blake 3:17
22nd June 2014, 12:15
Ernie Tate, a working class and free minded Trotskyist of some 60 years (that's 60 years of Trotskyism!) has published his memoirs. I haven't got my hands on the books yet but have read some of the excerpts online. From what I've seen the really interesting stuff is all pretty Toronto, Cuba and labour.
Just for the crazy sectariana folks -- Ernie recruited Tariq Ali to IMG, was beat up by the Healyites and had his case known, and was the leader of the IMG who supported a merger of the IMG and the IS when it would've worked. As one comrade put it, that would've changed the whole shape of revolutionary politics in England but elsewhere.
1959 (I think) on Teamster politics:
Once we stood a good chance of getting a couple of militants onto the Executive Board, but we unfortunately suffered an embarrassing set-back when one of our members who was running for the Executive was arrested by a plain-clothed cop on the street just outside the plant. He had taken a Globe and Mail newspaper from its box without paying for it, and was fired when the company heard about it. It was a petty and quite dumb thing to do, something he had done many times before, he later told us. As a result, our opponents very happily spread the gossip about this incident throughout the plant, helping to torpedo our efforts to get on the Locals Executive. I remember how we were acutely embarrassed by it and of course it set us back quite a bit. Getting our members established in the plant in the first place hadnt been easy, by any means. In those depressed times, even when we would finally manage to get someone into a targeted plant, there would often be layoffs and they would be quickly out on the street again, the result of the policy of last hired, first fired. We also had a couple of peopleJoe Rosenblatt comes to mindworking at Canadian Pacific Railway on the loading dock in Toronto, but none of this compared to what happened in the Teamsters as the decade came to an end. It was one of the few times in those years when our group made a focused effort to get as many members as possible into a specific union local of a specific industry.
As the decade came to a close, Toronto became the focal point for a series of wildcat strikes in the trucking industry throughout Ontario. It was a time of great turmoil in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters which was undergoing a deep crisis, its membership in a state of revolt, especially in Ontario where many of its locals were under trusteeship, the most egregious case being that of a large Windsor local of some 5,800 members that had been in trusteeship for an amazing fourteen years and another large local in Toronto, with over 5,500 members, that had been in trusteeship for more than a year. The unions head office in Washington had been under investigation by the Labour Department for corruption and as a result, in February 1958, under a court order, Jimmy Hoffa was forced out of office and replaced by a government appointed board of monitors that promptly began an anti-union campaign that lasted twenty- seven months, carried out under the guise of getting Hoffa, all the while delaying a convention that ostensibly it had been put in place to organize. In the meantime, the Hoffa machine was still in control, with many of its locals in Ontario suffering under his trusteeships.
http://links.org.au/node/3743
Just for the crazy sectariana folks -- Ernie recruited Tariq Ali to IMG, was beat up by the Healyites and had his case known, and was the leader of the IMG who supported a merger of the IMG and the IS when it would've worked. As one comrade put it, that would've changed the whole shape of revolutionary politics in England but elsewhere.
1959 (I think) on Teamster politics:
Once we stood a good chance of getting a couple of militants onto the Executive Board, but we unfortunately suffered an embarrassing set-back when one of our members who was running for the Executive was arrested by a plain-clothed cop on the street just outside the plant. He had taken a Globe and Mail newspaper from its box without paying for it, and was fired when the company heard about it. It was a petty and quite dumb thing to do, something he had done many times before, he later told us. As a result, our opponents very happily spread the gossip about this incident throughout the plant, helping to torpedo our efforts to get on the Locals Executive. I remember how we were acutely embarrassed by it and of course it set us back quite a bit. Getting our members established in the plant in the first place hadnt been easy, by any means. In those depressed times, even when we would finally manage to get someone into a targeted plant, there would often be layoffs and they would be quickly out on the street again, the result of the policy of last hired, first fired. We also had a couple of peopleJoe Rosenblatt comes to mindworking at Canadian Pacific Railway on the loading dock in Toronto, but none of this compared to what happened in the Teamsters as the decade came to an end. It was one of the few times in those years when our group made a focused effort to get as many members as possible into a specific union local of a specific industry.
As the decade came to a close, Toronto became the focal point for a series of wildcat strikes in the trucking industry throughout Ontario. It was a time of great turmoil in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters which was undergoing a deep crisis, its membership in a state of revolt, especially in Ontario where many of its locals were under trusteeship, the most egregious case being that of a large Windsor local of some 5,800 members that had been in trusteeship for an amazing fourteen years and another large local in Toronto, with over 5,500 members, that had been in trusteeship for more than a year. The unions head office in Washington had been under investigation by the Labour Department for corruption and as a result, in February 1958, under a court order, Jimmy Hoffa was forced out of office and replaced by a government appointed board of monitors that promptly began an anti-union campaign that lasted twenty- seven months, carried out under the guise of getting Hoffa, all the while delaying a convention that ostensibly it had been put in place to organize. In the meantime, the Hoffa machine was still in control, with many of its locals in Ontario suffering under his trusteeships.
http://links.org.au/node/3743