Historic 1934 Minneapolis: Strike Commemorated

The 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis was one of the key events that led to the great labor battles that built the CIO in the late ’30s. Significantly, the main leaders of the Minneapolis strike were revolutionary socialists, Trotskyists, to whom Socialist Action traces our roots.

On July 25-26, Minneapolis commemorated the strike with a street festival, an old-fashioned labor picnic, and other events. The free street festival took place near the warehouse district where striking workers and their allies had held off gangs of deputized strike-breakers 75 years ago.

The above photo shows Dave Riehle, a locomotive engineer for the Union Pacific and a local labor historian, speaking at the July 26 picnic in Minnehaha Park.

A few days earlier, Riehle and other participants in the commemorative events were interviewed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (July 19, 2009). “Today is starting to look more and more like the era the truck drivers were living in back in the 1930s,” Riehle told the paper.

“The union movement learned then that you have to organize and get out on the streets if you want to change the relationships of the forces in society. Obama is not going to save the workers, just like FDR did not save them. Labor has never had a savior. If we are going to save ourselves, we have to do it ourselves.”

To read a longer account of this event click here:

http://socialistaction.blogspot.com/2009/08/75th-anniversary-of-1934-minneapolis.html