International Brotherhood of Teamsters

INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS. The Teamsters (IBT) are the most important transportation union in North America with 1.4 million members in package delivery, rail, local and over-the-road trucking, and warehousing. They also represent workers in food and beverage, other industries, and many public employees. The largest component of the Teamsters remains, however, the nearly 280,000 bloc of workers that the IBT represents at United Parcel Service (UPS), the largest logistics company in the world.

“The Teamsters union has been home to the most-organized and long-term presence of both mobsters and socialists in the American labor movement,” quipped former Teamster and sometime columnist Danny Katch. Interestingly, the smaller and short-lived dissident currents of the Left have had the most long-lasting impact upon the Teamsters.

Founded in 1903, organizing the “team drivers” of horse-drawn wagons of goods and beer in major metropolitan areas, the IBT made the transition to representing truck drivers during the motorization of the freight industry during and after World War I. Until World War II, the industry remained essentially local and regional business, with few national companies.

The trucking industry became subject to regulation under the New Deal’s Motor Carrier Act of 1933, which stabilized the industry. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act gave workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. In this context, members of the Communist League of America, Trotskyists later known as the Socialist Workers Party, made their mark.

During 1934, Teamsters in Minneapolis-St. Paul staged a series of strikes that effectively organized the local trucking and warehouse industry. Led by Carl Skoglund, the Dunne brothers (Vincent, Ray, and Grant), and Farrell Dobbs, the Minneapolis Trotskyists defied the opposition of Teamster president Dan Tobin, a fervent anti-communist. The Minneapolis Trotskyists parlayed their local victory into organizing drivers across the upper Midwest into the Central States Drivers Council. This regional form of organizing became the model organizing over-the- road truck drivers across the country.

Encouraged by the Tobin administration, officials of the Roosevelt administration launched a political attack on Minneapolis Trotskyists who attempted to abandon the more conservative AFL for the CIO. Trotskyists found themselves literally removed from the union, in a violent campaign of intimidation and violence led by Seattle Teamsters’ leader Dave Beck and Detroit Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa. A new leadership replaced the Trotskyists and soon afterward, in 1941, several of the Minneapolis Trotskyists were put on trial for sedition under the Smith Act and then sentenced to prison. This action ended an era of radical IBT organizing, with ripples far beyond.

If idealism had been crushed at its base, the Teamsters soon had every opportunity to thrive as a business union. In the postwar setting, with the massive boom in the freight industry and the economy at large, and aided by the creation of the federally-financed interstate highway system under New Deal regulations, the Teamsters embraced the golden opportunities. Membership swelled and with it political influence. Eager to add to their membership, the IBT was also quicker than many unions at encompassing African American members and at reaching beyond their given industry for members of practically any blue-collar workforce. Jimmy Hoffa was reported to have quipped that anyone with casters on their bed could be a Teamster member, with the benefits of representation.

At the same time, the Teamsters could also be rightly considered the most corrupt major union within the labor movement and also among most likely to use violence against their own members. Teamster officials determinedly enacted union protections for their criminal actions and for their own security in office against would-be reformers.

An especially dark side had long been present in the IBT attacks upon competing left-oriented CIO unions known for racial inclusiveness and at some places and times, their women leaders. The ILWU leadership, determined to broaden beyond its initial base in the ports, set in motion during the later 1940s an “inland march” to reach warehouse workers, including many Filipinos along the Northwest and California. Enraged at competition but also at the leftwing politics of the ILWU, Dave Beck organized the Western Conference of Teamsters, staging often violent raids upon ILWU locals. The two unions continued a vigorous competition for years, each winning and losing shares of locals.

The same dark side of Teamster also stretched into the center of the film industry, where Communists and their allies had led the talent guilds of writers and actors but also reached out for the craft unions of movie-making. Competing hard for membership across California with the CIO, the Teamsters had radiated hostility and acted to break the hold of assorted CIO union bodies, but this activity reached new public notoriety in the strike of the Hollywood studio unions during 1945-1946. Teamster thugs, allied with the gangster-infiltrated IATSE, the AFL union of the studios, smashed picket lines of the Conference of Studio Unions on behalf of the movie moguls and defeated the drive for comprehensive movie industry unionization. IATSE leaders, triumphant, went on to play a key role in the Hollywood Blacklist, and memorably in preventing the film Salt of The Earth from being shown in theaters.

Teamster activity against mostly union efforts of immigrant or “temporary” workers seeking to organize agricultural production through left-leaning unions and those supported by the Left had meanwhile grown more intense. From the 1940s, when a CIO agricultural union sought to build upon the success (and support) of the longshore locals, to the 1950s-1970s when the United Farm Workers (UFW) attempted a range of efforts to organize the embattled, mostly Mexican American workers, Teamsters had their own agendas. Insisting that they had the right and duty to organize farmworkers themselves, they often allied with agribusiness owners and local police, in many locations using violence and red-baiting to disrupt and disorganize union drives.

As president of the IBT, Jimmy Hoffa had brought organized crime further into the union’s pension funds and into the national leadership of the union. Hoffa naturally became the lightning rod for the politicians who sought to advance their careers by exposing corruption in the unions. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy pursued the case against Hoffa in what became a famous political struggle of the early 1960s.

But Hoffa had also led the Teamsters to the very zenith of their power and influence by negotiating the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA), organizing and standardizing the bulk of the freight industry across the United States. Hoffa’s years in power also laid the seeds for the rank-and-file revolt that would rock the union and the freight industry in the years after he entered federal prison in 1967.

The Mafia looting of the pension funds, the highly undemocratic structure of for the ratification of contracts and the undemocratic election procedures for electing Teamsters officers all emerged in the membership’s collective eye, as well as the violence against dissidents. These issues would become crucial under his Hoffa’s successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, but meanwhile, Fitzsimmons himself arranged for Republican President Richard Nixon to release Hoffa from prison on the condition that Hoffa could no longer run for union office. In return, Fitzsimmons as union president threw the support of the Teamsters for Nixon against Hubert Humphrey.

By late 1960s and early 1970s, the Teamster leadership faced a rebellious membership, with many strikes, often the unofficial “wildcat” strikes that challenged the entrenched and corrupt leadership along with employers. The radical politics and mass movements of the era had entered the Teamster workplace. After the Black Power, antiwar and student movements crested and declined, opposition to the leadership began to shift strategic organizing to the workplace and major industrial unions. The International Socialists, whose founding members had made their reputation in the Free Speech movement in Berkeley and the antiwar movement as well as the California Peace and Freedom Party, set themselves to democratize the Teamsters while supporting farm workers against Teamster misdeeds.

The 1970 “salad bowl strike” of California agricultural workers posed the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez against the Teamsters in the kind of labor drama unknown since the 1940s. Teamster violence and eagerness to settle with companies before UFW strikes could take shape brought the two unions into the sharpest conflict and brought many shades of the Left actively into support of the UFW. The Grape Boycott beginning in 1965, which attracted the interest and sympathy of Robert Kennedy, Martin Sheen and a host of other liberal celebrities, had succeeded in publicity and achieved important contracts, but did not lead to comprehensive unionization of the agricultural fields, above all in lettuce production.

By 1974, the two unions faced a destructive standstill. Under severe public pressure, the state Democratic party enacted a change in labor laws, allowing the UFW a major victory that it could not win in the fields. The IBT, if daunted, struck a bargain of its own with the UFW and growers. In future decades, mechanization of the industry eroded union victories, leaving the UFW a small if vital organization and Teamster locals with their own contracts.

During the mid-1970s, IS Teamster members threw themselves into building a national network of teamster activists focused on the demands and actions related to the 1976 NMFA. They formed Teamsters for a Decent Contract and later Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), in 1978, becoming an enduring organization. Never alone in the reform field, the TDU became the premier reform group for Teamster rank-and-filers from 1970s onward.

The 1980s, however, proved to be a difficult decade for Teamster reformers as well as other union members. The deregulation of the trucking industry, advocated by Ralph Nader and spearheaded by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and President Jimmy Carter, led to a massive restructuring of the industry with the loss of hundreds of thousands of Teamster jobs and enormous concessions on wages, working conditions, and benefits. At the same time, United Parcel Service (UPS) emerged as the largest Teamster employer in the United States.

By the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department brought a Racketeer-Influence Corrupt Organization’s Act (RICO) suit against the Teamsters, giving the government effective
control over parts of the union and also removing many mobsters from office. Within that context, TDU carried out a campaign for members’ right to direct election of the top union officers.

The TDU supported Ron Carey, a former UPS driver from New York and head of Local 814 in New York, as candidate for Teamster president. He won a three-way race and his supporters in TDU held a majority of positions on the newly elected executive board. It was a political earthquake that shook the Teamsters, the U.S. labor movement, and the major Teamster organized employers who had accustomed themselves to a cozy relationship with the union’s leaders.

In 1997, the Carey administration, working with TDU, fought UPS for full-time jobs for workers. The fighting slogan of the nation-wide strike was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.”
The Teamsters won a hands down victory over the global behemoth that UPS had become, including the creation of 10,000 new full-time jobs from an employer known for part-time work. This victory, the most successful and popular strike of American workers in a generation, seemed for a moment to promise a road back from defeats.

The backlash came swiftly. At the next national election for leadership, the hard-pressed Carey turned to political consultants from the Democratic Party. This misguided decision, using union members’ money for Carey’s re-election campaign, led to him being barred from running for union office again. Carey would later be found not-guilty in a federal court case, but the damage had been done.

In the years following Carey’s banishment, the reform movement fell into serious retreat. The brief period of reform victory and militancy came to an end. James P. Hoffa Jr., son of Jimmy, presided over the restoration of the old guard during the last years of the century. Hoffa Jr. subsequently won five elections. His long years in offices saw a precipitous decline in the union’s power, marked by the failure to organize the burgeoning delivery systems of Amazon, FedEx, and XPO Logistics.

Allen, Joe. The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020.

Crowe, Ken. Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters. New York: Scribner, 1992.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: New York: Pathfinder, 2018.

La Botz, Dan. Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union. New York: Verso, 1991.

Palmer, Bryan D. Palmer. Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers' Strikes of 1934. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013.