Frank Fitzsimmons

Frank Edward Fitzsimmons (April 7, 1908 – May 6, 1981) was an American labor leader.

Frank Fitzsimmons was born on April 7, 1908, in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, to Irish-American parents, Frank and Ida May Fitzsimmons.

His father was a brewer who moved the family to Detroit, Michigan, in 1924 when Frank was 16.

His father died of a heart attack when Fitzsimmons was 17 years old, and Frank dropped out of high school to support his family by working in an automobile hardware store.

In 1932, he got a job as a bus driver in Detroit, Michigan, and New York City before becoming a truck driver in Detroit in 1935.

He joined Teamsters Local 299, and became friendly with the local union's president, Jimmy Hoffa.

Fitzsimmons was elected Local 299 business manager in 1936, Local 299 vice president in 1940, and (at Hoffa's insistence) an international union vice president of the Teamsters in 1961.

He was appointed secretary-treasurer of the 80,000-member Michigan Conference of Teamsters in 1949, and vice president of Teamsters Joint Council 43 in Detroit in 1959.

During this time, Fitzsimmons became known as "a figure of ridicule" in the Teamsters; he was inarticulate, chubby, passive and easily embarrassed, and Hoffa and others frequently had him make coffee or hold chairs and rarely gave him any authority or duties.

Nonetheless, Fitzsimmons was considered an adept manager and a very skilled contract negotiator.

Despite Hoffa's many legal problems and the routine emasculation, Fitzsimmons remained the Teamsters president's staunchest supporter.

When Harold J. Gibbons resigned as Hoffa's executive assistant in December 1963 after a failed coup against the indicted Teamsters president, Hoffa appointed Fitzsimmons to the office.

In 1964, Hoffa was sentenced to an aggregate 13 years in prison for jury tampering, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud.

Fitzsimmons was initially not considered to be popular enough to succeed Hoffa, but Fitzsimmons was elected General Vice President of the Teamsters in July 1966, which to many Teamsters leaders signalled Hoffa's intention to make Fitzsimmons his heir-apparent if Hoffa was imprisoned.

He was acting president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1967 to 1971, and president from 1971 to 1981.

On February 28, 1967, the Teamsters executive board passed a resolution appointing Fitzsimmons "acting president" if Hoffa was no longer able to carry out his duties.

After failed appeals, Hoffa entered prison in March 1967, and attempted to run the union from jail through Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons, however, was to be nothing more than a glorified gofer:

"But there is no certainty that Hoffa intends to let Fitzsimmons run anything. Indeed, few other Teamster big wigs even pretend that the chunky, amiable Hoffa right bower has the capacity to hold the union together for long. 'He's just a peanut butter sandwich; he'll melt in no time,' is the unflattering comment of one union insider."

Fitzsimmons and others even denied that they were doing work on Hoffa's orders.

National trucking industry talks, which were interrupted when Hoffa went to jail, resumed with Fitzsimmons at the table.

Although the pact expired and the union struck for three days, Fitzsimmons was able to negotiate a new agreement, with a federal mediator's help, that some believed was richer than any Hoffa could have obtained.

He negotiated a second contract three years later that provided a 27-percent wage increase over three years.

Fitzsimmons rapidly solidified his own hold on the Teamsters presidency throughout 1967.

He had permitted the International vice presidents greater latitude in their own affairs and delegated authority to them, winning their allegiance.

He defeated an executive-board attempt to oust him in July and followed it up by demoting Hoffa aides and promoting his own supporters (including Weldon Mathis) to high positions in the union.

By August, he had openly declared he would run for the presidency of the union.

He further increased his popularity by negotiating in October 1967 a national master contract in the trucking industry that brought 40,000 Northeastern truckers into the contract for the first time and by negotiating a new contract that ended a five-month steel haulers' strike.

Fitzsimmons also began taking the union in new directions.

In July 1968 he and Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers formed a new national trade union center, the Alliance for Labor Action, to organize unorganized workers and to pursue left-wing political and social projects.

Fitzsimmons and Reuther offered the AFL-CIO a no-raid pact as a first step toward building a working relationship between the competing trade union centers, but the offer was rejected.

The Alliance's initial program was ambitious, but Reuther's death in a plane crash on May 9, 1970, near Black Lake, Michigan, dealt a serious blow to the Alliance.

On June 19, 1971, Hoffa resigned as Teamsters president and Fitzsimmons was elected international president on his own right on July 9, 1971.

By the year's end, Fitzsimmons had purged the union's top offices of several Hoffa supporters.

The group collapsed in January 1972 after the Auto Workers were unable to continue to fund its operations.

Fitzsimmons engaged in a notorious jurisdictional and organizing dispute with the United Farm Workers (UFW) from 1972 to 1977, raiding the smaller union and establishing a new national farm workers' union to compete with it.

The series of raids and counter-raids, repudiated contracts, and public-relations attacks began in December 1972 when Fitzsimmons ordered a 1967 no-raid and organizing non-compete agreement with the UFW to be dissolved and Teamsters contract negotiators to reopen contracts.

The UFW sued, the AFL-CIO condemned the action, and many employers negotiated contracts with the Teamsters, rather than with the UFW.

In 1973, he resigned his position as vice president of Local 299 and his son, Richard, was appointed his successor.

On July 10, 1975, a Lincoln Continental used by Richard Fitzsimmons was destroyed by a bomb outside a bar in which he was having a drink.