BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI – Say “Teamsters Union,” and one name immediately comes to mind: Hoffa. Nearly everybody knows about the mysterious disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, even if they know nothing else about him or the nation’s largest union.
Most people also know that he was supposed to have been corrupt, was killed by the Mafia, and that his body was never found.
But what if I was to tell you that there are second acts in life, and that Hoffa has been back in charge of the Teamsters since 1998, cleaned up and strengthened the union and added membership in an era when other unions have experienced steep declines?
Believe it or not, that’s exactly what’s happened. Except, of course, that this time it is the more famous Hoffa’s son, who usually goes by Jim. “This is really a story that needs to be told,” said Hoffa, still Teamsters president till he retires March 21.
“We rebuilt this union,” he said over a sandwich one recent Saturday in a deli just about a mile from where his dad vanished outside a restaurant on July 30, 1975. “The Teamsters were broke when I was elected. Membership was down. We had no money in our strike fund.” Today, the union’s financial picture is far better.
When James P. Hoffa was elected in 1998, the union was still under a cloud of corruption, and had been under government supervision under a consent decree since 1989, something the union accepted in order to avoid a racketeering trial.
The Teamsters’ problems neither started nor stopped with his dad. The younger Hoffa narrowly lost the election for president in 1996, to Ron Carey, who was widely celebrated by the media as a reformer who would clean up the union.
But in fact, Carey turned out to have improperly accepted vast amounts of outside money for his campaign, and to have other questionable financial dealings. The election was invalidated; Carey, who died in 2008, was expelled from the union for life, and Hoffa was then elected to finish that term.
He then was reelected to four more five-year terms. “By the way, the leadership then did not want a Hoffa back. I would never have been able to run if it wasn’t for that consent decree,” which included government oversight of elections.
Rank-and-file members, however, did want Jim Hoffa, who is not in fact a junior; his middle name is Phillip, not Riddle. The younger Hoffa is different in other, more important ways. Jimmy Hoffa had to drop out of school at 14 to work to support his family.
His son has a law degree from the University of Michigan, and while he did some legal work for the Teamsters, had a thriving law practice of his own. He said he had no plan to lead the Teamsters “until I realized that somebody had to save the union.”
“The union was on the brink of bankruptcy and was hopelessly divided. We faced employers bent on destroying our union, and who wanted to take advantage of our weakness, plus government policies that rewarded companies that sent jobs overseas.”
Why did the membership turn to him? Older Teamsters may have remembered that Jimmy Hoffa, whatever his faults, negotiated the famous Master Freight Agreement that had enabled members to go from near-poverty to the middle class, and had made their union the biggest and most prosperous in the world.
Jim Hoffa saw his job as restoring prosperity while avoiding and rooting out the last vestiges of corruption. To an astonishing extent, he succeeded. Within months after taking office, he negotiated a prosperous new contact for the carhaulers; a few years later, truck drivers, often seen as the heart of the union, won a better contract and regained the right to strike. Other victories followed.
There were occasional setbacks, such as an early failure to organize Overnite Transportation, and controversy, as when, in 2018, he used a provision in the Teamsters’ constitution to accept a new contract with UPS despite its being rejected by the membership.
The agreement, however, did create thousands of new jobs, and is now the richest contract in America. The Teamsters, which once had been somewhat of a pariah, became respectable again: in 2014 George Washington University presented its President’s Medal, which has been awarded to the likes of Walter Cronkite, Shimon Peres and Mikhail Gorbachev, to James P. Hoffa.
Two years ago, Hoffa, who will be 81 in May, announced he wouldn’t run for another term. But despite his success, the man he wanted to succeed him, union vice-president Steve Vairma, was badly defeated by another vice-president and Hoffa critic, Sean O’Brien.
O’Brien, who takes office March 21, has called on the union to be more militant and aggressive. When asked why his candidate was rejected, the outgoing president shrugged. “Sometimes people just want a change. You say, you know, things are going good, and they say, ‘yeah, but it’s time to get someone new in there.”
Noting that turnout was very low — 13 percent — he added, “people don’t bother to vote when things are going well.”
When his term ends, he plans to relax a bit – but when it comes to the issues he cares about, like worker rights and pensions, he doesn’t intend to disappear. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he laughed.
My guess is that we will indeed.
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