Jimmy Hoffa negotiated a National Master Freight Agreement, consolidating his own power and that of his Teamsters Union and perpetuating the corruption endemic to both.
On behalf of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, and Helpers of America (IBT), union president Jimmy Hoffa signed the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA) in Chicago, Illinois, on January 16, 1964. Labor experts, Teamster dissidents, and even many state and national officials who would later comment that Hoffa’s sensational disappearance (and probable murder) in 1975 was the best thing that could have happened to American trade unionism agree that the NMFA represented, from Hoffa’s perspective as well as from those of many Teamsters, his finest achievement. It was the first agreement to cover the trucking industry nationwide.
The NMFA and its successive versions brought contractual uniformity to the wages, hours, and working conditions of 30 percent of the Teamsters’ 1964 members, encompassing 450,000 intercity (or “over-the-road”) truckers and local carters. Despite local unions’ resistance to it in the San Francisco Bay Area, in New York City, and in northern New Jersey, as well as qualifications to it in the form of regional supplements and local riders, the agreement paved the way for standardization of the wages and contracts of the rest of the membership.
For Hoffa, the agreement, which was renegotiable every third year, consolidated his political position within the IBT and made him the chief collective bargainer for the nation’s largest trade union. Given Hoffa’s profound knowledge of the industries with which he dealt, his domineering personality, his exploitation of underworld and political alliances, and his unbridled ruthlessness, it bestowed unprecedented power upon him within the IBT at the same time that it gave the IBT unprecedented power within the American labor movement.
Hoffa always generously acknowledged that if the attainment of a national agreement was his, the vision was that of Farrell Dobbs
Insofar as Hoffa espoused any political ideology, it was borrowed from Dobbs’s own, namely that the American economy was fated to endure cycles of depression and faced ultimate failure. Dobbs believed that trade unions ought to contribute to revolutionary change. At the peak of a promising union career, Dobbs abandoned unionism, later to lead the Socialist Workers Party
Foremost was Dobbs’s insistence on establishing centralized areawide collective bargaining mechanisms through which to acquire uniformity in wages, hours, and working conditions for “over-the-road” truckers. Dobbs believed such centralization was mandated by the nature of the trucking industry, one characterized by ease of entry, low capital requirements, and tens of thousands of intensely competitive operators. In such circumstances, individual operators had little opportunity to pass increased costs to consumers through price hikes. They could lower their basic costs, principally labor, only by undercutting wages, increasing hours of work, or moving operations to low-wage areas.
Dobbs believed that the harmful effects of this competition could be mitigated if uniformities were brought to the drivers’ wages, hours, and working conditions. Under common conditions, operators could raise their prices together and more readily pass their cost increases to consumers without traditional price wars, wage cuts, or changes of base.
Tactically, Hoffa became a master of Dobbs’s techniques of leverage, or of using an employer or situation the union controlled to organize or to negotiate successfully with employers or other unions. Hoffa maximized advantages inherent in labor reform laws of the 1930’s. The federal Norris-LaGuardia Act
Labor reforms, in short, legalized certain types of economic coercion peculiar to the needs of a vigorous labor movement. To the leverages legally available, Hoffa and his cohorts added their preferred efforts to impose organization from the top down. They invoked their own forms of coercion, from questionable contract clauses to tertiary boycotts, beatings, and bombings. The sweeping centralization afforded by the NMFA, linked to the clout of the IBT and to a personality such as Hoffa’s, gave Hoffa and his union vast power.
Several immediate consequences resulted from Hoffa’s centralization of Teamster authority in his own hands by virtue of the NMFA, within a union historically characterized by its decentralization and the substantial autonomy of its locals. Union membership had risen to 1.7 million by 1964 from 1.4 million in 1957, when Hoffa became Teamster president. By the time Hoffa went to prison in 1967, three years after the first NMFA, the Teamsters had gained 300,000 members, only a minority of whom were truckers. Unionization had been extended, for example, to warehousemen, chauffeurs, bakers, and confectionery workers. In addition, as the Teamsters’ chief collective bargaining agent, Hoffa redrafted and shrewdly reinterpreted the union constitution to funnel the all-important, and politically exploitable, grievance procedures into his own office. Furthermore, but of vital importance, Hoffa extended and intensified his power over the Teamsters’ Central and Southern States Pension Fund (CSSPF).
Despite the fact that Hoffa had become the Teamsters’ principal leader by 1954, three years prior to his election to the union’s presidency in 1957, he lagged far behind other major labor leaders in developing pension funds
Hoffa clearly was aware of how to deploy the funds of local union treasuries and welfare trusts to buttress his personal empire, but he did not negotiate the Teamsters’ CSSPF, his first pension fund, until January, 1955. Thereafter, however, with characteristic astuteness, he learned to manipulate CSSPF moneys by grasping personal authority over their dispersal and investment and made these decisions his principal preoccupation.
There was much to preoccupy him, for successive NMFA Teamster contracts with employers stipulated ever-rising employer contributions to the CSSPF. The $2 per week that employers paid for each employee in 1955 rose to $4 by 1960 and to $7 in 1964. By 1965, $6 million in such contributions flowed into the CSSPF monthly. The fund’s total value for the union’s 1.7 million workers had soared to $200 million. By 1967, the U.S. attorney general’s office and the nation’s courts had handed down 200 individual indictments against Teamsters and their allies, winning 125 convictions related mainly to Hoffa’s and other Teamster officials’ illegal uses of CSSPF funds. The ability to exploit the power inherent in this immense fund stemmed from Hoffa’s ability, thanks to this control over successive NMFA contracts, to control the Teamsters’ collective bargaining.
Hoffa’s unprecedented labor empire and the many threats it posed were brought to the general public’s attention rather dramatically on several fronts. The menace of the IBT was already painfully evident to both union and nonunion workers, as well as to employers and employer representatives, who were victims of the Teamsters’ ostracization, intimidation, beatings, shootings, and bombings. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clark R. Mollenhoff was among the first at the national level to expose Hoffa’s tentacles of power. He informed and advised congressional and other federal officials as they investigated Hoffa’s union.
Public awareness was more broadly awakened by the persistent investigations of the McClellan Committee
A legislative response came even as McClellan’s hearings proceeded. The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act
The labor reform legislation enacted between 1932 and the mid-1940’s—in spirit mostly trusting and permissive by past comparisons—was altered by modifications following the lines of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Sober questions were raised concerning how much union power the national welfare could tolerate and whether union “monopolies” ought to be subject to the full force of the country’s antitrust laws. Hoffa’s consolidation of power through the NMFA brought further concerns as well as achieving the practical purpose of standardizing the working conditions of truckers and ending some of the competition among them.
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citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Franco, Joseph, with Richard Hammer. Hoffa’s Man: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa as Witnessed by His Strongest Arm. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987. Candid and colorful. Written by a voluble Hoffa admirer and organizer whose background of violence is characteristic of Hoffa’s associates, many of whom are depicted here. Photos, excellent index. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Hoffa, James Riddle. The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa: An Autobiography. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970. Interesting, if self-serving. Politicians, judges, journalists, and others not “connected” with Hoffa are presented as wrong or confused. No reference features. To be read for balance and some color. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Jacoby, Daniel. Laboring for Freedom: A New Look at the History of Labor in America. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Discusses Hoffa’s effects on the overall history of the U.S. labor movement. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">James, Ralph C., and Estelle Dinerstein James. Hoffa and the Teamsters. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1965. An invaluable and unique inside scholarly study based on ninety days of close association with Hoffa in action and broad access to Teamster files. Admiring of Hoffa’s intelligence and abilities, but objectively raises serious questions about his use of power and money. Clearly written. Chapter notes, glossary, and good index. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Moldea, Dan E. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians, and the Mob. New York: Paddington Press, 1978. The book began as a working thesis and became the author’s project for the National Broadcasting Company in the mid-1970’s. Detailed and informative insights into both Hoffa’s connections and his decline. Photos, brief chapter notes, excellent index. Updates aspects of Mollenhoff’s work. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Mollenhoff, Clark Raymond. Tentacles of Power: The Story of Jimmy Hoffa. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1965. Superb reporting that earned the author a Pulitzer Prize. Relies heavily on Mollenhoff’s investigations and McClellan Committee testimony. An exciting, informative, and frightening read. Photos, notes, brief appendix, but no index. Outstanding objective damnation of Hoffa’s abuses of power. -
citation-type="booksimple" xlink:type="simple">Witwer, David. Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. The bulk of this history of the Teamsters is devoted to Hoffa and the era of corruption that he came both to preside over and to symbolize.
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