Long history of gov't harassment

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The U.S. government has directly atmosphere resulted in the expulsion of 11 interfered in the Teamsters union for "communist-led" unions from the Congress decades. Both Democratic and Republican of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by 1950. administrations have made the Teamsters The government's goal in these cases was union one of their prime targets. It is the to disperse the militant wing of the union During the great Midwestern organizing In the 1950s, with the aim of further drives of the Teamsters union in the 1930s, weakening the union movement, the for example, the Justice Department's FBI government conducted Congressional resorted to framing up militants on "investigations" into union corruption.

Teamster Minneapolis strike leader McCarthy initiated a "Select Committee" Farrell Dobbs summed up his experience to investigate "labor racketeering." This during this period in the book "Teamster became the infamous anti-labor McClellan Politics": "Basically, the [government's] Committee. It focused almost exclusively legal assault on the IBT was intended to on the Teamsters union.

Dobbs should know. He and several other Teamsters was simply a pretext which the leading Teamster militants landed in prison government used to launch an all-out attack in 1940 in a government frameup aimed at against the trade-union movement as a leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters As a result of reactionary pressure from strikes and of the first successful Teamster the McClellan hearings, for example, AFLThe government often led "red-baiting," engineered the expulsion of the Teamsters anti-communist crusades against militants. from the national labor federation in 1957. The Smith Act, which was invoked against This expulsion divided and greatly Dobbs, targeted anyone who advocated weakened the trade-union movement. socialist ideas. It was used extensively in A few years later, the McClellan ComAfter World War II, the government- the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin bill. This particularly the Justice Department-again "killer law" further straitjacketed the unions threw its full resources into creating an through the imposition of new restrictions anti-communist climate. This anti-union and government controls.— C.F. U.S. government framed up many for union representation. FBI sent largest union in the United States. Its movement. members can shut this country down in a matter of hours.

numerous occasions.

curb militancy in its ranks..."

destroying the union. Dobbs had been a whole.

over-the-road organizing drives.

the late 1930s and early '50s. militants during 1930's upsurge Teamster leaders to jail in 1941.

The McClellan Committee In 1957, reactionary Sen. Joseph But the "labor racketeering" of the CIO Secretary-Treasurer George Meany mittee's deliberations led to the passage of Edwin Meese III, and other top government officials hasn't helped him. He's expendable.

The U.S. government only "discovers" the crimes and brutality of puppets like the Shah, Somoza, and Marcos once a revolution looms on the horizon. And so it is with Jackie Presser and his ilk.

What disturbs the bosses-and their government-is the potential of an awakening membership in the Teamster Visible rank-and-file discontent against the Teamster bureaucracy has already surfaced in the union. Presser's 1983 proposed concessionary "relief rider" to the National Master Freight Agreement, for example, was rejected by 88 percent of the union's members.

Presser's attempt to ram through a quick 1984 United Parcel Service (UPS) settlement on 90,000 Teamsters was declared illegal after court action by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and several UPS workers.

And then something occurred last year which really began to show that the emperor perhaps didn't have any clothes. A rank-and-file slate won office in Grocery Drivers and Warehouse Local 138 in New York City. This large local was previously mob-controlled.

The new leadership organized elections of shop stewards for the first time. Incredible as it may seem, the local held its first local meeting in history. And the local didn't Teamster bureaucracy.

Some Teamsters, however, are not being confused by the government's anti-corruption campaign. Keith Gallagher, TDU member from Roadway Express in Scranton, Pa., writes in a TDU bulletin that, "intrusion by the federal government in running our union should be unwelcome. Instead, we need the right to vote for our top officers, and we need it now!" He asks "Could we really trust courtappointed personnel to negotiate our national contracts, or trust the Reagan administration after they crushed PATCO?"

Hal Leyshon, a freight driver and member of TDU's New York-New Jersey regional council, seconded these sentiments. He told Socialist Action that the "government collaborated with the mob to destroy Teamster rank-and-file democracy throughout the Midwest and sections of the South beginning in the late 1930s. The government and the employers wanted to destroy the union's capacity to continue winning better conditions for the workers."

Leyshon concluded: "Local 138's recent experience shows that it is possible for a mobilized and well-organized membership to take control back from the gangsters, corrupt officials, and labor fat-cats. None of it's going to be easy, but I'm for looking to the membership and not the government for the solution."

This is a dynamic that the seeks to short-circuit.