Vol. 72/No. 26      June 30, 2008

BY FRANK FORRESTAL
AND RYAN SCOTT  
To learn how an earlier generation of workers gained experience in union combat, a good place to start is by picking up a copy of Teamster Power by Farrell Dobbs. Originally published in 1973, the new Pathfinder edition is enhanced by a winning new cover; enlarged, easily readable type; 24 pages of photos; illustrations; and an expanded index. The Spanish-language edition, Poder Teamster, will be out soon.

The book is must reading for working-class militants fighting to expand unionization; for those who participated in May Day actions demanding legalization for immigrant workers; for independent truckers resisting assaults on their livelihood; for vanguard workers in the front lines of resisting immigration raids and deportations.  
 
Using class power
Teamster Power tells the story of how the men and women of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 574 (later Teamsters Local 544) and their class-struggle leadership used the power they had won through three hard-fought strikes in 1934 to extend union power to cities and towns across the upper Midwest. Above all, it shows how workers used their class power against the bosses and transformed themselves in the process.

The book continues the story Dobbs began in Teamster Rebellion, the first volume in the four-part series on the Teamster battles of the 1930s. Teamster Politics and Teamster Bureaucracy round out the series.

Dobbs was a rank-and-file leader of the 1934 Teamster strikes and organizing drive. “The young Farrell Dobbs we get to know in the pages of Teamster Rebellion became one of the great mass organizers of the U.S. working class,” writes Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in the introduction to that book. “Barely thirty, he was the chief architect and leader of the campaign—stretching from Texas, to Detroit, to Canada, to Seattle—that organized some quarter million over-the-road drivers into a powerful union and transformed the upper Midwest into union territory, the legacy of which is felt to this day.”

In the introduction to Teamster Power, Dobbs, referring to the 1934 strikes, says the most important fact was that workers won a “new sense of hope in the union.” The workers of Minneapolis “began to look toward unionization as a way to win a better life for themselves. Wherever a new fight developed, the rank and file sought to emulate Local 574’s methods, especially in the formation of broad strike committees.”

In the heat of battle, Local 574’s membership learned from their own experiences that they had nothing in common with the bosses and their government. They learned that “if the workers don’t fight as a class to defend their interests, the bosses will gouge them,” Dobbs explains.  
 
Teamster officialdom
In addition to fighting the trucking bosses, Local 574 went up against the American Federation of Labor officialdom, which opposed militant labor struggles. In response to the threat posed by the accelerated widening of union power in Minnesota, the Teamsters International bureaucracy, led by its president, Daniel Tobin, set out to crush the class-struggle leadership of Local 574.

Using its seasoned and battle-tested leadership, Local 574 stuck to its class-struggle course. Despite having its charter taken away by Tobin, Local 574 continued to win strikes, renew contracts with real gains, and recruit new members, reaching more than 4,000 members. From their combat experiences, Dobbs writes, a small but significant layer of the local’s membership “was learning political lessons from experiences in the class struggle. Some were recruited into the revolutionary party.”

Dobbs explains, “after a delay of almost two years” it became possible “to launch the general organization drive [throughout the Midwest] that should have followed on the heels of our strike victory in 1934.”  
 
11-state campaign
In the chapter, “We Reach Outward,” Dobbs describes how the “Teamster expansion drive” led to the launching of the North Central District Drivers Council and their victory against a notoriously antilabor produce chain in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Word got out that the union victory resulted in wages being almost doubled in some towns. “News of the victory swept across the prairies like a grass fire. Workers in town after town were inspired to pitch into the Teamster campaign with renewed vigor,” Dobbs writes.

These gains set the stage for launching the North Central Area Committee—now with the official backing of the Teamsters officialdom—to unionize over-the-road drivers through an organizing campaign covering 11 states. The ensuing mobilization of truck drivers resulted in the “biggest contract ever negotiated by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters up to that time,” Dobbs said, and significant uniform wage gains and qualitative improvements in working conditions for tens of thousands of drivers throughout the Midwest.

Omaha and Sioux City became the center of the 11-state drive to organize over-the-road truckers in 1938-39. Dobbs dedicated Teamster Power “to the main army of the over-the-road campaign, the rank-and-file Teamsters of Omaha and Sioux City.” Workers in both cities fought a six-month battle with the bosses and won a decisive victory. A good number of photos bring to life the militancy of their fight.

“To all intents and purposes, we had laid siege to Nebraska like Grant did to Vicksburg. Our task now was to hold firm in the established positions and to steadily intensify use of union power against the class enemy,” Dobbs writes.

“Every worker militant in the city and state now understood that the bosses could be beaten,” he explains. With the defeat of the Omaha-Sioux City bosses, the over-the-road contract was firmly planted in 11 states.  
 
 
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