The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959—known as the Landrum-Griffin Act after its sponsors, U.S. Reps. Phillip Landrum (D-Georgia) and Robert Griffin (R-Michigan)—is a piece of federal labor, transparency, and anti-corruption legislation targeting improper practices in labor-management relations. The Landrum-Griffin Act instituted a bill of rights for union members, which included protections of members’ right to speak out on union matters without interference from union officers, to run for local union offices in secret ballot elections, and to a fair internal union discipline process. ¹²

Clark Mollenhoff, a reporter for the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, tipped Kennedy off to Mollenhoff’s investigations of Hoffa, which started after allegations of “brutal tactics by Teamsters officials in Minneapolis.” ¹³ Kennedy would resist Mollenhoff’s entreaties until after the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee) defeated Kennedy’s brother, U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), for the party nomination for Vice President. After Dio’s arrest for the Riesel attack, Robert Kennedy agreed to take Mollenhoff’s challenge to Hoffa to his boss, U.S. Sen. John McClellan (D-Arkansas). One of Robert Kennedy’s biographers claimed that Kennedy hoped Kefauver’s rise to prominence with his televised hearings on mob activities could be a model for his brother John. ¹²

Riesel had alleged that Dio and his mob associates had received charters for “paper locals” of the Teamsters union—nominal divisions of the union that had no members but had officers who could vote in Teamsters internal elections. Union officers on the make (like Hoffa) could charter paper locals under control of mobsters to gain loyal supporters in union power struggles; the mob men could use the racketeer-controlled unions to secure extortion payments or kickbacks for sweetheart contracts. ¹²

Mollenhoff connected Kennedy with Ed Guthman, a Seattle Times reporter who had investigated the financial dealings of Dave Beck, then the president of the Teamsters Union, in fall 1956. Guthman’s sources connected Kennedy with Beck’s fixer, a Chicago-based labor-management consultant named Nathan Shefferman. Carmine Bellino, the ex-FBI forensic accountant who had worked on the House investigation and was now one of Kennedy’s top researchers, identified numerous irregularities in financial information related to Beck and Shefferman’s business arrangements, concluding that Shefferman was operating as Beck’s “personal shopper.” Kennedy would write that “We had come to the startling but inescapable conclusion that Dave Beck, the president of America’s largest, most powerful labor union, was a crook.” ¹⁴

Kennedy would confront Beck, who stonewalled asserting that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations lacked jurisdiction to inquire about labor union governance. (Teamsters officials hoped to move any inquiry to the Labor Committee, which was seen as more pro-union.) Kennedy’s boss, Sen. McClellan, authorized informing Beck that the Senate intended to hold hearings on his misuse of union funds as early as January 1957. ¹⁵

Creation of the Subcommittee

The Senate resolved the jurisdictional dispute between the Labor Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after the seating of new Senators in January 1957 by establishing a special bipartisan Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor-Management Field, better known as the Rackets Committee. Sen. McClellan would chair the committee with Sen. Irving Ives, a liberal Republican from New York, as vice-chair. ¹⁵

The AFL-CIO executive council voted 26-1 in favor of ordering its member unions to remove from office any official who refused to testify on union matters. ¹²

Cheasty would supply information to Hoffa about the committee’s activities on two occasions under FBI surveillance; the second time, Hoffa paid Cheasty the agreed $2,000. Hoffa was then arrested by federal agents in the lobby of the Dupont Plaza Hotel and charged with bribery. ¹⁵

Robert Kennedy joked to reporters that he would “jump off the Capitol” if Hoffa were acquitted. ¹⁷ Hoffa sought to have the trial delayed until after the Teamsters convention in October, at which he would challenge for the union’s national presidency. While Hoffa was unsuccessful in that effort, his legal team was able to challenge Cheasty’s credibility and tied him to segregationists; the jury ultimately acquitted the Teamsters boss. ¹²

Fall of Dave Beck

Dave Beck, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, first sat to testify before the Rackets Committee on March 26, 1957. Beck had sought to avoid testifying by methods including taking foreign travels and claiming ill health. ¹⁵

The Rackets Committee and its investigators questioned Beck alleging he had misappropriated $322,000 (approximately $3 million in 2019 dollars) in union funds. Beck repeatedly invoked his privileges under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. ¹² The AFL-CIO labor federation, which counted the Teamsters as a member union, suspended Beck from its executive council on March 29. ¹² Beck would be convicted, but the former “Republicans’ labor statesman” would be pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1975. ¹²

Unlike Beck, Hoffa did not exercise his Fifth Amendment privileges in testimony in late August 1957. The Committee challenged Hoffa on his relationship with Test Fleet, a trucking company owned by Hoffa’s wife and the wife of the head of Teamsters Local 337. Sen. John Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) further challenged Hoffa on his wife’s alleged no-show job with a jukebox servicemen’s local of the Teamsters Union. While Hoffa’s answers were evasive (he told Sen. Kennedy: “I can’t answer that, except for the fact I can’t answer that” when questioned about his wife’s no-show job²⁰), he avoided pleading the Fifth. ¹²

Robert Kennedy then pressed Hoffa on his relationship to Johnny Dio, the mobster who had orchestrated the attack on labor journalist Victor Riesel. Hoffa denied speaking to Dio about bringing New York City cab drivers into the Teamsters; Kennedy then played recorded wiretaps clearly demonstrating that Hoffa had done so. Under further questioning, Hoffa employed language indicating faulty memory over 100 times. ¹² Committee vice chair Sen. Irving Ives (R-N.Y.) quipped that Hoffa had “one of the most convenient forgettery of anybody I have ever seen.” ²¹

In mid-September, the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee issued seven charges against the Teamsters Union for the various corrupt activities of Beck, Hoffa, and other union officers. A week later, the government filed charges against Hoffa for perjury in a wiretapping case and the AFL-CIO issued an ultimatum that the federation would expel the Teamsters if the union did not clean itself up in a month. ¹² In October, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters Union; the union would not be readmitted to the federation until 1987. ¹⁵

Investigations of Other Unions

While the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor-Management Field spent most of its efforts targeting the Teamsters Union—34 of the 58 compiled volumes of testimony to the committee concerned the IBT—the Committee also identified corrupt practices in other arms of the labor movement. Kennedy found that James G. Cross, leader of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers Union, had connived to give himself near-dictatorial power, giving himself full control with depositing union funds and placing his own salary under the control of the union’s executive council rather than the full national convention. He was also allegedly spending union funds on personal entertainments and to maintain a mistress. ²³

The Rackets Committee also pursued corruption in the Carpenters Union. A Carpenters vice president who was involved in a land deal with Jimmy Hoffa was implicated in a kickback scheme through which companies targeted by the union would buy from the officer’s “Penn Products” company. ²⁶

The Eisenhower administration found the Kennedy-Ives bill too weak, with Labor Secretary James Mitchell stating that it “would delude the workers of this country and the American public into believing they had protection they did not in fact have.” ²⁷ After the administration’s criticism, the Senate adopted a number of amendments toughening the bill’s transparency requirements; the amended measure passed the Senate overwhelmingly. House Democrats, fearing that amendments that would make the bill less palatable to labor would pass, bottled Kennedy-Ives in committee before failing to pass it without amendment using the suspension of the rules procedure.³³

As the House and Senate had passed different bills, a conference committee was needed to reconcile the versions. In the conference committee, the House prevailed on most of the disputed provisions; the sides compromised on exempting the garment industry from secondary boycott prohibitions. The conference report was adopted by both Houses of Congress and the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 was signed by President Eisenhower on September 14, 1959. ³⁷ The bill secures for union members the equal right to nominate and vote for candidates for local union offices; freedom of speech and assembly within the union, including the right to criticize union officers; a secret ballot to vote on dues, fees, and assessments; the right to sue the union; and protection against improper union discipline including a guarantee of due process in disciplinary hearings. ⁴⁰ Union officers must also file disclosures of potential conflicts of interest,^{45 46}

Officer Elections

The LMRDA established minimum standards of union democracy in the election of union constitutional and executive officers.⁴⁷ Local union officers and delegates to conventions of national or intermediate-level union bodies with the power to elect intermediate and national-level union officers must be chosen by secret ballot of the members in good standing. The law also limited the length of allowable union officers’ terms, with local officials held to a maximum of three-year terms, intermediate body officials to four-year terms, and national-level officials to five-year terms, with union constitutions able to establish shorter term lengths. ⁴⁹

The law barred employers (and their agents) from providing money (other than bona fide wages and benefits), gifts, or other things of value to labor union officials. ¹²

Amendments to Taft-Hartley

The Landrum-Griffin Act made a number of changes to the National Labor Relations Act, which the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act had amended. Most of the changes curtailed or regulated abusive labor union practices, but the law did expand the ability of construction unions to require union membership and make collective bargaining agreements in advance of construction. ⁵¹

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