Word: unionizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...issue of local independence has played a very large part in creating the present corruption and lack of popular control. From its very first days, the locals of the union have fought every effort of the central leadership to consolidate control under one governing body...
...even when Dave Beck made what appears to have been a genuine effort to clean things up when he came in, he ran into such opposition from the locals that, by 1954, he had to 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...
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 But at the same time, the New York organizer of the Teamsters, long famed for his honesty, has been replaced by a known stooge of Hoffa who was installed by the Executive Committee of the international.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...
...long standing of shakedowns and violence in the teamsters, the members are not as much surprised as annoyed. They have tended to line up behind the leaders who brought them through the depression and crises of organization, and the employers who have found the teamsters a solid if difficult union with which to do business have not moved for a revolution which might bring in the unpredictable. The little businessmen who have been hit by the thuggery and extortion which comes so easily into a craft union like the teamsters are almost powerless to do anything...