Mob rule versus Teamster militants

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The Hoffa Wars is essential reading for anyone interested in the American labour movement and for anyone involved in the struggle against the manipulation of power under capitalism.

It is only partially concerned with Jimmy Hoffa, former head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the world's biggest trade union with 2 million members.

The book traces Hoffa's murky career from militant trade unionist to the day in July 1975 when he was murdered and his body tossed into a steel crusher to emerge in the words of his adopted son (who was implicated in the killing) as "a goddamn hub cap ... a fender being driven around by someone".

Fascinating

The Hoffa story is fascinating in itself, but the book is also about union leaders who are still very much alive and in control of the IBT, Frank Fitzsimmons and his son, Jackie Presser, Rolland McMaster and sundry other totally corrupt It is also about the penetration of organised crime into the US labour movement and the links between 'the mob' and the CIA/FBI in the assassination of the Kennedys, the plots to kill Fidel Castro and the whole rise to power of Richard Nixon.

But most of all The Hoffa Wars is about the long struggle of rank-and-file Teamsters to democratise the union in the teeth of countless killings, bombings, beatings and corrupt deals with employers and the underworld.

Not socialist * It should be stated that Dan Moldea emerges as a liberal reformist, the book is certainly not written from a socialist perspective and his main hero seems to have been Robert Kennedy.

Yet it perfectly illustrates the urgent need for the revolutionary programme in trade union work.

He makes a brilliant job of exposing Fitzimmons and the corrupt leadership, and at the same time expresses support for Teamster reform groups, (the latest one being TDU-Teamsters for a Democratic Union) in their tactics of going through the courts.

Yet throughout the book the state and the courts are shown to be totally opposed to the interests of the rank-and-file Teamster! Indeed he shows very clearly that the biggest sin Hoffa committed was to hand the strongest section of the. American working class to U.S. capitalism on a plate.

Anti-union Republicans and Democrats were able to use Hoffa's gangsterism to discredit and browbeat the whole labour movement.

Moldea's book is also extremely well documented. It shows each little link in the chain from the ordinary teamster paying his union dues and pension fund to that money being used to finance everything Local 299 offices: (seated) McMaster, from homes and swimming pools for bureaucrats to the killing of John Kennedy, the plots to assassinate Castro, the dope trade, the election of Nixon and the Watergate cover-up.

Corrupt practices

The BT membership has been consistently cheated and ground down for the last forty years-both previous I8T leaders, Dave Beck and Hoffa, were jailed for corrupt practices that represented only a tip of the iceberg of their real democracy activities and it is clear that Frank Fitzimmons has only escaped the same fate because of his uniquely balanced compromise with politicians and mobsters.

In case anyone thinks that 'the mob' is some sort of outdated side-show in American politics it may be as well to bring in one or two facts.

A conservative estimate of the net profits from illegal and quasi-legal operations of organised crime in the US shows that it generates more than 10 times the profits of Exxon (the largest corporation in America).

"Organised crime" here refers to the activities of the major "Mafia" - families, the leaders of which all have proven close links with the Hoffa/ Fitzimmons/McMaster power axis in the IBT.

One gangland leader, Tony Provenzano, was an BT vice-president until recently when he was finally jailed for ordering the kidnapping and murder of a Teamster dissident back in 1961.

Meat hook

The kind of men you come up against if you speak out of turn in the IBT is well illustrated by the case of David Yaras, a former Capone associate who founded IBT •Local 320 in Florida.

Before he was jailed for imurder Yaras described how he and his henchmen had tortured suspected government informer for 48 hours, smashing his joints with an ice-pick, hanging him on a meat hook, and burning his genitals off with a blow-torch.

The term "Teamster business agent" is synonymous with thug or goon in many IBT locals.

The violence of the unionisation struggles in America during the thirties was transformed into violence against the membership by the leadership during the late fifties, the sixties and the seventies.

Countless dissidents were killed, beaten Up and intimidated.

In 1969 unofficial strikers had to fight a pitched battle with guns and clubs as Teamster "officials" tried to get a convoy of lorries through the picket line in order to make good a routine "sweetheart" contract with the employer.

In 1976 Peter Camarata (leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union) was nearly kicked to death right in front of Frank Fitzimmons at a party during the national delegate conference.

Even so, it is the willingness of workers to come forward and fight that shines through the pages of the book.

Blown up

This militancy has been most continuous in the huge IBT branch that has been the home of the Hoffa/Fitzimmons/ McMaster clique, that is Detroit Local 299. It is worth quoting from the diary of Jim Leavitt, a Detroit activist who helped lead an unofficial strike and angry march on the union hall in 1970:

"Considering the character of our enemy-of which we were and are fully aware-it must have been a form of insanity that forced frail beings like us to override our fears and confusion, to put aside our sense of responsibility to our families, our own pleasures and security, and openly challenge perhaps the most ruthless, powerful group of social criminals this country has ever known... I entirely reject any position that entails anything less than an absolute and complete repudiation of the present Teamster leadership"

This was written shortly after Leavitt's house, containing his wife and children, was blown up by 'persons unknown' Though IBT leaders inevitably use witch-hunts to attack dissidents there is little sense of anything other than pure trade union militancy in the variqus reform groupings that have flared up and been defused in the history of the union.

Workers defence

TDU had a cost of living clause in its 1976 programme but. only to link wages to the government's own inflation figures. In addition, spontaneous workers defence squads have been formed from time to time. But in general, principled political leadership has been lacking since Farrell Dobbs was jailed in 1941 for "sedition"

Hoffa in fact was the main tool of the state in its battle against the Trotskyist leader. As Dobbs said in a television inter: view some years later:

"Now it is true that Hoffa was among the IBT goon squads that Tobin sent to Minneapolis •.. That's actually true. But he says in effect there he whipped us. For instance, he was helped by the Minneapolis Police Department, the courts of the city, the county, and the state ... the mayor, the governor and an anti-labour law that had been rigged and put through by the governor of the state, and by che FBI, the US Department of Justice and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who then happened to be President of the United States ... Under those circumstances you got to admit that Hoffa had just a little help, didn't he?' Tactics Violence is not the only tactic used by the IBT leadership to maintain its stranglehold on the rank and file.

Obviously the bureaucracy has negotiated better conditions though these negotiations are usually carried out in collaboration with the employer rather than confrontation.

Indeed since the early sixties it has been unofficial action that has won the best conditions.

Juries bribed

Many dissidents were simply fired from their jobs land therefore from the union) with the bureaucracy making deals with the bosses not to fight for their reinstatement.

When the going gets rough then juries are bribed, judges are granted favours or key witnesses removed-and all this in conjunction with the more mundane tactics of ballot-rigging, union jobs for old pals, tampering with minutes and fixing rule changes.

With the power of the bureaucrats, the mob, the police, the courts and the government ranged against them it is amazing that Teamster militants have maintained a continuous opposition since Hoffa came to power.

It is easy to point out their political inadequacies, their reliance on legal procedures their lack of real programme and their occasional tendency to leave the union rather than continue the battle inside (like the Fraternal Association 01 Steel Haulers, set up by e specially exploited section q1 drivers in 1967). Yet having said that, The Hoffa Wars still stands as testimony to the gut class-conscious militancy which is an essential part of the fight for a revolutionary perspective:

Hoffa Fitzimmons Meanwhile Frank Fitzimmons squats at the head of the world's most powerful union, an organisation that has the power to bring the world's most committed capitalist nation to a complete standstill.

American capital knows who its friends are and Fitzimmons has so far retained his usefulness despite massive and blatant misuse of union funds and blank cheque support for near psychopathic criminals like Rolland McMaster.

And what of Hoffa, the man who made Fitzimmons, only to see his creation turn on him?

Whether Hoffa is now a hubcap or a fender, the kindest judgement is to echo Moldea's opening sentence of the whole book: "Jimmy Hoffa's most valuable contribution to the American labour movement came at the moment he stopped breathing on July 30 1975"

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DUSTRIAI NELES CUT SEA POORE R FUTURE SurTEk CIE ES CULA

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the TEAMSTERS ARE GROWING!

reviews The Hoffa Wars, Teamsters, Rebels Poli- ticians and the Mob, by Dan E. Moldea, pub- lished by Paddington Press at £5.95