AFL-CIO

The AFL-CIO is portrayed as a national labor federation whose conflict with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters moved from an ultimatum over corruption to contests over representation, rival union charters, and street-level force. Its power in this account lies not only in declaring the Teamsters outside organized labor’s central federation, but also in enabling competing unions to challenge Teamsters control—and in drawing on methods that the narrator sees as closely resembling Hoffa’s own.

Expulsion and the contest over legitimacy

Ten days after Jimmy Hoffa took office as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1957, the AFL-CIO expelled the union. The federation said the Teamsters could return only if they removed what it called corrupt control by Hoffa and racketeer union officials. The expulsion made the dispute larger than a clash between two labor leaders: it placed the Teamsters’ legitimacy and access to organized labor’s national institutions in question.

That exclusion also shaped the practical struggle to organize workers. In Detroit, organizers trying to unionize taxi drivers faced the possibility that an AFL-CIO affiliate could intervene after the Teamsters had done the work of securing support. Labor law allowed an election once organizers had signatures from 30 percent of workers, but the narrator says his colleague Bill advised waiting until support exceeded 50 percent, since a union could lose an election it had only just qualified to hold. Another union could enter the contest with cards from 10 percent of workers and potentially displace the first organizer—or split support so that neither union prevailed. Signatures, therefore, were not a vote: elections were secret, and workers who signed could later choose differently. The federation’s absence from Teamsters ranks did not end competition; it made the prospect of an AFL-CIO affiliate entering a local campaign a continuing strategic concern.

Pressure beyond the organizing drive

The federation’s conflict with Hoffa also reached the film industry. Twentieth Century Fox commissioned a screenplay based on Bobby Kennedy’s book about organized crime and labor unions. Budd Schulberg later recounted that a labor tough warned the studio’s incoming head that Teamsters drivers would refuse to deliver the film prints and that stink bombs could drive audiences out of theaters. Twentieth Century Fox abandoned the project; Columbia Pictures, which considered taking it over, abandoned it as well.

The pressure was reinforced by a letter from Bill Bufalino, a Teamsters lawyer who was also Hoffa’s lawyer. Schulberg described the letter as telling Columbia that Twentieth Century Fox had wisely withdrawn after considering the possible consequences, and expressing confidence that Columbia would do the same. The episode shows the federation’s conflict with Hoffa becoming a struggle over whether a hostile public account of the Teamsters could reach an audience. It also shows the limits of treating the battle as one-sided: the Teamsters’ own lawyers and drivers were presented as capable of applying pressure outside union elections and formal hearings.

Chicago: rival unions and open conflict

In Chicago, the rivalry became an effort to organize taxi drivers through a breakaway local. Dominic Abata’s rebels won their election in the summer of 1961. At an AFL-CIO convention soon afterward, Paul Hall denounced Hoffa and gave the rebels a Seafarers International Union charter, bringing them into the federation. The charter gave the insurgents an institutional home beyond their challenge to the Teamsters and made the contest a direct struggle between union networks.

The narrator frames the escalation as a decision by the AFL-CIO, rather than an initiative begun by Hoffa. He argues that Hall did not act in Chicago without the federation’s executive board behind him, and describes the coming contest as one in which each side would answer the other’s tactics. That distinction matters in his account: Hoffa’s response was forceful, but the federation’s intervention had already turned a local taxi-organizing dispute into an open inter-union conflict.

Joey Glimco arranged an informational picket outside a Chicago hotel where Hall and Abata were celebrating. A Teamster went inside, shouted at them, and struck a police officer who told him to leave. After the man was arrested, Hall and Abata came outside; Glimco’s men then attacked them and the officers. The confrontation, which lasted until squad cars arrived, was not simply spontaneous disorder in the narrative: the picket had been arranged to draw the rivals outside. The scene makes the stakes of the charter concrete. Institutional affiliation and election results were accompanied by physical intimidation, and the Teamsters’ answer to the AFL-CIO’s organizing move reproduced the escalating tactics the narrator attributes to both sides.

Philadelphia and the Voice challenge

The Chicago conflict had a counterpart in Philadelphia, where a rebel faction called itself the Voice, short for Voice of Teamsters Local 107. The faction sought to repeat Abata’s success, and Hoffa suspected that Hall and the AFL-CIO were behind it as well. Hall brought a muscle crew into Philadelphia and housed its members at a Seafarers International Union hall. Hoffa sent the narrator back with some of the Chicago crew to assess the opposition’s position.

The narrator describes watching the hall through its plate-glass wall, where rows of bunks were visible, and then returning with a panel truck carrying eight or nine men. At 6:30 in the morning he drove the truck over the sidewalk hedge and through the glass; the men attacked Hall’s crew as they emerged from their beds. The account establishes the violent escalation but does not supply a complete aftermath for the incident. In the broader organizational contest, the Philadelphia faction and its suspected AFL-CIO backing show how the Chicago precedent travelled: a local rebellion could be treated as part of a wider federation-backed challenge, and Teamsters leaders answered it with their own organized force.

Reach and limits in the wider account

The AFL-CIO is presented as a federation whose influence could be exerted through expulsion, affiliated unions, and intervention in local contests. Its support for Abata’s rebels and the Voice made it a direct opponent of Hoffa’s effort to retain control of Teamsters locals; the account also connects Hall’s tactics to the federation’s wider leadership rather than depicting him as acting alone. Yet the narrative does not describe the AFL-CIO as controlling every event that followed. It distinguishes the federation’s support and organizing pressure from the Teamsters’ own decisions to intimidate, provoke, or attack.

That tension gives the AFL-CIO’s role its particular significance in the book. The federation’s formal condemnation of corrupt control coexisted with a hard contest for workers and locals, while the Teamsters’ exclusion did not leave the federation’s opponents without resources or leverage. The result is a portrait of labor power as both institutional and physical: a charter, an election threshold, a warning letter, and a broken plate-glass window all belong to the same struggle over who could speak for workers and command their loyalty.