The 75th Anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike¶
Core Argument¶
The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, as David May argues in this 75th-anniversary retrospective, was a watershed in US labour history precisely because it demonstrated how a revolutionary Marxist leadership could transform a demoralised and atomised workforce into a fighting force capable of defeating a united employers’ front. The chapter’s core narrative thrust is that the strike’s success flowed from the application of class-struggle methods—rank-and-file democracy, militant picketing, solidarity with the unemployed, and a daily strike newspaper—which stood in direct opposition to the conservative “business unionism” of the American Federation of Labor officialdom.
May situates the strike within the broader collapse of US unionism after the 1929 crash, when AFL membership fell to two million and wages halved. Minneapolis was an “open shop” stronghold controlled by the Citizens Alliance, an anti-union employers’ organisation. Against this backdrop, the Trotskyist Communist League of America launched an organising drive among coal yard workers in winter 1933, led by the Dunne brothers, Carl Skoglund, and Farrell Dobbs. The chapter details how the rank and file bypassed the Teamsters bureaucracy by establishing an elected strike committee and “cruising pickets”—mobile squads that followed scab trucks beyond police lines and persuaded or forced drivers to dump cargoes. This tactic, May notes, actually recruited former scabs into the union.
The strike unfolded in three phases. The first, in February 1934, closed 65 coal yards and won recognition for Local 574. The second, in May, extended the campaign to all truck drivers and warehouse workers, culminating in the “Battle of Deputies Run” where workers captured the city market. The third, in July, saw police open fire on pickets on “Bloody Friday,” killing Henry Ness and John Belar and wounding 55. Yet the workers refused to be intimidated: 40,000 attended Ness’s funeral, and when strike leaders were arrested, a further 40,000 marched for their release. The bosses capitulated on 22 August.
May draws heavily on the theoretical framework of Leon Trotsky, who criticised the Socialist Workers Party for pursuing a “trade union policy” rather than a “Bolshevik policy.” Trotsky’s warning—that honest trade union militancy is not identical with revolutionary politics—is the chapter’s central polemical thrust. May argues that the SWP failed to win the workers it recruited to a revolutionary programme, instead confining itself to apolitical class-struggle unionism. This, he contends, proved opportunistic and ultimately led to the loss of an entire layer of militants after Trotsky’s death. The chapter concludes by drawing a direct parallel to the present: unions today, dominated by a conservative bureaucracy tied to the Democratic Party, are incapable of fighting even basic reforms. The task, May insists, is to transform them into organs of class struggle and to build a mass, class-independent political party based on the unions.