wanted to wage because of the turmoil on the ground.

The militancy had spread to public employees – with New York City letter carriers, mail handlers and postal clerks forcing the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers to call the first federal workers strike in US history.

Fitz was negotiating his first NMFA that year – the April 1970-March 1973 contract – and he was under a lot of pressure from his members to get them big pay raises to keep up with rampant inflation.

Problem was, the Motor Freight Carriers Association – feeling pressure from the big corporations who’s goods they hauled, wanted him to keep labor costs down.

Fitz gave the MFCA what they wanted at the table – but he was not able to sell it to the truckers.

The leaders of Joint Council # 25, Teamsters local 705 and the independent Chicago Truck Drivers Union, who had a separate agreement patterned on the NMFA, were forced by their angry members to call a strike.

Unlike other IBT officers, the Chicago union leaders had to take full personal responsibility for their separate pact (in other words, they couldn’t pass the buck and blame Fitz if the members didn’t like it).

They were not prepared to put their necks on the block like that, so they called a walkout.

Since every major 48 states common carrier had routes that passed through Chicago, this touched off a national strike.

Fitz and the other IBT officers didn’t call it – it spontaneously broke out.

Embarrassingly enough for Fitz, his home union, Detroit local 299 (which he was – at least on paper - still the principal officer of), was a center of the wildcat strike action.

But it soon spread – promoted by diverse teamsters for diverse reasons - militant shop stewards in the freight barns who wanted a fair deal for their guys, Jimmy Hoffa supporters angered at Fitz for not leaning on President Nixon to get Hoffa pardoned, communists and Trotskyists who had taken trucking jobs to spread anti Vietnam War militancy among truckers, and regular truck drivers who, without the Hoffa mystique blinding them, (and in part because their illusions in Hoffa made them hate Fitzsimmons) finally saw they were being sold out.

Ohio was the epicenter of the revolt – truckers all over the state rose up against their companies – and against William and Jackie Presser, the father and son labor racketeer team who dominated the Ohio Conference of Teamsters and every major Teamster local in Northern Ohio.

The Ohio truckers launched what amounted to a rolling insurrection – riding up and down the highways of that state, often getting into running gun battles with the Ohio Highway Patrol.

The Pressers – and their cosa nostra buddies from Cleveland and Youngstown – were completely unable to break the strike, despite their best efforts.

Governor Rhodes actually had to call out the Ohio National Guard to deal with the armed wildcatting Teamsters.

Incidentally, the Ohio National Guard soldiers who were deployed at Kent State University to stop students from protesting against the invasion of Cambodia – the troops who fired on those students on May 4, 1970, killing 4 and wounding 15 - had also been on the anti truckers strike detail for most of the previous month.

That’s why they had loaded M-14 rifles.

And that’s why they were so comfortable with firing live rounds at White American civilians (because that’s what they’d been doing for the previous few weeks).

The strike spread as far east as New York City and as far west as Los Angeles – truckers there even shut down the seaport, the nation’s second largest.

At peak, 200,000 freight teamsters were involved in the work stoppage.

This was the biggest wildcat strike in American history.

The Motor Freight Carriers Association and it’s member carriers were outraged!

The Fortune 500 companies who’s products they delivered were screaming blue bloody murder – and they had to stand there looking stupid, because they couldn’t live up to their service guarantees to their clients.

Hoffa had sworn up and down to MFCA in 1964 that there would never ever be a national Teamsters freight strike.

And yet, now they faced….a national Teamsters freight strike.

And none of those tough guy Teamsters could get the trucks rolling again – not Fitz, not the Pressers, not the Provenzanos in New Jersey, not Gunner Hansen on the Los Angeles waterfront, not Joseph “Joe T” Trerotola, “Matty the Horse” and all the other thugs in New York – none of these slick talking gangsters were able to live up to their promises to the carriers!

Eventually, the strike fizzled out, and for only the cost of a few minor economic concessions the NMFA and it’s pattern agreements were finally ratified.

But the trucking companies never forgot April 1970.

Nor did they ever forgive – their drivers, or the IBT!

After the truckers returned to work, there was a massive wave of retaliatory firings across the country – most of the leaders of the 1970 wildcat lost their jobs.

Jobs were plentiful then, so they were quickly able to get work elsewhere, but the message was sent – especially when the IBT let the militants get fired (even the ones who were official Teamsters Union shop stewards – who were explicitly protected from firing by Article 4 and Article 21 of the NMFA)!

This was the beginning of the end for the dissident movement in the Teamsters – Fitz was raising the price of dissent to a fee too high for most truckers to pay.

Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen consumers rights group and a small Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists (later to be renamed “Solidarity”) came in and picked up the remnants of that movement.

Nader had some of his young activists set up a highway safety group called the Professional Drivers Council (which, despite it’s name was NOT run by actual truckers – it was strictly controlled by college-educated professional activists).

The International Socialists had sent a number of their college student members into the trucking industry to carry out political agitation on the job a few years earlier, during the waning days of the 1960’s.

One of those activists, University of California at Berkeley physics major turned Cleveland Teamsters local 405 Yellow Freight truck driver Kenneth Paff, founded a group called Teamsters for a Decent Contract (later to be renamed Teamsters for a Democratic Union).

Meanwhile, Fitz tried to placate Hoffa supporters by lobbying President Nixon and the US Bureau of Prisons to free Hoffa.

The feds and Fitz agreed – but with a catch.

Hoffa could come home but would be banned from union activism until 1980.

Hoffa agreed to that deal while sitting in his cold dank cell in the United States Prison at Lewisburg – but changed his mind when he got home to Detroit.

Of course, by then, it was too late – he’d signed the federal conditional release papers (which he – and his lawyers – had read beforehand) and that was that.

Hoffa got a paralegal job at his son Jim Hoffa’s labor law firm in Detroit (a cover for his continued labor activism, which was a conditional release violation).

Fitz kept his job as president of the second largest union in the United States – 2.3 million members (only the 4 million member National Education Association was bigger than the IBT)

The union was expanding – in typical Teamsters fashion.

The IBT absorbed the Brewery Workers International Union, an AFL-CIO affiliate who’s jurisdiction overlapped with the Teamsters; BWIU members brewed the beer while Teamsters drove the beer delivery trucks.

The BWIU was on the decline – between job loss from new beer brewing technology to competition driving many small New York City, Milwaukee and St Louis beer companies out of business to Coors Beer’s strikebreaking at their flagship brewery in Golden, Colorado, the Brewery Workers Union was in trouble and needed to be bailed out.

Fitzsimmons launched a North America-wide boycott of Coors Beer that would last until 1988 – but that token show of militancy was about all the Teamsters Union did for the brewery workers

Out West, the Teamsters Union reverted to old school Dave Beck-style goon squad thuggery in the lettuce fields.

The United Farm Workers of America, a small AFL-CIO union that had grown out of the Mexican American civil rights movement of the 1960’s, had finally gotten a union contract in the grape and lettuce fields of California after a 6 year long strike.

That agreement expired in 1973 – and as the clock ticked towards the expiration date, Fitz approached the Associated Farmers (the main agribusiness employers association in the state) and offered the IBT as a pro business alternative to the UFW.

The Associated Farmers jumped at the chance to get a pro company union.

Fitz hastily chartered agricultural locals in the San Joaquin valley of California - Dave Beck-style locals that were in trusteeship from the day they were chartered and were run by Fitz’s hand picked flunkies.

A Teamsters official actually told reporters that this was because Mexicans weren’t intelligent enough to run their own unions – so they needed White officers to run their unions for them!

It was all downhill from there.

Fitz approached the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to hire “union organizers” – and the IBT hired dozens of gangbangers from that notoriously violent motorcycle gang to staff those undemocratic trusteed locals.

Since the Hells Angels was – and is – an all White gang, many of who’s members wore Nazi or Confederate insignia on their clothing (or had swastika, Iron Cross or Confederate flag tattoos on their bodies) the racist message to the Latino workers was crystal clear.

This blatant gangster unionism was all done with astonishing openness – many of the Hells Angels “organizer” thugs openly wore their gang colors (sleeveless leather motorcycle vests with the name of the Hells Angels chapter they belonged to and the Hells Angels logo sewn on the back) when they were in the field “organizing” for the Teamsters Union!

Much of said “organizing” consisted of bullying UFW members into signing IBT authorization cards – usually in the fields on company time in full view of the ranchers and their foremen.

Of course, the same ranchers and foremen would instantly call the lawyers and file an unfair labor practices complaint with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board if the UFW’s organizers were to engage in pro union solicitation in the fields!

Ironic – considering that the typical UFW organizer was either an ex farmworker or a liberal college student or a Catholic priest or a left wing activist – while the IBT’s so called “union organizers” were gangbangers with long criminal records, many of whom had never done an honest day’s work in life.

The gangbangers also attacked UFW picketlines, and roamed around the farming towns of California harassing and beating UFW supporters.

Oddly, this open thuggery was pretty much invisible to the California Highway Patrol and to the local sheriff’s departments of the farm belt counties - even when the beatings happened in broad daylight in the middle of town.

In short, it was Al Capone’s Chicago-style baseball bat unionism brought to the Central California high desert.

The UFW won the public relations battle, easily.

Which wasn’t that hard – many liberal and leftist Hollywood actors were vocal UFW supporters, and their high profiles helped the union get good press.

And, of course, the spectacle of non violent Gandhian labor activists being beaten by Hells Angels thugs was pretty damned clear – it would be difficult for anybody with an ounce of humanity to not feel instant sympathy for the beleaguered UFW and to hate the thuggish Teamsters Union with a passion.

But, the IBT won the labor relations war.

The Associated Farmers got the ALRB to recognize the fraudulently collected Teamsters Union petitions, and signed sweetheart contracts with the IBT that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

And the UFW’s membership shrank from 100,000 after the 1970 contract to less than 5,000 after 1973.

Fitzsimmons was also desperately trying to prove a point – he wanted to show the bosses that he would do ANYTHING for them, no matter how low or vile.

His real audience wasn’t the ranchers of California – but the Motor Freight Carriers Association and their member companies.

In a way, the Teamsters Union was doing high profile penance for the “sin” of not breaking the 1970 wildcat strike!

As the Teamsters Union sank to it’s lower depths of gangster unionism in the fields of California, it shrank away from it’s heights of activist unionism in the inner city ghettoes of Georgia.

The Alliance for Labor Action, the IBT’s labor federation with the United Auto Workers, had finally fallen apart.

The minifederation’s organizing drive among African American workers in Atlanta collapsed – mainly because the IBT and UAW’s organizing staffs narrow legalistic NLRB-style organizing techniques were inadequate to the task of unionizing several thousand workers at multiple employers.

Only an area-wide simultaneous strike at all of those companies would have been able to organize those workers.

The White dominated conservative leaderships of Atlanta Teamsters local 728 and United Auto Workers Region 5 were not prepared to do that.

Especially if such a strike would lead to several thousand militant African American workers coming into their unions and, due to the militant circumstances of their unionization, wanting to fully participate in the life of the union.

That would pose a special danger – since strikes always result in new leaders coming from the ranks, and those new leaders would almost certainly challenge the good old boys for leadership in those unions.

Not to mention the racial factor – Teamsters local 728 and the UAW Region 5 locals in Atlanta were very much White dominated, and had only desegregated recently and reluctantly (basically because the Civil Rights Act made it a federal crime for them to stay jim crow unions).

They didn’t want a bunch of Blacks coming to their union meetings – and maybe even attending union picnics and social events!

The good ole boys were even more horrified at the thought that some of those African Americans might run for union office – and possibly even win!

These bigots would rather have Atlanta stay non union if the price of organizing the city was to have African American led multiracial unions.

So the local UAW and IBT officers dragged their feet – filed as few NLRB elections as possible and even those were pursued as nonaggressively as possible.

As a result, very few workers were organized, despite the thousands who had initially rallied to the campaign.