The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.
In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis.
That broad sweep of history is, in a nutshell, what I’m researching for my next possible book project: a history of the New York City labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. First, though, the AFL and CIO needed to merge. It took the two local labor councils, the AFL’s Central Trades and Labor Council and the CIO’s Industrial Union Council, four years after Meany and Reuther clasped hands to merge at the local level. A lot of the delay had to do with the Teamsters union. Trawling the New York Times archives, it looks like the Powers That Be were convinced that a united labor movement that included a Teamsters union that could enforce solidarity picket lines at any company that needed deliveries by truck would be “too powerful.” They began demonizing the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa with lurid stories of underworld connections, probably accurate stories about strong-arm tactics that involved sabotage, property destruction and a not-insignificant amount of personal violence in order to trigger Senate hearings into labor racketeering that would end with yet-another anti-union federal law in 1959.
Not that Hoffa’s a great guy. He enforced segregated union locals (at his majority white members’ request), earned the highest salary and all-expenses-paid perks, dealt his wife in on business deals with employers against whom he bargaining and generally treated the union like a business. These reasons were why the NYC CIO balked at merger, as the head of the AFL CTLC, Martin Lacey, was also the head of the local Teamsters Joint Council. Lacey was anti-Hoffa, and these years coincide with Hoffa’s power grab for the IBT presidency. In NYC, his proxy was a two-bit crook named John DioGuardi, who “organized” six or seven paper locals to beat Lacey’s re-election (the whole matter wound up stalled in court for years).
Thaddeus Russell’s Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (Knopf, 2001) doesn’t have any of this. It is, nevertheless, a scholarly and even-handed account of Hoffa as union leader that avoids the lurid “cosa nostra” Mafia bullshit and makes a good case that Hoffa, in competition with social democrat-oriented CIO unions, and pursuing pure business unionism, delivered for his members wages and benefits that were among the best for his era. David Witwer’s Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (University of Illinois, 2003) probably makes a stronger case for how the Teamsters’ coercively (and violently) enforced boycotts and jurisdictional picket lines were necessary to organize industries marked by multiple small employers for which the National Labor Relations Board was mostly unhelpful, and how the sensationalized (albeit, still true) charges of “racketeering” and “union corruption” were almost always politically motivated. (He also has nothing on the Martin Lacey saga in New York.)