In my inevitable quest to learn more about the history of our new home in the Twin Cities, I recently read Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs as a primary source on the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. That strike was a significant moment in US labor history, beginning a shift towards industrial unionism – the idea that all workers in a given industry should be part of the same union, rather than organizing unions by trade. It also, not coincidentally, triggered real growth for the Teamsters and was one of the turning points leading American Trotskyists to split from the Stalinist Communist Party USA.
Farrell Dobbs was a key figure in all of the above. He was one of the strike leaders and would go on to work for the Socialist Workers Party; he also remained active in the Teamsters, acting as an advisor to a young Jimmy Hoffa (although Hoffa would later purge him from the union). Interesting guy.
The book is in print from Pathfinder Press, the publishing arm of the Socialist Workers Party. There’s no ebook available so hit up your public library, like I did. Thanks, Seattle Public Library! It’s the first of four books by Dobbs on the history of the Teamsters and how they organized; I intend to work my way through all of them, so you know I enjoyed reading the first one.
Dobbs is not the most inspiring writer ever but he’s competent. I liked getting the front line view of what happened in 1934 and the years leading up to it. The overarching pattern is determination and practicality; the strike organizers had to be firm despite political pressure and physical violence, pushing over and over again before their final victory. On Bloody Friday, when the police opened fire on the strikers, 67 workers were wounded and two were killed. The state government built a military prison camp for holding arrested union members. The local Teamsters dug in and kept working, finding compromises where possible while keeping their goals firmly in sight.
Another important lesson is the way Dobbs and the rest built a broad tent. In particular, I was struck by the emphasis placed on unionizing unemployed people. The union leaders recognized that the unemployed were a potential source of scab labor, and that they would naturally be sympathetic to workers’ causes, so they made sure to bring them into the strike and supported their needs – which wound up becoming a small-scale conflict between the Trotskyists and the Stalinists.
Dobbs gets a bit smug there:
When the ERA strike began after Bloody Friday, Sam Davis of the Communist Party tried to muscle his way onto the strike committee. He had no credentials from any work project, and the ERA strikers refused to seat him on their committee. Having isolated themselves from the class struggle raging in Minneapolis because of their ultraleft policies, the Stalinists reacted by continuing to denounce the “anti-working-class policy of the Trotzky-ite leaders.”
Leftist factionalism is nothing new. I’ll have to find some original sources for the other side of that argument at some point.
And as far as factionalism goes, I liked learning how the strikers worked with and against Governor Floyd Olson. Olson was the first governor elected as a member of the Farmer-Labor Party, and was generally pro-worker; he was certainly not radical enough for the Minneapolis Teamsters and his compromises weren’t always acceptable. He was the guy who called out the National Guard and built that prison camp I mentioned. It isn’t a complete parallel to the current-day arguments between progressives and centrists but it’s not a million miles away either.
So, all in all, a good read with some lasting lessons. I look forward to the third book in Dobbs’ series, Teamster Politics, in which he tells the story of how the Teamsters fought the fascist Silver Shirts.