Jimmy Hoffa

On September 24, 1936, he married laundry worker Josephine Poszywak whom he had met six months earlier at a non-unionized strike of laundry workers. They were blessed with a son, James P. Hoffa and a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer.

James took his father’s path and became a labour leader. He is also an attorney who remained a labour lawyer in Detroit for 25 years and since 1999 serves as the General President of IBT.

Barbara served the 21st Missouri Circuit Court as Associate Circuit Judge from July 1992 to March 2008 and then as Assistant Missouri Attorney General of Civil, Disability and Workers' Rights Division from February 2009 to March 2011.

Jimmy Hoffa was born on February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana, United States to John Cleveland Hoffa and Viola (née Riddle) Hoffa. His ancestors were originally Pennsylvania Germans and immigrated to Indiana in the mid-1800s and his maternal ancestors were Irish Americans.

His father was a coal-driller who succumbed to lungs disease in 1920 when he was just seven. Following this tragedy his mother who he later described as a person "who believed that Duty and Discipline were spelled with capital D's" took to laundry to sustain her family.

While studying, Hoffa and his three siblings also got into after-school jobs to help their mother run the family. In 1924 he and his family relocated to Detroit where he spent the rest of his life.

In pursuit of supporting his family, he finally dropped out of school at 14 years of age and started to work full-time as a manual labour.

He joined a grocery store chain in Detroit on a loading dock working with laborers in unloading produces from rail cars to warehouse. The job offered poor work conditions with substandard wages. Laborers were paid only for actual loading and unloading whereas they had to be present for a 12-hour shift.

His bravery and aplomb got him associated with union activities in his teenage. Impressed by his organising skills the workers of the grocery chain accepted him in a leadership role and in turn Hoffa organized his first labour strike that saw the workers landing up with a better contract.

He left the grocery chain around 1932 and thereafter accepted invitation to play the role of an organizer with the Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit.

He along with other union leaders thrived in unifying different local unions of truckers and in this manner membership of Teamsters union which was 75,000 in 1933 rose to 170,000 in 1936, to 420,000 in 1939 and advanced further during the ‘Second World War’ reached a million counts by 1951.

Many strategies to strengthen union in different companies to win contracts were applied by Teamsters including secondary boycott and quickie strikes in which Hoffa played an instrumental part. Over the years Teamsters emerged as one of the most strong and effective unions in the US.