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The last of four books on the 1930s strikes, organizing drives, and political campaigns that transformed the Teamsters union in Minnesota and much of the Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement. Written by a leader of the communist movement in the U.S. and organizer of the Teamsters union during the rise of the CIO. Indispensable tools for advancing revolutionary politics, organization, and effective trade unionism.
Photos, index. Now with enlarged type.
Anonymous
Posted September 20, 2002
This book recounts how the U.S. government, with the aid of the Teamsters Bureaucracy, stepped up its war against the rights of militant trade-unionists in the years leading up to WWII. And, more importantly, it tells how the revolutionary socialists who led the teamsters organizing campaigns waged a political fight against the war, the government frame-ups, and how they maintained their class-struggle approach. Farrell Dobbs was the central leader of the teamsters in Minnesota as well as a primary target of FBI prosecutions. He was one of 18¿all supporters of the Socialist Workers Party and the Teamsters over-the road-campaigns--who were railroaded to jail as the U.S. prepared for WWII. It was exactly the same type of prosecutions that we see beginning today as the U.S. targets workers rights in preparation for a war on Iraq that will have dramatic domestic as well as international repercussions. Dobbs pulls no punches. His account is gritty, politically enlightening, and totally relevant.
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Posted September 29, 2002
The major industrial unions rose from almost nothing to massive powerful organizations in the mid to late 1930s. They were social movements in the broadest sense. They led powerful strike mobilizations, galvanizing the hopes of not merely their own members, but other workers, the unemployed, family farmers, and others. By the 1950s, U.S. union structures had become a prop of capitalism, both domestically and internationally, ruled by officialdom as corrupt and disloyal to workers as can be found on any corporate board. How did the fighting unions become their opposite? Farrell Dobbs, a Minneapolis Teamster and leader of the famed 1934 Minneapolis general strike, and later of the Socialist Workers Party, describes how the militancy of his union was confronted, and smashed, in the prelude and opening of World War II. He also explains the lessons to be learned by today?s militant workers.
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Posted October 4, 2002
This book is listed as out of print, but Pathfinder has just published a brand new edition with better print, more pictures, and other new features. With a war drive on in the US today, we need the lessons of the battles in this book by the militant teamstesr of the Midwest, especially Minneapolis in 1940 and 1941, fighting against Roosevelt's war drive, and its clamp down on union rights. Dobbs was the general organizer, a man who helped turn the Teamsters into an industrial union,together with other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis teamsters. They built a militant movement that included not just union members, but farmers, the unemployed and many other working people. Dobbs and the militant teamsters and the Socialist Workers party refused to give up with the Teamsters bureaucracy and the Roosevelt administration tried to jail and persecute them and drive them out of the union. This is about that fight. Particularly poignant is Dobb's depiction of his last conversation with Teamster's boss Tobin. Tobin dangled a secure position as an IBT international leader before Dobbs, a working man with young daughters. The path of resistance could and did lead Dobbs to prison. Yet, he explains why he chose to fight and continue to fight the rest of his life, long after Tobin had been forgotten. We need this book to fight the war that is coming!
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Posted October 7, 2002
This is the fourth in the fascinating series of books on working class struggles in the 1930s, centering on the strikes and organizing by drivers and warehouse workers in the Midwestern states. Farrell Dobbs was a young worker in the Minneapolis coal yards who quickly became a leader of these strikes and organizing campaigns, as well as a member and then leader of the Socialist Workers Party. The first three volumes (Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics-- don¿t miss them!) take up the important strikes in Minneapolis in 1934, the subsequent over-the-road organizing campaign throughout the upper Midwest, and the vital and complex political challenges militant workers took on in confronting the employers, their government, cops and finks, and reactionary, class-collaborationist trade union officials. Teamster Bureaucracy draws some of the broadest lessons for working class fighters from those years of struggle. Facing the intense political pressure of the opening years of WWII, the Stalin-Hitler pact, frame-ups by the FBI, the drive by Teamsters international president Daniel Tobin (aiding and aided by the Roosevelt administration) to crack down on militant local unions -- this book is full or rich experiences we can learn from today. It should be in every workers library!
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Overview
The last of four books on the 1930s strikes, organizing drives, and political campaigns that transformed the Teamsters union in Minnesota and much of the ...