13. The Trouble with the Teamsters

Which side are you on, boys?

Which side are you on?

Florence Reece

It is striking how often Rochdale, created by a consortium of labor unions, the home of many thousands of union members, and dedicated to the proposition that protection of the rights of labor was a core principle of a fair, just, and equitable society, had serious problems with labor unions. Indeed, one can demarcate major transitions in the history of Rochdale by its labor troubles; the controversy over discrimination in the building trades unions at the Rochdale construction site in 1963; the teachers’ strike in 1968 and its aftermath; and in the late 1970s, the bitter strife that accompanied the strike by the Teamsters Local 80, representing Rochdale’s security guards and maintenance workers.

Rochdale had a history of generosity toward the workers it hired. Jack Raskin recalls that in 1970, when the Tenants Council controlled the Board of Directors, their commitment to paying Rochdale workers a living wage led them to top the negotiating position of the union representing the cooperative’s maintenance workers; the union asked for a 25 percent increase, and Rochdale’s negotiator shrewdly countered with an offer of 37 percent. The union representative quickly shook hands on the deal.1 At the time, Rochdale was feeling relatively flush, though by the late 1970s, with a few carrying charge hikes, an oil embargo, and a fiscal crisis under their belts, Rochdale’s residents were still committed to giving their hired workers a fair wage, but were in a more cautious and less generous mood.

Initially the security guards and maintenance workers were represented by Local 32b of the Building Services Union. By the early 1970s representation had switched to the Local 80 of the Teamsters, with Barry Feinstein as its president. Feinstein had emerged as one of the most powerful union leaders in the city in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis.2 He had a reputation for brashness and unpredictability, and for parlaying his presidency of two relatively small locals into a position of real influence in the city’s turbulent post–fiscal crisis labor situation. He was also very well connected politically, having been an early supporter in 1974 of Hugh Carey’s successful bid to become governor, gave $10,000 to Carey in 1978 toward his successful reelection bid, and was no doubt convinced, with reason, given that the state held Rochdale’s mortgage and ultimately controlled its fate, that in a contest of wills with Rochdale’s board, his would prevail. (On November 7, 1978, Election Day, several days after the 1978 strike began, Feinstein declared a one-day truce, and had his Teamsters leaflet Rochdale for Carey.) He was also something of a gambler, willing to throw his dice and take his chances. All these factors would come into play in the strike in 1978.3

Rochdale’s security and maintenance workers had struck before, in December 1976. Feinstein engaged in typical hardball tactics, setting up a picket line around the power plant, halting deliveries, and holding out the prospect of cutting off Rochdale’s light and heat. With six hours of fuel in the power plant left, Rochdale’s Board of Directors capitulated. As William Booker, the chairman of the Board of Directors said, “When a thief holds a gun at your head, you give him your wallet, don’t you?”4 The settlement gave the Teamsters almost everything they wanted, starting with an increase that amounted on average to 24 percent, and bringing the average salary, in the opinion of the Rochdale board, to $18,000 a year. (It needs to be kept in mind that many households in Rochdale had annual incomes in the $9,000 to $12,000 range.)5 There were other provisions that the board found onerous, including one that mandated cost-of-living increases that were projected to reach $1.6 million over five years.6 It was also, under the contract, exceedingly difficult to fire workers, and since there was a general feeling that there was considerable overstaffing–some members of the board felt that up to twenty members of the sixty-man security force were superfluous. Rochdale’s board complained of “numerous cases of drunk guards, guards sleeping, or guards who had committed crimes. We spent most of our time trying to get one or another of them fired.”7 In 1974, the only year for which hard data is available, Rochdale had a staff of 279, of whom 21 worked in the management office, 160 worked on maintenance, 23 in the power plant, 5 supervised activities in the community center, and 60 served on the security staff, for a total annual payroll of $3.1 million.8

In a year when most municipal workers had their wage increases frozen or deferred, the generosity of the Rochdale settlement stood out. Feinstein, always one to stick a shiv in the ribs of a defeated opponent, gloated the day after the settlement, “This is the best settlement any union in the city has won in five years.”9 Although most Rochdale board members were union members, they felt they had been had, and that the Teamsters settlement placed a great strain on Rochdale’s finances. They vowed to be tougher in the next round of negotiations.10

The contract was due to expire on November 1, 1978. On June 5, Rochdale’s board unanimously agreed to “commit itself to strive to obtain an equitable settlement in the forthcoming negotiations and to develop a contingency plan to combat a strike, should it develop.”11 There were serious concerns about the size of the eventual financial package; Rochdale was running an annual operating deficit of $250,000, and was in arrears for a $1.3 million property-tax bill. However, the main worry was the security guards. Besides the obvious reality that in a high-crime area of New York City in the late 1970s, Rochdale Village really needed security guards, they did not want to be defenseless against retaliations by strikers. And there were some on the board, from the beginning, who believed that given the lack of discipline and problems with the guards from Local 80, the union needed to be broken and replaced. Rochdale’s board made an agreement, should a strike occur, to hire replacement guards from the International Bureau of Protection and Investigation (IBPI). The new guards were not unionized (union security guards would not have crossed the Teamsters picket lines), and had reputations as strike breakers. The board also hired a lawyer, Samuel Rosen, who typically advised management in labor situations, and had previously represented IBPI.12 Various attempts to reach a compromise came to naught. Rochdale had made it clear that if a strike started, the security guards would not get their old jobs back. (They had also obtained a court order to prevent the Teamsters from stopping deliveries to the power plant.) For Jack Raskin, on Rochdale’s board of directors, it was simply a matter of self-preservation—“We had a community to protect.” For Feinstein this plan was “union busting, plain and simple.” Battle lines were drawn. A board member said his attitude before the strike began was, in response to Feinstein’s demands, “No, no, a thousand times, no. We’ve had enough and will fight like the British did when they were threatened by Hitler’s armed might.”13 On November 1, 1978, the Battle of Rochdale commenced.

Within hours, there were acts of vandalism by the Teamsters. On one night, shortly after the strike started, electrical closets in five buildings were doused with gasoline and set on fire, putting hundreds of apartments into darkness. Sewer lines were plugged with cement. In early December Rochdale’s manger, Oscar Whitfield, came to his office one morning to find six bullet shots fired into his window.14 For Jack Raskin, the strike was “a nightmare.” For Barry Feinstein, three weeks into the strike, it was “Harlan County, Kentucky, in Queens.”15 If nothing else, most Rochdale residents would have agreed with Feinstein that, like the famous song the Harlan County strike spawned, Rochdale soon became a place where only one question mattered: “Which side are you on?” By the following August, a writer in New York magazine could describe the still ongoing strike as “the longest-running major strike in New York City history.”16

Though Rochdale was able, by court order, to keep fuel deliveries coming to the power plant, the Teamsters were able to shut down almost all other commercial traffic into the cooperative. Another court order was needed to permit deliveries to continue to the Co-op Supermarket, though not before at least three delivery vans were met with gunfire. (Thereafter trucks entering Rochdale received police escort.) The garbage went uncollected, and without a maintenance staff, residents took out their own garbage, and placed it outside, sometimes having to walk long distances to do so. However, until another court order was received, no one would cross the Teamsters picket line to pick it up. Reporters noted residents wading through piles of debris every morning, and pictures of large, informal garbage dumps, bags waste-high, slowly encroaching on open spaces, appeared in many newspapers. Snow removal was another problem, with drifts gathering and lingering for weeks in the legendarily severe winter of 1978, until a nonunion company was hired to collect it.17 Many residents intensely disliked the way their community looked and smelled. “This place is getting too slummy, like a ghetto” one longtime resident told a reporter at the height of the strike.18

Nothing did more to give Rochdale a sense of slummy decrepitude than the constant vandalism. An article in the New York Amsterdam News titled “Rochdale Under Siege” described the shuttered auditorium in the community center: “At the center of the stage is a pile of charred wood, the remains of a grand piano that was set on fire; huge picture windows are either cracked and taped up or replaced with sheets of plywood.” In addition to the piano, the curtains on the stage had been torched, and the auditorium floor had been burnt and pulled apart. The reporter walked through the cooperative seeing everywhere “twisted door frames and soot-blackened walls.”19 Another account of vandalism included “firebombing, gunfire, the burning of electrical closets, destruction of sewer pipes and lighting fixtures, the slashing of tires and the shattering of windows.”20 There were also acts of vandalism directed against specific individuals. One morning, William Booker, one of the leaders of the Concerned Cooperators, went to the parking lot to find his car utterly smashed, the windows broken, the chassis beaten and twisted by sledgehammers. The striking guards regularly taunted Rochdale residents, built bonfires out of garbage on the lawns, parked illegally and dangerously, and did whatever they could to show their disrespect for Rochdale and its residents.21 By August 1979 the bill for vandalism was already at $250,000 and rising.22

But as unsettling as the vandalism was, the most alarming aspect of the strike was the violence and the physical intimidation. About one month into the strike, at least ten of the newly hired guards (out of a force of about fifty) had been hospitalized, assaulted by striking guards.23 Although they were not supposed to, persons on both sides often carried weapons, both knives and guns. The striking security guards engaged in acts of intimidation against their replacements, and the replacement guards, no choirboys either, knew how to defend themselves. One replacement guard was kidnapped, stripped, and dumped naked in the middle of the night in the Aqueduct IND station. One evening, Rochdale’s manager, Oscar Whitfield, was walking by himself when he was set upon by striking security guards, waiting for their prey, who grabbed him, turned him upside down, held a gun to his head, and said, “It’s time for you to go.” He soon resigned.24 Fred Wilson, a Democratic leader in Rochdale and a strong strike opponent, was also jumped and assaulted by strikers. Jack Raskin, one of the lead negotiators for Rochdale, received a threatening message, and was escorted home by detectives for a month. When this protection ended, his son met him at the LIRR station nightly for the remainder of the strike.25

With all the guns, the Dodge City swagger, and the macho posturing, it was only a matter of time before someone got seriously hurt. One cold night, a striking guard stood in the way of a snowplow. The snowplow, like almost all maintenance activities in Rochdale during the strike, had a security guard riding shotgun. When the striking guard refused to move, a rapidly escalating exchange followed. The replacement guard opened his jacket, displayed his weapon, and offered the standard street threat, “Any of you motherfuckers want to challenge me?” Someone did, shots were exchanged, and the striking worker was seriously injured.26

Violent confrontations between striking and replacement security guards were a frequent occurrence. Rinker Buck, in an article on the strike in August 1979, described one incident he witnessed:27

A ragged line of maintenance men…fanned out across the lawn to clear it of months of accumulated refuse. The crew was protected front and back, by three beefy securitymen, billy clubs in hand, watching for trouble…. Moments later, an angry group of Teamsters from a nearby picket line, tripping across a chain fence as they advanced, moved among the maintenance crew. Billy clubs flew, rakes and brooms became defensive weapons, and lawn mowers were ripped apart during a furious scene that lasted less than a minute. Serious injury was averted only by the timely arrival of the police. It was just another day in the life of Rochdale Village.

One similar episode had a more tragic ending. Another group of maintenance workers were attempting to cut the grass and remove garbage from the property, accompanied by security guards. Strikers from Local 80 attempted to intimidate them, and one of the strikers, Tony Dickson, pulled a knife, and according to some accounts, tried to remove the gun from the holster of a replacement guard, Edwin Suarez. The striker was told to drop his knife, and when he did not do so, he was shot, seriously wounded, and died several days later. When, after the funeral, the Teamsters attempted to parade through the cooperative with a mock coffin to protest the murder, anonymous phone calls were received by the 113th Precinct, threatening to shoot the picketers.28 The strike was one of the most violent in the recent labor history of New York City.29

In addition to direct physical intimidation, the Teamsters used other means to metaphorically twist the arms of Rochdale’s board. Barry Feinstein tried to get Jack Raskin fired, telling Raskin’s employer, a manufacturer of office equipment, that if he kept Raskin on his payroll, future contracts with any unionized workplace, including city and state agencies, would be severely disadvantaged; he also spread rumors that Raskin was racist and was trying to get black workers fired. Raskin got a call from his own union vice president telling him to back off or face bodily harm. Other union members on the board (and most were) faced similar pressure. For Feinstein this was just business as usual in a difficult strike. He said in 1979: “Sure I put the heat on Jack Raskin. I went over to his union personally to get them to change his vote on the Rochdale board. And I’ve done the same to other board members. What’s he crying about? When you’re in a war, you use whatever means are available to you to win.”30

All that Feinstein accomplished was to make his opponents more resolute. An anonymous leaflet, from April 1979, somewhat melodramatically captured the dominant sentiment in Rochdale about the Teamsters. “Too much has been destroyed, too many hours of sweat and strength have been given to keep Rochdale safe, for us to turn around and say YES—do to us what you did two years ago! In Rochdale’s case—we do not say—when rape is inevitable—relax and enjoy it!!,” and as for giving into the Teamsters demands and rehiring the guards, “This Cannot, Must Not, and Will Not Happen!”31

By working together, Rochdale residents could challenge the pervasive sense of fear that had pervaded the cooperative since the beginning of the strike. Rochdale residents attempted to cope with the situation of the strike, and tried to keep things as clean and orderly as possible, taking turns in cleaning the laundry rooms, emptying the filters, and washing the floors, and performing as much maintenance as possible. Many people praised the coming together of Rochdale residents as an indication of the true cooperative spirit, facing adversity through mutual assistance. Meetings were held in buildings, tasks were divided, and many senior citizens took the lead in directing the activity, including, in one building, an eighty-year-old man who spent his days supervising the collection and depositing of garbage. Rochdale Village for a few months was more kibbutz than cooperative. Abraham Kazan would have been pleased and proud. Rochdale residents soon set up their own security details, including twenty-four-hour hall patrols manned by residents, and card tables in building lobbies where residents checked the IDs of those entering the buildings.32

One group, calling itself the Committee to Save Rochdale, looked around the cooperative, found it to be in horrible disrepair, and decided that both a cleanup and an act of defiance against the Teamsters, around the time of Easter and Passover in 1979, would send a spiritual message to all sides: Rochdale would get out of its house of bondage, and Rochdale would be resurrected. The group started near the power plant on Bedell Street, where the strikers congregated, leaving a slovenly mess behind them. They threw away garbage, cleaned sidewalks, emptied trashcans, painted defaced siding. The group draped a large homemade banner over part of the power plant. Its message was simple and direct: “We Shall Overcome.” It was a common sentiment among Rochdale residents. Rochdale residents also formed the Rochdale Defense League and they told the local precinct that if the police wouldn’t defend them against the Teamsters, they would take matters into their own hands. Police protection notably increased thereafter, and the incidence of vandalism was curtailed when some enterprising Rochdalers obtained the names and addresses of the shop stewards of the Teamster local, and dumped garbage on their lawns.33

It would be nice to report that Rochdale residents, faced with the challenge of the Teamsters strike, put their past disagreements behind them and began to work together for the common good. But this is not what happened. Indeed, the strike brought a new ferocity to the cooperative’s combative internal politics. When, at the beginning of the strike, the Concerned Cooperators, holding a slim eight to seven majority on the Board of Directors over the United Shareholders, refused to share offices, the latter group walked out, making a quorum impossible and plunging Rochdale into chaos.34 (Any collaboration between these sworn enemies would have been very difficult; on the other hand, one is reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s famous comment that it is better to have a political opponent inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.) And the United Shareholders, originally opponents of the Teamsters, by December were arguing that the strike was proving too expensive—Arthur Greene, one of the Shareholders’ leaders, later estimated that fighting the strike had cost $1.5 million—and called for a negotiated settlement.35 Whether a middle ground such as Greene sought was possible is perhaps to be doubted, but he felt the intransigence of the board and Feinstein were mutually reinforcing.36 By some accounts the United Shareholders’ neutrality shaded into active support for the Teamsters, such as bringing them coffee on cold mornings, and on occasion joining them on the picket lines.37 Whether or not those accounts are true, the Teamsters did successfully exploit the differences between the two factions.

Barry Feinstein was in favor of arbitration, largely because he was confident that he had sufficient influence and pull to get most of what he wanted in the end, and that any compromise would certainly have to involve bringing back the striking workers in some capacity. The board was wary of arbitration for this very reason. The sticking point was the security guards, who had, in the words of the board’s president, Leo Mossman, orchestrated “Barry Feinstein’s reign of terror.”38 Mossman said the board would be willing to “arbitrate all issues except the guards returning as guards.” (The board was willing to consider their return as maintenance workers.) Arbitration sessions took place at the World Trade Center with Deputy Mayor Basil Paterson (Feinstein walked out of several meetings).39 When Paterson proposed binding arbitration, Feinstein (and the United Shareholders) said yes, the Concerned Cooperators said no. To the press Feinstein accused Rochdale of having a “bananas” management, which had refused “every recommendation made by impartial arbitrators” and of “setting labor relations back to the 1930s.”40 In private, Feinstein was convinced he had the upper hand. According to Rochdale board member Cleo Smith, Feinstein once threatened him, saying that Feinstein “didn’t have to do business with us. ‘We can break you and then the state will take you into receivership. I know the state will give me the deal I want.’”41

In any event, the main political factions in Rochdale continued to spar, and in December 1978 their feuding made it to the editorial page of the Daily News, which had a cartoon of two big bruisers in a wrestling ring, wearing respectively the singlets of the Concerned Cooperators and United Shareholders, eyeing each other warily, waiting for the chance to wallop each other.42 The Concerned Cooperators made their own cartoons, including one that put their opponents in bed with Feinstein, and another with Feinstein (with “666” on his forehead) playing the pan pipes, while Arthur Greene and Frank McKanic (another leader of the United Shareholders) danced on a grave with a tombstone inscribed, “Rochdale, Murdered 1979.”43 (The third, smaller faction, the Committee to Save Rochdale, mentioned above, were very much opposed to the Teamsters but were convinced that the two dominant factions were spending too much of their energies attacking each other, and they issued a leaflet that pleaded with everyone to put their “miscellaneous B.S.” behind them.)44 The hostilities between the Concerned Cooperators and the United Shareholders reached a climax when the former tried to oust Greene and McKanic from the board of directors. A cooperative-wide recall election was held in April 1979 that, by a decisive two to one margin, called for their removal. However, this was fought in the courts, and the episode ended inconclusively.45

And it was in the courts where the dispute between Rochdale and the Teamsters would be resolved. The National Labor Relations Board ruled in April 1979 that Rochdale Village Inc.’s contract with Teamsters Local 80 was properly voided on October 30, 1978; but on May 9, 1979, an arbitrator (appointed when the Teamsters, after complicated legal proceedings, won the right to have binding arbitration) ruled that the Teamsters contract was still in effect, and ordered any replacement workers to leave the cooperative by May 31.46 The Rochdale board refused to do this, saying that no one else would decide whom they hired or fired, and locked out the Teamsters.47 (The United Shareholders urged an acceptance of the arbitrator’s edict.) The state commissioner of housing, Victor Marrero, said that unless they obeyed the order, the members of the board faced removal.48 A stalemate ensued until this opinion, in turn, was overturned in October 1979 in the appellate court. Fred Wilson, the Democratic district leader in Rochdale, exulted, “The Teamsters are finished.”49 And though it took the Teamsters a while to realize it, they were. The denouement occurred in late November, when the US district court judge Eugene Nickerson ruled that the Teamsters contract had expired the previous October, and that all of the union’s claims were without merit.50 There were no further appeals, and the union decided that given the adamantine stance of Rochdale, and recent court reverses, their cause was lost. Many members of the Teamsters Local 80, some of whom lived in Rochdale, told Rochdale residents that they had been opposed to the strike, but had been forced by Feinstein. One union member said, “We’ve all been screwed. The residents should never have been put through this. I know—I live here. The Teamsters have lost—I know that too.”51 There was no way back. The striking workers would not be rehired. The strike, which had started with such a bang, ended in whimpers, and simply melted away. One day, about a year after it began, the pickets on Bedell Street near the power station were not there, and Rochdale’s residents, and the new security guards and maintenance workers, got on with their lives. Rochdale Village had defeated the Teamsters. Barry Feinstein had suffered a major setback, one that put his career as a labor leader on a downward trajectory. In 1993 he would be removed from his positions with the Teamsters for corruption, and though he would make a comeback, his days as one of the city’s major labor leaders were over.52

The strike, for those who lived through it, was a defining moment of their years in Rochdale. It was a time when their commitment to the cooperative was challenged as never before, when even daily tasks such as taking out the garbage became imbued with a broader political and moral significance. In many ways the strike transformed Rochdale’s image of itself. For many, the strike was most easily interpretable in racial terms. While, as far as I can determine, there was never any anti-Semitism directed against Barry Feinstein (and almost all the striking workers were black and minority), the strike was interpreted as a fight against the white power structure of the city. As Tom White, the chairman of the Committee to Save Rochdale, who would soon emerge as a power in Rochdale politics, put it, “a lot of strikers were misled, deceived and betrayed into thinking that it was a union dispute when it was actually warmed-over racism in disguise” and that the strike “shows disrespect for the black community” raising the ire of “an angry community bent on self-determination and the right to exist in peace with dignity.”53

There were many who thought that Barry Feinstein had chosen Rochdale as a setting to flex his labor muscles because, in Cal Jones’s words, “The union wanted to use us as an example, because we didn’t have the political clout of white communities.”54 With the exception of the Daily News, Newsday, and WNBC, the strike was scandalously undercovered, and there were complaints about a “conspiracy of silence,” and the lack of politicians coming to their aid.55

Placing the Rochdale Teamsters strike in the context of the broader struggle between blacks and whites in New York City was a common response. Al Mossman, the president of the Board of Directors, felt that Local 80 was annoyed that Rochdale’s $18 million-a-year operating budget was in the control of blacks. Fred Wilson, the Democratic leader in Rochdale, felt that the UFT had played an insidious role in the strike, writing letters to all their members in the cooperative, attacking the Rochdale Board of Directors. For many who viewed the Rochdale strike from the outside, including the Amsterdam News, which covered the strike extensively, this was its meaning: the 1968 teachers strike redux, another chapter in the endless struggle between white perfidy and black resistance. “No matter what concessions the black majority on Rochdale’s board of directors offered last October to avoid a strike, the teamsters union negotiator warned that it was out to get rid of those ‘black bastards.’ That, in a nutshell, is what the year long strike of security guards is about—the determination by the teamsters and their representatives including Al Shanker’s UFT, to demonstrate their awesome power and show its 25,000 residents who’s boss.”56

The Amsterdam News went on to rewrite, not terribly accurately, the history of Rochdale, reducing it to a simple racial struggle, the ultimately failed effort of whites to control the destinies of black South Jamaica, offering the following nutshell history:57

Rochdale sprang up as a “white enclave” to stem the exodus of whites fleeing Queens. Demonstrations by blacks who threw themselves in the path of heavy machinery were of no benefit…. The 15,000 white voters played a key role in the social, political, and economic policies of Jamaica. In 1969 they joined forces with the teachers union in the borough to deny blacks their rightful control of schools in their neighborhoods there.

This was not a particularly well-informed view of Rochdale’s history, and it is doubtful that many in Rochdale interpreted the Teamsters strike in such crudely reductive racial terms, certainly not the leaders of the major political factions in the cooperative. Rochdale, after all, still had a substantial white population of 10 to 15 percent in 1979, and many of the leading figures in Rochdale’s internal politics during the strike, such as Jack Raskin and Arthur Greene, were Jewish, and, as always was the case in Rochdale, all the major factions were racially integrated, and their fierce fights had no racial subtext.

But this era was coming to an end, and within a few years almost all of Rochdale’s politicians would be African American. (The time was coming when prominent white leaders in Rochdale would be asked to leave their positions. Sue Raskin, who was president of the Concerned Cooperators during the strike, remembers meeting several years after its conclusion with a group of the faction’s leaders, who said that it was time for black leadership. “I was upset by it, but I understood it, if you want to run it, you run it,” Raskin said.)58 It was easy to view the strike in terms of stark dichotomies; a powerful and well-connected union, whose tentacles reached into the highest echelons of influence at City Hall and the state Capitol, doing all it could to crush and destroy what by the late 1970s was the largest predominantly black housing cooperative in the city. The forces arrayed against Rochdale, Basil Paterson aside, were at best incidentally black, while Rochdale had become at best incidentally white.

Dramatic events can encapsulate and underline the consequences of long- gathering social trends. The labor-based social democratic city of the 1950s that had given birth to Rochdale was no more. The Rochdale Village that emerged victorious from the Teamsters strike, its head bloodied but unbowed from its struggle with its formidable foe, was a cooperative with a new racial identity. In place of an experiment in integration, Rochdale had become a model for hard-won racial self-determination. Rochdale Village was now in its purpose, its meaning, and its aspirations, a cooperative that was proudly, determinedly, and defiantly black.