(The Daily Oakland Press published the following story by Joseph Szczesny on its website on September 6.)
PONTIAC, Mich. — The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the nation’s largest, most influential and notorious trade unions, is celebrating its 100th birthday this weekend.
James P. Hoffa, the Teamsters’ general president, said recently that when the union first organized 100 years ago, team drivers were among the most exploited workers.
“Working long hours for little pay and no benefits, they had to combat the isolation that characterized their duties. They knew that by joining together for a common purpose they could create a formidable force with which to confront the abuses of management,” Hoffa said.
“The world is a very different place since the September day in 1903 when two small unions merged at Niagara Falls to form the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,” Hoffa said. But many of the challenges confronting the union remain the same, he added.
Now, as then, workers must fight to achieve fair wages, safe working conditions, comprehensive medical care, a dignified retirement and a voice on the job, Hoffa said.
Hoffa said the Teamsters are putting a new emphasis in recruiting new members, serving its members and fighting for social justice.
The Teamsters gained a foothold in major cities and ports in the Northeast soon after its founding and gradually evolved during the 1930s and 1940s from a relatively loose collection of locals into one of the few unions in the United States with a cohesive membership that stretched from coast to coast.
Teamsters were at the forefront of labor battles during the 1930s and Farrell Dobbs, a militant Teamsters leader from Minneapolis, began to reach outside urban areas and to organize over-the-road truck drivers. Working from a base in Detroit, Jimmy Hoffa, the father of the current Teamsters leader, built on Dobbs’ ground-breaking work and developed the master freight agreement that by the 1960s covered thousand of drivers.
The freight agreement also solidified Teamsters influence, making it a force in national politics and a target for critics who charged the union had been completely infiltrated by organized crime.
With urban roots, the Teamsters grew up alongside organized crime and at times had developed an alliance of convenience with mobsters in cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City and Cleveland. Over time, as the union and its members became more affluent, the Teamsters also provided seed money for organized crime’s effort to turn Las Vegas into a mecca for gamblers and tourists.
The Teamsters ties to organized crime had become notorious by the late 1950s and early 1960s when Bobby Kennedy, who was soon to become attorney general of the United States described the union as a “hoodlum empire.”
Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa faced off throughout the 1960s over organized crime’s infiltration of the union. Hoffa was sent to jail in 1967 on a charge of tampering and disappeared in 1975 after he told allies that he planned to reclaim his old job.
Hoffa now said there is little doubt that his father was killed by “the mob.”
The senior Hoffa’s disappearance, however, ultimately led to a renewed crackdown by federal prosecutors who looked at every aspect of the union, just as deregulation and other sweeping economic changes began to undermine its economic influence.
Under pressure from the Reagan administration, the Teamsters signed a consent decree that gave enormous power to a special review board. Since 1989, the review board has removed dozens of Teamsters from office on corruption charges or for associating with organized crime figures.
The consent decree also required the direct election of the Teamsters president and in 1991, after a spirited campaign, Ron Carey, who was backed by the Teamsters For A Democratic Union, became Teamsters president. Carey continued the house cleaning begun by the IRB, but was caught up in a election scandal in 1996 and left office in 1997.
Carey’s departure opened the door for Hoffa, who ran on a campaign to restore Teamsters power. Hoffa also has promised to keep the Teamsters clean and last year declared that the mob had finally been run out of the union.
The Teamsters president also is actively pursuing mergers with other unions such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.
Ken Paff, the top organizer for TDU, said the union has to do more to recruit new members if it wants to remain a force in American life. “We’ve lost 50,000 members in the last year. That’s a huge number,” said Paff, who said one big disappointment was the decision by flight attendants from Northwest Airlines to leave the union.
“We have to be more open to diverse ideas and more diverse people,” he said. “A lot of the Teamster history isn’t very pretty. But a lot of it is also about the good things like pensions and health-care, more job security and a better life for working people,” Paff said.
To celebrate the occasion, the Teamsters will hold a daytime gala event today in Washington, with guests including former President Clinton and wife Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. There will also be a gala dinner in the evening.