Last month, the media blared that Detroit cops were about to dig up a driveway that they thought covered Jimmy Hoffa’s body. Ever since Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance, police have investigated rumors Hoffa was buried under a New Jersey football stadium, or was murdered in a Detroit residential home, among others.
Now, fifty years after Jimmy Hoffa blazed across the American labor movement and the newspaper headlines, permit me to remind folks what Jimmy Hoffa did.
Jimmy Hoffa successfully forced corporate America to pay fair wages to over two million semi-skilled workers in the trucking and warehouse industry. Before Hoffa, companies considered those workers trash. After Hoffa, those workers could afford houses, and had health plans and pensions.
During the Depression, a 16-year-old Jimmy Hoffa began his career by dramatically smashing a crate of strawberries onto the warehouse floor and leading 300 Detroit workers out on a strike that won higher wages and shorter hours, and a union for those folks. His charismatic leadership, even as a teenager, meant that grown men voted for him to lead their union.
Hoffa rose rapidly in the Detroit Teamsters. Countless beatings and arrests did not prevent him from organizing thousands of local truck drivers and warehouse workers into the union.
Within a few years Hoffa helped organize over 100,000 long-haul truckers in the Midwest into the Teamsters union during the the Depression. He allied with militant socialists to wage a comprehensive campaign across a dozen states. His tactics included hand-to-hand combat, boycotts, bombings, sabotage and blockades of freight routes.
In the 1950s, Hoffa achieved leadership of the national Teamsters, and organized virtually every trucking company in the United States, along with warehouses and dozens of other industries. Hoffa even helped organized 100,000 trucking and warehouse workers in the Deep South, the most effective organizing campaign in the south in US history.
By the 1960s, Hoffa helped pull up 2 million working people into the middle-class with strong teamster contracts. Few people have ever won increased wages for as many working people in all of labor history.
Any union member could walk into the Teamsters building and right into Hoffa’s office, without an appointment or getting screened by a secretary. He’d remember your name and call the boss on the phone right then to straighten out your beef.
But Hoffa was also deeply flawed. He helped thousands of black workers to win large wage increases, but in the 1940s, he tacitly allowed the highest-paying trucking jobs to remain mostly white.
And organized crime wanted into the wealthy Teamsters pension fund. Hoodlums took over local teamster unions in places like Chicago and New Jersey and demanded that Hoffa loan Pension fund money to their schemes, including Mob-run hotels in Las Vegas.
In 1957, Senator McClellan’s “Rackets” Committee, whose lead investigator was a young Robert Kennedy, angrily criticized Hoffa for not removing the mobsters from the Teamsters.
Hoffa failed to act against the hoodlums. The AFL-CIO, the umbrella group of most US unions, expelled the Teamsters.
The Senate hearings provoked criminal investigations, and Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and union fund mismanagement.
The McClellan Committee also proposed new legislation that outlawed the “secondary boycott,” meaning that union workers could now be fired for refusing to handle non-union goods. Hoffa had exploited the secondary boycott tactic to help build the union, because union truckers had been able to refuse to handle freight from non-union sources.
While Hoffa was imprisoned, the Mafia began stealing from the Teamsters pension fund with the cooperation of Hoffa’s successor, Richard Fitzsimmons.
President Richard Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence after 4 years, but Nixon, as a favor to Fitzsimmons, imposed parole requirements prohibiting Hoffa from holding union office for 10 years. Hoffa angrily condemned that parole condition, and pledged to drive out the hoodlums when he was allowed to run for Teamster office again in 1980.
Hoffa left his house to meet with a Mob-connected Teamster officer in 1975, and never returned. The prime suspects in his disappearance were themselves murdered.
Hoffa’s son was elected to head up the Teamsters in 1998. these days, the Teamsters are down to roughly 1.4 million members, from a peak membership of about 2.2 million in Hoffa Senior’s day, mainly because the de-regulation of trucking allowed unfettered competition that destroyed most union trucking firms. These days Teamsters also represent cops, flight attendants, car rental clerks, bakers, brewery workers, cannery employees, and dozens of other occupations.
The Hoffa story is personal. In the 1970s, I got out of jail, and worked at minimum wage. I continued to do bad things for extra money just to pay rent. Then I got a teamster job at good wages, and was able to give up crime forever and raise a family.
Anyone with a strong back who could read shipping labels could be a Teamster driver or warehouse worker. At many Teamster jobs I took, I’d often meet fellow ex-cons there, grateful, like me, for their second chance to earn an honest well-paid living. One problem of today's economy is the current lack of these decent-paying jobs for folks who can't go to college.
Thank you, Jimmy Hoffa. Your body may lie in an unmarked grave but the good you did lives on, in the hearts and paychecks of millions of working folks and their kin.