Word: hoffa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Newfoundland, where Premier Joey Smallwood is renowned as one of labor's best friends, one of labor's worst friends got a toe hold almost surreptitiously. Jimmy Hoffa and his racket-ridden International Brotherhood of Teamsters quietly set up two locals with 1,200 members. Alarmed, Smallwood last week bounced into the provincial legislature to denounce Hoffa & Co. as "pimps, panderers, white slavers, murderers, embezzlers, extortionists and dope peddlers." The legislators speedily responded with a sledgehammer law: the provincial government can now dissolve any local upon evidence that a "substantial number" of its union officers have been convicted...
Sentenced last week by a federal court in Tacoma, Wash, on six counts of income tax evasion: Dave Beck, 64, longtime Teamsters Union president, nudged-from office by Jimmy Hoffa in 1957, and in trouble with the law ever since. Sentence: five years' imprisonment and $60,000 fine, plus $10,961.52 in court costs. Said U.S. District Judge George H. Boldt in a lecture from the bench: "Mr. Beck plundered his union, his intimate associates, and, in some instances, his personal friends-most of whom quite readily would have given him anything he asked...
...abandon the attempt at reform and winning employer's respect through controlling an honest union. But he succeeded, nevertheless in gaining a sort of grudging admiration even from those employers with whom he drove the hardest bargain, admiration which has been increased along the same lines by Hoffa. Admitting that his contracts are so favorable to the unions as to be piratical to the owners, they nevertheless grant, "When Jimmy Hoffa says something, you know he means it. If he says his boys won't strike, they won't. Look at the auto unions if you don't think this...
...Hoffa's tremendous understanding of the problems of the trucking industry, though autocratically applied, has enabled him to work towards eliminating competition, standardizing working conditions, and relating the union demands to employer's abilities to pay in a way which has strengthened the industry as well as the union, just as Daniel Tobin's policies twenty-five years ago helped to pull the industry out of the depression...
Today there are some signs that the court-appointed monitors, despite the odds they find themselves working against, may succeed in cleaning up the union. A few scattered unions have voted in "reform" officials to replace the former supporters of Hoffa. But at the same time, the New York organizer of the Teamsters, long famed for his honesty, has been replaced by a known stooge of Hoffa who was installed by the Executive Committee of the international. Every step forward seems to involve another backward...