Hoffa, J

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">see teamsters</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><div class="header-list-style" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 class="entry-title grid-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/jimmy-hoffa-disappeared-and-then-his-legacy-took-on-a-life-of-its-own/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Hoffa disappeared – and then his legacy took on a life of its own</a></h2><div class="grid-post-box-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 12px;"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); font-size: inherit;">by <a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/the-conversation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; font-size: inherit;">The Conversation</a></span> <span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); font-size: inherit;">November 30, 2019</span></div></div><div class="item-content entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 18px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;">On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters Union, disappeared. He’d gone to a restaurant in suburban Detroit apparently expecting to meet a couple of mafia…</p></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 12.5px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we think of the Teamsters union, we often think of the mob and the figure of Jimmy Hoffa, memorialized by countless Hollywood films. Yet Ken Paff reminds us that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters should also conjure up in our minds rank and file militancy and enormous worker power in key sectors of the economy — as witnessed in the late 1990s with the UPS strike. Paff, one of the founders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, reflects upon the history and future of the IBT.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 12.5px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Resources:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 12.5px;"><a href="http://www.tdu.org/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Teamsters for a Democratic Union</font></a></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 12.5px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Early, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/jimmy-hoffa-the-irishman-martin-scorsese-film-teamsters" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">“The Ghost of Jimmy Hoffa Won’t Go Away,”</a> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jacobin</em> October 12, 2019</font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-december-2-2019/">https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-december-2-2019/</a>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><h1 align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Labor's War at Home</font></h1><h3 align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">by Lee Sustar</font></h3><h4 align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Internationalist Socialist Review, April 2003</font></h4><h4 align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;"><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><img src="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/PageMill_Images/redblueline.gif" width="301" height="11" naturalsizeflag="0" align="BOTTOM" />
</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the war drive against Iraq has focused the world on the Bush Doctrine abroad, there is a domestic equivalent-a dramatic escalation of the 25-year employers' offensive. With the White House leading the way, Corporate America aims to deal a series of decisive defeats to organized labor and to consolidate a balance of class forces that overwhelmingly favors employers. With union membership in the private sector down to just 8.5 percent (and 13.2 percent overall),' business sees an opportunity to achieve virtual de-unionization.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many, if not most, unions face their greatest struggle in decades-not just to hold on to some gains, but to even survive. In February, the leaders of five of the largest unions, seeking to push a more aggressive strategy for organizing staged what Business Week called a "palace coup" on the AFL-CIO Executive Council to create a smaller executive committee to drive policy.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, there is deep unease in the ranks of organized labor about George W. Bush's agenda, reflected in the passage of antiwar resolutions in union after union and the formation of U.S. Labor Against the War. Even the AFL-CIO Executive Council has voiced opposition to a unilateral U.S. war on Iraq-a major departure from top union officials' lockstep support for U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War. The controversy over the war could presage a wider debate among union members about how to reverse labor's decline.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The urgency of such a debate can't be overstated. Even in union strongholds, labor is in retreat in the face of employer demands for givebacks in wages and benefits. Unions have already agreed to billions of dollars in concessions over the last two years in steel, aerospace, airlines and telecommunications. Where unions hesitate to accept cuts, such as at United Airlines, Bush's Air Transportation Stability Board and bankruptcy judges are imposing them anyway. Meanwhile, in the public sector unions which represent 37.5 percent of those workers, the fiscal crises of states and cities have prompted government demands for cuts in jobs, pay and working conditions in the public sector as well. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatened to impose 12,000 layoffs if municipal unions refused to accept $600 million in concessions. In Portland, Oregon, the public school teachers' union agreed to a 5 percent pay cut and to work 10 days for free. Even "good" contracts, such as the Teamsters' agreements with UPS and freight companies, mask concessions by allowing the companies to grind down the number of good jobs and working conditions over the course of five-year deals.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Government intervention is playing a central role in this offensive. Since taking office, George Bush has banned strikes in the airlines, invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in the West Coast dock dispute; banned unions from key parts of the Department of Homeland Security; imposed new financial reporting requirements on unions and announced plans to privatize some 850,000 federal jobs, most of them unionized.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush's anti-union campaign is by far the most aggressive one from the White House since President Ronald Reagan fired nearly 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981. Just to make sure union leaders got the point, the White House dispatched Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to the annual AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Florida in February to add insult to the many injuries Bush has inflicted on labor. When asked by International Association of Machinists (IAM) President Thomas Buffenbarger about the new restrictive reporting requirements, she read out accounts of corruption involving IAM officials. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called Chao "insulting at times," adding that, "In all my years, I've never seen a secretary of labor so antilabor."</font></h4><h4><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chao's attack was a rebuff to conservative union leaders such as Teamsters President James Hoffa, who has sought to build an alliance with Bush on issues ranging from oil drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve to war on Iraq<font style="font-weight: normal;">. Hoffa, along with Carpenters President Doug McCarron, who took his union out of the AFL-CIO in 2001, had attempted to consolidate a right-wing opposition to Sweeney. In late 2002, the Carpenters re-affiliated with the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), a violation of the AFL-CIO constitution and a test of Sweeney's resolve. The building trades are also at odds with Sweeney over their handling of the $335 million insider trading scandal that enriched the top labor officials who direct the union-run insurance company ULLICO, which handles $6 billion in pension funds for the building trades." Former BCTD chief Robert Georgine, who is CEO of ULLICO, has refused to make public an outside review of the scandal, which prompted resignations from the ULLICO board by Sweeney and two other top AFL-CIO officials.</font></font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The formation of the new, smaller executive committee can be seen at least in part as a countermove against the right by more liberal-left union leaders. While this isn't a division remotely on the scale of that which led to the split of the old CIO from the AFL in the 1930s, the tensions are real enough. Certainly, the politics of individual leaders matter in this dispute-the palace coup was engineered by the liberal leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).'3 The key factor, however, is the pressure from the employers and the U.S. state on one side and an increasingly bitter and angry union rank and file on the other.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, the major union contract battles of 2002 highlighted the increasing pressure on labor officials from their restive memberships. Although labor officials bowed to employers' demands in every major battle, bitterness in the rank and file over concessions has forced leaders of a number of unions to sharpen their rhetoric against the employers and at least partially mobilize the membership for action.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">If union leaders have been able to get away with making concessionary agreements, it's because the rank and file does not yet have the confidence and organization necessary to take the initiative in the struggle. Nevertheless, the growing support for antiwar resolutions in union bodies, as well as labor participation in antiwar protests, reflects a politicization of sections of organized labor.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article isn't intended to be comprehensive account of labor struggles over the last year-recent articles in the International Socialist Review provide such an overview. The aim, rather, is to briefly summarize trends and provide an analysis. It will conclude with a discussion of the kind of politics and organization necessary to reverse organized labor's long decline.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The employers' offensive intensifies</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the employers' offensive has continued for more than two decades, the economic boom of the 1990s gave unions greater leverage to resist and sometimes make serious gains. After the long strikes and lockouts at A.E. Staley, Caterpillar, Bridgestone-Firestone and the Detroit newspapers in the mid-1990s, the 1997 Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service demonstrated that workers can take on powerful corporations and win. Reform Teamster President Ron Carey was ousted by government intervention in the aftermath of the strike on trumped-up corruption charges for which he was eventually cleared. Nevertheless, the UPS strike finally broke the automatic assumption that a strike equals defeat that had overshadowed the labor movement since the destruction of PATCO.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The next three years after the Teamsters' win at UPS saw strike victories for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) at Verizon (twice) and US West, for technical workers at Boeing and janitors in Los Angles and Chicago. This must be put in perspective, however. While the number of strikes and lockouts involving more than 1,000 workers jumped from 17 in 1999 to 39 in 2000, it fell to 29 in 2001 and just 19 in 2002. The number of person-hours lost due to strikes was the lowest since records were first kept in 1947. (Final figures for 2002 were not available at the time of publication). Even in 1986, in the heyday of Reaganism, there were 69 such work stoppages. In 1974, at the height of the rank-and-file rebellion, there were 424 strikes and lockouts.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The onset of recession in 2001 gave employers greater leverage to press their demands in both the private and public sectors. The 12-day Minnesota public sector strike at the same time as a New Jersey teachers' strike at the time signaled an attack on public sector unions at the federal, state and local levels that is intensifying today. (Those strikes also showed that even under the ideological pressure of patriotism after September 11, workers were willing to fight). Despite the recession, union membership held steady at 16.4 million in 2001, but dropped to 16.1 million in 2002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Virtually the entire decline came in the private sector, where unions represent the smallest proportion of workers in nearly a century. For the three "heavy metal" unions, the losses in recent years are staggering. Over the last five years, the United Auto Workers have lost 95,000 members; the Machinists, 33,000; the Steelworkers, 121,000. The losses would be greater except for mergers and new organizing pursued outside the unions' traditional jurisdictions. For many unions, the membership figures are much worse: The 15 biggest of the 66 affiliated unions in the AFL-CIO represent 10 million of 13 million of the federation's membership.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">With the economy still limping along in 2002, union job losses continued to mount, especially in manufacturing. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, hiring is at its lowest level in 20 years, and the economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since the recession began in 2001. Employers used the opportunity to bring back "concessions bargaining"-the term for unions' agreement to surrender wages and working conditions that began in the late 1970s and accelerated following the PATCO defeat.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twenty years ago, union leaders from former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland on down tried to justify concessions on the grounds that the U.S. economy had to be more competitive with Japan in order to prosper. The escalation of the Cold War in those years provided additional ideological justification for "national sacrifice."</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">This time, union leaders have taken a different approach. While they have claimed that it was necessary to take concessions in order to "save" companies like bankrupt United Airlines and US Airways, in many cases they have tried to resist them, however half-heartedly. This is not due to stiffer backbones in the union leadership, but to the increased working class consciousness after 25 years of sacrifice and expectations raised in the 1990s boom. In the early 1980s, the employers could claim that free-market policies were the cure for the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and workers were prepared to accept it. Today, in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and the recession, workers are bitter and suspicious.</font></h4><h4><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a result, union leaders have had to articulate the pressure from below and talk tough. In New York City, for example, Randi Weingareen, president of the 130,000-member United Federation of Teachers, last year organized an authorization vote for an illegal strike. While it was a symbolic gesture, he was able to secure a better-but still concessionary- deal than originally offered. Similarly, Roger Toussaine, the reformer who now heads New York's subway union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, also mobilized for an illegal strike before accepting an improved-but again, concession</font></h4></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><h4 style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;">Bush's anti-union campaign is by far the most aggressive one from the White House since President </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ronald Reagan fired nearly 11,000 striking air traffic </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;">controllers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981. Just to make sure union leaders got the point, the White House dispatched Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to the annual AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Florida in February to add insult to the many injuries Bush has inflicted on labor. When asked by International Association of Machinists (IAM) President Thomas Buffenbarger about the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> new restrictive reporting requirements, she read out accounts of corruption involving IAM officials. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called Chao "insulting at times," adding that, "In all my years, I've never seen a secretary of labor so antilabor."</span></font></h4><h4 style="font-size: small; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chao's attack was a rebuff to conservative union leaders such as Teamsters President James Hoffa</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-weight: normal;">, who has sought to build an alliance with Bush on issues ranging from oil drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve to war on Iraq. Hoffa, along with Carpenters President Doug McCarron, who took his union out of the AFL-CIO in 2001, had attempted to consolidate a right-wing opposition to Sweeney. In late 2002, the Carpenters re-affiliated with the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), a violation of the AFL-CIO constitution and a test of Sweeney's resolve. The building trades are also at odds with Sweeney over their handling of the $335 million insider trading scandal that enriched the top labor officials who direct the union-run insurance company ULLICO, which handles $6 billion in pension funds for the building trades." Former BCTD chief Robert Georgine, who is CEO of ULLICO, has refused to make public an outside review of the scandal, which prompted resignations from the ULLICO board by Sweeney and two other top AFL-CIO officials.</font></h4><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div>