Revolutionary Teamsters – The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934

By Bryan D. Palmer

Published by Haymarket Books, 2014

Reviewed by Steve Halpern who works as a school bus driver and is a Teamsters Union member. 

Today negotiations are underway between the Teamsters Union, representing 340,000 United Parcel Service employees and the UPS corporation. The Teamsters Union International President Sean O’Brian argues that UPS gouged out about $100 billion in profit during the pandemic. Teamster Union members received no increase during those years. What they received was forced overtime, a two-tier wage set-up, and non-union drivers transporting UPS packages. O’Brian argues that UPS will need to change these basic conditions or there will be a strike starting on August 1, 2023.

So, we might ask the question: With all the profits UPS has made in recent years, why are they so resistant to giving up any major concessions? Back in the 1960s when Jimmy Hoffa was President of the Teamsters Union, the drivers went on national strikes and won major concessions. In those years the U.S. economy dominated the world, and manufacturing corporations were routinely gouging out significant profits.

For the last fifty years the U.S. economy as well as workers wages have been stagnating. Recently, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and this move caused banks with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to go bankrupt. Seventy percent of UPS is owned by banks. Although UPS has been highly profitable, many other corporations are struggling to survive. So, the managers of banks are determined to gouge out as much money as they can.

Understanding our current reality makes Bryan Palmer’s book Revolutionary Teamsters – The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 extremely relevant. In addition to this book, we can read four books by one of the leaders of this strike, Farrell Dobbs. These include Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy. Dobbs speeches on these strikes can also be listened to on YouTube. 

However, before I write about the story of the 1934 strike, a bit of background might be useful.

Background – The 1917 Russian Revolution

Early in the year of 1917, Russia was at war with Germany. Literally millions of Russian soldiers died in that war. During those years, Russia was a relatively underdeveloped nation where less than four-million people worked in industry while about 150 million peasants worked on farms. This relative underdevelopment meant that the huge amount of resources used for the war caused massive famine. Babies died because their mothers didn’t have food and there was no breast milk for the infants. Under those conditions thousands of children, who became orphans, roamed the streets trying desperately to survive. 

In February of that year, masses of workers had enough and went on a general strike. They were met be mounted Cossacks who were under order to murder the protesters. The Cossacks were also fed up with those conditions and refused to carry out their orders. Some of those Cossacks returned to their barracks and arrested their commanding officers. The workers also arrested the Czar who was the dictatorial ruler of the country.

Out of that revolution, a condition of dual power emerged. A Provisional Government took power but needed to rule with the consent of workers councils known as Soviets. While the workers had basic demands, the Provisional Government worked to maintain the basic status quo that had been organized by the deposed Czar. 

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin the central leader of the political party known as the Bolsheviks was living in exile at this time and managed to return to his country. Lenin convinced the Bolsheviks to support the demands that workers desperately wanted. These were Peace, Bread, and Land (for the peasants), as well as All Power to the Soviets. By October of 1917, the Bolsheviks won support for their demands and organized the removal of the Provisional Government from power in an almost bloodless revolution.

While the workers of the new Soviet Union celebrated their new government, governments of fourteen nations ordered their armies to invade Russia in an attempt to oust the Bolsheviks. The Red Army under the leadership of Leon Trotsky defeated this invasion. 

However, the masses of people in the new Soviet Union were drained by the world war, famine, and then the civil war. There was an attempted assassination Lenin and he never fully recovered. Under those conditions the opportunist Joseph Stalin managed to come to power. Over a period of several years Stalin managed to murder most of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. 

We might think about the fact that Karl Marx imagined that socialism would emerge in a highly developed capitalist nation. Under those conditions a revolutionary government would be able to make immediate improvements in the standard of living. Those conditions did not exist after the Russian Revolution. 

One of the results of Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution was his persecution of Leon Trotsky, who was a central leader of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union and in 1941 an agent of Stalin took his life. However, Trotsky was able to organize a nucleus of supporters who remained loyal to the original goals of the Russian Revolution. One of the centers of support for Trotsky’s politics was in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  

The 1934 Teamsters Strikes in Minneapolis

In the year 1934, the United States was in the middle of the depression. Large numbers of workers were unemployed and there was no unemployment insurance. Working class unemployed families struggled to survive. Minneapolis, Minnesota had some of the lowest wages in the country.

Under these conditions, workers waited in coal yards for orders for those who had the money to purchase coal to heat their homes. The workers needed to carry 100-pound bags, sometimes up three and four flights of stairs to deliver those orders. Wages were about $15 per week, and this wasn’t enough to provide for the needs of a family. If a worker had any complaints about this set-up, employers simply replaced that worker with someone who was glad to have employment.

These conditions caused simmering feelings of outrage that were spreading all over the country. Strikes erupted on the West Coast of longshore workers, and in Toledo, Ohio of auto-light workers. As a result of these strikes John L. Lewis, who was the President of the Mine Workers Union, began to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations. (C.I.O.).

At this time, the union movement was experiencing some of its worst years. Union membership was half of what it had been. Unions in the American Federation of Labor were organized on a craft basis. For the Teamsters Union this meant organizing truck drivers in several different unions. The President of the Teamsters International Union, Daniel Tobin, was adamantly opposed to organizing the warehouse workers who loaded the trucks driven by teamsters. 

Under these conditions, supporters of Leon Trotsky who were members of the Communist League of America (later renamed the Socialist Workers Party) worked in the coal yards and spoke to their coworkers about organizing a union. Those workers approached Bill Brown, who was the President of the local #574 Teamsters Union, and an agreement was made to engage in an organizing drive. 

The local union encouraged everyone who had anything to do with the trucking industry, who did not hire or fire workers, to join the union. Eventually large numbers of workers asked for union recognition, but the employers refused to negotiate with their union representatives. So, the local chapter of the teamsters went on strike. Daniel Tobin refused to recognize the strike, or to pay strike benefits. The workers who were on strike would later view this job action as an all-out war. The events of this strike gave ample evidence for why workers felt that way.

Today women are union members who work driving trucks, as well as in UPS warehouses. However, it wasn’t until 1921 that women won the right to vote. They were totally excluded from the trucking industry in 1934. However, Local 574 made a concerted effort to recruit women to support the strike in many ways.

The local union also worked with unemployed workers. They used the power of the union to demand more money in relief for those who were unemployed. That perspective undercut any drive to scab on the union.

One of the most effective tools used for supporting the strike was the publication of the pro-union newspaper The Northwest Organizer. Leaders of the Socialist Workers Party wrote for this 

paper and cut through the lies that were routinely reported in the mainstream press.

James Cannon, who was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party wrote for the Northwest Organizer. Cannon was one of the writers who wrote about how the workers had the real potential to win the strike. He also used fiction where he deliberately broke the rules of spelling and grammar to make his point. One of his columns was of an imaginary young worker who wrote to his sweetheart about the strike. The title of the column was “dere Emily” and below is a sample of Cannon’s column.

“the thing us workers has got to lern, Emily, it is this.” It is one thing to “be ambishus for ourselves only. we got to be ambishus for ALL our working class brothers and sisters, and rise with our whole class.”     

  

In preparing for the strike, the union rented a hall where meals were served, flying pickets were organized, cars were fueled and repaired, and injured strikers were treated by a doctor and nurses. Carlos Hudson was a writer for the Northwest Organizer, and in an article written in 1935 he reported on the activities that went on the in new Teamsters headquarters.

“At any hour of the day or night one finds some sort of meeting in progress. On Monday the full membership of the General Drivers’ Union gathers, on Tuesday the taxi drivers. On Thursday the independent truck owners. A large unit of federal workers recently organized by local 574 meets each Friday evening in the third-floor auditorium. Every Saturday night there is dancing. A workers’ forum is held on Sunday afternoon. In one or another of the numerous halls a meeting is usually in session; or a group of raw workers is busy organizing itself, with the help of 574. On the second floor is located what must be the most popular bar in town, where every evening crowds of workers with their wives and sweethearts sit around the tables gossiping, or dance to the music of a mandolin and guitar. It is doubtful whether, since the 1890s, a union has come to mean so much to so many thousands of workers.”  

The Tribune was one of the newspapers in Minneapolis that ran routine articles ridiculing the strike. The owners of this paper were also determined to use trucks to deliver the newspapers in direct violation of the strike. So unarmed women and men attempted to prevent those trucks from moving. The police attacked these demonstrators and sent several to the hospital. 

Bryan Palmer found a quotation that described Roy Boumans and his wife who was called Mrs.

“Roy was one of the first in his outfit to join (Local 574); it took a little nerve to join a Minneapolis trade union in 1933. When the strike came, Roy spent seventeen and eighteen hours a day on the picket line. He felt he had to win the strike, or he’d lose his job and be even worse off than he was in 1932. Mrs. Bauman worked all day peeling potatoes and making coffee in the commissary, and listening breathlessly to what they said over the mike in the evening mass meetings. . . When they brought in the women who had been beaten up by armed guards in the Tribune alley, and laid them out in rows at the strike headquarters, Roy went and got himself a club. . . On the day of the battle of Deputies Run . . . Roy was at it all day—in the battle and in the mopping up. He fought with a kind of delighted fury, and has gotten a kick ever since out of his memories. He sent three cops to the hospital.”   

Since the police understood that they were ineffective in beating back the strike with clubs, in the second strike, they used shotguns. In July of 1934 the police fired their shotguns at unarmed demonstrators and murdered teamster union member Henry B. Ness as well as an unemployed supporter of the strike named John Belor. The police injured about 67 union members and their supporters. 40,000 people attended the funeral of Henry B. Ness.  

The workers armed themselves and prepared to get their revenge. The organizers of the union argued that if the workers used those weapons, the National Guard would be called in and the strike would be defeated. It wasn’t easy taking those weapons away from the workers.

Eventually the National Guard was sent to Minneapolis during the third strike, and they declared martial law. Under those conditions two reporters for the Northwest Organizer were arrested by the police. These were James Cannon and Max Shachtman. When the police couldn’t figure out what to charge these reporters with, they turned them over to the National Guard. 

Then the National Guard raided the union headquarters and arrested some of the strike leaders. The Governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson represented the Farmer Labor Party. He had a difficult time arguing that his usage of the National Guard wasn’t about breaking the strike and the will of the teamsters. 

However, because the union members were well informed, those efforts were useless in forcing an end to the strike. Eventually the teamsters won union recognition, significant wage increases, and all the striking members were able to return to work. As a result, the Teamsters Union in Minneapolis grew from 100 members to over 7,000 members.

In spite of this tremendous victory, Teamsters Union International President Daniel Tobin demanded that union dues be paid for all the 7,000 members who had been on strike and received no wages. The local union attempted to meet those obligations, but Tobin placed the local in receivership. Those efforts initially failed, and the elected leaders continued to organize the union. 

From there Farrell Dobbs and other leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters Union went on organizing drives that won union representation for thousands of over-the-road drivers. During this period Dobbs worked with union President Daniel Tobin. 

At one point, Tobin offered Dobbs the post of Vice President of the union when that post became available. Dobbs turned down the offer and began to work full time for the Socialist Workers Party. 

Then the United States government ordered the military to support the allied powers during the Second World War. The leaders of the Socialist Workers Party apparently learned the lesson of the German Socialist Party in their support of the German armed forces in the First World War.

In 1914, the German Socialist Party had members in the government, their own schools and social clubs. The leaders of that party understood that if they opposed German participation in World War I, their party would be outlawed, and they could lose the entire infrastructure they thought they had. So, the German Socialist Party supported the German armed forces in WWI. 

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t believe this news. Up until that point, the Socialist Party was ardently opposed to any support of the German military. By 1917 the Bolshevik demand for an end to the war became essential to the Russian Revolution.

Most German Socialist Party leaders became more and more supportive of capitalist interests. By 1918 there was a revolution in Germany where the workers were in the position to take power. However, German Socialist Party leaders supported the fascist armed Freikorps who drowned that revolution in blood. The defeat of the 1918 German Revolution helped to pave the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. 

Armed with the legacy of this history, the Socialist Workers Party opposed the United States participation in WWII. In that effort they were also continuing the legacy of Eugene Debs, who served time in prison for merely giving a speech against U.S. participation in the First World War. 

Daniel Tobin felt that this position gave him the wedge he needed to oust the leadership of local 544 (the name was changed from local 574) of the Teamsters Union. The story of how this happened is extremely relevant to our reality today.

Jimmy Hoffa learned many of his organizing skills from Farrell Dobbs in the drive to represent over-the-road drivers in the Teamsters Union. He was also friends with leaders of local 544. 

Then, Daniel Tobin ordered Teamster Union officials from all over the country to go to Minneapolis, assault supporters of the union local, and take control of the Teamsters Union in the city. Jimmy Hoffa came from Detroit to be a part of that effort.

The local 544 leadership recognized the hostility of the Tobin bureaucracy and applied for a charter with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). The local union received a charter, and the membership of local 544 voted to accept membership in the C.I.O. However, the Tobin bureaucracy went to court to take control of the local union.

In this and other court decisions, the government has made it crystal clear that in this country union members do not have the right to a democratic union. If workers had that right, the union rank-and-file would have the right to elect or remove union leaders. 

However, the courts, in effect, decided union members do not have that right. They allowed the International Teamsters Union to take over the union headquarters and appoint unelected officials to run the local. 

Understanding that resistance to these actions would end in defeat, the local leadership had a meeting where it was decided to go along with the new union officials and attempt to preserve the gains that were made during the strike.      

The federal government under Franklyn D. Roosevelt then indicted 18 members of the Socialist Workers Party under the almost unbelievable charge of attempting to overthrow the government. Apparently, the federal government was worried that the small Socialist Workers Party would sneak up on the military and overthrow the government in a surprise attack. This is the kind of absurdity the government argued in order to get the convictions. 

We might also think about how this trial took place at the same time as the Japanese Air Force bombed the United States military base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. As in all wars, the United States government was on an all-out drive to convince workers of the absurd idea that we need to murder workers from other countries to defend their so-called “democracy.”

Then, after Jimmy Hoffa became President of the Teamsters Union, he used the organizing techniques he learned from Farrell Dobbs to get a national contract for the union. The UAW President Walter Reuther teamed up with George Meany to throw the Teamster Union out of the AFL-CIO. The federal government followed that action by indicting and then getting a conviction of Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa would spend time in prison before he was released and then assassinated. Two of the leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters Union were also assassinated.

In the convictions of the Socialist Workers Party leaders as well as Jimmy Hoffa, the federal government used its power to compromise the power and influence of the union. Their absurd argument was that they were defending the interests of union members. 

What we can learn from the 1934 Teamsters Strike

Today Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brian has a different perspective from the former President Daniel Tobin. O’Brian says that if UPS refuses to grant the basic modest demands of the union, there will be a strike on August 1. O’Brian has spoken to union members all over the country who have expressed their support for his negotiations with UPS. However, UPS executives have been adamant in refusing to grant the strikable demands of the union.

The 1934 Teamsters strike gives us many lessons. Perhaps one of the best ways to negotiate with the company is to prepare for a strike. The methods used in the 1934 strike continue to be relevant today.

Sean O’Brian has argued that a union victory with UPS will benefit workers all over the country. That statement was underscored by all the union organizing drives after the victory of the 1934 teamsters’ strike. 

In 1934, the Minneapolis teamster leadership understood that they were striking for the entire working class. To back up that perspective, they organized workers who were in no way teamsters. That perspective gave them massive support in the city.

Understanding that perspective, we can also see that we need to break completely from the Democratic and Republican Party shell game. We need a political party dedicated to the needs of the working class. In 1934, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson argued that he was a friend of labor. However, because he was dedicated to maintaining the status quo, he ordered the National Guard to occupy Minneapolis. We can say the same of Bernie Sanders, who also argues that he is a friend of labor.

On the other hand, Farrell Dobbs was part of the leadership that organized to win the 1934 strike. After Dobbs spent time in prison, he went on to support the 1953 Montgomery Bus Boycott, protesting against Jim Crow segregation. He then went on to support the politics of Malcolm X by supporting the effort by Pathfinder Press to publish he speeches. Malcolm was opposed to the Democratic and Republican Parties and encouraged Black people to organize independently.

Today the capitalist economy is more international than it ever has been. Commodities we purchase every day are made all over the world. The largest working class of the world is in China where hundreds of millions of workers make many of the commodities we rely on.

So, being an international union means that the unions need to have an international perspective. This means full support for immigrants who come to this country primarily because 70% of the workforce of the world lives on ten dollars per day or less. 

In the United States young people are raised with the idea that the ticket to a relatively comfortable life is with an advanced education. Well, as we have seen there was a depression in the past and there will be one in the future. Depressions are indifferent about whether or not people have an education. 

Depressions are a natural outgrowth of the capitalist system. Workers produce all commodities, and capitalists profit from all those commodities. However, while capitalists amass enormous wealth and power, they contribute nothing of real value. This is the essence of the contradiction we all live with. 

Today the working class is different from what it was in 1934. Black people and women have won significant gains over the years. However, institutionalized racist and sexist discrimination continues to be a routine fact of life. The working class is much more international than it was then. In my opinion, we can learn a lot from the leadership of the Teamsters Union in 1934. While I do not agree with all the conclusions of Bryan Palmer in this important book, the facts he presents are well worth considering.