Tobin took advantage of the wave of pro-union sentiment engendered by the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and by 1935 union membership had increased nearly 65 percent to 135,000.

A group of radicals in Local 574 in Minneapolis—led by Farrell Dobbs, Carl Skoglund, and the Dunne brothers (Ray, Miles and Grant), all members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America—began successfully organizing coal truck drivers in the winter of 1933.

[34] When the employers' association reneged on the agreement, Local 574 resumed the strike, although it ended again after nine days when martial law was declared by Governor Floyd B.

Harry Bridges, radical leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), was leading "the march inland"—an attempt to organize warehouse workers away from shipping ports.

[10] In 1946, Beck successfully overcame Tobin's opposition and won approval of an amendment to the union's constitution creating the post of executive vice-president.

[66] In Kansas City, corrupt Teamsters locals spent years seeking bribes, embezzling money, and engaging in extensive extortion and labor rackets as well as beatings, vandalism and even bombings in an attempt to control the construction and trucking industries.

[63][72] A major battle broke out within the Teamsters over whether to charter the locals, and the media attention led to inquiries by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations.

[104] Rank-and-file anger over the McClellan Committee's revelations eventually led Beck to retire from the Teamsters, which allowed Jimmy Hoffa to take over.

[108] Beck was called before the McClellan Committee again in early May 1957, and additional interest-free loans and other potentially illegal and unethical financial transactions exposed.

[133] The AFL ousted the ILA in September 1953, and formed the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen-AFL (IBL-AFL) to represent longshoremen on the Great Lakes and East Coast.

[143] Raiding by the Teamsters was such a serious issue that it prompted the AFL and CIO, which had attempted to sign a no-raid agreement for years, to finally negotiate and implement such a pact in December 1953.

The union won substantial gains for its members, fostering a nostalgic image of the Hoffa era as the golden age for Teamster drivers.

Hoffa also succeeded where Tobin had failed, concentrating power at the international level, dominating the conferences which Beck and Dobbs had helped build.

[149] Hoffa was moreover defiantly unwilling to reform the union or limit his own power in response to the attacks from Robert F. Kennedy, formerly chief counsel to the McClellan Committee, and later Attorney General.

Kennedy's Department of Justice tried to convict Hoffa for a variety of offenses during the 1960s, finally succeeding on a witness tampering charge in 1964, with key testimony provided by Teamsters business agent Edward Grady Partin.

Fitzsimmons also slowly moved the union's political stances to the left, supporting universal health care, an immediate end to the Vietnam War, urban renewal, and community organizing.

In 1968, Fitzsimmons and United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther formed the Alliance for Labor Action, a new national trade union center which competed with the AFL–CIO.

While the Teamsters won rich national master contracts in trucking and package delivery in the 1970s, it did little to adapt to the changes occurring in the transportation industry.

But decentralization of power within the union led several Teamster leaders in California to repudiate this agreement without Fitzsimmons's permission and organize large numbers of field workers.

Deregulation had catastrophic effects on the Teamsters, opening up the industry to competition from non-union companies who sought to cut costs by avoiding unionization and curbing wages.

By the end of the 1990s the National Master Freight Agreement, which had covered 500,000 drivers in the late 1970s, dropped to fewer than 200,000, with numerous local riders weakening it further in some areas.

The decline in working conditions in the freight industry, combined with long-simmering unhappiness among members employed by the United Parcel Service, led to the development of two nationwide dissident groups within the union in the 1980s: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), an assemblage of a number of local efforts, and the Professional Drivers Council, better known as PROD, which began as a public interest group affiliated with Ralph Nader that was concerned with worker safety.

TDU acquired greater prominence, however, with the election reforms forced on the union by the consent decree it had entered into in 1989 on the eve of trial on a suit brought by the federal government under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

[159] In 1991, Ron Carey won a surprising victory in the first direct election for General President in the union's history, defeating two "old guard" candidates, R.V.

The Carey administration did not, on the other hand, have much power in the lower reaches of the Teamster hierarchy: all of the large regional conferences were run by "old guard" officers, as were most of the locals.

The Carey administration retaliated by dissolving the regional conferences, calling them expensive redundancies and fiefdoms for old guard union officers, and rearranging the boundaries of some joint councils that had fought against the dues increase.

After the strike, a reform movement known as "Teamsters United Rank and File" (TURF) formed to continue to challenge against the union's national leadership.

The new caucus's goal was to make internal Teamster governance more transparent and democratic, which included giving rank-and-file more of a say in the terms and approval of contracts.

Durham, leader of the Teamsters in North Carolina, was considered the "establishment" candidate and front-runner in the campaign (he had the backing of a majority of the union's executive board).

[183] As of November 10, 2022, the union was required to pay eligible terminated employees more than $175,000 as part of a settlement with the District of Columbia Attorney General's Office for violating D.C. Code 32-1303.