June 4, 2020

As the current Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 174, I had an incredible upbringing as a child. I am the son of a military man and homemaker mother that raised four fantastic children, two girls, and two boys.

My father, after a distinguished career in both the Air Force and then the Navy that included nineteen campaigns in Vietnam, retired and became a truck driver for Teamsters Local 313 in Tacoma, Washington. Later in his career, he became a Teamster construction driver in Local 174 before retiring for good. His father, my grandfather, was a charter member of Teamsters Local 2 in Butte, Montana.

As the son of a military man, we moved all over this country and abroad. Many people may discuss the merits of being a military brat and how hard it can be on children moving around from place to place every other year, but for me it was an invaluable experience that helped shape the person I am today. I say this because I had the opportunity to grow up in the South during the 1960s and 1970s: Florida twice, first in Pensacola and then in Tampa, and finally in New Orleans and the suburbs of Louisiana.

Many historians might tell you that the Jim Crow Era in the South, which began during the period of Reconstruction in 1877, ended the day the United States Supreme Court handed this nation “Brown vs. the Board of Education” in 1954 ensuring equal access to public education for all people regardless of race. But any person who actually lived in the South during those times knows there was a big difference between what that decision meant legally and what was really happening in the communities where I lived and the problems that continue to exist to this day.

I witnessed firsthand as a child the obvious acts of racism and bigotry in the South, which I didn’t understand at the time because we were never raised that way. It’s not that the military was color blind, but as far as race relations go the military was light-years ahead of the deep South.

Now as an adult, 66 years after “Brown vs. the Board of Education” was handed down by the top court in the land, 56 years after the “Civil Rights Act” was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and 55 years after the “Voting Rights Act” was signed into Law, somebody needs to explain to me why we have not progressed as far as we should have in racial relations during that entire time.

We continue to see unarmed people of color murdered at the hands of those who swore an oath to protect and serve ALL citizens of the communities they police. We continue to see an immediate cover-up by their superiors. We continue to see them receive the due process they did not extend to their murdered victims. And we continue to see the guilty walk free!

The greatest thing about being a Teamster is that I believe all of our members are equal in the eyes of the Constitution of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as well as the Constitution of the United States of America.

Now I would love to tell you that the Teamsters Union is perfect, but you and I know that would be untrue. We have come a long way as a country and even further as a Union … but we still have miles to go.

We must always work to communicate with each other and strive to make each day better than the day before. Free of racial disparities, free of discrimination, free of disparate treatment, free of unjust treatment of any kind and free of murder.

You and I are not supposed to be judged by the color of our skin, by our gender, by our sexual orientation or preference or by the faith that we hold. We should only be judged for the work that we do and the contributions that we make.

When our own lives are disrupted by this ongoing constitutionally protected First Amendment Right of civil unrest, it can be easy to fall into wishing things would return to “normal.” Wishing the protests would stop, or that the protestors would find some other, more convenient way to express their grievances. And so to combat this mindset, I ask you to please take a moment to compare these protests to one of the highest forms of protest taken by us in the Labor movement: the Unfair Labor Practice strike. This is another federally protected right: the right to withhold your labor.

The purpose of a strike is to disrupt and inconvenience, and that is what makes it effective. Imagine if our peaceful picket lines were brutally attacked with tear gas, batons, and tasers, and then we were sent back to work under the same or worse conditions than what led us to the street in the first place.

Imagine if one among the many of us decided to sneak onto company property and sabotage company equipment, and that person’s actions became the only measure by which our entire strike action was judged. Whether that saboteur was a coworker with a taste for vengeance, an outsider with an agenda, or a management stooge trying to stir up trouble, it makes little difference: in any case, you would find it unfair and unspeakably frustrating to have your entire peaceful protest and all of your legitimate grievances dismissed by those in power because of the actions of a small percentage of the whole.

These current protests against the murder of George Floyd and so many others, just like our strikes, have a specific goal. That goal is to force those in power to take our grievances seriously and address them meaningfully. Even if you do not support the Black Lives Matter movement and you do not feel that the justice system in this country is stacked against people of color, at the very minimum we as Union members have a sacred responsibility to support the rights of all Americans to protest peacefully in pursuit of their goals. If we cannot protect those rights for others, then there will be no one left to protect those rights for us when we need to exercise them.

We must keep holding those in all positions of leadership to the highest standards. We must always call out injustices that are visible or not so visible and demand they be corrected.

May God bless you all and may God Bless the Teamsters Union.

In Solidarity,

Rick Hicks
Secretary-Treasurer – Teamsters Local 174