80 years ago: Teamsters strike in Minneapolis

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T nesota, as many Februaries in Minnesota are cold. he year was 1934. It was a cold February in Min­ The temperature had dropped below zero, and peo­ ple were scrambling for coal to heat their homes and businesses. But no coal was to be had. Teamsters Lo­ cal 574, along with other workers in the Minneapolis coal yards, had gone on strike. Sixty-five out of 67 coal yards were closed within three hours of the strike, and no coal was being moved anywhere in the city. After three days, the bosses agreed to negotiate, and after a vote on collective bargaining in mid-February, the union won the right to recognition along with small wage increases for most workers.

But this was just the beginning of what was to be­ come one of the most important sequences of strikes to take place in the United States during the Great De­ pression. They were the strikes that “made Minneapo­ lis a union town,” eventually opening up many indus­ tries to successful union organization.

The entire working class was radicalizing during this time, as low wages and long hours ground them down into a life of poverty, and strikes were on the rise. The difference in Minneapolis was that Local 574 was led by a small layer of Trotskyist socialists, who used their revolutionary experience to lead the strike to victory.

Before the Teamsters strike in 1934, Minneapo­ lis already had a long and storied history of radical workers’ organizations and militant strikes. In Min­ neapolis, the working class was made up of a mixture of U.S.-born workers, and immigrants from countries like Norway, Sweden, Germany, Finland, and Russia. The shifting Minnesota workforce mainly worked in booming industries such as logging, mining, milling, and on the railroads.

These workers made up the majority of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Minneapo­ lis; in the 1910s IWW Local 10 was one of the largest in the Midwest, and the fact that many Wobblies and socialists also belonged to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had a big influence on the workers’ move­ ment in Minneapolis. Many railroad workers were so­ cialists, following leaders such as Eugene Debs. When Debs ran for president in 1912, he carried four coun­ ties in the U.S., three of which were in Minnesota, and dominated politically by railroad workers.

Many of the immigrant workers who made Minneso­ ta their home were already Socialists when they came to the United States, and many already had significant union experience in their home countries. In fact, Debs’s Socialist Party had so many immigrant mem­ bers that it was organized into separate language fed­ erations. These factors combined to result in a large militant and socialist influence in the labor movement in Minneapolis, making the time ripe for a strike like the one that happened in 1934.

V.R. (Ray) Dunne and Carl Skoglund (known by his friends and comrades as “Skogie”) were prime exam­ ples of this type of worker in Minneapolis. Dunne, who grew up near Little Falls, Minn., traveled around the country, working as a logger or field laborer, and gain­ ing strike experience before finally settling in Min­ neapolis and getting a job as a driver for an express service and later in the coal yards. Skoglund, originally from Sweden, immigrated to the U.S. in 1911, after be­ ing blacklisted for his involvement in strikes and so­ cialism, and unable to find a job in his home country. After working as a lumberjack in Northern Minnesota and injuring his foot, he moved to Minneapolis and got a job in the railroad industry, joining the Socialist Par­ ty and becoming a leader in the Scandinavian Socialist Federation of the SP.

Dunne and Skoglund were founders of the Com­ munist Party in 1919. Both were also elected as del­ egates to the Minneapolis Trades and Labor Assembly (AFL), and were expelled from the AFL in 1925 during a witch hunt in the unions for “reds.” Both men were also expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 for supporting James P. Cannon and Trotsky’s Interna­ tional Left Opposition against Stalin, and went on to form the Communist League of America (Left Oppo­ sition)—the Trotskyist organization that would later become the Socialist Workers Party.

In the early 1930s, the Communist League decided to start a unionizing drive within the coal industry in Minneapolis, through Local 574. This was planned in order to reach the ever-growing layer of workers who were radicalizing during the Great Depression and organize them into joining the union and taking action against the boss class. Both Carl Skoglund and (Right) Local 574 Women’s Auxiliary serves a meal to striking truck drivers.

(Left) Minneapolis cop attacks striker.

V.R. Dunne were working in the coal yards at the time, and they were soon joined by other comrades from the party, including Dunne’s brothers Grant and Miles, and a young coal-yard worker named Farrell Dobbs.

Working conditions in 1934 were harsh. Accord­ ing to William Millikan in his book “A Union Against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and Its Fight Against Organized Labor,” between 1929 and 1933, 25% of factories in Minneapolis went out of business, and in 1932 the unemployment rate in Min­ nesota was 23.4% (just under the national average). During this time, the wages of workers in Minneapolis fell by 27%, and almost half of the workforce saw their working hours cut below 40 per week.

To put this into perspective, Farrell Dobbs described the working conditions in the coal industry in 1934 in his classic account of the strike, “Teamster Rebellion.” According to Dobbs, drivers at this time made be­ tween $10-$18 a week for 54-90 hours of work; many worked from 3 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week. Farrell himself was barely making ends meet for his family on $18 a week for 60 hours of work. When his hours were suddenly cut to 48 (with a $2 cut in pay), it made the difference between subsistence and poverty.

That’s when Dobbs decided to join the union. He says, “If workers in their daily lives are more or less able to keep afloat and expect to be able to gradually move ahead, they will not tend to radicalize. It’s differ­ ent when they are losing ground and the future seems precarious. Then there begins a change in their atti­ tudes, something which is not always immediately ap­ parent. Any spark can light the fire, and once lit, that fire can rapidly expand.”

And that fire was ready to explode late in 1933, when the organizing drive began in earnest. At this time, Teamsters Local 574 was an “open shop” union. “Open shop” was defined in the employers’ propaganda as a workplace where the workers could elect to be union or non-union. In reality, “open shop” meant no union at all. Union supporters could and were summarily fired. Local 574, chartered as a “General Drivers” lo­ (continued on page 11, in “Immigrants ask: “When will deportations stop?’”)

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2014 The strike in the coal yards was the beginning of a series of strikes that ‘made Minneapolis a union town.’