Revolutionary Socialist and Militant Leader in Trucking, Maritime, and Longshore Unions

Shaun “Jack” Maloney, 1911–1999

by Dave Riehle

Shaun Maloney, one of the last survivors from among  the heroic figures who emerged from the labor struggles of the 1930s, died at his home in Seattle on December 19, 1999. He was 88. Maloney’s activism in the labor movement began with teenage membership in the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) on the South Dakota prairies of the 1920s, followed by participation in the great Teamster struggles of the 1930s. The indelible image of a hot July day in 1934 when Maloney and 66 other striking truck drivers were shot down by city police during the titanic Minneapolis Teamster strikes was burned forever into his memory and retold often to succeeding generations of labor militants.

After serving two years in federal prison on frame-up charges arising out of his organizing of over-the-road truck drivers in the late 1930s, a campaign on which he worked intimately with Farrell Dobbs (and, among others, James R. Hoffa of Detroit), Maloney was released in early 1942 and left Minneapolis for the West Coast, where he lived the remainder of his life.

(He was not included in the government’s 1941 frame-up trial against Minneapolis Teamster leaders – presumably because in 1941 he was already in prison on other frame-up charges. He was also not expelled from the Teamsters union, as others were. In fact, he had a withdrawal card from the Teamsters and a letter from Jimmy Hoffa certifying him as a good guy.)

His labor activity on the West Coast included over four decades of activism in the militant International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), where he was elected to five successive terms as president of the Seattle local, serving until his retirement in 1976.

Up until a few weeks before his death Maloney continued his activity in the ILWU as a relentless advocate of the interests of retired members, as well as a tireless campaigner for militant labor solidarity. In 1986, although retired for ten years, he traveled to Austin, Minnesota, with other members of ILWU Local 19 to join in solidarity actions with members of Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, then on strike against the George A. Hormel Co. In November 1999, although confined to a wheelchair as a result of a series of recent strokes, Maloney joined in the labor protests at the Seattle WTO meeting, a fitting culmination to over 70 years of labor activism.

Throughout the decade of the 1940s Maloney worked as a merchant seaman, including sailing on the fabled “Murmansk run,” which during World War II delivered desperately needed supplies and weapons to the Soviet Union under the Lend Lease program. U.S. merchant ships ran gauntlets of German submarines and aircraft along a northerly route near the Arctic Circle to reach their Soviet destinations. Only four of every forty ships made it to their destination. After his ship, the S.S. Samuel Chase, was almost destroyed by German attacks on a run in 1942, Maloney spent almost six months ashore at Archangel in the USSR before repairs could be made to the ship and he was able to return to the U.S., where his family members had already mourned him as dead.

His participation in a bitter intra-union dispute in the late 1940s known as the “Mahoney beef,” after its militant leader, Seattle seaman  John A. Mahoney, led to their expulsion from the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific along with numerous other militants, including Labor Standard’s founding editor Frank Lovell. After that, Maloney found work on the Seattle docks, where his aggressive advocacy of workers’ interests as an influential union officer and rank and file militant frequently engendered controversy.

A Seattle newspaper columnist who once described Maloney as the “stormy petrel” of the Seattle waterfront, writing in 1973, related that “some employers complained that Maloney’s idea of labor relations was to hard-time the bosses… Beefs naturally gravitated into his vicinity and swirled around him.”

However “this moody, often oratorical Irishman,” the columnist said,  “ held his members’ loyalty” and had been reelected the previous year even though the local was “under the shadow of a huge legal judgment,” the result of a Maloney-led battle against giant Sea-Land shipping corporation.

Maloney would not have flinched at those descriptions of his labor strategy. His outlook on life, undiminished in old age, was one of class struggle, harsh and uncompromising, but animated by a vision of a better world built by the action of the working class.

Shaun Maloney imbibed his labor radicalism at an early age. He was born in Minneapolis on September 10, 1911. His father left the family before he was born, and Maloney took his step-father’s last name in the early part of his life. Maloney’s stepfather, Ole Severson, was an early supporter of the IWW, and Maloney’s mother, Katherine McGillin, was a militant Irish nationalist. Shaun, known to most of his Minneapolis associates as “Jack,” dropped out of formal education  before attending high school. He began working with Ole Severson, who had been blacklisted as a result of participation in a defeated Teamster strike in Minneapolis in 1917.

Shaun dug foundations with a team of horses, moved furniture, and performed other odd jobs that were available to those who were blacklisted. At 15 years of age he began driving an old sidecar motorcycle to deliver packages. Soon after, he graduated to driving delivery trucks around St. Paul/Minneapolis and neighboring cities in the Midwest, joining Minneapolis Teamsters Local 574 in 1927.

As a child, Shaun  became acquainted with the legendary Dunne brothers, family friends and fellow IWW members who as the eventual leaders of the victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, along with Swedish immigrant Carl Skoglund, conceived and carried out the revolutionary strategy that made open-shop Minneapolis a union town.

Maloney first met Skoglund in 1929 at a bar across the street from the union hall. Maloney often said he considered Skoglund the real strategist of the 1934 strikes and the author of the conception of organizing drivers across the Midwest, a perspective carried out with great skill by Dobbs and Maloney in the mid to late 1930s.

Although only 22 years old, Maloney was quickly incorporated into the strike’s central leadership, participating not only as a leader of the feared flying picket squads but as a seasoned negotiator and strategist, more than once stepping into the breach when the older leaders were imprisoned at the State Fair Grounds under the eye of the Minnesota National Guard. One of Maloney’s proudest moments came when agreement recognizing the union was finally reached in August 1934, contingent on a majority vote of the workers, a vote administered by the Regional Labor Board. A front page photo in the August 28, 1934, Minneapolis Journal shows a dapper “Jack Severson,” as he was then known, sporting a worker’s cloth cap adorned with a couple of union buttons casting the first ballot in the election.

Although it was a secret ballot, there was no doubt about how his vote would  be cast. And for 65 more years after that there was never any doubt about where Shaun “Jack” Maloney stood when workers’ rights were at stake. An instinctive rebel, with a profound sense of solidarity with all of the oppressed, from trade unionists to members of minority groups, women, gays, Native Americans, and many others, a cultured and self-educated man with an eighth grade education, his memory is cherished by those who knew him, and who, like him, look hopefully to the working class as an agent and champion of social change, of a world without borders, a world of peace, abundance, and human solidarity.

Shaun Maloney left no direct descendants. He is survived by two sisters, Margaret Mack of San Diego and Dorothy Weinreich of Pico Rivera, California, by scores of nieces and nephews, and by many longtime friends whose lives are forever enriched by having known him.

Memorial Meeting for Shaun Maloney in Seattle

A memorial meeting for Shaun Maloney was held at the Seattle Labor Temple on January 15, 2000. Despite short notice, some 200 people attended. There were political activists from many different organizations, and a wide range of union activists, especially from the Teamsters and ILWU. The meeting was low-key and fairly informal, but all who spoke told of the many ways they had benefited from Shaun’s generous and rich experience, advice, and encouragement. People like Shaun Maloney don’t come along that often. The meeting paid well-deserved tribute to a very great person.

— Rita Shaw

ILWU Honors Maloney

The January issue of the ILWU newspaper, The Dispatcher, paid tribute to Shaun (Jack) Maloney, who in the 1930s fought “to build the Teamsters union into a national powerhouse.” The paper noted that Maloney, 88, “joined in the labor protests” against the WTO in Seattle, just ten days before his death, “using a wheelchair after a series of recent strokes.”

The ILWU paper acknowledged that Maloney’s “labor activity included a decade of activism in the Sailors Union of the Pacific (SUP) and over four decades in the ILWU. He was elected to five successive terms as President of Seattle’s ILWU Longshore Local 19, serving until his retirement in 1976.”

The Dispatcher also told its readers that Maloney had opposed the “Mechanization and Modernization Agreement” with the maritime shipping bosses that was promoted by the ILWU’s longtime president, Harry Bridges. Maloney believed the agreement would result in the loss of  “thousands of  jobs and union power. Because of his [opposition] actions, a second vote was required in Seattle and San Francisco to narrowly ratify the agreement.”

— Charles Walker