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The last of four books on the 1930s strikes, organizing drives, and political campaigns that transformed the Teamsters union in Minnesota and much of the Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement. Written by a leader of the communist movement in the U.S. and organizer of the Teamsters union during the rise of the CIO. Indispensable tools for advancing revolutionary politics, organization, and effective trade unionism.Teamster Bureaucracy tells how the rank-and-file Teamsters leadership organized to oppose World War II, racism, and government efforts -- backed by the international officialdom of the AFL, the CIO, and the Teamsters -- to gag class-struggle-minded workers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

This book should be in every worker's library
This is the fourth in the fascinating series of books on working class struggles in the 1930s, centering on the strikes and organizing by drivers and warehouse workers in the Midwestern states. Farrell Dobbs was a young worker in the Minneapolis coal yards who quickly became a leader of these strikes and organizing campaigns, as well as a member and then leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
The first three volumes (Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics-- don't miss them!) take up the important strikes in Minneapolis in 1934, the subsequent over-the-road organizing campaign throughout the upper Midwest, and the vital and complex political challenges militant workers took on in confronting the employers, their government, cops and finks, and reactionary, class-collaborationist trade union officials.
Teamster Bureaucracy draws some of the broadest lessons for working class fighters from those years of struggle. Facing the intense political pressure of the opening years of WWII, the Stalin-Hitler pact, frame-ups by the FBI, the drive by Teamsters international president Daniel Tobin (aiding and aided by the Roosevelt administration) to crack down on militant local unions -- this book is full or rich experiences we can learn from today. It should be in every workers library!

how a fighting union was housbroken
The major industrial unions rose from almost nothing to massive powerful organizations in the mid to late 1930s.They were social movements in the broadest sense.They led powerful strike mobilizations, galvanizing the hopes of not merely their own members, but other workers, the unemployed, family farmers, and others. By the 1950s, U.S. union structures had become a prop of capitalism, both domestically and internationally, ruled by officialdom as corrupt and disloyal to workers as can be found on any corporate board.How did the fighting unions become their opposite?Farrell Dobbs, a Minneapolis Teamster and leader of the famed 1934 Minneapolis general strike, and later of the Socialist Workers Party, describes how the militancy of his union was confronted, and smashed, in the prelude and opening of World War II.He also explains the lessons to be learned by today?s militant workers.

Workers fighting War,Bureaucrats Roosevelt fighting workers
With a war drive on in the US today, we need the lessons of the battles in this book by the militant teamstesr of the Midwest, especially Minneapolis in 1940 and 1941, fighting against Roosevelt's war drive, and its clamp down on union rights. Dobbs was the general organizer, a man who helped turn the Teamsters into an industrial union,together with other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis teamsters. They built a militant movement that included not just union members, but farmers, the unemployed and many other working people.Dobbs and the militant teamsters and the Socialist Workers party refused to give up with the Teamsters bureaucracy and the Roosevelt administration tried to jail and persecute them and drive them out of the union. This is about that fight. Particularly poignant is Dobb's depiction of his last conversation with Teamster's boss Tobin. Tobin dangled a secure position as an IBT international leader before Dobbs, a working man with young daughters. The path of resistance could and did lead Dobbs to prison. Yet, he explains why he chose to fight and continue to fight the rest of his life, long after Tobin had been forgotten. We need this book to fight the war that is coming!

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Workers against World War II
This book, which is the third and last in a series by the same author, tells the riveting story of a group of workers in Minneapolis organized into a local of the Teamsters Union who were victimized for opposing the entrance of the US into World War II.It shows quite convincingly how World War II, contrary to the recent hoopla over Tom Hanks and Saving Private Ryan, was anything but "the good war."Author Farrell Dobbs was an elected local Teamsters leader, who had helped spearhead organizing drives which built the union into a major power in the midwest during the 1930s.Dobbs was also a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, which gained a lot of influence in the labor movement in Minneapolis; and which openly opposed the US entry into World War II.Dobbs and his fellow Teamster and Socialist activists had to fight the combined might of the national Teamster bureaucrats, the local trucking bosses and the Roosevelt Administration, who succeeded in putting Dobbs and others on trial for sedition.The defendants were the first to be tried under the 1940 Smith Act, later used widely against members of the Communist Party.The defendants were also charged with violating an old law passed in 1861 to target the Confederacy, which had never been used.Though the defendants were convicted and spent time in federal prison, the book shows how they put up an excellent public defense and won many supporters.Especially in conjunction with Dobbs' two earlier installments in the series, this is book well worth reading.

Damn Bureaucrats
This book displays the repression of a the powerful leftist Minnesota Teamster's Local 544.They took a stand against world war two and paid the price through legal harassment and the thuggery of the union bureaucracy. It's fairly depressing overall--they had quite a powerful union built on arevolutionary platform; but it does show how such a union operates and theconsiderations the union made in taking action. The content is good but itdoes not follow the events completely chronologically and thus can be hardto follow. ... Read more

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For over two decades, Beyond Bureaucracy has helped both modern academic thought and current management practice with its far-reaching examination of the causes and consequences of change in organizations and leadership. From a powerful behavioral science perspective, this classic collection of essays examines the strategic, methodological, and conceptual issues central to changing organizations. ... Read more

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Even though our government has had a long history in dealing with poverty, it has failed to produce consistent or coherent programs to eliminate poverty or alleviate its consequences, Judith Russell charges in this hardhitting analysis of the war on poverty. The book focuses on the genesis of the Economic Opportunity Act, conceived in 1963 and enacted in 1964, which constituted the core of President Kennedy and President Johnson's antipoverty crusade. Russell asserts that, the war on poverty could have been an inclusive program of government-sponsored jobs, job training, and job placement in conjunction with the private sector, but it was not.To support her thesis, she draws upon a treasure trove of archival sources, including newspapers and legal journals, party platforms, public opinion surveys, an interview and ten-year correspondence with former Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, and the oral histories and other documents found in the Kennedy and Johnson Presidential Libraries. ... Read more

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This book examines the psychological experience of work for members of a bureaucracy.Combining interviews of planners and public administrators with an analysis of the psychological dynamics at play in their work places, Professor Baum formulates a theory for understanding the nature of problem solving and concludes with recommendations oor more rational problem solving. ... Read more

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Religion under Bureaucracy is an innovative study of religion and politics in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu which focuses on the relationship between the state and the central religious institution of the area, the Hindu temple. Religion, politics, economy and culture intersect in the temple and Tamil Nadu has 52,000 in all, many richly endowed with land and prominent locally as sources of patronage and economic and political power. Dr Presley examines the institutional challenge that Hindu temples have presented to the developing South Indian state over the last century and a half and the ways in which a government publicly committed to non-intervention in religious matters has come to involve itself deeply in temple life - establishing a presence in temple management, regulating the use of the temple's material and symbolic resources and, beyond this, seeking to control many details of Hindu organisation, economy and worship. ... Read more

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Bureaucracy and Race overturns the common assumption that apartheid in South Africa was enforced only through terror and coercion. Without understating the role of violent intervention, Ivan Evans shows that apartheid was sustained by a great and ever-swelling bureaucracy. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which had dwindled during the last years of the segregation regime, unexpectedly revived and became the arrogant, authoritarian fortress of apartheid after 1948. The DNA was a major player in the prolonged exclusion of Africans from citizenship and the establishment of a racially repressive labor market. Exploring the connections between racial domination and bureaucratic growth in South Africa, Evans points out that the DNA's transformation of oppression into "civil administration" institutionalized and, for whites, legitimized a vast, coercive bureaucratic culture, which ensnared millions of Africans in its workings and corrupted the entire state. Evans focuses on certain features of apartheidthe pass system, the "racialization of space" in urban areas, and the cooptation of African chiefs in the Bantustansin order to make it clear that the state's relentless administration, not its overtly repressive institutions, was the most distinctive feature of South Africa in the 1950s. All observers of South Africa past and present and of totalitarian states in general will follow with interest the story of how the Department of Native Affairs was crucial in transforming "the idea of apartheid" into a persuasiveand all too durablepractice. ... Read more

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Encounters between clients and staff members in human services organizations are "disputes waiting to happen" with potential for disagreement and conflict at every point. Both the client and the staff member have needs and expectations which often produce a conflict of interest and a clash of perspective. This initial disagreement becomes an argument which in turn becomes a full-scale conflict and easily escalates into something which prevents the organization from operating effectively and the client from achieving his sometimes trivial demands. This volume studies in particular the Work Incentive (WIN) programme, examining how staff-client interactions are conducted in terms of conflicts, disputes, hearings, meetings and legal procedures. This is an organization constantly challenged to manage disputes that may range from normal daily disagreements between client and staff to violent incidents. How does it cope? How is conflict managed? How are disagreements resolved? And how are disputes handled without damaging the day-to-day running of the organization?This book has implications which go far beyond the WIN programme to all organizations, particularly those involved in the human service sector. Conflict management is increasingly a skill which is important both in the welfare system and in business. This book is a reference tool for the legal, social and organizational aspects of dispute resolution, and an ethnographic study of our times. ... Read more

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During the 1980s, there was a mounting interest in the relationship between gender divisions and organizational hierarchies. Much research in the area, however, has been narrowly focused around discrete issues such as sexuality, the gendered division of labour within organizations and feminist theories of the state. This volume provides an introduction to the entire range of historical and contemporary debates around gender and bureaucracy. Issues covered include gender and the development of modern bureaucracies; sexuality and organizations; male bonding and organizations; gender and organizational culture; feminist theories of the state; the efficacy of feminist intervention within bureaucratic structure; sex segregation within organizations; the relationship between gender, ethnicity and social class within organizations, and the relationship between organizational position and home and "personal" life. The book should be useful to students of the sociology of work and of gender, organizational studies and women's studies. ... Read more

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As a result of the writings of Foucault, surveillance has come to be seen as a phenomenon of major importance in modern societies. But there are few, if any, studies which relate the concept of surveillance to that of bureaucracy, thus connecting Foucault to Max Weber. Dandeker's text breaks new ground in re-examining the framework of Weber's analysis of bureaucracy in the light of problems of surveillance. The author also provides a critique of a variety of other theories of the significance of bureaucracy in the modern world. The core of the book is concerned to offer a detailed analysis of the use of bureaucratic surveillance in the state and the economy. The author gives particular attention to the role of warfare in the expansion of surveillance. The text brings together problems that ordinarily are treated in substantial separation from one another, including analyses of staff and line in organization theory, military service and the formation of prisons and asylums. ... Read more

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A guide which evaluates organization, written from the needs and experiences of students. Three models of organization are introduced - "community", "the market" and "bureaucracy" and each model is applied to three case studies: youth homelessness, HIV/AIDS and broadcasting. Through these, the authors consider issues of power, change and evaluation in organization. ... Read more

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"This useful collection of case studies of women in Arizona, Texas, Utah, and California state bureaucracies is a cooperative comparative venture among authors asking similar questions about obstacles to and facilitators of women's career advancement. The editors proceed from the proposition that bureaucracies should be democratic. More specifically, they submit that proportional representation of women in bureaucracies will result in public policy that is more in women's interests than policy produced by predominantly male bureaucrats. The authors find support for this proposition; female bureaucrats are generally more supportive than male bureaucrats of public policies responsive to women's needs. The case studies also illustrate how the status of women in state bureaucracies is dependent on gubernatorial electoral politics." Choice ... Read more

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A study of the bureaucratic context of medical work. It emphasizes the structural context in which individual action occurs in the medical world. The author argues that there are fundamental and irreconcilable conflicts inherent within medical consultations, and these occur, not just between staff and patients, but even within the various things that any one individual may want or have to do. He aims to render the transparent apparent, to set the business of diagnosis, treatment and their discussion within an organizational framework. The text's concern is with the consultation itself and more specifically with its overt social form. The question it asks of each consultation is: what kind of social occasion is this? It demonstrates that there are special sets of rules that make medical consultations distinct social occasions, rules that are clearly informed by the location of the action within a bureaucratic setting. The author's model emphasizes the doctor's technical authority over the patient, and the impersonality and neutrality of medical intervention. ... Read more

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For years many citizens have complained that our national government is fettered by legions of inefficient, unaccountable, feathernesting lawyers. These critics might be right about the numbers--there are nearly 40,000 lawyers employed by the federal government in every branch and at every level. But most of these professionals fulfill functions that are essential to or extremely valuable in running the machinery of government.In this volume, Cornell Clayton and eight other authorities on public law and legal agencies explore the role that politics play in this federal legal bureaucracy-especially within the executive branch. They provide insights into the historical development, present status, future trends, and interrelations among the offices of the Attorney General, Solicitor General, Special Prosecutor, White House Legal Counsel, Office of Legal Counsel, and counsels in regulatory agencies like the EPA and the EEOC. All the essays highlight a common theme--the perpetual tensions and conflicts between executive-branch politics and the profession's prinicpled independence.Readable and enlightening, these essays add much to our understanding of--and remove some of the tarnish from--this elite corps of legal experts. They should benefit anyone interested in the legal profession, presidential politics, administrative law, public policy, and bureaucratic politics in our nation's capital.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more