Hall vs. Hoffa
BROOKS, TOM
SEAFARERS' CHIEF SLOWS TEAMSTER DRIVE Hall vs. Hoffa By Tom Brooks James Riddle Hoffa once told an audience of Great Lakes seamen, "I am after one great union of all people, on the land, on...
...The game is a rough one...
...He has recently moved off the waterfront to attack certain weak spots within the 1.7million member Teamsters, principally some 150,000 taxi cab drivers across the country...
...Hall runs a taut ship...
...Hall's raids into Teamster territory indicate that Meany may have found a way to get back at the Teamster boss...
...But if Meany intends to fight Hoffa with Hoffastyle tactics, he has picked the right instrument in Paul Hall...
...Exasperated, Hawk snapped at two of his aides, "Get him...
...But the move was defeated by a 15-7 vote of the Longshoremen's executive board-an effective measure of Hall's strength within the dock union-and in the end O'Donovan was dropped...
...Officially, the Federation encourages locals to break away from the Teamsters, but it offers them no safe harbor...
...Captain William V. Bradley, President of the ILA, was pressured into quitting the AFL-CIO in order to keep O'Donovan and others of his kind on the waterfront...
...Hall has been a kind of waterfront Horatio keeping the Teamsters at bay...
...The aggressive pursuit of a breakaway policy would create a showdown with Hoffa, which most of the AFL-CIO brass would like to avoid...
...Much depends on what happens when Hall and Hoffa clash next...
...Few observers of this running feud expect Hall to limit his operations against the Teamsters to taxis...
...The rivalry between the two candidates provided Hall with an opportunity to demonstrate his characteristic toughness and control...
...When I get all those fingers, I close my hand...
...To advance his ambitions for control over all transportation, the President of the Teamsters Union has grasped power on the waterfronts of the East and West Coasts through alliances with Joseph Curran's National Maritime Union and Harry Bridges' West Coast International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, expelled from the old CIO for being Communist dominated...
...but wartime expansion of shipping and a turn in the Communist party line that took the bloom off the militancy of its rival, the National Maritime Union, enabled it to gain a secure berth on the waterfront...
...But blocking the way to Hoffa's further aggrandizement of power is a little-known sailor named Paul Hall...
...Hall has already brawled with Teamster pickets in Chicago, where cabs have been dumped and burned...
...If a seaman misses one while on the beach, he is taken off the shipping rolls...
...Some old-timers grumble that the union is not as democratic as it used to be...
...Hoffa, of course, has long been a thorn in the side of the AFL-CIO President and a disruptive force in the labor movement...
...Hall won the election...
...Until the early 1940s, the union had little importance...
...They're my boys now...
...He also sent in 200 Teamster stalwarts to ride Chicago cabs in an effort to win back the hackies...
...In the uneasy days following the Federation's expulsion of the dock union in 1953, Hall's initial stand was unclear...
...Still, Hall remains one of the more accessible trade-union leaders, and a large part of his day is spent talking with sailors on the beach...
...The Seafarers is a well-disciplined outfit that is always battle-ready...
...Hoffa By Tom Brooks James Riddle Hoffa once told an audience of Great Lakes seamen, "I am after one great union of all people, on the land, on the sea, and in the air...
...At a union meeting prior to the election, he and Hawk squabbled over an obscure parliamentary point...
...Indeed, the Seafarers fought the ILA long after the Federation had given up...
...Under Hall's reign, too, SIU membership meetings are compulsory...
...In any event, Hall has so far managed to do what the AFL-CIO, the McClellan committee, Robert Kennedy and the courts have not-apply the brakes to Jimmy Hoffa's mighty ambitions...
...Taxi contests between the Seafarers and the Teamsters are also on in Milwaukee and Boston...
...In an effort to offset the loss in SIU membership, Hall has pushed his union into the warehouses and light manufacturing concerns that are situated in the neighborhoods along the waterfront...
...SINCE the ILA battle, Hall and Hoffa have tangled in a number of key waterfront and transportation fights-over Great Lakes seamen, Puerto Rican truck drivers, taxi drivers, in the Caribbean and along the East and Gulf Coasts...
...In Philadelphia, Teamster officials have been arrested for fist-fighting with Hall's men at union meetings and-if convicted-face sentences of up to nine years in jail for interfering with the democratic rights of union members...
...Meany rebutted that either O'Donovan went or the Longshoremen would go back into exile...
...Tom Brooks, formerly an assistant labor editor of Business Week magazine, is now a freelance writer...
...As head of the 75,000-member Seafarer's International Union (SIU...
...Louis, the domain of Hoffa's chief aide, Harold Gibbons...
...His own rise in the labor movement roughly paralleled that of the SIU...
...If there is something on that Hall expects his sailors to participate in-a strike action or picketing on behalf of another union-and a beached sailor fails to put in his turn, he is not likely to find a berth when he wants to ship out...
...He also has his allies within the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), a key union on the docks of the East and Gulf Coasts, the Great Lakes and in Puerto Rico...
...The following year Hall ran for secretary-treasurer, a post then held by John "Whitey" Hawk...
...Before long, O'Donovan became a test of Hoffa's power...
...Hoffa sent word that his boy was not to be dropped...
...For the sake of clarity, Hall might have also added: "Where George Meany orders us to go...
...As a condition of its return, Meany insisted that the ILA be "clean," and that among the thugs who had to go was Larry O'Donovan, a Teamster hood from Chicago...
...Other truck-union locals have also defected, notably the milk drivers of Cincinnati, and the present AFL-CIO practice of chartering such groups as local unions offers little protection against possible retaliation...
...After it became clear that the ILA was on the docks to stay, Hall made peace overtures to his chief opponent, Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasia, the Brooklyn dock boss and brother of Murder Inc.'s Albert Anastasia...
...How much rein Meany will now give Hall remains to be seen...
...The same note of toughness was struck by Hall during 1953-56, the three years that the AFL tried to cleanse the waterfront of the racket-ridden International Longshoremen's Association...
...You are but one finger on my hand...
...Paul Hall was born into a trade-union family 48 years ago in Ingelnook, Alabama...
...As a general workers union, the SIU conceivably could move into the vacuum left in the AFL-CIO by the exiled Teamsters...
...No one moved...
...But when George Meany asked for Hall's help on the waterfront, he got it...
...By this time, though, the Teamsters had been expelled and were working with the remnants of the Irish West Side mob to keep the ILA outside the Federation, as a possible lever to aid the trucking union's return...
...The door to Paul's office," one sailor recently remarked, "used to be open, then it got closed, and now there's a receptionist...
...The recent decline in shipping, which has brought increased unemployment among seamen, has provided Hall with an additional supply of ready muscle...
...So far, he has picked up defecting Teamsters taxi locals in Chicago, where Joey Glimco, a Hoffa pal and a known racketeer, had control, and in St...
...But Hall's union offers defecting Teamsters a possible home, for the SIU has both the money and the muscle to provide the protection they may need...
...As Hall himself says, his union "is ready, willing and able to fight Hoffa and his hatchet men in those areas where they have control, where Hoffa chooses to do battle...
...To carry out this task, Hall recently chartered the catch-all Allied Industrial Workers division of the SIU, a move reminiscent of John L. Lewis's establishment of District 50 of the United Mine Workers...
...The two worked together to bring the errant dock union back into the AFL-CIO...
...Then, in a quiet drawl, Hall said: "Now you know the score, Whitey...
...Direct confirmation is hard to come by, but Meany made it clear where he stood when he secured Hall's appointment to the AFL-CIO executive board following the SIU's initial forays...
...Hoffa has countered with a raid against SIU industrial locals in Philadelphia...
...And it was not until 1944 that Hall, who had been working below decks in the "black" gang as a ship's oiler, made his first appearance in the Seafarers' administrative offices, after winning election as the SIU port agent in New York...
...He had argued against the ouster and in the past had always "positioned"-his favorite verbwith ILA boss Joseph P. Ryan against the reform elements within the mob-infiltrated dock union...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 22
