Jimmy Hoffa means of leveraging union strength at one company, to then move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies. This process, which took several years starting in the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by, and in many cases controlled by elements of, organized crime. For Hoffa to unify and expand trucking unions, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area. Organized crime influence on the
GCHQ trade union ban GCHQ trade union ban The GCHQ trade union ban was a ban on trade union membership of employees at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham between 1984 and 1997. This was based on the claim by the Conservative government that it undermined national security. It sparked a dispute which became a cause célèbre, one of the most important trade union issues of the 1980s and the second longest continuously fought dispute in British trade union history. In 1981, a series of strikes in Whitehall over pay led to industrial action at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence 'listening centre' network based