Daniel J. Tobin

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Daniel Joseph Tobin (1875-1955) was the long-time head of the Teamsters Union in the U.S. (1907-52). Born in Ireland he emigrated to Boston in 1890. He attended high school at night and labored by day. In the late 1890s he started his own small carting business. He married Annie Elizabeth Reagen in August 1898, who died in 1920; they had five sons. Although he was an independent contractor, he joined Boston Local 25 of the Team Drivers' International Union in 1900, and in 1903 helped create International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America (IBT). He was elected president in 1907 and moved to Indianapolis.

Power in the union was held by big-city locals, which handled all contract negotiations; the main role the locals saw for the international was preventing jurisdictional disputes with other unions, attending to bureaucratic details, and acting as the union representative in national affairs. Tobin quickly mastered his roles and edited the union magazine, the International Teamster. His main interest was in the American Federation of Labor, run by Samuel Gompers, which he served in numerous senior capacities.

Tobin undertook a long jurisdictional battle with the United Brewery Workers over the right to represent beer wagon drivers. While the Teamsters lost this battle in 1913, when the AFL awarded jurisdiction to the Brewers, they won when the issue came before the AFL Executive Board again in 1933, when the Brewers were still recovering from their near-elimination during Prohibition.

In 1924 Tobin tried and failed to get the AFL endorse Robert M. La Follette for president. Ater that he became a leading Democrat, chairing the Labor Bureau of the Democratic National Campaign Committee in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. The Teamsters paid him very well--a salary of $30,000 by 1940, when the large union had 450,000 members. Tobin was aggressively anti-communist, and was active in international labor affairs. In 1947 he was forced to turn over operations to Dave Beck. He retired in 1952, with union membership at 1.1 million.

[edit] References

Garnel, Donald. The Rise of Teamster Power in the West (1972).
Korth, Philip. Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 (1935)
Leiter, Robert D. The Teamsters Union (1957).
Van Tine, Warren R. "Tobin, Daniel Joseph" in Dictionary of American Biography Supplement 5 (1977).