The Meany years [1952 to 1979] were also the time that the Teamsters, after being purged from the AFL-CIO for corruption, organized themselves into the largest amalgamated union in the United States, with nearly two million members.
The strategies that the Teamsters used then and that the SEIU uses today are not new. In the 1860s, William H. Sylvis (founder of the National Labor Union, the first attempt to create a national labor center) used similar techniques in an effort to control specific labor markets. The goal was to control wages and thereby reduce or eliminate competition between companies in the same industry.
[Also should be noted John L. Lewis' use of leverage strategies in the 30s...]
"Leverage" strategies, developed by socialist Farrell Dobbs, were responsible for the meteoric growth of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) during the late 1950s and 1960s. IBT grew rapidly under the pragmatist and often controversial leadership of James Hoffa, Sr.
Leverage campaigns, or what SEIU calls "pressure campaigns, require broad-based organizing aimed at unionizing large sections of a particular labor market and finding economic, social, or political circumstances that will pressure companies within that labor market to acquiesce to unionization.
Leverage or pressure campaigns may eschew NLRB secret-ballot elections and challenges when companies offer neutrality or voluntary recognition or enter into card-check agreements (in which they agree to acknowledge a union if a majority of employees sign cards verifying their union membership).
Strategically, such campaigns can also mover far more rapidly towrad a first contract than traditional organizing approaches can.
The importance of such strategies is clear because they offer an alternative to organizing one workplace at a time in an industry, which is a tremendous resource drain and can fail more broadly if individual companies either gain the support of other nonunion firms or cannot compete with nonunion firms. If industry-wide pressure campaigns are part of a strategy for social and economic justice, the workers' desire for unionization can align with broader social justice forces, expanding progressive conditions and the potential for building political power.
-excerpted from Solidarity Divided:
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