Why Jimmy Hoffa had to go

There's been an abundance of speculation about the whys and wherefores of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance in 1975. The common theme is that Mr. Hoffa ran afoul of some of his more unsavory mob buddies and was sent to swim with the fishes.

Exactly why Hoffa's underworld connections would want to eliminate him has never been explained. Lending pension-fund money to mob-connected construction and real-estate outfits was a win-win. The Italians got loans they'd never get at the bank, and the Teamster's Pension Fund got a better return than they would have got at the bank.

The only losers in that arrangement were the banks!

It's a sad thing that Hoffa's legacy will forever be tainted by innuendo and conspiracy theories. The reality is that Hoffa was the single most important player in bringing America's working class into the middle class.

The pinnacle of Hoffa's career as a union leader arrived with the Teamster's Master Freight Agreement of 1964. Guys who drove trucks for a living were making annual incomes that, in today's money, would range from $75,000 to well into the six numbers.

The Teamsters, and the union movement in general, had momentum on their side. Guys wore their Teamsters jackets with pride, as well they should.

By 1967 Jimmy Hoffa was in jail.

As you well know, from the high-water mark of the middle sixties to today, it's pretty much been a continuous downward spiral for workers in America.

Who benefited from Hoffa's elimination?

Wouldn't that be the place to look when you're trying to solve the great Who Snuffed Hoffa mystery?

West Bengal workers lead in labour militancy

While thrashing the CEO with iron bars is going a bit too far, one cannot help but admire the determination of these workers not to accept the back of the hand from their employer.

Contrast that with how workers in North America respond to unilateral employer decisions that impact pay, hours, or whether you have a job at all. Labour militancy here is but a distant memory. If the hedge fund that just bought your workplace wants to "create efficiencies" by shutting down and relocating to a low wage state or Mexico or China, workers are expected to slink quietly into the twilight of redundancy with nary a murmur of protest.

If the place was unionized there may be murmurs of protest, but they'll last only a few weeks while some once-mighty outfit like the Steelworkers or Teamsters haggle for a better severance package for their dispossessed members.

The reality of organized labour in America today is that even the Teamsters and the Steelworkers all too frequently negotiate contracts that leave their members working full time but living below the poverty line.

That's just not right.

When pacifists built warships

Ya, I know that ain't a warship.

But here's my point; I spent a couple years at Irving Shipbuilding back in the early '90s, working on the Frigate Program.

It was a good gig. Strong union, sensible management, fair wages.

I was a welder/steel-fitter with pacifist inclinations. As a shop floor guy who needed to feed his family, my attitude to the big questions has always been; if I didn't do that job somebody else would.

I realize at some level that's a cop-out. Any Nazi death camp commandant could make the same argument.

But back to the picture above.

That's a "megaload" making its way from Idaho to the tar sands developments in Alberta. Every Teamster, Ironworker, etc. on this job is approaching it in the same way I approached my shipyard gig; if I didn't drive this truck somebody else would, and I've got a family to feed.

I don't think we need to judge those folks for making that decision.

Many years ago I used to work for one of the biggest megaload contractors in eastern Canada, Lackie Brothers.



They had a lot of work taking big loads up to the Bruce Nuclear development.

I don't have any use for nuclear power. I think it's stupid to pursue energy sources when you haven't figured out how to deal with the waste from your energy-producing process. But again, me refusing to work on anything to do with nuclear energy is hardly going to slow down the development of the Bruce.

The theoretical socialists would of course point out at this juncture that if none of the overalls crew went to work, nothing would happen.

That's true in the long run. In the short run, the kids you feed need three meals a day whether daddy has a job or not.

So you fold up your principles and stuff them in the back pocket of your Big Bill coveralls, and you go to work.

I'd like to say that Lackie Bros. was a good gig but I'm not so sure. I came along at a time when the elder Lackie who had started the company was giving way to his offspring. I never saw any evidence that the offspring had any interest in the business other than storing their boats in the fenced yard of the shop on Centennial Ave. in Kitchener.

That's the shop where I worked.

Lackie Bros was what's known as a closed shop. You had the Ironworkers Union representing the outside guys, the Ironworkers Shopmens local representing the shop guys, and if I'm not mistaken, the Teamsters representing the drivers.

The shop was located in Kitchener, and had a lot of folks of German descent on the floor. There is something about the German attitude that looks askance at questioning authority. They just want to follow orders.

I'll never forget the day this German guy asked if he could leave early for his daughter's fourth birthday party. Most guys would just have left without bothering to ask. This guy asked, and the weasel who was our shop floor boss told him "no".

I saw that middle-aged man cry because his boss told him he couldn't go to his daughter's birthday party.

This was a completely closed union shop where one would presume that the union called the shots.

It doesn't work like that.

The machinery of intimidation works across union lines. The same kind of anti-authoritarian attitude will challenge authority in either environment; the difference is that in the union shop he will likely keep his job after that challenge.

My quibble in the shop was that the stewards had pretty much become management bumboys. They'd be writing their own overtime tickets and look the other way when that management weasel was pushing around some of the meeker guys.

I remember going at it with the shop steward over an issue that touched me personally. The outside guys were a bit slow, and some of them were brought into the shop just to keep them busy. I found myself welding flanges onto the end of a pipe while an outside Ironworker was welding the same flanges onto the other end of the same pipe.

At the time the Shopworkers rate was twelve bucks an hour, while the outside guys were making $20. That didn't work for me.

I took it up with the shop steward, an affable enough guy who spent 100% of his time building Lackie their own custom-spec floats. He was accustomed to writing as much time and a half and double time work for himself as he felt like doing.

Like I said, nice enough guy, but he could not see my problem. At the end of the day his concluding remark was, "well, we're not going to tell the boss how to run the business."

Well, that was enough for me. Remember, this was back in the day where if you could read a blueprint and run a bead you were pretty much golden to a lot of employers, so instead of staying and fighting the good fight I left for a job at Dick Cheney's Dresser Industries for a bit more money.

That's what you do when you have a family to feed.

Labour day

Or labor day as our friends south of the 49th like to call it, because after all, there's no "u" in labor!

Not many of u anyway.

Dean Baker has an opinion piece at the AJE site today where he uses Canada as an example of how labour might be revived in the US.

I sort of lost him after he pointed out that in Western Europe union membership tends to be 80% of the workforce or more.

That's the example we should be following. On paper Canada's 31% looks impressive, but Baker forgot to mention that in the private sector it's closer to 12% and shrinking. In fact one of the prime items on the wish list for the Harper gang is to bring in US-style right-to-work-for-less legislation.

Big Unions in the US were flirting with self-destruction and irrelevance for years, but their wholesale acquiescence to two-tiered contracts was the kiss of death. How can you tell the new hire he's working for 14 bucks an hour but the old guy next to you is going to keep his 30? This is the antithesis of what unions should be about.

And the new hires know it.

I was listening to a couple of talking heads discuss Obama's lack of appeal to the so-called NASCAR vote. The Democrats are ostensibly the union-friendly party, so what's the problem with the blue-collar white guys? They think their interests are better represented by a guy who claims corporations are people too?

Unfortunately, that's exactly what a lot of them think. The complacency of union leadership over the past forty years has led them to that point. The seeds of that complacency were evident within the membership all along.

It was my observation on one shop floor after another that the rank and file were a lot more conservative than the leadership. On being hired into a union shop back in the sixties or seventies, the average worker would initially be very cognizant of the fact that their low-skill job payed four or five times the minimum wage because there was a union contract. Hell, they'd even attend the odd union meeting!

Talk to them a year or two later and it's a different story. They're not working class anymore, they're middle class. Their taxes are too high. And goddamn, what are they paying all those union dues for anyway? After a couple of years on the job the typical UAW member had succeeded in convincing himself that the only reason he was getting a mere four or five times minimum wage and not eight or ten was because the union was holding him back.

I've seen it a thousand times.

And that's the attitude that's played so nicely into the hands of the oligarchs and the corporate weasels who came up with "right to work". Sounds good, doesn't it? Of course you should have the right to work! And who needs unions? Aren't you man enough to walk into the boss' office and demand your due? Of course you are, and we'll help you out by moving your job to Georgia or Alabama where it's going to be a lot harder for those union types to hold you back!

How stupid can people be!

What hope I see on the horizon for workers doesn't come from the Canadian labour model, which I fear is meandering down the same road to irrelevance that their American brothers and sisters have already trod.

The hope is coming from a new generation of workers who will realize that what the Teamsters and the USW and the UAW have left them isn't good enough, and will take matters into their own hands.

In China militant workers have been known to toss recalcitrant managers from the factory roof. In America those managers will be joined by a few union bosses once the next generation gets their hands on the wheel.