A New Culprit in the Decline of American Labor? Robert F. Kennedy and the Long Cast of Hoffa's Shadow

I just finished reading Jack Goldsmith’s In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) which I highly recommend. Who needs fiction when real-life history produces stories like these? The author is a Harvard law professor whose mother married Chuckie O’Brien on June 16, 1975 when the author was 12 years old. In the author’s own words, Chuckie was “a great father” who “smothered me in love” (p. 5). But on July 30, 1975, former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and Chuckie—Hoffa’s longtime friend and aide in the Teamsters—quickly became a leading suspect in this extremely high-profile case.

In Hoffa’s Shadow chronicles Hoffa’s rise and fall—often with Chuckie at his side—and his disappearance—where the FBI long thought Chuckie was also at his side, unwittingly delivering him to mob hitmen (a fiction often repeated in popular culture, including most recently in Netflix’s The Irishman). The focus is uniquely on Chuckie—his life, his ties to the Teamsters and the mafia, his personal values, his decades-long public mistreatment at the hands of the FBI, and the sheer improbability of any culpability in Hoffa’s disappearance. All of this is quite interesting, but what really makes this book such a compelling read is how deeply personal it is. Goldsmith is exceptionally candid in describing how he idolized Chuckie in high school but at age 21, renounced him and changed his name from Jack O’Brien to Jack Goldsmith out of fear that “the association with Chuckie might jeopardize my legal career” (p. 26). After 20 years, Goldsmith reconciled with Chuckie, who accepted Goldsmith “back into his life without qualification, rancor, or drama” (p. 41). The author eventually convinced Chuckie to let him tell his story, in the author’s hope that it would solve the 45 year-old mystery of Hoffa’s disappearance. Alas, the author ultimately fails on this last account, but in the end that seems like a minor footnote given the depth of insight we get into Hoffa’s leadership of the Teamsters, the relationship between the mafia and the Teamsters, the likely reasons for his disappearance, the troubling extent of the federal government’s use of its own power, and at a personal level, the complex character of Chuckie.

From a labor relations perspective, one thing that jumped out to me is the provocative claim that the field has overlooked “the most fundamental” reason for the decades-long decline in labor union membership. It is well-recognized that the fraction of workers represented by a union (“union density”) peaked in the private sector in the mid-1950s, and since that time has fallen from around 35 percent to 6 percent. Many explanations have been proposed, including structural change (e.g., the decline of manufacturing, demographic shifts, globalization), decreased demand for union representation (e.g., laws and paternalistic human resource management provide some of the protections that unions provide, or unions have failed to keep up with what workers want), and legal and illegal employer opposition facilitated by hostile legal rulings. But Goldsmith argues that “the most fundamental reason [that membership fell] was the identification of the entire labor movement with corruption, violence, and bossism—an identification that crystallized with Bobby Kennedy’s singular crusade” (p. 108). Wow!

What was this singular crusade? Senator Estes Kefauver led a special Senate investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, and the resulting public attention on the sensational hearings helped propel Kefauver to national prominence (including being selected as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1956). According to Goldsmith, Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy saw this as a model for elevating the profile of the Kennedys (which included his older brother John F. Kennedy), and perhaps, too, for Bobby Kennedy to prove his worth within the Kennedy clan. So in 1957, the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management (“the McClellan Committee”) was created to investigate labor racketeering (the corruption of labor unions by organized crime), with Bobby Kennedy as its chief counsel. Enter Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. Goldsmith quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger as saying that before the hearings even started, Kennedy had already concluded that Hoffa was corrupt and ran the Teamsters solely for his own benefit. As such, Hoffa was “the enemy [Bobby Kennedy] had been seeking” (p. 99).

The reality of Hoffa is seemingly much more complex. Hoffa seemed to genuinely care for the economic well-being of truck drivers and other workers, and fought hard on their behalf—albeit often too hard in terms of taking an extreme ends-justifies-the-means approach, even if this meant hiring mob goons to literally fight employers and giving kickbacks to the mafia to maintain his own power. So of course Hoffa was no angel, but In Hoffa’s Shadow shows the extent to which Kennedy became obsessed with publicly vilifying Hoffa. And each time this failed, “Kennedy got angrier, become more vindictive, and invariably cut more corners” (p. 102). This included sending the IRS on a fishing expedition looking for evidence of criminality in over 3,500 tax returns, and then illegally entering confidential IRS information into the public record.

Students of labor relations know that these hearings resulted in the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 which sought to make unions more democratic while also placing a few additional restrictions on union activities (especially banning secondary boycotts). But Goldsmith interestingly argues that the larger effect was that the hearings led by Bobby Kennedy “embedded in the public mind, including the minds of many workers, the idea that unions were flawed institutions exercising illegitimate power” (p. 106). And thus we have Goldsmith’s provocative claim that “the most fundamental reason [for declining union power] was the identification of the entire labor movement with corruption, violence, and bossism—an identification that crystallized with Bobby Kennedy’s singular crusade.” Whether we can trace 65 years of union decline to this one moment is debatable and would represent an influence with remarkable staying power, but it is certainly stimulating to consider its role among other factors.

Goldsmith doesn’t let Hoffa off the hook: “his defiant embrace of criminal tactics and associations [even if done in with the sincere belief that this was to help the rank and file] allowed Kennedy [and others] to paint him as a subversive force…and his performance tarnished the entire labor movement” (p. 107). But Kennedy was anything but balanced, and ignored, for example, the role of employers in fighting workers. Kennedy’s campaign against Hoffa continued in the 1960s with Kennedy’s appointment (by his then-president brother) as U.S. attorney general. In the end, according to Goldsmith, Kennedy “neglected, elided, or interpreted away ethical and legal restrictions that are supposed to channel and constrain the federal government’s colossal power to destroy one’s reputation and liberty” (p. 121). This included a sharp rise in the government surveillance of individuals, including breaking into homes and businesses to plant listening devices, typically without any warrants or legal oversight.

The extent to which this rise in illegal government surveillance connects to Goldsmith’s own work in government is another unique aspect of In Hoffa’s Shadow making for a compelling read. But a larger take-away, in my eyes, is that these revelations implicitly highlight the need for democracy, transparency, and institutional balance. When the government holds all the cards, where are the checks on its power? Or to what end is government power being exercised? These questions are as important as ever when legislation and judicial rulings are seemingly weakening organized labor for political gain, and we seem to have forgotten the importance of the labor movement and other groups for a vibrant democracy. Hidden in In Hoffa’s Shadow, then, is a strong conservative case for labor unions, even if the focal union in this book has historically struggled with democracy and corruption.

So in the end, this book is about much more than Hoffa’s disappearance. Indeed, I assume that “in Hoffa’s shadow” refers to the personal experiences of Chuckie O’Brien. But as we continue to confront questions of power, democracy, and surveillance, it seems that we’re all living in the shadows of Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, with their lasting implications for labor unions and democracy.

The Great Uprising of 1877, The Great Divides of 2019

The 1870s ushered in an era of intense and violent labor conflict that would continue for decades, and I wonder whether we’re on the cusp of similar social strife, albeit not as overtly violent. A massive depression in the mid-1870s caused severe unemployment and wage cuts, and union membership plummeted. A six-month coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania in 1875 involved open battles between strikers and company-paid police. The coal company hired an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to infiltrate the miners (two decades later, a Pinkerton even infiltrated the legal defense team representing union leader Big Bill Haywood). The strike ended when the miners agreed to a 20-percent wage reduction. Although it may have been fabricated, the Pinkerton agent’s testimony led to the death penalty for 10 miners accused of killing several mine bosses.

But this was just the beginning. After a series of wage cuts, railroad workers reached their limit with a 10-percent wage cut in July 1877, and went on strike. The strike quickly spread until railroad activity in large sections of the country was affected. Large crowds stopped trains, spiked switches, and took over depots and roundhouses. Two hundred federal troops were first sent to Martinsburg, West Virginia, and violence flared elsewhere. Nine people were killed in rioting in Baltimore; the state militia fired into a crowd in Pittsburgh, killing 20 and prompting a night of conflict, fire, and destruction that resulted in $5 million of railroad property damage.

These events became known as the Great Uprising of 1877 because this was much more than a railroad strike. More workers were involved than in any other labor conflict of the 1800s. Many of these were not railroad workers—coal miners, ironworkers, and others significantly aided the railroad workers in many locations. Black longshoring workers in Texas and sewer workers in Kentucky struck for higher pay. There were general strikes in Chicago and St. Louis. State militia and federal troops were used to forcefully end demonstrations and restore order in many locations. Yet despite its widespread intensity, the uprising ended nearly as quickly as it began, and railroad traffic resumed normal operations at the end of the month.

The Great Uprising of 1877 is probably more notable for what it represents than what it accomplished. The numerous strikes clearly reflected pent-up grievances of workers in many industries and locations struggling with the forces of industrialization and the conflict between labor and capital. The uprising also demonstrates the shared concerns of workers and is frequently used to define the beginning of the modern era in U.S. labor relations—one in which capital and labor are often sharply at odds. As such, the Great Uprising of 1877 laid the foundation for future labor–management conflict, not cooperation.

More broadly, in his book Age of Betrayal (Knopf, 2007), Jack Beatty characterized the Great Uprising of 1877 as a “social earthquake.” Some of the violent attacks on railroad property may have resulted not from work-related grievances but from frustration with the invasion of railroads into local communities, often against the wishes of local residents and small retail shop owners.

Fast forward to today and we can see parallels. Then and now, new technologies and new forms of employment relationships caused significant disruptions to work and communities. Then it was the railroads and industrialization, now it's computing-based technologies and gig work. Then and now, the rhetoric of protecting the individual liberty to hire or work on terms of one’s own choosing is used to weaken workers and unions. Then it was armed repression of unions, now it’s rulings like Janus. Then and now, individuals turn to collective action and protest when they feel otherwise powerless against threats to their work and their community. In recent months, we’ve seen vibrant teacher strikes, often in states that are not labor friendly, and walkouts at McDonald’s and Google over sexual harassment. We should be trying to create workplaces and communities that are inclusive and enjoy broadly-shared prosperity. Instead, we have increasing insecurity, widening disparities, and polarization. History shows us that trouble follows.

And the MOOC Adventure Begins

Along with a few faculty colleagues here in the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the University of Minnesota, I've been developing a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Human Resource Management Principles for People Managers. This completely-online specialization, as Coursera calls it, will cover the basics of recruitment, performance management, and compensation, primarily with an eye toward non-HR managers who have been promoted into positions with people management responsibilities (individuals exploring career possibilities in HR, or updating their HR knowledge would also be welcome--indeed, anyone is welcome, and we don't have any way to screen enrollment in any case).

This turning into a lot of...wait for it...WORK! I'm preparing the first course which will launch in early February 2016. This course provides a foundation for developing an approach to skillfully managing employees by illustrating alternative human resource management (HRM) strategies, introducing the importance of the legal context, and thinking about what motivates employees. This is intended to give managers and others the factual and conceptual basis for developing specific, critical HRM skills in the subsequent courses on hiring employees, managing performance, and rewarding employees. 

This will primarily be delivered through on-demand video lectures. To fit into a YouTube world, the recommended video length is 4-8 minutes! This is unlike anything I've ever done. And to make all of this engaging in a completely online course with no instructor interaction, I'm trying to make my lectures rich in graphics, which further adds to the work. I used to think it was a lot of work to prep a regular face-to-face class. I still do, but this is even more! 

In any case, here is my first attempt (actually, it's a revision of my first attempt--my first attempt was 14 minutes...I like content!): The Evolution of HRM. 

Want to see more? You'll need to wait for the course. Look for "Preparing to Manage Human Resources" on the Coursera website in early February. 

Update (1/30/16): On Coursera, my course is here. For a complete list of videos, go to my MOOC page.

A St. Patrick's Day Reflection--Heritage and Work

When I was growing up, as far as anyone knew, my family's heritage was entirely English. With the advent of online, searchable Censuses and other genealogical records, however, I discovered that I also have some Irish heritage. So on St. Patrick's Day, I find myself reflecting on my heritage, and asking questions for which there will only be speculative answers. Many of these ultimately tie to work.

One of my great-great-grandmothers emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland, to Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1860s. She was single, wasn't even yet 20 years old, and she seems to have arrived several years before her parents. So she probably set off for America looking for work. She then married my great-great-grandfather, a Brooklyn cigarmaker. His father was a cigar maker from the East End of London who had at least three cigar maker sons plus a cigar maker son-in-law. All them, except one brother, emigrated to Brooklyn in 1859. Again, I can only speculate as to why, but work is likely at least part of the story. Perhaps the availability of cigar making work, or perhaps the ability of cigar making work to provide for better living conditions than in London's East End. My great-great-grandmother's younger brother also became a cigar maker, perhaps due to my great-great-grandfather. And we can only imagine the changes they witnessed as cigar making went from being a skilled craft done by hand to a machine-based, repetitive task.

As an aside, there is a more famous cigar maker who emigrated from London's East End to New York around this time--Samuel Gompers, president of Cigar Makers' International Union and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Before then, Gompers was president of the Manhattan local when it struck in 1877, and an article in the Brooklyn Eagle (November 9, 1877) describes how Gompers spoke to a mass meeting of Brooklyn cigar makers to raise support. Much to my surprise, the article indicates that my great-great-great-uncle was president of this Brooklyn local (No. 87 of the Cigar Makers' International Union)--or someone else with the same name, though I can't find other Brooklyn cigar makers with this name in the 1880 Census. So my great-great-great-uncle presumably met Gompers, and perhaps my great-great-grandfather and other relatives did, too.

My other Irish roots come from a different set of great-great-great-grandparents. In the 1850 Census they are living in Baltimore and are shown as being born in Ireland. Their two oldest children were also born in Ireland while their other four, including one of my great-great-grandfathers, were born in Maryland. Again, why did they emigrate and why to Baltimore? My great-great-great-grandfather was a millwright and Baltimore was probably a good place for that kind of work at that time. My great-great-grandfather, however, followed more in his father-in-law's footsteps and became a produce dealer in Brooklyn. Why? And why Brooklyn? The questions continue.

I'm unlikely to ever know how many of the answers pertain to work. But we know that in many cases, work plays a key role in many of these critical life events. And on a daily level, many of our ancestors undoubtedly worked hard to try to make a better life for their children. Just as we do today. In an era when we are bombarded by stories of changing work and changing technology, it's easy to lose sight of these fundamental commonalities of work across time, space, and culture. And someday perhaps my own descendants will ask "Why Minnesota?" And the answer will be a common one. For work.

Frances Perkins: Mother of the New Deal

As the Supreme Court wrestles with the future of U.S. social programs, it seems appropriate to recognize Frances Perkins on her birthday. Perkins was a tireless advocate for workers and their families. She was the first woman to ever hold a U.S. cabinet position, and as Secretary of Labor during the Great Depression she was the driving force behind federal legislation creating social security, unemployment insurance programs, a federal national minimum wage, overtime premiums, and protections for child workers.

Born on this day in 1880 from descendants of early New England families, Perkins was concerned with the plight of the poor from an early age. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she volunteered in Chicago at the famous Hull House, a charitable community center for poor immigrant workers. From there, Perkins moved to Philadelphia where she worked to shut down agencies that lured women to Philadelphia with the promise of factory jobs and instead forced them into sexual slavery as prostitutes. She also interviewed many factory girls who were paid less than men, relegated to the worst jobs, and discriminated against within labor unions.

A few years later, Perkins ran the New York City office of the National Consumer League fighting dangerous working conditions, excessive working hours for women, and child labor. She witnessed the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire firsthand in 1911, and she became an influential figure in the subsequent investigations and reform movements. In 1919, at the age of 38, Perkins was appointed to the New York Industrial Commission, a state agency overseeing factory safety and regulation. This was a major appointment at a time when women did not yet have the right to vote and the leadership ranks of government, business, and labor were dominated by men. When he was elected governor of New York in 1928, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted Perkins to chair this commission. With the onset of the Great Depression, Perkins advocated for investigations into the problems of unemployment, and urged the creation of unemployment insurance systems which did not yet exist in the United States.

When Roosevelt was elected U.S. President in 1932, he appointed Perkins as Secretary of the Department of Labor. The challenges she faced were enormous--nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed, the idea of federal government policies on work was widely seen as unconstitutional, the Department of Labor she inherited was disorganized if not corrupt, and a woman had never before held a Presidential Cabinet post. The challenges further increased with the outbreak of bitter strikes in the mid-1930s. But she worked tirelessly--so tirelessly that her chauffeur was run ragged and quit.

Perkins' concern with worker voice led her to help bring about section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), but her greater interest in the NIRA was a public works component to provide work for the unemployed. Even more importantly, Perkins was instrumental in the passage of the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, even while enduring sharp personal attacks by opponents of these initiatives and by those uncomfortable with a woman in a position of power and influence. By overcoming these attacks, broad segments of the labor force would be protected by minimum wages, overtime premiums, child labor restrictions, unemployment insurance, and old-age insurance (social security) for the first time in U.S. history.

Perkins served as Secretary of Labor for 12 years, a period that included much of the Great Depression and World War II. During the war, she promoted the contributions of female factory workers and ensured that Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would support the continuation of the International Labor Organization as an international agency advocating for workers. Perhaps her only major goal that she was unable to achieve was an issue that remains highly contested today--universal health insurance to further enhance the security of workers and their families.

Owing to Frances Perkins's intellectual abilities, determination, passion, and untiring efforts, she was perhaps the one individual most responsible for the lasting legacies of the New Deal for the American worker. More generally, this New Deal period was, in her own words, a "turning point in our national life--a turning from careless neglect of human values and toward an order...of mutual and practical benevolence within a free competitive industrial economy."

Notes: The ending quote is from Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 337. For more about Frances Perkins, visit the Frances Perkins Center.

Eureka! The Labor History Symbolism of Melbourne's Tallest Building

Greetings from Melbourne, Australia! It's interesting being in a country where industrial relations is such a prominent subject. Controversies over industrial relations legislation were central to the federal election campaign in 2007, and the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations before becoming Prime Minister. Indeed, even Melbourne's tallest building has some interesting labor symbolism.

Melbourne's tallest building is the Eureka Tower. It is named after the Eureka Stockade, a structure built by gold miners when they rebelled against the government over a number of grievances during the Victorian gold rush in 1854. Some of these grievances were caused by incentive compensation plans among government inspectors run amok. Unfortunately, during the financial crisis we've seen the negative effects of other incentive plans, such as those for Wall St bankers, also run amok.

But back to the Eureka Tower...the gold crown on the building symbolizes the gold rush, and the red stripe near the top represents the bloody nature of the conflict (more than 30 people died). The miners created a blue flag with a white cross and the stars of the Southern Cross, and adopted this Eureka flag as their banner. The blue glass of the Eureka Tower captures the Eureka flag's blue background, and the building's white lines capture the white cross of the flag. The Eureka flag is still used today by the Australian labor movement.

It's nice to see this important history reflected in what otherwise appears to be a modern skyscraper. Unfortunately, most people probably just see a skyscraper, and all too easily overlook the importance of labor, past and present.

And a special hello to all my friends in Australia's "IR club"!