“Teamsters Metropolis: Not Necessarily a Safe Neighborhood for Workers” by Ryan Patrick Murphy (Ann Arbor, Michigan, $29.95, University of Michigan Press, 2025), 246 pages, paperback
Almost any book about the Teamsters Union is sure to catch the interest of those who follow class struggle and Teamsters Metropolis is no exception. No one any longer disputes the evidence of the Teamsters as a mobbed-up, corrupt organization that enriched those at the top of the union and contributed to the enrichment of the organized criminals with whom those leaders connived. There are two views (with gradients) about whether that corruption benefited the union and members or left a long-term negative legacy that members still struggle to overcome.
Of
course, the image of the corrupt Teamster union corresponds with the popular
image of mob life. That is, flashy clothes and cars, protection and gambling
rackets, and over the top violence and murder. Generally overlooked in popular
culture are the innocent victims of this corruption. Murphy trains a queer eye
on this history and presents the Teamsters is a place of cultural struggle. He
identifies the place of that struggle as the Teamsters Metropolis. While he doesn’t blindly overlook the harms
to workers caused by Teamsters corruption, he does take a generally positive
view of this place in the Teamsters Union. There is much to disagree with but
the book is worth reading. The point of view interesting as are many of the not
well-known parts of the story.
At the
highest level of abstraction, Murphy’s thesis is “the Hoffa-era Teamsters union has much to teach contemporary labor
scholars and activists . . . Hoffa’s Teamsters union was a culturally revered,
economically impactful social movement because it challenged the embodied
experience of life according to the Protestant work ethic.” (184). As he
describes it, “unruliness defined this
unionism that skirted the boundaries of the law; that blurred the line between
workers, owners, activists, and entrepreneurs; and that challenged bourgeois
standards for physical comportment.” (12).[1] Ultimately he concludes,
referring to public queer spaces, “the
commitment to providing gratification for marginal workers who found so little
comfort in the mid-twentieth century, is the most enduring contribution of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters to the US labor movement.” (198).
Murphy makes
his argument over five chapters and an epilogue, each of which describes a
different facet of the Teamsters Metropolis.
Chapter 1 is the story of entrepreneurial cartel unionism in the service
sector, particularly in small businesses servicing coin operated vending
machines and jukeboxes in the 1950’s. Murphy asserts “that these small
businesses and Teamster locals were the primary venue for the cultural struggle
over the meaning of suburbanization – and the attendant investment in whiteness
and heterosexuality – for the children and grandchildren of Jewish and Catholic
‘new immigrant’ families.’ (25). He claims, with little evidence that Jimmy
Hoffa understood this and that it’s why he focused his organizing on that
sector. As Murphy describes it, these cartel unions were formed and headed by
entrepreneurs who moved up to the higher incomes offered by union organizing
from the very types of small businesses they later brought into the union.
Often workers in these businesses had no choice about whether they would be
union members or which union would provide for their representation. Generally,
workers received little or no benefit from their union membership but the
businesses, which were considered members of the union (40), got protection
from competition enforced by mob based “muscle.” (29). If necessary, the union
relied on paid sham pickets, violence, and property damage provided by
organized crime to ensure the small businesses agreed to join the unionized
cartel. This system, according to Murphy, provided ‘order’ for the industry (36,
36), and sufficient income for both union officials and business owners to join
“U.S. middle-class culture” (17).
The chapter
further describes this counterculture, as Murphy labels it (19), by telling the
stories of the personalities, businesses, and corrupt union locals involved. He
sidesteps the issue of corruption with a claim that “Hoffa motivated rank-and-file workers because he was a countercultural
person.” (19), and that ‘Teamster activists’ made economic gains because of
the unrestrained culture of the union (51). In accordance with the queer view-point
of the book, Murphy frames Teamsters Union membership as providing “a mechanism to eastern and southern European
Catholics and Jews to struggle over where they would fit into the city, how
they would be white, and if they would be normal sexual subjects.” (25).
Interesting
as is this story, the analysis suffers from some serious flaws. Murphy almost
entirely collapses the distinction between workers, owners, and union
officials. The lifestyles that form the basis of his conclusions about
countercultural living as Teamsters are those of business owners and union
officials. Workers are lost here since there is virtually no information about
the lifestyles of workers in the service industries he describes. It is
therefore impossible to determine whether there was a place for workers in this
‘countercultural’ Teamsters metropolis. Thus, one is left wondering whether the
broad cultural claims Murphy makes about Teamsters apply to workers in general,
or just some or all Teamster members. Clearly, however the claims, to the
extent they are valid, do apply to union officials who lived decadent
lifestyles and, as far as we can tell, likely had little or no concern about
the welfare of the workers they organized and claimed to represent. (127).
Also, Murphy
doesn’t discuss at all whether there is any connection between the corruption
he describes and the current state of the Teamsters. Many current Teamster
activists would argue this “counterculture” continues to pervade the union and
provides the historical basis for the decadence of current union officials.
Whether it’s blurring election and other rules for their own benefit or their
excessive salaries, many believe rightfully that these things are the direct
result of the historical corruption in the Teamsters union. To such criticism
Murphy offers the retort “it is time to
move past the paranoid readings of Hoffa the crook.” (19). This is wholly
insufficient to those who continue to toil in conditions that could be much
better in the absence of the decadence of current union officials.
This
corruption and decadence of union officials did not go unnoticed by the government
and it stepped into the fray with the Senate Select Committee on Improper
Activities in the Labor or Management Field, the so-called ‘McClellan Committee’
hearings led by Bobby Kennedy as chief counsel. (58). In Chapter 2, Murphy tells
the tale of these hearings, which Kennedy ran with the flair of a showman. According
to Murphy the purpose of the hearings was to expose “the vulgar culture of the Teamsters metropolis . . . to regulate the Teamsters’ bodies, tastes,
and styles, realigning them with the suburban culture at the center of US Cold
war planning.” (67). “Kennedy’s
questions were pedagogical, evoking information that taught viewers how to live
in the suburbanizing midcentury metropolis: how to consume in a measured
manner, how to embody ethnicity while shoring up middle-class whiteness, and
how to make a living through hard work rather than via illicit ethnic
networks.” (67).
The hearings
lasted three years and yielded a wealth of evidence of wrongdoing, including
violence and corruption. A primary focus was the decadent consumption habits of
union leaders supported by skimming dues money. For example, the committee,
with apparent dramatic flair, exposed high end consumption by Teamsters
President Dave Beck using kickbacks from the union’s lawyer who also
represented retailers. (67-71). Murphy attempts to minimize the decadence of it
by comparing the $790,000 (in today’s dollars) stolen from workers and funneled
to union leader Beck with the costs to taxpayers of some of the infamous
corruption schemes of finance capitalists. He suggests that the prices (in
today’s dollars) of $1,600 coats and $134 ties are not extraordinary,
persisting in his apparent inability to distinguish between lifestyles of union
leaders and the workers who made up the membership of those unions. It’s very
unlikely that workers currently represented by the Teamsters Union would find
either those coats or those ties affordable.
Chapter 3
opens with Jimmy Hoffa celebrating in “the
dining room of the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.” (86). The rooms
there cost $805 per night in today’s dollars. (87). The story Murphy tells is
of the use of pension fund money to leverage Miami Beach real estate “as a centerpiece of Teamsters’ proworker
investing strategy.” (87). Hoffa wasn’t there just to celebrate, however,
he was also engaged in an ultimately largely unsuccessful effort to organize
public employees in South Florida. (88, 107). An effort that was mostly a
failure, at least in part, due to the drain on Hoffa’s energy caused by the
need to defend himself against corruption charges. (116). The queer perspective
presented here is that “a vacation in
Hoffa’s Miami Beach . . . incited new,
sensuous desires that allowed rank-and-file Teamsters to imagine a world beyond
work,” (89), as they stayed in “flamboyant
resort hotels,” (96), that “clearly
transgressed bourgeois taste standards, ” (96), while white middle- and
upper-class Miamians “frequented a
racially restricted “sexual underground . . . just beyond city limits.”
(97). Of course, “while Teamster real
estate investments were a source of great enjoyment for some union members, Hoffa often channeled Florida financial
deals through his associates in the Jewish and Sicilian underworlds.” (89,
emphasis added). Ultimately, Hoffa, who was opposed to investing workers’ pension
funds in the stock and bond markets, (100), began investing those funds in
second-tier hotels, “vacation homes, and
retirement apartments.” (101-102, 108), and “took large, fraudulent commissions.” (111-112).
Hoffa and his associates stole funds from
workers’ pension funds and were ultimately convicted for “fraudulently investing $20 million of worker pension money in real
estate in Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama, among other states, and of diverting
$1 million for their own use.” (115). One wonders whether that enrichment
provided a material basis from which Jimmy Hoffa’s son, James Hoffa, was able
to leverage himself into his father’s old job at the top of the Teamsters
Union. Murphy doesn’t address such issues but does note that Teamster
vacationers “drove back up north to the
Teamsters metropolis as more secure members of the white middle-class even as
they often disdained bourgeois culture.” (117). And while it may be true
that worker members of the Teamsters Union had such disdain, it also seems
clear that many in the leadership of that union embraced - and embrace - the
most basic bourgeois values and behaviors including stealing from and exploiting
the working class.
Corruption,
violence, and Mob ties are the hallmarks of the Teamsters Union in popular
culture. Less well known are claims by Teamsters officials, including Jimmy
Hoffa, that they have always opposed segregation and embraced minority workers.
(80). Those claims are not true, a fact that Kennedy seems to have wanted to avoid
during the McClellan hearings but that was, nonetheless, established during
questioning of a black truck driver by conservative Senator Barry Goldwater.
(80-81). It is racist exploitation by the Teamsters Union that Murphy addresses
in Chapter 4. For non-white residents of the US through much, maybe all, of the
last century life included poverty, hunger, segregation, racist violence, and
Jim Crow. (121). While the Teamsters organized into their metropolis European
Jewish and Catholic immigrants (at least those who were small business owners)
and “conducted union business in posh
downtown hotels,” (121), Teamsters members who were “Black and Brown workers . . . (were forced) . . . to pay union dues
while earning minimum wage, receiving not benefits, and working mandatory
overtime without pay.” (122). “Teamster
locals that sold racist, collusive contracts provided Hoffa with money, with
political connections and with muscle, all of which helped him win the union’s
presidency in 1957.” (122).
It is not surprising
that the entrepreneurial cartel unionists and the small business owners with
whom they colluded were responsible for the contacts that proved “gravely adverse for those who worked under
them.” (127). Whatever the benefits of the Teamsters Metropolis, those things
were denied to the activists whose stories Murphy tells, particularly Black and
Brown women. (152). These denials are part of a pattern in the Teamsters Union
that continues. Present day Teamsters officials are silent or support
anti-immigration policies and sentiment, for example, and are virtually never
heard criticizing police murders of Black and Brown members of our communities.
Thus, the lie that the Teamsters Union has always welcomed Black and Brown
workers continues.
In Chapter
5, Murphy pushes “us toward a newer,
queerer understanding of labor’s past,” (181) by telling the story of
Sylvia Pagano, an entrepreneur and close friend of Jimmy Hoffa and his family,
who set up deals and acted as a go-between for Hoffa and organized crime
figures. Hers is a story mostly absent from narratives about the Teamsters and
Jimmy Hoffa, despite the wealth of information about her activities gathered
surreptitiously and unlawfully by the FBI. (160-161). Pagano was not simply “a powerbroker: a person who made a lot of
money, who was unendingly busy, and who was at the center of Jimmy Hoffa’s
zealous effort to make the International Brotherhood of Teamsters the largest
and powerful union in North America,” (161), she “had the ultimate influence over Hoffa’s financial decisions.” (165).
She was a single woman who engaged in affairs with mobsters while being
intimately connected to Hoffa’s family, including his wife, Josephine.
(170-171). Murphy describes her lifestyle as ‘queer domesticity.’ (169).
According to
Murphy, Pagano recognized that “she lived
far outside the box that society had made for her in the 1950s and early 1960s
. . . a lonely place to be.” Those who investigated her and wrote of her
unfortunately failed to recognize her as having significance beyond being a sex
object or possible mistress of Jimmy Hoffa. (172). Her story is one of the most
interesting in the book. That story, however, does further show Murphy’s lack
of insight into the distinction between the lifestyles of union officials and
workers. The Teamsters Metropolis is a place reserved for Teamsters officials.
Workers seem to be absent from this place.
Murphy wraps
things up in his Epilogue where he asserts that “the Teamster movement fought for a different embodied experience, one
demanding access to both the consumer comforts of suburbia and the unrestrained
indulgence of the old neighborhoods of the central city.” (185). He
supports this assertion by collapsing the distinction between the mob and the
Teamsters, and, essentially, crediting the Teamsters culturally for the mob’s
ownership of gay bars and bath houses. (196-197). To his credit, Murphy
recognizes that Teamster membership declined continuously from 1968 until the
end of the 20th century, (188), and that Hoffa’s legal exposure on
account of his corruption “led him to
settle for smaller pay increases” and accept employer demands resulted in truckers,
who formed the backbone of the Teamsters union, to suffer when the promises of
the National Master Freight Agreement went unmet. Ultimately therefore the
corruption and rebelliousness of Teamsters leaders of the so-called
“Metropolis” hurt workers and weakened their movement.
“Teamsters Metropolis” is worth reading.
The lesson Murphy wants us to learn from his telling, that the success of the
Teamsters union was the result the urge to resist cultural norms in a place
somewhere between suburbia and the city has merit but seems of little use for
current working class struggle. Ultimately the stories told illuminate the
importance of recognizing the difference between union leaders (and
bureaucrats) and workers. The union leaders, whose stories Murphy tells, enjoy
lifestyles that are materially different from the workers they claim to
represent. The stories of these labor aristocrats are not therefore the stories
of workers. No amount of cultural mystique can conceal that. Ultimately a true
telling of labor history would include the stories of the workers and their
struggles against both Capital and the labor aristocrats whose corruption has
hindered their progress. Murphy’s book helps us to see that. Give it a read.
April 3, 2026
Bob Kolstad
[1]
Murphy cites here: David Witwer, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters
Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 78-85.
No comments:
Post a Comment