Teamster Rank and File

Explaining why social movements and labor activists run into obstacles, and how these can be overcome, this book draws valuable sociological and strategic lessons from the drivers' ten-week wildcat strike that helped lay the basis for organizing Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Teamster Rank and File presents a detailed case study of how Los Angeles truck drivers organized victorious campaigns to improve workplaces and reform an ineffective union, and how the employers and a corrupt international union leadership eroded the power the workers had built. In this new edition, Samuel R. Friedman provides insights and evidence about past and current efforts to improve working conditions and create a political movement to challenge the rule of billionaires, highlighting the need for a socialist analysis and politics to develop strategies such as "Bargaining for the Common Good" to meet the overlapping economic, political, and environmental crises of our era. This book will be useful for courses on social movements, work and industry, labor sociology, labor history, labor studies, the sociology of organizations, and graduate courses in capitalism and socialism, while also being a good case study for courses in qualitative research methods. In addition, many union, workplace, and socialist activists will find this book useful.

Samuel R. Friedman has worked as a sociologist and AIDS and public researcher since 1968. In the 1970s and recently, he has worked with Teamster and other activists to organize rank-and-file movements. He organized a union where he worked in the later 1980s. He is a socialist and a poet. He currently is employed as Research Professor at a major medical school.

Foreword to the 1982 Edition by Doug Allan and Peter J. Camarata, Introduction to the First Edition, Introduction to the New Edition: TDU, the Rank and File, and Socialism From Below, 1. Bureaucratic Unionism, 2. Teamsters Local 208, 3. Drivers and Driving, 4. Rank-and-File Rebellion in the Late Fifties, 5. Rank and Filers in Office, 6. Changes in the Trucking Industry and the Teamsters Union, 7. Apolitical Activism Ambushed: The 1970s Wildcat, 8. Trusteeship, 9. Militants Enchained, 10. Teamsters Rank-and-File Organize Nationwide, 11. Conclusion: The Many Meanings of Local 208, Appendix 1: Dates in Local 208 History, Appendix 2: What Might Socialism Look Like?, Appendix 3: Creating a Socialism That Meets Needs