Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
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Leadup to the strike
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was, under the leadership of
Daniel Tobin
in 1933, a conservative union averse to strikes. While the union's
members were often called on to support other unions' strikes, since
their role in transport brought them in contact with workers in many
other unionized industries, and had developed strong traditions of
solidarity in some areas, the International Union itself was cautious to
the point of resistant to any use of the strike weapon. The provisions
of the International Constitution that required a two thirds vote of the
membership to authorize any strike action and that gave the
International President the power to withhold strike benefits if he
believed that a local union had struck prematurely, It also divided its
members into separate unions along craft or industry lines: ice wagon
drivers in one local, produce drivers in another, milk drivers in a
third, and so forth.
The Teamsters also had a number of general locals; Local 574 in
Minneapolis, which had no more than 75 members in 1934, was one of them.
A number of militant members, including several
Communist Party members who had gone to the newly formed
Communist League of America (Left Opposition) in the internal split following
Trotsky's expulsion, became members of Local 574 in the early 1930s.
These militants —
Ray Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant,
Carl Skoglund and later
Farrell Dobbs—began
by organizing coal drivers through a strike in the coldest part of 1933
that ignored both the cumbersome approval procedures established under
the International's Constitution and the ineffective mediation
procedures offered under the
National Industrial Recovery Act.
The victory gave the union a great deal of credibility among both
drivers and their employers. The union began organizing drivers wherever
they could be found.
The union also began preparing for the strike in a number of ways. It
rented a large hall that could be used as a strike headquarters,
kitchen and infirmary. It organized a women's auxiliary to staff the
headquarters. Finally, it entered into discussions with the sympathetic
leaders of organizations of farmers and the unemployed to obtain their
support for the upcoming strike.
The strike
The strike began on May 16, 1934. The strike was remarkably
effective, shutting down most commercial transport in the city with the
exception of certain farmers, who were allowed to bring their produce in
to town, but delivering directly to grocers, rather than to the market
area, which the union had shut down.
The market was to be the scene of the fiercest fighting during the earliest part of the strike. On Saturday, May 19, 1934,
Minneapolis Police
and private guards beat a number of strikers trying to prevent
strikebreakers from unloading a truck in that area and waylaid several
strikers who had responded to a report that scab drivers were unloading
newsprint at the two major dailies' loading docks. When those injured
strikers were brought back to the strike headquarters the police
followed; the strikers, however, not only refused to let the police into
the headquarters, but left two of them unconscious on the sidewalk
outside.
Open battle between striking teamsters armed with pipes and the police in the streets of Minneapolis.
Fighting intensified the following Monday, May 21, when the police,
augmented by several hundred newly deputized members of the Citizens
Alliance, an employer organization, attempted to open up the market for
trucking. Fighting began when a loaded truck began leaving a loading
dock. The battle became a general melee when hundreds of pickets armed
with clubs of all sorts rushed to the area to support the picketers;
when the police drew their guns as if to shoot, the union sent a truck
loaded with picketers into the mass of police and deputies in order to
make it impossible for them to fire without shooting each other.
Other unions, particularly in the building trades, began to strike in
sympathy with the Teamsters. The American Federation of Labor Central
Labor Council in Minneapolis offered financial and moral support for the
strike, allowing the union to coordinate some of its picketing
activities from its headquarters.
The fighting resumed on Tuesday, May 22. The picketers took the
offensive and succeeded in driving both police and deputies from the
market and the area around the union's headquarters. Two deputies, one a
member of the board of directors of the Citizens Alliance, were killed
in the fighting.
Negotiations
The Central Labor Council, the Building Trades Council and the
Teamsters Joint Council approached Mike Johannes, the Minneapolis Chief
of Police, to propose a truce, under which the local would cease
picketing for twenty-four hours if the police and the employers ceased
trying to move trucks. The employers, the Teamsters and the building
trades signed a formal truce agreement. Johannes, however, declared that
the police would move trucks once the truce expired, leading the union
to announce that it was resuming picketing.
At this point city government appealed for Governor
Floyd B. Olson
to mobilize the National Guard. Olson did, but stopped short of
actually deploying them, unwilling to alienate his labor supporters.
Olson had already been attempting to mediate the dispute, On May 25, the
employers and the union reached an agreement on a contract that
provided union recognition, reinstatement for all strikers, seniority
and a no-discrimination clause. The membership approved it
overwhelmingly.
The strike resumes
The union thought that it had the employers' agreement to include the
"inside workers", the warehouse employees as well as the drivers and
loaders. When the employers reneged on that agreement the strike resumed
on Tuesday, July 17. Governor Olson again mobilized, but did not
deploy, the National Guard.
The union's leadership had chosen to use different tactics in this
strike; it ordered its members to picket without carrying any clubs or
weapons of any sort. The police, on the other hand, armed themselves
with riot guns which sprayed buckshot over a wide arc.
On Friday, July 20, a single yellow truck drove to the central market
escorted by fifty armed policemen. The truck made the small delivery
successfully, but a vehicle carrying picketers wielding clubs cut off
the truck. The police opened fire on the vehicle with shotguns, then
turned their guns on the strikers filling the surrounding streets. An
eyewitness reported that as the pickets moved to aid their fallen
comrades, "They flowed directly into buckshot fire...And the cops let
them have it as they picked up their wounded. Lines of living, solid men
fell, broke, wavering." He also said he saw one man "stepping on his
own intestines, bright and bursting in the street, and another holding
his severed arm in his right hand." By the end of hostilities, two
strikers were dead and sixty-seven wounded.
The police violence sparked a show of support from other unions and a
one day strike of transport workers. Each side stepped back from the
confrontation: Chief Johannes and Mayor Bainbridge faced calls for their
impeachment, while the union continued to urge its members not to give
the police any justification for further attacks, disarming a number of
picketers who wanted to return fire with fire. The union did not make
any overt efforts to stop those few trucks accompanied by convoys of
forty police cars apiece that tried to deliver goods, but sent so many
cars with pickets to accompany those convoys that the police were never
able to shepherd more than a few delivery trucks on any given day.
Martial law and settlement
A public commission, set up later by the governor, reported: “Police
took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the
police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the
pickets.” On July 26, Farmer-Labor governor Olson declared martial law
and mobilized four thousand National Guardsmen, who began issuing
operating permits to truck drivers. On August 1, National Guard troops
seized strike headquarters and placed arrested union leaders in a
stockade at the state fairgrounds in Saint Paul.
The next day, the headquarters were restored to the union and the
leaders released from the stockade, as the National Guard carried out a
token raid on the Citizens Alliance headquarters. The union appealed to
the Central Labor Union for a general strike and the governor issued an
ultimatum that he would stop all trucks by midnight, August 5, if there
was no settlement. Nevertheless, by August 14 there were thousands of
trucks operating under military permits. Although the strike was gravely
weakened by martial law and economic pressure, union leaders made it
clear that it would continue.
On August 21, a federal mediator got acceptance of a settlement
proposal from A. W. Strong, head of the Citizens Alliance, incorporating
the union’s major demands. The settlement was ratified and the back of
employer resistance to unionization in Minneapolis was broken. In March
1935 International president Daniel Tobin expelled Local 574 from the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). However, in August 1936
Tobin was forced to relent and recharter the local as 544. The leaders
of 544 went on to develop the area and conference bargaining that exists
today in the IBT.
Local 544 remained under socialist leadership until 1941, when
eighteen leaders of the union and the Socialist Workers Party were
sentenced to federal prison, the first victims of the anti-radical
Smith Act, a law eventually found by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
The impact
The strike changed Minneapolis, which had been an open shop citadel
under the control of the Citizens Alliance for years before 1934. In the
aftermath of this strike thousands of other workers in other industries
organized with the assistance of Local 574.
The strike also gave the Communist League, later renamed the Workers
Party of America, a strong position in Local 574, and in other Teamster
locals within the metropolitan area of Minneapolis. Trotskyist strength
grew to over 100 members. This gave leadership to the Trotskyists
through the various unions they led within the Central Labor Council. As
mentioned below, through organizing the first area-wide contract for
any union outside of rail, the Trotskyists established locals of their
party where ever there were Teamster locals, from South Dakota to Iowa
to Colorado. The party was later driven out of that local by
prosecutions under the
Smith Act and a trusteeship imposed by Tobin in the early 1940s.
More importantly, the strike launched the career of Dobbs, who played
a significant role in the organization of over-the-road drivers
throughout the Midwest. Those efforts led in turn to the transformation
of the Teamsters from a craft union, made up of locals with a parochial
focus on their own craft and locality, into a truly national union.
or History
l Strike of 1934 grew out of a strike by Teamsters against most of the trucking companies operating in Minneapolis, a major distribution center for the Upper Midwest. The strike began on May 16, 1934 in the Market District (the modern day Warehouse District) and ensuing violence lasted periodically throughout the summer. Led by local leaders associated with the Trotskyist Communist League of America, a group that later founded the Socialist Workers Party (United States), the strike paved the way for the organization of over-the-road drivers and the growth of the Teamsters labor union. It, along with the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party, were also important catalysts for the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s, much of which was organized through the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
