The Teamsters saga: Power and politics and the day workers commanded the city’s streets

We’ve been thinking lately about our brothers and sisters in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The IBT is legendary. It represents a diverse collection of 1.4 million workers in both public and private sectors, but lately some Teamsters have been in the news, locally and nationally, in ways that seem to us a bit puzzling.

Teamsters roots run deep in Pittsburgh. Three decades ago, the Teamsters local that represented newspaper delivery drivers had enough juice to fill Downtown streets with thousands of picketing workers. Some of us remember this. It happened during the 1992 Pittsburgh newspaper strike. Alarmed officials called out the riot police and, at dawn, one of the most dramatic moments in the city’s history unfolded on Fort Pitt Boulevard. Pittsburgh’s media landscape changed forever. 

Driving the strike was Teamsters Local 211, a muscular organization that once boasted more than 700 members.

That local no longer exists. In April, its 23 remaining members voted to dissolve the local as part of a settlement to end its strike against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The deal, made in secret, angered and flabbergasted members of the four other unions on strike with the Teamsters, including members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. During our 22 months on strike, we’ve experienced the intense comradery of standing on picket lines in very uncomfortable situations, secure in the faith that those beside us will not move, no matter the odds. Teamsters in 1992 experienced it, too. We remain eternally grateful for those who continue to stand with us.

We won’t belabor the point, but we did reach out to retired Local 211 President Joe “JoJo” Molinero to get his take. Molinero took over as the local’s president in 1991 and within a year was on the front lines of a major strike. He knows the local’s long history because he’s lived much of it. Molinero retired in 2019.

“It’s sad to see after all these years,” he said of the local’s demise. “That local was charged in 1928. It’s sad. That’s all I can say.”

He lays much of the blame for the local’s collapse on the intransigence of Block Communications Inc., owners of the PG. “From my perspective, the Blocks were intent on never giving the unions a contract, period,” he said.

We’ll come back to Local 211’s story in a second, but first let’s explore another Teamsters story, this one involving the union’s role on the national political stage.

A few weeks ago, IBT President Sean O’Brien stepped up to a podium in Milwaukee and addressed delegates at the Republican National Convention. At first, he gushed over former President Donald Trump, then shifted his focus and delivered a blistering attack on corporate America. TV images showed delegates cheering the first part of O’Brien’s message, then frowning at the second part.

We were confused. Others were incensed. The Teamsters’ social media team went rogue, posting on X: “Unions gain nothing from endorsing the racist, misogynistic and anti-trans politics of the far right …. ” That post has since been deleted.

Teamsters Vice President John Palmer blasted O’Brien for legitimizing a presidential candidate, and a political party, known for pushing anti-union policies and legislation.

“I ask people all the time to name one thing in recent history — well, go all the way back to Reagan — name one thing the Republicans have done to support labor,” Palmer said during a phone conversation last week. “No one ever answers that question for me.”

The Teamsters have yet to endorse a presidential candidate — the union usually makes this announcement after both political conventions are concluded — but last week Palmer said to hell with it, he was backing Vice President Kamala Harris. 

In a one-page letter, Palmer called Trump a “a known scab, a union buster” whose campaign is heavily funded by rich folks. “He is running to serve himself and his wealthy backers, who have nothing but disdain for working people,” Palmer wrote.

He noted Harris’ support for legislation that boosts the fortunes of working people — the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS and Science Act, “all which have created union jobs and strengthened our communities.”

Other big unions representing auto workers, teachers, health care workers, communications employees and dozens of other professions already have endorsed Harris, he noted.

The Teamsters, he wrote, “must now join with our union siblings and support the only viable alternative to chaos, division and anti-union attacks in this election.”

As for the death of Pittsburgh’s local representing newspaper deliver drivers, Palmer expressed disappointment. He became a Teamster in 1987. Back then, he said, “You knew somebody had your back.”

Historically, he said, “the Teamsters have a reputation for being a gnarly bunch of guys, tough guys. Those Teamsters, I’d like to find them again.”

They were certainly here, in Pittsburgh, during the newspaper strike of 1992.

Pictures published 30 years ago show the proof: angry union members packed shoulder-to-shoulder on Fort Pitt Boulevard. Nervous managers standing in front of newspaper delivery trucks going nowhere. Helmet-clad police wielding batons. The images reflect tensions that had been building for hours. The situation seemed ready to explode.

***

On the evening of Sunday, May 27, 1992, Pittsburgh Press managers informed the Teamsters they were taking the extraordinary step of implementing a new newspaper delivery system. This system, when fully implemented, would mean the loss of hundreds of jobs and had been the subject of negotiations for months, but no agreement had been reached. No matter. Managers decided to proceed anyway.

Molinero was in the Press building that night. Earlier, he’d asked Joe Pass, the local’s attorney, what to do in just this situation. Pass had told him, “Call a strike.”

So Molinero told a Teamsters foreman to go along with the company’s plan — otherwise, the foreman could be fired. A driver was instructed to go to the back lot and get into a loaded delivery truck. Molinero followed him. The driver started the truck and pulled up to the gate. At that point, Molinero determined, he could legally make his move. He stopped the driver and said, “Hold it, get out of the truck. We’re going on strike.”

Other drivers then went to their cars and got strike signs — they’d stashed them in their trunks in anticipation of a job action. The strike was on.

***

The Press had been a fixture in Pittsburgh since the 1880s. For decades, thousands of boys and girls got home from school in the afternoon, plopped down their books and went to work, on foot and bicycle, tossing copies of the latest edition of the Press onto doorsteps and in driveways throughout the region.

That tradition of utilizing “youth carriers” would end under the paper’s new plan. But what really shocked the Teamsters was the proposed elimination of 450 of the local’s 650 jobs. 

“Who’d ever think they’d attempt to get rid two-thirds of your membership?” Molinero said. “And how do you that? How would you get two-thirds of your membership to vote themselves out of a job? It’s insane.”

Since the Press shared business, production and delivery systems with the Post-Gazette under a joint operating agreement, the strike halted operations at both newspapers. Striking workers picketed and held rallies while negotiations went nowhere.

Two weeks into July, the Press announced it would resume publication, without its unions. In a town with a long history of union activism, this was either a bold or a foolish move. 

The company set a target date — July 27 — and prepared for a siege. Cots and washing machines were delivered to the Press building. Bosses secured rooms at local hotels for out-of-state strikebreakers. Security guards wearing jumpsuits and military-style boots began patrolling the newspaper property.

The day before publication, July 26, rain moistened the city’s streets. At the Press building, scab workers prepared the presses to run once again. Strikers sheltering under umbrellas outside suspected something was happening inside the building but couldn’t confirm it. Managers covered press room windows with newsprint to block the view.

The rain let up as darkness settled over Downtown.

Two blocks away, at the Hilton Hotel, Molinero and Pass were in the middle of a marathon session with Press managers, but the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement. Sometime after midnight, Molinero received an urgent phone call. Union members standing outside the newspaper building could feel the rumble of presses. Managers were indeed carrying out a plan to publish a scab edition. It was time to take action.

***

Pass and Molinero make an interesting pair. The two first met in the early 1970s, during a picnic the Teamsters held each year for the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization. Molinero was standing next to Local 211 President Teddy Cozza when Pass approached. Pass had been the local’s attorney for only a short time.

“He was dressed in a pair of shorts and tennis shoes and a raggedy shirt,” Molinero recalled. “He was wobbling up the street. He looked like a homeless guy. I said to Teddy, ‘Who the hell is this?’ “

“This is our lawyer,” Cozza responded.

Over the next half-century, the two would work together on a number of issues and contracts and become close friends.

Full disclosure: Pass, now 82, represents the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, so we’ve gotten to know him over the past few years. During a break in a bargaining session with company attorneys last year, we asked him why he committed his professional life to representing unions. He responded by telling us the story of his grandfather, Sante D’Andrea.

Sante immigrated to the U.S. from Italy in 1905 and as a young man went to work in a Washington County coal mine. The job destroyed his hearing because of all that blasting of heavy rock. He left that gig and became a mechanic at a Neville Island steel mill. One day in the mid-1950s Sante was busy repairing a saw and did not hear a notification that the machine was being fired up. The suddenly spinning blade cut off his arm.

“I can always remember sitting at my grandmother’s enamel table and my mother and everybody crying, ‘What are we going to do?’” Pass recalls. “Who would hire a one-armed middle-aged man with bad hearing?” The family feared losing its home.

“A guy from the steelworkers union came by and said, ‘Don’t worry, Sante, we’ll take care of you,’” Pass said. “And they got him a job passing out tools at the tool room. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t know what would have happened. The [United] Steelworkers were a lifeline to a lot of people.”

Molinero’s father worked as a union painter — the jobs were seasonal, so the family often struggled. That meant eating a lot of pasta, which was cheaper than meat.

One of five children, Joe Molinero, now 79, grew up in the Hill District. As a youth, he’d wander Downtown to run errands for the city’s newspaper drivers. He’d fetch coffee and sometimes help load a truck. A lot of the drivers lived in the Hill and looked out for him. During slow times at the old Sun-Telegraph building, he and his friends would slide down chutes that led to the delivery room. It was great fun.

In 1965, Molinero became a Teamster. It was a lucky break. Driving a newspaper delivery truck paid well and offered men a path to middle-class life. Molinero could buy a decent house and car. He didn’t have to worry so much about bills. His wife, Marilyn, could stay at home and raise the couple’s children.

Molinero proved ambitious and hard-working. He learned the city’s confusing maze of streets and alleys, studied the various delivery routes, became a union steward. Cozza noticed and made him his executive assistant. In 1991, a federal judge removed Cozza from the local’s top position (citing Cozza’s alleged ties to organized crime in Western Pennsylvania), and Molinero took over.

Less than a year later, he found himself managing a strike that was getting national attention.

***

After receiving the call at the Hilton, Molinero walked to a window and looked down the street. He saw a few security guards roaming around idle trucks in the Press parking lot, nothing else. Molinero asked the Press attorneys if it was true, were the presses running? They shrugged and claimed they didn’t know.

Molinero and Pass walked out of the meeting and headed to the street to see for themselves what was happening. The two met with a handful of striking workers, then walked next door to the United Steelworkers Building. The entire first floor had been converted to a strike headquarters, with banks of telephones and tables stacked with strike signs.

Molinero placed a call to the president of a laborers’ local. In anticipation of such an event, organizers had arranged a sort of phone tree, with captains assigned to call 10 members, who in turn would call 10 others. Union locals had earlier been put on alert that they may need to mobilize on short notice. Now was that time, they were told.

The boulevard outside soon began filling with workers — boilermakers, steamfitters, sheet metal workers, carpenters, coal miners from Fayette County. News accounts at the time estimated the crowd size at 3,000. The workers and supporters mingled on the boulevard, chatting, wondering what was happening.

An hour or so passed. On occasion, groups of workers marched around the Press building, looking for any sign of activity. At one point, they saw people peering out from upper-floor windows. “Scabs go home,” the workers chanted. “Scabs go home.”

TV crews arrived and conducted on-the-street interviews with Pass and Molinero and a few of the striking workers. As the hours passed, fatigue settled in. People had been standing for hours.

Bill George, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, approached Molinero. “You better make a speech,” George said. “People are going to start leaving. We can’t let that happen.”

Molinero looked out at the sea of people on the boulevard. He’d been president of the local for only a year and had never before addressed this many people. This was nerve-wracking. What would he say? 

He climbed the steps to the entrance of the Steelworkers Building. Someone handed him a megaphone. He looked out over the sea of people before him.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you,” he said to the crowd. “They’re going to try to print sometime tonight, so I’d appreciate it if everybody could stay.”

A while later, the crowd migrated to the end of the block, turned left at Commonwealth Place and amassed at the two entrances to the Press parking lot. From those positions, workers could see the loading docks. At present, they saw no activity there.

At 2 a.m., two Chrysler automobiles slowly approached the crowd on Commonwealth and tried to turn into the lot. They were immediately surrounded by strikers and their supporters, who rocked the vehicles.

The driver of the first car, a man with permed curly hair and a Press employee badge, nervously watched through the windshield as a slender man yelled epithets and bent the vehicle’s antenna into a pretzel. Other workers admonished the man, and both vehicles were allowed to enter the lot.

Meantime, Molinero and Pass returned to the Hilton to resume negotiations. At 4 a.m., however, word spread through the crowd down the street that those talks had failed. By then, workers could see strikebreakers loading newspapers into delivery trucks at the loading docks. “Nothing goes, nothing comes out,” chanted the striking workers.

Pass and Molinero again returned to the boulevard and huddled with other strike leaders. They told the gathered workers, “Listen to police, no violence.”

Dim, hazy daylight emerged from the eastern horizon. Energized, striking workers and their supporters packed themselves into a block of humanity on Fort Pitt Boulevard, at the back entrance of the Press parking lot. Those in front could see white-shirted managers, nonunion drivers and security guards gathering around delivery trucks several yards away. A truck engine rumbled. Headlights blinked on. 

Earlier, a few men in the back of the crowd had passed out cans of soda pop — it did not seem odd at the time; most of these men had been picketing outside The Pittsburgh Press building for more than eight hours, so refreshments were appropriate. Now a few of those cans sailed overhead and landed with thuds near the trucks, the cans hissing and spewing liquid as they broke open and cartwheeled across the lot. The security guards, drivers and managers scurried back toward the safety of the Press building.

A little after 6 a.m., a line of helmeted police officers carrying wooden batons appeared on the sidewalk along Fort Pitt Boulevard. They marched forward, eventually squeezing their way between the crowd of Teamsters and a 6-foot-high brick wall surrounding the parking lot. Once inside the lot, police formed a line and faced the crowd blocking the exit. A delivery truck behind them edged forward. It was clear the police intended to create a path so the truck could depart.

Union leaders in the crowd shouted to the men, “Hold your ground,” and, “No violence.”

Pittsburgh police and the Teamsters local once enjoyed a close relationship. Decades earlier, a Downtown police station was located on the block that was now the Press parking lot. Press managers often hired police officers as “extras.” The officers paid a small fee to the Teamsters, a sort of union fee, and then worked on the loading docks or as drivers. 

Those days were long gone by 1992, but some relationships remained. Officers had for years continued to stop by the newspaper loading docks to pick up a copy of the latest edition and chat with the workers. That didn’t matter now, though. It was clear on this morning that police would do the bidding of the Press managers. And so they held batons with both hands in front of them and advanced.

They reached the first row of men, the officers shoving their way forward into a human wall 20 bodies deep. Workers shouted and cursed. The delivery truck growled its way closer, closer to the exit.

After about 30 seconds, striking workers conducted a planned and coordinated move that puzzled police: They abruptly stopped struggling and sat down in the street. Officers looked at each other, then glanced out at the crowd before them. Some of the men were seated, others were lying on their backs. What next?

Within moments Police Chief Earl Buford arrived on the scene. It was time to make arrests.

Several offices walked into the crowd, ready to cart workers off to jail. The striking workers locked arms. Undaunted, police picked one section of the crowd and got to work. Officers struggled to separate the strikers’ linked arms. After several minutes, they succeeded in carrying away one worker, then another. 

After 30 minutes or so, it became apparent this would take forever. Police gave up. Those carted away were released a short time later, some returning to the picket line.

For the Press, all was not lost, however. Anticipating issues at the Downtown printing plant, managers had arranged for about 200,000 editions of the Press to be printed at an out-of-town facility. These newspapers, produced with nonunion labor, were delivered to Pittsburgh in vehicles disguised as bread trucks.

What managers did not expect was the backlash from Pittsburgh readers unwilling to accept a scab edition of the Press. Once they’d learned of the company’s deception, readers brought their newspapers to the Press entrance at the Boulevard of the Allies and hurled them at the front door. The city brought in dump trucks to haul them away.

The next day, managers at the Press gave up. In the Press newsroom, where nonunion reporters, photographers and editors had been working to produce another edition, editor Angus McEachran called his staff together. He climbed onto a desk and, in a booming voice, delivered a message: Go home, we’ll be in touch to let you know what’s going to happen next.

One problem remained. A number of out-of-town scab workers were still in the building, fearful of what would happen if they left. Molinero and an assistant police chief came up with a solution. Union picketers would allow the scab workers to leave if they promised not to come back. Eventually, two buses pulled up to the Press entrance, and the strikebreakers hustled through a gauntlet of jeering strikers for their ride out of Pittsburgh.

A little over two months later, on Oct. 2, the Scripps Howard chain, owner of the Press, announced it was selling the newspaper. The eventual buyers: the Block family, owners of the Post-Gazette.

This was a relief to workers. They knew PG publisher Bill Block. He was a fixture in the building, known for showing up in the drivers’ room during breaks on Saturday afternoons and buying coffee for his employees. During an initial meeting with unions, managers and attorneys, Block said he wanted to work with the unions.

The two sides settled in 30 days — the Post-Gazette would implement a depot system similar to that suggested by the Press, but it would be put into place over a period of years, without any layoffs. The workforce was reduced through retirements and buyouts. The first post-strike edition of the Post-Gazette landed on doorsteps on Jan. 18, 1993.