Seafarers International Union

The Seafarers International Union enters the account less through its internal organization than through its role in a contest over who would represent workers—and who could enforce that claim. In disputes with James R. Hoffa’s Teamsters, the union and its leader, Paul Hall, backed challenges to Teamsters control in Chicago and Philadelphia. The resulting confrontations show labor jurisdiction functioning not merely as a matter of representation, but as a struggle in which competing unions and their allies used political influence, organizing campaigns, and muscle.

Jurisdiction and the AFL-CIO

The union’s claims in Puerto Rico exposed the practical disagreement at the heart of the conflict. Hall’s union sought to represent drivers on the docks who carried ship cargo away from the waterfront. Hall’s position, as recalled by Frank Sheeran, was that their work on the waterfront put them within the Seafarers’ jurisdiction; Frank Chavez, a Teamsters loyalist, argued that they were drivers and therefore belonged with the Teamsters. The disagreement placed the unions in direct competition over the same workers.

The dispute was also bound up with a wider political rupture. Hall belonged to the AFL-CIO executive board and had been among those who expelled the Teamsters from the federation. Hoffa believed Hall was trying to help bring him and the Teamsters down. Sheeran described the conflict as a bloody war in which both sides had hit squads. His account therefore presents the Seafarers not as an isolated challenger, but as part of a federation-backed contest in which local organizing fights could carry national stakes.

Chicago and Local 777

In Chicago, the contest centered on Teamsters Local 777, a taxicab local controlled by Joey Glimco. Dissidents wanted to leave the Teamsters and establish an independent local. Their leader, Dominic Abata, had collected enough signed cards to bring the question to an election. Sheeran acknowledged that the rebels had their own reasons for wanting out, while describing the Teamsters leadership’s fear that a successful departure would encourage other locals to follow.

Hoffa sent Sheeran to Chicago before and after a convention to work under Glimco. In Sheeran’s telling, the immediate aim was to prevent Hall from gaining ground through the dissidents. He describes Glimco directing him to approach Abata and deliver what he called a message, an instruction Sheeran understood as a show of force rather than a shooting. Sheeran and two men sent from Philadelphia went to a cinder-block building where Abata was reportedly present. About fifty men emerged; Sheeran’s companions ran, while he stood his ground and threatened that anyone who attacked him would have to kill him. Abata recognized him. The account makes the encounter a pointed illustration of how an organizing dispute could be policed through personal reputation and threatened violence.

Other tactics targeted the rebels’ ability to earn money. Sheeran recounts that cabs bearing rebel or Seafarers signs were stolen from stands, driven to Lake Michigan, and allowed to sink. A backup car then picked up the participants; a paper bag containing cash was handed to a police officer, who was told that the cab had run out of gas or lost its brakes. These episodes, as Sheeran describes them, were meant to impose costs on the dissidents and undermine their revenue.

The rebels nevertheless won the Local 777 election in the summer of 1961. Soon afterward, Hall spoke at an AFL-CIO convention and called Hoffa a fink. He then gave the victorious dissidents a Seafarers charter and brought them into the AFL-CIO. That outcome turned a local election into an overt institutional challenge: the breakaway group had not simply left the Teamsters, but had gained a place within Hall’s union and federation. Sheeran presents Hoffa’s response as an escalation of an existing war, while insisting that the AFL-CIO had initiated the wider confrontation.

Philadelphia: a union hall as a base

The Chicago struggle had a counterpart in Philadelphia, where a rebel faction inside Teamsters Local 107 called itself the Voice of Teamsters Local 107. Hoffa suspected that Hall and the AFL-CIO were supporting the faction, as they had supported the Chicago rebels. Hall brought a muscle crew to Philadelphia and housed them at a Seafarers union hall at Oregon Avenue and Fourth Street.

Sheeran says he went to inspect the hall and found its front door locked, but could see rows of bunk beds through plate glass along Fourth Street. He then borrowed a panel truck from the Local 107 lot and filled it with eight or nine men. Each wore a white hat so Sheeran could distinguish his own group. At 6:30 one morning, he drove the truck over the sidewalk hedge and through the plate-glass window between two trees. The men inside Hall’s crew had been asleep; Sheeran says his group fought them with fists as they got out of their bunks. The truck escaped, the attackers fled on foot, and police arrived from around the area.

Sheeran characterized the raid as a message job, not an attempt to seriously injure anyone. He also said a magistrate had been standing by to accept bail if the men were caught, though no one was arrested in that incident. His account places the union hall at the center of the confrontation: it was both accommodation for Hall’s muscle and the target of a deliberately forceful attack. He recalls that the wider fight with the Voice brought repeated arrests, including one day when he was arrested twenty-six times in twenty-four hours, bailed out, and returned to picket-line clashes.

Significance in the account

The Seafarers International Union’s role is clearest through the actions associated with Hall: its jurisdictional claim over dockside drivers, its support for the Chicago dissidents, its charter for the successful Local 777 breakaway, and the Philadelphia crew based at its hall. The evidence does not describe the union’s internal structure or establish that every participant in the clashes was a union member. It does, however, show how Hall’s support connected local dissent to the AFL-CIO and transformed a dispute over membership into a contest between rival labor organizations.

That contest also complicates any simple distinction between union organizing and coercion. Elections and signed cards mattered, and the Chicago rebels ultimately won. But intimidation, damaged livelihoods, armed reputations, and physical attacks surrounded the effort to determine which organization would represent the workers. In Sheeran’s retrospective account, the Seafarers International Union is therefore significant as both a labor institution and a participant in a struggle where organizational allegiance was enforced on the street as well as decided at the ballot box.