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After the election of James P. Hoffa to the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), one could almost hear the
groans coming from Berkeley, Madison, and the Upper West Side. After such stunning, desperately desired victories as Ron Carey's election in 1991 and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's rise to power in 1995, it was not
surprising that the ascendancy of the retrograde "Junior" would cause such anguish among left-wing intellectuals. After all, it appeared for a while that they had finally, after so many years out in the cold, found a
home in the House of Labor. The exuberance demonstrated in op-ed articles, books, and at the various labor teach-ins made it seem that the left's dream of influencing the contemporary official labor movement had finally
come true. Now, with Carey banished, Sweeney's key supporters in the AFL-CIO facing possible indictments, and Junior holding a powerful position on the Executive Council, the "progressives" are once again on the
defensive, while the predictions for labor's future have grown considerably darker.Forecasts for the Teamsters are especially bleak. Commentators from The New York Times to The Socialist Worker are virtually
unanimous in assuming that the Teamsters will become less democratic and that the dramatic militancy demonstrated by Carey against United Parcel Service (UPS) will be only a memory under Junior's leadership. Many are
convinced that the fulfillment of Hoffa's pledge to decentralize power will guarantee a return to the union's days of slack organizing and sweetheart contracts. According to the pseudonymous Jim Larkin, writing in The
Nation, "Taking a hands-off approach to the affairs of 541 local unions will satisfy his core constituency—the officialdom—but only at the expense of the Teamsters' ability to win fights with big employers."1 Without an
International controlled by the members, the argument goes, local officials will be able to confine the class struggle to golf matches with employers. Conversely, the success of the 1997 UPS strike has often been
credited to the allegedly democratic character of the Carey regime. Yet a closer look at Carey's tenure and more ancient Teamster history reveal that the militancy in the UPS strike and during the union's "golden years"
in the 1930s and 1940s was connected less with formal democracy than with the compelling power of competition.2 It is ironic, as any veteran Teamster will tell you, that such aggressiveness of the union as during the
UPS strike had not been seen since the days of Carey's predecessor and Junior's father, Jimmy Hoffa, a man not known for his democratic sensibilities. The senior Hoffa's militancy and the devotion of the union's
membership he gained from it were especially notable in his early years as a Teamster organizer in Detroit. The combined membership of the two sister locals that Hoffa led, Locals 299 and 337, rose from fewer than 1,000
in 1937 to more than 20,000 in 1950, with most of the expansion occurring before and after world War II.3 This impressive amount of organizing would not have been possible without equally impressive contracts. Hoffa's
locals increased their members' wages from subsistence levels in the 1930s to middle-class levels in the 1950s; the workers also won dramatically reduced hours, improved working conditions, and the first pensions in the
industry. What made Jimmy Hoffa and Ron Carey so militant? Many assume that for Carey, the cause was his background as an independent, combative leader of Local 804 in Queens. In the case of Jimmy Hoffa, none of the
many journalists, government investigators, or economists who have studied his life has offered an explanation for his militancy. Thus a central mystery in the legacy of Hoffa has remained: why would the leader of a
thoroughly undemocratic union bother to mount ambitious organizing drives or force concessions from employers? Previously unexplored historical evidence demonstrates that the senior Hoffa's legendary militancy was
driven by unrelenting competition from rival unions. More importantly for current Teamsters, history also indicates that whether the junior Hoffa exhibits his father's aggressive tendencies will be determined not by his
character or by his politics but by his opponents. Indeed, the ouster of the reform leadership might be a blessing for those Teamster members who joined the union for material gain, not to take it over.
Jungle Unionism In 1935 Jimmy Hoffa was hired as a business agent by the struggling, rough-and-tumble Local 299 in Detroit. At the time the local had only 400 members in good standing and even fewer dollars in its
treasury.4 Constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and desperate to add dues-paying members, 299's organizers operated in a world that was largely unaffected by the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
Rather than devoting their time to signing up workers and petitioning for elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they preferred a far more effective, two-step organizing strategy. Working mostly
within the local cartage and automobile transport industries, 299's business agents approached the owner of a firm and told him that if he did not enroll his employees with the union, his trucks would be bombed. Then,
if the employer refused to capitulate, they bombed his trucks. In the mid-1930s the local gained a reputation as the most violent, lawless union in an unusually violent, lawless city.5 By 1938, Local 299 had bombed
and intimidated its way into relative stability, with a membership of more than 2,000 in carhauling and local cartage, and a newly established sister local, local 337, to handle its growing warehouse and grocery
divisions. With most of the cartage firms organized, Local 299 was able to win the first industry-wide contract for Detroit's intracity drivers and helpers by threatening a general trucking strike that would have
paralyzed the city's commercial districts just before Christmas.6 As soon as the Detroit locals established themselves, however, they faced threats to their existence from competing unions. While the violence between
employers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the great automobile organizing drives of the late 1930s and early 1940s is rightly legendary, during this period the Detroit Teamsters were engaged in some of the
bloodiest wars in American labor history, not with employers, but with rival unions. In 1938, the long-standing jurisdictional conflict between the Teamsters and the United Brewery Workers (UBW) reached Detroit, as both
unions battled for control over the city's 800 beer truck drivers. For nearly a year, the two unions went at it in the streets with baseball bats and blackjacks. Squads of goons were imported from other cities, and the
president of Local 337, Bert Brennan, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by gunmen hired by the Brewery Workers.7 Unable to conquer the UBW in the city's breweries, the Teamsters attacked their rival's
secondary jurisdiction in the soft-drink industry. By 1940, Local 337 had organized the bulk of the soft-drink bottling plants in Detroit and was prepared to use its new base as leverage in the breweries. The Brewery
Workers responded with a full-scale assault. Armed pickets surrounded the largest Teamster-organized bottling plant and attacked IBT drivers in the streets. The war ended in a draw with the unions sharing jurisdiction
over beverage drivers, but battles continued to erupt until the two international unions merged in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the competition forced 337 to expand its organizing and win strong contracts in the beverage
industry. By the 1950s the Detroit Teamsters held a virtual monopoly in both the breweries and the soft-drink plants.8 A more sustained and far-reaching challenge to the Teamsters came in 1939, when several unions of
the Congress of Industrial Organizations began their attempts to take control over Teamster domain in several Detroit industries. That year the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Employees of the CIO picketed a
Detroit dairy that had been recently organized by the Teamsters, setting off a decade-long war between the two unions. The Retail Worker organizers were beaten off by a seventy-man Teamster army led by Hoffa, but they
continued their drive on Teamster jurisdictions through the 1940s.9 During the summer and fall of 1941, violence between unions reached unprecedented levels in the streets of Detroit. At the center of that violence
were Teamster Locals 299 and 337, which by that time were under the de facto leadership of the twenty-eight-year-old Jimmy Hoffa. Two years earlier, John L. Lewis of the CIO declared war on the American Federation of
Labor when he announced that the newly established United Construction Workers Organizing Committee (UCWOC) would attack the older labor federation at the very heart of its strength, in the building trades.10 Lewis and
his brother Denny, who was appointed director of the UCWOC, set their sights on the Teamsters, whose strategic position within the building trades made them the key to an industry-wide organizing drive. The first
great success for the UCWOC was in Minneapolis, where in 1941 the famous Trotskyite-led Local 544 disaffiliated with the Teamsters and joined the construction workers' union. Emboldened by the CIO's victory in
Minneapolis, in June 1941, Denny Lewis issued a direct threat to the Teamsters. At a CIO conference in Chicago, he announced that the United Construction Workers would launch "a streamlined CIO organizing campaign among
the motor transport and allied workers of the entire midwest area" to bring them "into a modern, progressive union."11 Despite the rhetoric, the CIO knew that workers really wanted unions that could win high wages at a
low price. The UCWOC set its dues at $1.50 a month, well below the average charged by the Teamsters, and did away with initiation fees altogether.12 The leaders of the Detroit Teamsters, all of them grade-school or
high-school dropouts, didn't know or care about the Lewis brothers' promises to introduce modernism and progressivism into the trucking industry. What they did know was that a competitor was coming to town to take away
their members. Hoffa and his comrades were ready. They succeeded in getting the normally tight-fisted president of the international, Dan Tobin, to contribute $1,300 a month to the Detroit locals' war chest.13 More
importantly, the executive board of the UAW declined to give the CIO raiders full endorsement or financial assistance for fear of jeopardizing the auto union's valuable relationship of mutual support with the Detroit
Teamsters.14 In September, busloads of UCWOC "organizers," many of whom were actually petty criminals hired by the CIO for the raid, arrived in Detroit from Minneapolis. They first went after automobile transport
drivers, the heart of Local 299's membership. Every day for two months, Hoffa and his men cruised the streets on the lookout for CIO poachers. When they saw one talking to a Teamster carhauler, they attacked with
spectacular ferocity. Baseball bats, blackjacks, and knives were their favorite weapons, but for the first time guns were also used by the Teamsters.15 The UCWOC's organizers and musclemen did not back down. In
September and October, Detroit's downtown streets were frequently filled with car chases, shoot-outs, and massive brawls. A bloody, Hoffa-led invasion of the UCWOC headquarters slowed the CIO raiders, but the turning
point came when Hoffa announced that he was negotiating with the carhaul companies on a new wage scale. When Hoffa succeeded in raising wages, previously disaffected carhaul drivers returned to the Teamsters.16
Defeated in carhauling, UCWOC turned to intercity ("over-the-road") drivers in Michigan and neighboring states. The timing was fortuitous for Hoffa, who had risen to become one of the lead negotiators for the Teamsters'
Central States Drivers Council (CSDC). The CSDC was then bargaining with a committee representing 6,000 intercity trucking firms in twelve Midwestern states over renewing a contract that would expire in November.
Knowing that a weak contract would throw open the door to the UCWOC, the drivers' council, led by Hoffa, demanded substantial wage increases in a contract that had already moved truckers from the lowest level of
industrial workers into the middle class. When the employers refused to back down, Teamster locals in Michigan and the rest of the Midwestern states prepared their members for a strike. Hoffa announced that if the
employers refused to accept the union's revision of the wage scale, "no freight will move over the highways." Fearing that such a walkout would cripple defense production, Tobin, who was Franklin Roosevelt's closest
friend in the labor movement, called off the strike and submitted the dispute to the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB). The IBT president, who was keenly aware that wage increases were necessary to avoid losing
the heart of the union's membership to the CIO, was no doubt banking that his pull with the Roosevelt administration would win a favorable settlement from the mediation board. Tobin's wishes were met, as the NDMB
awarded over-the-road drivers a 13 percent wage increase, which was less than Hoffa's negotiating team had demanded but enough to keep the drivers from switching unions. Shortly thereafter the UCWOC closed its
headquarters in Detroit, and by the summer of 1942 it was virtually extinct.17 While the war with the UCWOC was raging, the Teamsters fought battles for control of their jurisdictions on several other fronts.
Undaunted by the Teamsters' violent defensive tactics, the Retail Workers had made significant progress in organizing retail and food industry clerks, truck drivers, and warehousemen between 1939 and 1941. Worst of all
for the Teamsters, in 1941 the Retail Workers reeled off a string of impressive contracts with department stores and warehouses in the city.18 An official for the Teamsters joint council in Detroit wrote to
International president Dan Tobin that the Detroit locals were having difficulty keeping their members from fleeing to the CIO.19 In an act of desperation, twenty Teamsters ambushed and stomped the regional director of
the Retail Workers, putting him in the hospital with a concussion.20 Hoffa then chose a more effective response to the Retail Workers. In August he and Bert Brennan launched a counter-campaign against their rival in
department stores and warehouses. Teamster business agents descended on CIO shops and attempted to convince the workers that better contracts would be won by the IBT. The Retail Workers held on to most of their members,
but the Teamster organizing campaign extended the IBT deeper into the strategically vital retailing and warehousing industries and expanded Local 337's membership.21 From the beginning of the rivalry between the CIO
and the Teamsters, in 1936, when the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union began organizing warehouses on the west coast, to the autumn of 1941, the IBT's membership grew from 172,204 to 544,247, making
it the fastest-growing union in the United States. This was no coincidence. Even Tobin, writing in the October 1941 issue of the union's magazine, acknowledged that the tremendous expansion of the IBT "was due to the
fact that the CIO decided to spend their money in an endeavor to raid the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, where in many instances, especially in Detroit, they submitted wage contracts far below the contracts
under which our men were working."22 The bloody history of these wars between rival unions makes for riveting storytelling, but it also contains significant points about both the Detroit Teamsters and the nature of
the labor movement. The intensity of these jurisdictional fights indicates that they were vitally important to the participants, not only for the men with the baseball bats but for the unions that employed them. The
leaders of the Detroit Teamsters in the 1930s and 1940s were fighting a war for the existence of their union and for their livelihood. Faced with competition from fellow AFL unions like the Brewery Workers, and from CIO
unions who received substantial support from their internationals, the still-vulnerable Detroit Teamsters could not afford to be the complacent business unionists they later came to epitomize. They were forced to
respond to the competition, at first with desperate acts of terrorism, but later more effectively through voracious organizing and aggressive dealings with employers. In fact, in 1944 one of the leaders of the Detroit
Teamsters anonymously complained to A. H. Raskin, then a War Production Board inspector and later the dean of American labor journalism, that when the union honored the no-strike pledge it suffered mass desertions to
the Retail Workers.23 Even under the legal and nationalistic restraints of war mobilization, Hoffa and the Detroit Teamsters continued organizing within their traditional field and expanded into new industries, often
provoking outrage among employers, editorial writers, and government officials.24 By the late 1940s, construction workers, taxi drivers, and even coat-check girls, florists, undertakers, and farmers were members of
Locals 299 or 337. The contracts the Teamsters won, especially in warehousing, local cartage, and over-the-road freight hauling, set national standards for wages and hours.25 All this was done without a single real
election for the officers of the locals.26 For government investigators and liberal journalists, Hoffa came to represent dictatorship, corruption, and violence. For Teamster members who enjoyed their new homes and
cars, Hoffa's name meant militancy. "Restore Teamster Power!" Ron Carey may not have lived in as perilous a world as the Detroit of the 1930s and 1940s, but his term as General President of the IBT hung by a
thread from the start. Carey won the election in 1991 with fewer than half the votes cast by the membership and certainly would have lost if the old guard hadn't split its vote by running two candidates against him.
Once in office, Carey faced intense pressure from every direction. To maintain the support of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which was crucial for his election, he had to demonstrate uncompromising militancy,
not only against the old guard but against employers as well. Moreover, he had to satisfy the federal overseers, who insisted that Carey expel mobbed-up members and put into receivership locals they deemed corrupt.
Internal Justice Department memoranda that came to light during the investigation of the 1996 election scandal showed that federal overseers were reluctant to investigate charges of corruption against Carey as long as
he was willing to follow their instructions. In 1994, Frederick Lacey, chairman of the Independent Review Board, wrote to investigator Thomas Puccio, "I told you ... what would happen if you brought Carey down, in
that there were 'old guard' teamsters throughout the country that were hoping that Carey would be eliminated as a candidate in 1996, so that the clock could be turned back to what it was when I first came on the scene
as Independent Administrator."27 Most importantly, the old guard kept Carey's feet to the fire throughout his presidency. Beginning shortly before the national contract with UPS expired in the summer of 1993, the old
guard launched a vigorous public relations campaign against Carey and the IBT administration, charging the international with fiscal irresponsibility, revealing that Carey had owned a large amount of UPS stock, and
alleging that the Teamster president had long-standing ties to Mafia bosses in New York.28 Carey felt enough pressure to poll the membership on its willingness to strike, but his opponents had not generated enough heat
to force him to call a walkout, despite the poll's showing that 94 percent of the Teamsters who worked at UPS were willing to shut down the company.29 Even a pledge by the AFL-CIO to loan the union $80 million for
strike benefits wasn't enough to persuade Carey to use the union's most powerful weapon against the company.30 This was despite the fact that the primary issue in the 1993 contract campaign was the large number of
low-paid, part-time workers, just as it was when Carey did use the strike weapon four years later. By the time the National Master Freight Contract negotiations began in December of 1993, the old guard had upped the
ante considerably. While Carey and his negotiating team opened talks with Trucking Management Inc. over renewal of the national contract that had been instituted by Jimmy Hoffa in 1964, Hoffa's son was announcing to the
media that he intended to challenge Carey in the 1996 election for the IBT presidency.31 In the winter of 1994, as the March expiration date for the freight contract approached, Carey faced three formidable challenges
to his leadership. At the AFL-CIO convention in February, Hoffa openly campaigned among union leaders, asking for their support in his bid for the Teamster presidency.32 Meanwhile, the Independent Review Board was
conducting an investigation of the evidence the old guard had provided, which indicated ties between Carey's home local in Queens and the Lucchese crime family. Then in March, just before the expiration of the freight
agreement, the membership voted down Carey's proposal for a dues increase by a ratio of three to one.33 Confronted by the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa, at risk of being thrown out of office by the union's federal overseer, and
facing evidence that his support among the rank and file was thin at best, Carey's administration was in a crisis by the time the freight contract expired on March 31. Accepting another concessionary contract without
even a show of strength would have ensured defeat in the 1996 election. So, Carey called on 75,000 freight drivers to strike, causing the union's first national walkout in fifteen years. After twenty-four days, the
IBT and the employers' representatives signed an agreement that included significant pension and health care improvements and reduced the number of part-time workers in the industry, but allowed the companies to more
than double the amount of freight they moved by rail. Carey's opponents seized on the concession as further evidence that his leadership was ineffective. Leaders of the union's 400 freight locals, which were
traditionally Hoffa strongholds, refused to recommend the contract to the membership.34 Still embattled and with no major contracts to negotiate, Carey limped through 1995 watching his opponents gather their forces
around Hoffa Junior. As Hoffa's election campaign began in earnest in 1996, it became clear that Carey's opponents had the numbers and the organization to prevail in the contest. At the IBT's convention in July,
Hoffa forces were so powerful that Carey was forced to resort to authoritarian parliamentary tactics to thwart his opposition's attempts to strip him of power through constitutional amendments. Despite their inability
to overcome Carey's tactics, Hoffa delegates were able to use the convention as a national platform to present their candidate's irresistible slogan: "Restore Teamster Power."35 That slogan, along with Hoffa's charges
that Carey had caved in to both UPS and the freight association, proved to be highly effective among the membership. The slogan spread to locals across the country, appearing on T-shirts, street signs, and bumper
stickers. It became clear that the message and the power of the Hoffa name tapped into a widespread desire among the rank and file for a leadership that would fight the employers. The slogan's appeal also showed that
despite the freight strike, Carey had not satisfied that desire. Even The New York Times, in an editorial endorsing Carey, acknowledged that he had "yet to prove he can turn the teamsters' economic fortunes around by
organizing new members and negotiating rich contracts."36 Despite Hoffa's almost total lack of union experience and the national media's mocking coverage of Junior's campaign, Carey managed to poll only 16,000 more
votes than his opponent out of nearly half a million ballots cast. Without the $700,000 in embezzled union funds that were used for the Carey campaign's direct mailings, it is entirely plausible to assume that Hoffa
would have won in 1996. Fortunately for UPS workers, however, the embezzlement scheme and the tenacity of the old guard enabled them to fight for the impressive contract they won in the summer of 1997. Immediately
after the election, Hoffa's chief advisors, Richard Leebove and George Geller, began investigating the Carey campaign's finances. By March of 1997 they had presented the federal overseer with sufficient evidence to
prove that the Carey campaign had embezzled union money.37 Between March and the expiration of the UPS contract in July, Carey was within inches of losing the presidency, and he survived during that period only because
the overseer, Barbara Zack Quindel, hoped that a victory over UPS would help Carey in the re-election she would have to mandate. With his chief campaign aide indicted and the operative responsible for laundering the
funds furnishing investigators with information on the scheme, Carey knew that his victory in the 1996 election would be overturned and that his only chance would be to survive long enough to run in the re-election; and
if he was to make it to the re-election, he would need to have something to sell to the membership. Having forgone the opportunity to strike UPS in 1993, Carey could not afford that luxury in 1997. Creating a dramatic
confrontation with the company was the only chance he had to stay in power. Once he called the strike, the embattled union president revealed what it meant to him. The night the walkout started, in an interview on "The
Newshour with Jim Lehrer," Carey placed the blame on his enemy, not UPS. "Jimmy Hoffa introduced the concept of part-timers," Carey said, in response to Elizabeth Farnsworth's first question about why the issue was so
important. The man who allegedly "permitted the company" to institute part-time jobs, who was now a specter threatening to take away his power, forced Carey to call the strike.38 A significant but often overlooked
fact is that the Teamsters' negotiating team accepted a five-year contract rather than a four-year deal, which had been standard with UPS since the company was first organized.39 Observers who did mention this called it
a concession by the union. Carey, though, must have been more than happy to accept a five-year contract, knowing that the next union election would take place one year before, not after, the expiration date, thus saving
him from the prospect of having to wage another risky campaign against UPS to win re-election.40 Toward a New Rank-and-File Strategy With competition compelling militancy for both the Detroit Teamsters in the
1930s and 1940s and for Carey in the 1990s, one might wonder about the value of democracy in a union. Certainly it had nothing to do with the rich contracts won by Hoffa, but did it lead to the UPS contract of 1997?
Supporters of TDU's strategy of rank-and-file control have argued that the contract campaign leading up to the strike was possible only because of the new democratic culture of the union. But the "education and
agitation" of the UPS rank and file, conceived and overseen by staffers in Washington, was a top-down operation from the beginning. The international mailed bargaining updates and educational videos to stewards and
conducted a series of workshops that organized union officers and members into an effective fighting force.41 This preparatory organization, which certainly was necessary to win the strike, was produced by a determined
central leadership, not democracy. This is not to say that the members were not important in bringing about the strike. To the contrary, the strike happened because Carey's objectives coincided with the desires of a
hungry rank and file. Indeed, the plan to drop the hammer on UPS was able to be carried out only because the members were ready for a fight, regardless of the international's attempts to make them ready. The evidence
presented here indicates that even an "empty suit" like Junior, facing a restive membership and unrelenting opposition, would have had no choice but to take on UPS with the full force of the union's power. The formal
democracy that existed in the union might have facilitated that opposition, but before democracy came to the Teamsters, TDU had grown in size and influence to the point where it could succeed in forcing union leaders to
fight for better contracts. The dissident group waged several successful anti-concessionary campaigns in the 1980s, and in 1988, following a TDU anti-contract campaign, the union's old-guard international leadership was
forced to turn down a national carhauling proposal when 72 percent of the membership rejected it in a poll.42 It seems that by the 1990s the two factions within the union were powerful enough to generate the intensity
of competition that produces contracts like the 1997 UPS settlement, with or without formal democracy. For union members who want higher wages, less work, and better conditions, the historical evidence suggests
that a strategy of perpetual opposition to the union leadership, regardless of its background or intentions, might be more effective than attempting to become the union leadership. According to this analysis, union
democracy is best viewed as an instrument of leverage with which to force the bureaucracy to perform, not as a means to install a new bureaucracy. It is evident from countless historical examples of reformers growing
increasingly conservative after taking office that a person's interests change upon the assumption of power. The primary interest of any leader, whether a self-interested careerist or a life-long revolutionary, is to
maintain power. With no effective opposition, the leader has no incentive to serve the interests of membership. If Tom Leedham and TDU had won the recent Teamsters election, the movement behind Hoffa would most likely
have faded away.43 This would have been the worst possible outcome for the union's membership, since it would have eliminated any source of opposition within the union. A TDU victory would have created a one-party
state, and such regimes are notorious for their lack of productivity. The ouster of TDU from the Marble Palace now presents an opportunity for the group and its allies. The most effective internal dissident
organization in the history of the American labor movement no longer needs to concern itself with disciplining the membership or defending corrupt officers. Now it can devote itself to its most valuable and no doubt
most popular function: making the Teamster leadership deliver the goods. Perhaps Teamsters for a Democratic Union should revert to its original name, Teamsters for a Decent Contract. After all, who joins a union in
order to manage it? |
