Big Labor sees pensions as a “weapon”
Once used as a plaything for gangsters, Big Labor pension funds are now a weapon for left-wing political advocacy. What happened to just funding blue collar retirees?…
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
A crackdown on political violence that quietly worked
Union violence used to be a major force in American public life. Where did it go?…
Fifty years after Hoffa, the Teamsters are still bad news
On July 30, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa—better known as Jimmy—went for lunch at a suburban Detroit diner. The former boss of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, notorious for his corruption…
Republicans and the Teamsters, a Bad Relationship
If Republican leaders follow the American Compass into the arms of the Teamsters union, they will be repeating an error of their predecessors from the Eisenhower era. They would do…
Republicans and Big Labor: GOP-Union Outreach Before Franklin Roosevelt
A review of the history shows that Republican political figures chasing the votes of working men and women have repeatedly sought to collaborate with union bosses who claim to speak…
Republicans and Big Labor: Wagner and Taft-Hartley
After the war, unions flexed their NLRA-supercharged muscles with the largest strike wave in American history, which worsened inflation caused by military demobilization. That economic disruption swept the Republicans into…
Republicans and Big Labor: The Two Minds of Tricky Dick
Richard Nixon had voted for Taft-Hartley in Congress, but opposed efforts to establish a national right-to-work law. After his decisive but narrow victory, President Nixon pursued a middle path on…
Republicans and Big Labor: Reagan-Bush and Beyond
Running away from Big Labor, most prominently by Ronald Reagan’s Transportation Department sacking illegally striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981, did not harm the GOP.
The Teamsters’ Trojan Horse
Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley presents himself as a conservative champion of working-class voters, attacking wokeness in corporations and the workplace. But that doesn’t fit the recent coziness between Hawley and…
A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: The Old Left and the Reds
American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators…