Expulsion of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the AFL-CIO

The Expulsion of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the AFL-CIO was a direct institutional challenge to the power James R. Hoffa had consolidated in the union. The AFL-CIO did not merely censure the Teamsters: it excluded them and made their return conditional on removing the leadership and racketeering influence it blamed for the union’s corruption.

Background and Timing

The expulsion came ten days after Hoffa took the oath of office as Teamsters president in 1957. The timing made the decision an immediate rebuke to the new administration, rather than a remote dispute over union policy. The stated condition for readmission named Hoffa and his racketeer union officials as the problem: the AFL-CIO said the Teamsters could return only if they got rid of “this corrupt control.”

Hoffa’s rise was accompanied by the advancement of allies within the union. In 1957 he gave Tony Provenzano, then president of Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, an additional position as president of New Jersey’s Joint Council 73, representing one hundred thousand members. In 1961, despite the monitors’ order that Provenzano be purged, Hoffa made him an International vice president. Those later developments show how the union’s leadership network continued to take shape after the expulsion; they should not be mistaken for the specific reason given by the AFL-CIO in 1957.

The AFL-CIO’s Decision

The AFL-CIO’s action made the conflict concrete: the Teamsters lost their place in the federation, and readmission was tied to a change in who controlled the union. The demand reached beyond Hoffa personally to the racketeer union officials around him. In effect, the federation treated corruption as a question of institutional command, not simply individual misconduct.

The record gives the condition for return but does not describe a subsequent readmission or detail the negotiations surrounding the decision. Its significance in the account rests on the sharpness of the ultimatum: the Teamsters could not rejoin while the leadership the AFL-CIO identified as corrupt remained in control.

A Wider Public Reckoning

The expulsion unfolded amid a year of growing public attention to organized crime. On November 15, 1957, news of the Apalachin conference brought the apparent reach of a national crime syndicate into public view. The book places that exposure alongside the conflict over Teamster leadership, presenting the union’s expulsion as part of a wider confrontation with the suspected links between organized crime and labor power—not as proof that the Apalachin news itself caused the AFL-CIO’s decision.

The episode also foreshadows the difficulty of separating formal union authority from the criminal networks that surrounded it. Hoffa’s ability to promote allies and the AFL-CIO’s insistence that the union remove corrupt control point in opposite directions: one toward the consolidation of power, the other toward exclusion unless that power changed hands.