Voice of Teamsters Local 107

Voice of Teamsters Local 107 was a rebel faction within Philadelphia’s Teamsters Local 107 whose challenge to the local leadership drew Jimmy Hoffa into an intense campaign to secure the union’s control. Its contest was more than a local election: for Hoffa, Philadelphia’s divisions threatened the solidarity he needed to pursue a nationwide freight agreement, while the faction’s persistence showed that opposition to his leadership could not be removed simply by defeating it once.

Formation and Local Conflict

The Voice formed amid wider trouble in Philadelphia’s Local 107. Hoffa suspected that Paul Hall and the AFL-CIO were supporting the rebels, and he increasingly kept Frank Sheeran in Philadelphia as the conflict escalated. The Voice was not the only opposition group. Joey McGreal had a separate, unnamed faction of muscle men, while the Betterment Committee was a less radical group whose members Sheeran described as more intelligent than the muscle factions. These groups did not act as a united opposition: Sheeran said they could not agree among themselves, and McGreal’s followers sought control of the local for their own benefit.

The dispute also involved control over the local’s relationship with employers. Sheeran described how a local’s leadership could receive under-the-table payments in exchange for labor peace, while workers became pawns in the arrangement. He said McGreal wanted that business for himself. The Voice, by contrast, had a name and forced an election; the account does not establish that it shared McGreal’s motives or methods. The faction’s challenge nevertheless unfolded in a local where Hoffa was also contending with Raymond Cohen, the sitting power at the top of Local 107, and with employer resistance to broader union agreements.

Confrontation in Philadelphia

The struggle took a violent turn around a muscle crew Paul Hall brought into Philadelphia. The crew stayed at the Seafarers International Union hall at Oregon Avenue and Fourth Street. Sheeran went to assess the building, saw rows of bunk beds through its plate-glass wall, and found the front door secured by a substantial lock. He then borrowed a panel truck and filled it with eight or nine men, giving each a white hat so he could distinguish his side from the others.

At 6:30 in the morning, Sheeran drove the truck over the sidewalk hedge and through the plate-glass window. The men inside were still asleep; Sheeran and his crew attacked them with their fists as they got out of their bunks. Police arrived from across the area. The account presents this assault as part of the Philadelphia labor conflict, but does not establish that the men in the hall were the Voice’s members. It does show the physical intimidation surrounding the local’s contest and the means Hoffa’s allies used against a rival presence in the city.

Election and Hoffa’s Intervention

The Voice forced an election for Local 107, prompting the incumbent side to organize a rally and bring Hoffa before the membership. Police wanted to bring him in through a back entrance and escort him down the aisle, where Voice supporters held signs on wooden posts that could have served as clubs. Hoffa refused. He told them, “Hoffa don’t use the back door. And I don’t want no cops escorting me down the aisle of my own membership. All I need is the Irishman.” Sheeran walked with him through the crowd. There were boos farther back, but no aggressive outburst along the aisle.

Hoffa used the rally to argue that his plans would benefit the membership and that solidarity was necessary to achieve them. His appeal did not persuade everyone, but Sheeran reported that many people who had come against him left with respect for him. The election was close: Hoffa’s side won by perhaps a few hundred votes. The Voice was checked, not eliminated, and the near loss made Cohen more accommodating afterward.

The contest had already proved vulnerable to violence. In an earlier election, the Voice lost by only 600 votes in a local of 11,000 members, but that result was set aside because anti-Voice violence had dominated the election. Hoffa then spent fourteen weeks at Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel campaigning for the April 1963 election. This time he campaigned vigorously without resorting to violence, explaining the expected gains in pay and pensions. His side defeated the Voice again, bringing the fourth-largest Teamsters local back into line. Hoffa promised to “let bygones be bygones.”

The National Stakes and the Voice’s Defeat

Hoffa’s campaign against the Voice was tied to his effort to establish the first Master Freight Agreement. The plan, pursued for decades, aimed to give Teamsters across the country a common contract, with uniform wages and benefits and a single negotiating process. A national agreement would also make it harder for trucking companies to divide local unions and, in Philadelphia, would weaken the leverage of a local leader who could resist the arrangement. Hoffa believed the Voice was being encouraged by the AFL-CIO and Bobby Kennedy, and said the rebels had to be converted to his way of thinking.

The benefits Hoffa presented to members had a material foundation. In 1955 he had established a pension fund supported by regular employer contributions; before it existed, many truckers depended on Social Security alone in retirement. By the end of 1963, Hoffa had secured the Master Freight Agreement. Its first contract brought a 45-cent-an-hour raise, and pensions began rising substantially. He appointed Sheeran to the union’s National Negotiating Committee after the agreement was signed. The election victories in Philadelphia helped Hoffa strengthen his position, while Cohen’s defeat for embezzling union funds in June 1963 removed a local opponent of the negotiations.

The Voice’s second defeat therefore changed the balance of power without ending dissent. Hoffa’s side had restored Local 107 to line with his national program, but the earlier close vote, the violence that invalidated it, and the faction’s continued presence made Philadelphia a measure of how difficult that consolidation was. In the account, the Voice is both a local electoral opponent and part of a larger struggle over who could speak for Teamsters members, control a powerful local, and determine whether the union would negotiate as a single national force.