75 Years Since Truckers Paid In Blood To Unionize

For many, it's an all-but-forgotten footnote of history...The trucker's strike was born in the Depression; 1934 was America's darkest Depression year. The unemployment rate in Minnesota was 25 to 30 percent.

Unions were rare or non-existent, but truckers in the Minneapolis Warehouse District tried to organize one. Labor historians say local businesses went to extraordinary lengths to stop it...local business leaders created the Citizen's Alliance with its own militia. Working with the Minneapolis police, they were determined to keep the trucks moving.

And on what came to be known as "Bloody Friday," thousands of striking truckers were just as determined to stop them.

News accounts reported Minneapolis Police and the Citizens Alliance fired on the crowd. Two were killed and more than 200 wounded. But the bloody conflict on in that hot summer of 1934 on that Minneapolis street. In fact, for some union leaders it was just the beginning of several years of terror...

The 1937 murder of Tom Dooher's grandfather in Minneapolis has never been solved. Patrick Corcoran was a leader of the trucker's strike and a Teamsters Union organizer, back when union organizing was a dangerous job....As many as six union leaders were murdered after the truckers strike, according to Berman.

"They would literally go through the front door, go into the dining room and pull him out yelling while my mother and her siblings and my grandmother were there," said Dooher. "Take him out, drive him around, beat him up and throw him back here on this curb and tell him to knock it off. And if he didn't, there would be more. "

Minnesotans were horrified by the violence in Minneapolis, which sparked widespread reforms we take for granted. Collective bargaining that led to 40-hour weeks and paid vacations, Social Security and the Depression-era work programs.

"This transformed the whole social politics and economic politics of the United States," said Berman. "And created the America that we know today."

http://wcco.com/local/truckers.strike.anniversary.2.1093679.html


4-pt series on the minnesota truckers' strike:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/mpls-a26.shtml

From October to December, members of the SWP were put on trial in a Minneapolis courtroom... Eighteen members of the SWP were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of up to a year and a half. (48)

...The Minneapolis trial represented the only use of the Smith Act before or during World War II. The frame-ups and imprisonment removed the Trotskyists from the leadership of the truckers.

The Stalinists, who had cheered on Roosevelt’s prosecution of the Trotskyists, would later, with the advent of the Cold War, come under attack by the Truman administration and see their members imprisoned and hounded out of their jobs, as the American ruling class and the labor bureaucracy waged a campaign to extirpate all vestiges of opposition in the working class to capitalism.

As part of the Cold War witch-hunt, the Stalinists were ejected from the Farmer-Labor Party and a faction of anti-communists led by Hubert H. Humphrey merged the FLP with the Democratic Party to form the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, thereby bringing this entity firmly under ruling class control.

***

Corporate ownership of Democratic politicians is the answer to the question of why support for the working man is so limp in our Party. That doesn't explain why so few current Democrats care, or are even aware of, what it took for the working man to get a voice in this country and how quickly our voice disappeared after the Second World War and of course the assault on civility that was the Reagan years.

During the 2004 election cycle at the state level I had the opportunity to talk directly with a candidate for the state legislature about the issue of "free" trade. He was completely ignorant about trade or put on a good show. Nonetheless he listened intently and of course committed to absolutely nothing. A few weeks later while volunteering to staff a voter registration table I had occasion to speak with this same candidate's campaign manager. At the end of our discussion she arrogantly said, "where else are you going to go?" Not only do democrats harbor this sentiment, they're proud of it!!!

Until there's a SECOND political party that challenges the status quo in this country workers are doomed to peonage.

So many have no idea of labor history and its getting worse...K&R of course.

about having to start all over again. Unions, strikes, the whole bit. He pointed out that we used to have a manufacturing base to unionize... the service sector is harder to organize and easier to replace.

We will NEVER have a middle class again until we have unions.

CEO pay has skyrocketed with the unionbusting.

How do you reconcile your belief that organized labor is a criminal conspiracy with the cited article?

And criminal now or not it doesn't negate the struggle against fascism that building the Unions was - and is.

In other contexts, she has cited approvingly and agreed with a weird Trotskyite argument that the major American unions and the Democratic Party are a criminal conspiracy to destroy the working class.

I understand what you mean, and agree, but that's not what she means.

You seem to think that only the radical left can represent workers, for some weird reason.

And yes, Hamden called it exactly right.

It's a shame (or perhaps a sham?) that the union leadership today, with few exceptions, is so far removed from those they purport to represent.

It took half a century and the blood of thousands to get some of the benefit of our labor and we walked away from it in less than a decade.
:kick: & R

A rising tide floats all boats. We owe the union and working people who fought for an 8 hour work day - 40 hour week - paid overtime - heated workspace - no asbestos... all things we take for granted today.

Workers need to unite again, whatever it takes, to fight back against the Bankster/Gangsters installed by Ronnie Raygun. If it was up to the Republicans.. we'd all be barefoot, squatting in dirt huts and working 100 hrs a week for no pay!

positive changes to our nation.

On the other hand, a big part of their demise was due to the influence of the mob on union leadership and its ties to organized crime. That was no small issue for many Americans who saw unions as a good thing until that happened. Of course, politicians used that as a bludgeon against unions and were able to mobilize public support for anti-union elected officials.

Finding a way to keep the unions free from mob influence would be a positive step toward reclaiming the influence of unions. How that could be done well enough to regain the confidence of Americans would be a key part of regaining union influence.

I guess that was Raygun`s intention with deregulation to destroy most of the independants make them company drivers.

It was Carter that de-regulated trucking. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy was also a strong supporter of de-regulation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Carrier_Act_of_1980


There are actually more independent drivers, by number, today than there were in 1980. Their success or failure has more to do with cut-throat rate competition than anything else, and in the current economic climate, even large non-union truck-load carriers along with the organized LTL companies like YRC are in trouble.

Many of the regulated, unionized companies went out of business because they just could not compete in the de-regulated atmosphere where their rates and therefore profit margins were guaranteed by the government.

Good post.