5 questions with Earlham College professor Ryan Murphy

When most people think of the Teamsters, they picture trucks, strikes, and maybe even Jimmy Hoffa. In his new book, Teamsters Metropolis, associate professor Ryan Murphy digs deeper, showing how this powerful union helped shape politics, infrastructure, and the daily life of post-war American cities. In this Q&A, Murphy discusses the significance of the Teamsters, what their story reveals about labor’s role in shaping modern America, and why it still matters today.

Q: Some people may be surprised to know that before you became a professor you had a successful career as a union organizer for flight attendants. Could you share a bit about that time in your career and what led you to Earlham?

“My first role out of college was as a flight attendant. I was a good student, but had read and written enough for a while and needed a break. I had grown up obsessed with planes, so I decided to interview to become a flight attendant. I started flying with United Airlines in 1998. 

I grew up in a political household and had always been interested in unions. During the spring of my second year as a flight attendant, I ran for office in the Association of Flight Attendants and was elected to run the communications side of the union at our local organization in San Francisco, which is where I was based at the time.

I stayed in that role through September 11, 2001, and as a result got a lot of firsthand experience with crisis communications. After the economic crisis in the travel industry that followed, I decided that my job as a flight attendant was insecure. I wanted to go back to school, so I decided to go to grad school. I got my Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where I conducted a study of my former workplace, which became my first book, Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice. I worked with former Earlham Provost Greg Mahler, who was incredibly supportive of junior faculty, letting us ask our questions and guide our careers, and his financial support helped me to write my first book.

Eventually, I came to Earlham while I was on the job market and found a position that combines LGBTQ+ studies and labor history — a role that’s been a perfect fit for both my interests and my work.”

Q: What inspired you to write about the Teamsters for your second book? What about them do you feel is relevant to society today?

“There are two reasons I started working on this project. The first is my family. In 1903, my great-grandfather started an immigrant family business, which was a trucking company. Then, in the 1930s, the Teamsters Local 120 organized our family business. The Teamsters are a well-known union because they led the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, which laid the foundation for trucker organizing in the Midwest.

The second reason I initially started researching was that I wanted to understand why unions in the 1950s invested in hotels on Miami Beach, rather than in something else, such as a dedicated TV network. The answer I found was that all these hotels were built by the Teamsters because Jimmy Hoffa believed it would aid the labor union as a whole for people to have a place to go and take a break from their hard work. They became more interested in giving workers something beautiful to enjoy, which was a part of the Teamsters culture.

Teamsters Metropolis is relevant to society today because it is a story of how ordinary people used their own skills to fight economic inequality. One of the biggest challenges we are currently facing as a country is the impact of economic inequality. The Teamsters tell the story not about experts, but about ordinary people like barbers, truck drivers, and nail salon owners who can work to redistribute the economy to make things fairer and more democratic.” 

Q: What role did students play in the compilation of Teamster Metropolis, and why do you feel it is important to work with students on your scholarship?

“Over the years, I’ve had 20 different students work as research assistants on Teamsters Metropolis, and the No. 1 contribution they made was helping to come up with a theory of how to structure the book. 

A group of us got to talking about the screenwriter David Simon and how we admired his ability to create a mysterious and gritty feel to a story. We decided to search for things that had that feel for the Teamsters, so they were challenged to find things that could contribute to a more real and gritty narrative. Their jobs were to read congressional investigations and F.B.I. files from the 1950s and 1960s, which took a lot of strategy due to the sheer length. In some cases, these files were 40,000 pages or more. The goal was to tell a realistic story about the Teamsters and their impact, and these students were incredible at helping accomplish that.

Teamsters Metropolis became the work it is today through dialogues with Teamsters, intellectuals, and students. I taught a class on Teamsters Metropolis in 2022, and through the workshopping in that class, ideas came together for this book. 

Intellectual life is all about working and talking to each other in conversation, and we lose something special when that conversation is only left to the experts. We accomplish very little in a vacuum. One of the big reasons that the Teamsters succeeded was because they were willing to take their expertise into a wider class experience for those with different upbringings and backgrounds.”

Q: What do you love about teaching at Earlham?

“I love that we have the space to be totally creative. I can get interested in new research threads and conversations, and I never have to worry that I won’t be able to make that the center of my teaching. It makes my work totally original because I don’t have to fit into an orthodox notion of what it is to be a history professor. Earlham is good about letting us be our best intellectual selves.”

Q: What is one thing you want people to take away from Teamsters Metropolis?

“The Teamsters were a venue to get the economic security with middle-class life while working and living in ways that were deeply controversial and formed by things that were on the margins. 

People often don’t want to be mainstream, but do want the comfort of it, and that’s what the Teamsters were for. People may scorn their methods, but at the end of the day, it was the people outside of the mainstream and using those unconventional methods that got us the ability to have the comforts that people have come to expect in U.S. society.”

Teamsters Metropolis was published by the University of Michigan Press and is available from major retailers.

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About Earlham College 

Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion foster a collaborative learning community that inspires and motivates students with transformative opportunities and experiences so they can become catalysts for good in a changing world. Located in Richmond, Indiana, Earlham is one of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 75 national liberal arts colleges and offers one of the top 20 classroom experiences in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.