The Teamsters

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters began in 1903 with the men who drove horse-drawn wagons — the teamsters who hauled freight through the streets of American cities. As the wagon gave way to the truck, the union followed the freight onto the highways and grew into one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in the country, its members loading, driving, and delivering the goods that kept the economy moving.

That position gave the Teamsters extraordinary leverage. Because almost everything Americans bought traveled at some point on a truck, a Teamsters strike could paralyze a city or an industry, and the union used the threat to win strong contracts for its members. By the middle of the twentieth century it had become a giant, its reach extending into warehouses, dairies, and countless other trades far beyond the loading dock.

Power on that scale attracted corruption. The union's leadership became entangled with organized crime, and its most famous president, Jimmy Hoffa, built the Teamsters into a colossus even as he was convicted of jury tampering and fraud and sent to prison. Hoffa's mysterious disappearance in 1975, presumed a mob killing, sealed the union's reputation for gangland intrigue. So severe was the graft that the American Federation of Labor had expelled the Teamsters in 1957, and the federal government later imposed years of oversight to clean it up.

Despite the scandals, the Teamsters endured as a pillar of American labor, negotiating for hundreds of thousands of workers and reforming its internal governance under government supervision. Its history captures both the promise and the peril of organized labor at its most powerful — a union strong enough to move the economy, and tempted by the corruption that such strength invites.