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New York City 1946 Teamster Strike: Wasn’t That a Time!

80 YEARS AGO, ON OCTOBER 28, 1946, a 2-month strike by 15,000 Teamster Union truck drivers in New York City came to a sudden end. After a powerful employers’ association had belittled the strikers’ demands for eight weeks, the bosses’ united front collapsed in a scramble by the holdout employers to sign agreements for the same terms they had refused to consider for so long. 

It was a stunning victory for the strikers, who won a substantial pay increase – nearly twice what had been the employers’ “last, best, offer” – plus a shorter work week, improved vacation benefits, and an end to both onerous work rules and to an unfairly pro-employer arbitration clause. 

Most importantly, the strike was a resounding victory for the Teamsters’ militant, left-leaning rank-and-file over their elected leadership, which went into the strike without having made any preparations to maximize the union’s leverage over the employers, as if “asking for too much” was a formula for failure. When the contract first expired, the local’s leadership sat on its hands, doing nothing to organize picketing, strike benefits, or publicity.

Before the strike began, the rank-and-file members of Local 807, which was the largest of the striking locals, had ratified a detailed 17-point wage-and-benefit package. The members had also voted to give themselves final say over any contract settlement.

TRUCK TRANSPORT PARALYZED

The strike, which came close to paralyzing truck transport in the city and throughout nearby Long Island and Westchester County, caused enormous disruption in the distribution of essential foodstuffs, raw materials, and merchandise. Fresh fruit and vegetables were hard, if not impossible, to find. As the strike progressed, tens of thousands of workers in many different industries were laid off when their workplaces ran out of raw materials or merchandise.

Experts estimated that the strike cost the city’s workers, consumers, employers and government one-and-a-half billion dollars, the equivalent of $25 billion today. But despite the economic disruption and the major media’s almost universal criticism of the strikers, the general public did not turn against the union, because the truckers’ wages had been virtually frozen since the U.S. entry into World War 2 in late 1941. 

Because the strike’s disruptiveness had been so predictable, New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer attempted to head it off by calling representatives of the employers and the union to City Hall before it started. There the mayor proposed they agree to a 2-year contract that would raise the Teamsters’ hourly wages by 18.5 cents, reduce their workweek from 44 hours to 40 and increase their eligibility for paid vacation time. 

The employer representatives brusquely rejected the mayor’s proposal, and indicated they might refuse to pay any wage increase because, they claimed, Teamster pay was already “far above other industries for comparable skill and work.” The elected union representatives said they were in favor of the mayor’s proposal, but a decision was up to a vote of the union members. The contract expired before either side took any action. Days later, despite Teamster officials’ strong recommendation in favor of the mayor’s proposal, Local 807 members voted unanimously to reject it.

RED-BAITING FAILS

With the battle lines were laid down when each side contemptuously rejected the other’s position, the Mayor chose sides by claiming the union’s rank and file was allowing itself to be misled by Communists and that the rank-and-file’s newspaper, I.B.T. News, was financed, written and circulated by Communists. 

O’Dwyer sent a telegram to Daniel Tobin, the international president of the Teamsters’ Union, telling Tobin that the local was out of control. He wrote, “Unless you or an authorized representative of the International Brotherhood assume responsibility and take control of this union and negotiate terms for the settlement of the strike it is very possible that bloodshed and injury will result.”

The Mayor’s red-baiting did not impress either Tobin (who was no radical) or the rank-and-file. Tobin rejected the Mayor’s attack on the union’s members, writing to the mayor that the strikers were “fighting for justice and a better chance to enjoy some of the profits obtained from the trucking industry” adding, “why don't you convince the employers to accept the proposition you have made for a settlement?”

The head of employers’ bargaining committee reiterated the bosses’ rejection of the mayor’s proposed wage increase, saying that accepting it “would be to throw the operators out of business.”

Before 10 days were up, the city’s shipping paralysis was having a major impact. Grocery stores began to shut down because their shelves were bare. Pharmacists told the Board of Health they had run out of essential prescription ingredients. Hundreds of factories were forced to suspend operations. Three hundred truck farmers on Long Island reported that tons of produce were rotting on the farm because their trucks could not get past the picket lines to New York City produce markets. Cigarettes were rationed one pack to a customer by many stores. Large scale lay-offs were instituted in some Paterson, NJ, mills where reserves of textiles and dyes had been exhausted. The General Motors assembly plant in North Tarrytown, NY, had to stop its assembly line.

ONE EMPLOYER MAKES A DEAL

On the 13th day of the strike, the stand-off was broken when one employer, the 330-store Bohack grocery chain, offered its teamster employes a 31-cent hourly increase, almost twice as much as the mayor’s proposal. In addition, Bohack offered to agree to most of the terms of the Local 807’s 17-point proposal. 

The teamster rank-and-file then voted nearly unanimously to work for any employer that would match the Bohack offer, with the result that about 6,000 of the 15,000 strikers were back at work less than three weeks after the strike began. 

TEAMSTER OFFICIALS TRY TO SHAFT RANK-AND-FILE

At the same time a closely-related labor dispute broke out, which made clear how unresponsive some elected teamster officials were to the majority of their members. The members of Teamster Local 804, all of whom were United Parcel Service workers, were not on strike, but they were heavily impacted by the strike-caused tie-up because the strikers had stopped delivering merchandise to Macy’s and similar stores, with the result that by the strike’s third week, the stores were running out of merchandise to ship, via UPS, to consumers.

Many Local 804 members were showing up for work, but were being sent home because department store shipments had dried up. Local 804 members took the position that their contract required UPS to pay them for a full day’s work even if there was nothing for them to do. The Local’s elected officials said the members’ interpretation of the contract was wrong. So when more than half of Local 804’s members struck UPS for failure to honor the contract, the elected officials said the strike was an unauthorized wildcat. Soon virtually all Local 804 members were on strike, despite the fact that Teamster president Tobin ordered them back to work.

The UPS strike continued long after the general-industry strike was settled, and the struggle between Local 804 members and officers eventually resulted in a full-scale rank-and-file revolt that forced the local to hold a previously unscheduled election of officers, which replaced all the incumbent officers with the leaders of the “wildcat.”

EMPLOYERS: ‘WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!’

While the back-to-work tide under the terms of the Bohack offer rose with the result 7000 union members were back at work under a new contract, the head negotiator for the trucking employers association continued to hang tough, saying the hold-out employers would never agree to it, “not today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.” On Sept. 25, the union showed a new-found determination to make a clean sweep by establishing a $50,000 fund to provide food for the drivers who had not been able to return to work.

In spite of the fact that none of the employers that had signed on to the Bohack formula was having any difficulty, financial or otherwise, abiding with it, the hold-out employers’ association continued to insist that paying the Bohack scale would force them into bankruptcy.

On Oct. 4, the head negotiator for the hold-out trucking companies launched a particularly bitter attack on Mayor O’Dwyer’s support for the Bohack formula, saying “We are confronted with the disgraceful situation in which our Mayor’s Division of Labor Relations is openly taking sides with the union against employers.”

STRIKERS WIN ANOTHER ROUND

The Teamsters won another round in their war of attrition to make the Bohack formula the new industry standard on Oct. 18, when the large trucking companies that delivered to 500 A&P stores and to 125 stores in the Gristede chain signed on. One day later, Safeway, with 220 stores, joined the back-to-work stampede.

On Oct. 28, when the holdout employers’ share of the trucking industry had shrunk a mere remnant, fewer than eight percent of the concerns that had thought of themselves as the only game in town just two months previously, they finally surrendered to the union. 

When they did so, their chief spokesperson predicted that the new contractual regime was doomed to fail if the union refused to modify the Bohack formula and replace it with one that was “economically sound.” The modification he saw as inevitable never took place.   https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol07/no05/v07n05-w66…;

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