GROWTH OF REFORM AMONG THE TEAMSTERS

...The trusteeship and the expulsions would be illegal under the current federal law that went into effect in 1959, too late to save Hayes's victims...

...If Teamster officials were accused of crimes, were not these crimes trivial compared to those of the bourgeoisie against the working class...

...For there are now two effective national organizations that coordinate a reform movement on a Teamster-wide basis...

...In locals with a combined membership of about 40,000 in I I cities, PROD and TDU report the victory of at least one more of their candidates in recent elections...

...From then on, PROD pressed the union to enforce its contracts, especially on safety...

...Here his account has the ring of authenticity...

...a somewhat smaller number attended PROD's gathering in Cincinnati...

...At their conference, the Naderites were pleased to meet, in addition to the usual white-collar reform activists, a group of truckdrivers who were anxiously, even militantly, aroused over driving safety...

...Katsaros reports that huge sums have been extracted from the union and its insurance funds by a series of devices, legal, semilegal, and illegal: kickbacks, extortion, finder's fees, real estate deals, commissions...

...It is hard to say if one group is more effective than the other...

...The Teamsters union is about to negotiate a national agreement for some 60,000 UPS employees, the largest single unit outside the National Master Freight Agreement...

...When corruptionists took the Fifth, their conduct could be hailed as a defense of labor's independence...

...But there was still the Godfather myth...

...Now, inching along with the times, the New School brought Katsaros, young, intelligent, articulate, the effective leader of a resolute opposition in Teamsters Local 282 (New York...

...With the help of sympathetic lawyers and student volunteers, PROD mounted an effective campaign for road safety, including congressional lobbying and actions in court and before administrative agencies...

...PROD and TDU both sent guest speakers...

...The first reform group arose out of the Professional Drivers Safety and Health Organization (PROD, now the Professional Drivers Council), set up in 1971 by Arthur Fox, a young Naderite attorney...

...And when Local 544 was defeated, it was by the combined power of federal and state governments, of courts and police and the Department of Justice, all ranged on the side of a conservative union officialdom and the hoodlums who went on to debase the Teamsters union...

...It made proposals to reform local union constitutions and formulated demands for inclusion in contract negotiations...

...In November 1978, an UPSurge national conference drew an attendance of 100 workers and spouses...

...This is regrettable, because Moldea tells us more than Brill about union reform battles...

...If he collaborated with gangsters, so went the fable, you had to fight fire with fire to build a union...

...they need strict enforcement of laws for union democracy and of laws against crime in the labor movement...

...In jail, convicted under the Smith Act, they pondered the past: could they have done things differently...

...If that conclusion now seems a rigid and selfdestructive non sequitur, it is easier to detect this in retrospect than it was at the time...

...some were roughed up...

...See Union Democracy Review, No...

...Analyzing the Teamster Central States Pension Fund, which covers unionists in 22 states, he notes that the Fund became a source of "venture capital for organized crime...

...went a popular view, because truckers presumably would elect Hoffa anytime by huge majorities...

...That was back in 1958...

...This is a local where, in past years, oppositionists have been knocked to the ground and stomped, the home of one member and the opposition printing press bombed, and where, in 1977, a former local secretarytreasurer was murdered...

...In New York State, a reform slate unaffiliated with any national caucus won by a large margin in the 2,200-member milkdrivers' Local 584...

...It exposed raids on the union treasury and on insurance funds...

...Without an insurgent drive within the union, backed by the rank and file, the restoration of democracy and decency in the Teamsters would be impossible...

...In the mid-1930s he and his worker Trotskyist comrades built the Teamsters union in Minneapolis, led regional truckers' strikes, and devised the organizational methods that made the Teamsters a powerful national organization...

...If "family" members stole, it was from those who were greedy...

...While the Fund can meet current pension claims, the beneficiaries face a "potential time bomb" in the late 1980s or early '90s when it 153 will be forced to cut benefits sharply or drastically increase the tax on employers, or to compel workers to make payments into the fund, or face bankruptcy...

...Unlike PROD, which began as a public-interest group, TDU from the start came forward as an avowed insurgent caucus...

...they had been murdering union dissenters...

...In 1978, it had a membership of 6,000...

...At the luncheon Katsaros was joined by Steven Brill, author of The Teamsters (published by Simon & Schuster in 1978), a best-seller that demonstrates convincingly that the evils Katsaros decries in Local 282 permeate the Teamsters union and involve its upper officialdom...

...It was this uncompromising stand that facilitated their enemies' efforts to cut them down...

...A misguided kind of "left" translated it all into the language of class struggle...

...It is impossible to assess the Fund's true assets...

...In June 1978, it announced that it would try to run candidates for president and for secretary-treasurer in the next national union election in 1981...

...Hayes imposed a trusteeship over the lodge for over two years to prevent the rebels from ousting an officialdom accused of financial malpractices by the international's own auditor...

...Democracy meant little in the Teamsters union...

...In Detroit Local 299, Hoffa's home local, TDU became a substantial force after supporting opposition slates...

...He points, for example, to a long record of insurgency in Hoffa's own Local 299 (Detroit...

...The effect is not to convince readers but to make them uneasy, so that even what is based on solid facts falls under a cloud...

...It campaigned for more effective legislation...

...A renewed interest in Teamster affairs brings us another worthwhile work, The Hoffa Wars, by Dan E. Moldea (published by the Paddington Press in 1978), which Moldea dedicates to "the members of the Teamster rebel movement who have been blackballed, beaten, and killed in their pursuit of a more democratic union...

...The question should be posed more accurately, not simply as a conflict between union members and union officials, but between democratic society and organized gangsters...

...Neither is it simply an internal union caucus...

...For one thing, there was the John L. Lewis myth, according to which union democracy was "irrelevant" and what counted were high wages, security, fringes...

...They had no thought of hassling the union, but hoped for its cooperation...

...A full 50 percent went to those with organized crime connections, and an additional 37.5 percent to those with some personal connection to Teamster officials...

...That question, by itself, is misleading...

...Then, when Hoffa was murdered in July 1975, the Godfather myth collapsed...

...Government and law by themselves have failed...

...And not only by the untutored masses...

...PROD probably has more truckdrivers...

...Rendered sophisticated by a certain kind of labor intellectual, the myth helped "explain" the Teamsters...

...The modern Teamsters union was built not by calling in racketeers but by workers who fought and who struck, as others did in other unions...

...If members did not "revolt," it was because they were happy with benefits brought by crooked, but presumably militant, leaders...

...The conference was followed by the founding of PROD as a public interest association, not a union caucus, with Arthur Fox as its counsel and director...

...it does not try to bargain with employers...

...As truckdrivers joined up in increasing numbers, PROD evolved into a membership organization composed mostly of Teamster unionists who wanted to reform their union...

...PROD's attention was inevitably directed to the union when drivers sought advice and assistance in processing grievances...

...One thing stands out clearly enough: Brill explains how corruption undermines the future of union members...

...soon PROD was forced to defend Teamsters' rights in their union against charges and to try to protect them against blacklisting on the job...

...Jimmy Hoffa personified all the rugged Godfatherly anti-virtues...

...154 Farrell Dobbs deserves a hearing...

...In 1971, the Naderites called a conference on trucking safety to put pressure on government regulatory agencies...

...Now that the books, movies, and television— and the New School—focus on Teamster rebels, we can ask why it took so long to discover the obvious...

...In Ted Katsaros's Local 282, the insurgents lost, but they succeeded in polling 43 percent of the votes...

...Racketeers pursued by the Department of Justice were transformed into heroes of the struggle for civil liberties...

...Meanwhile, he was expelling two union reformers in Tool- and Diemakers Lodge 113 in Chicago, Machinists who had led a three-year battle for democracy...

...In any event, it is sad indeed that Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, which might have remained a stronghold for decent unionism, was destroyed...

...Some of the winners belong to both reform groups...

...It elected its leader, Peter Camarata, as one of the local's delegates to the last Teamster convention...

...Hayes's, then president of the Machinists union and chairman of the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee, who lectured on high policy from a lofty plane...

...some were fired and blacklisted...

...If they had kept silent on the war issue, "our role...

...In a union where unscrupulous characters control hundreds of millions of dollars—and that's killing money—and without the moral or financial support of any wing in the labor movement, the PROD-TDU achievement is remarkable...

...He wanders into murky and irrelevant gangster stories...

...If they killed, they risked their own lives according to their own code of criminal honor...

...Who can keep track of those bizarre interconnections of crime...

...The gangsters had not been killing just one another and Hoffa...

...If that seems like an odd way of putting it, it fits the reality...

...PROD activists became union stewards...

...The story has been told before, and Brill's account of murder and theft leaves the reader with a familiar sense of stupefaction...

...A third oppositional group, much smaller than TDU or PROD, addresses itself exclusively to employees of the United Parcel Service, and so calls itself UPSurge...

...But can the reformers with all their courage, their talent, their tenacity possibly succeed in transforming the Teamsters...

...If they became rich, they acted without hypocrisy in a world where bankers exploited the poor...

...The Fund's declared assets of $1.4 billion is so overvalued that one government expert calls the estimate a joke...

...Just 20 years ago, the same luncheon series featured A.J...

...would have been no better than that of the unprincipled labor bureaucracy...

...In four volumes, the latest published in 1977, Teamster Bureaucracy, by Farrell Dobbs (New York: Monad Press), the author tells the important story of the Minneapolis Teamsters and the Trotskyists...

...some of what he tells about Local 299 squares with information received by this writer over the years from its members...

...Frank Fitzsimmons, Teamster president, was invited...

...Hoodlums who used the Teamsters union could luxuriate in the glow of the Gentle Grafter, the Robin Hood of slum and ghetto, the Godfather who brought a crude and rough justice into a dog-eat-dog world...

...TDU has more warehouse and general workers...

...nevertheless, at its conference, there was at least one driver from each of the nation's carhauling terminals...

...Beginning with an interest in auto safety, Ralph Nader and his associates extended their concern to safety in commercial trucking: excessive loads, improper vehicle repair and maintenance, long hours, and hazardous working conditions...

...The writers who belittle this figure as only a trivial fragment of the membership of a union that claims over 2 million members are simply not sensitive to grim realities...

...he declined...

...In 1976 a second, somewhat different, nationally organized reform group appeared in the union: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU...

...They were feared, envied, respected, even begrudgingly admired...

...That "realism," that misconception, was not shattered until Jock Yablonski was murdered in 1970 for leading an insurgent miners' movement...

...If our country has been notably unsuccessful in rooting out racketeers who poison national life, can we hope for better in the Teamsters...

...In any union deeply infiltrated by gangsters, no one has the right to "demand" that any group of unarmed workingmen by themselves miraculously clean up their union...

...But ordinary trade-union activity is simply not enough...

...Among the first few thousand dues-paying 155 members, at $20 a year, most held Teamster union cards...

...but PROD continued to grow and to expand until it had branches in major trucking centers...

...Their own lives and livelihood were on the line...

...they need the moral support of public opinion and of every agency of government...

...Of $1.2 billion in loans, only 12.5 percent ($150 million) was in arms-length commercial transactions...

...he assembles scraps of "evidence" to show that high Teamster officials could have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy and the CIA plot to murder Castro...

...In 1977, it collected $100,000 in dues, mostly from truckdrivers, a phenomenal achievement for a rank-and-file workers' group not officially sponsored by any union...

...it began as a publicinterest organization that unites truckdrivers in an effort to serve all their professional needs, among them the need for a clean democratic union...

...it would cost $10 million just to appraise the properties...

...Among its founders were a group of young independent socialists who won a wide following among their fellow unionists by able campaigns around down-to-earth union grievances...

...In Atlanta Local 728, PROD's candidate lost, but he made a strong showing: polling, out of 3,600 votes, 1,600 or 44 percent...

...It wasn't long before PROD leaders realized that the key to safety in the trucking industry was a good union, and that the key to a good union was union democracy...

...They were robbing not the rich, but workers' insurance funds...

...3, 1973...

...In short, the power of the nation's democracy must be exercised on behalf of union democracy...

...PROD aims to reform the trucking industry by reforming the trucking union...

...PROD was not intended originally as a union reform movement but was pushed into that role by the union's failure to back a campaign for over-the-road safety...

...Nevertheless, part of that experience is still relevant...

...And he tells about murder, beatings and intimidation: the whole register of offenses exposed long ago at the McClellan hearings but still fresh and current...

...Another dubious $900 million consist of vastly overvalued real estate loans...

...His associates took the Fifth...

...About $100 million was lost when money was loaned out at low interest rates to high-risk borrowers who should have paid substantially higher rates...

...These theorists seldom noticed the signs of actual revolt...

...Between them, PROD and TDU have 156 enrolled some 9,000 members...

...We learned then that behind union autocracy hid the festering of corruption and betrayal, the failure of a dictatorial union to protect its own members from death in the mines...

...Real estate taken over by the Fund when borrowers defaulted accounts for $100 million of the book assets...

...Once at the head of a mass movement, they felt honorbound to advocate an antiwar, class-struggle line, even though these policies rubbed against the strong opinions of their own constituency...

...No, they concluded, they had to act precisely as they did...

...By 1978, TDU reported 2,500 members, a solid enough base to permit the regular publication of local and national newspapers and to continue campaigning on national issues...

...But so did McCarthy's victims...

...Moldea tells the same story as Brill but makes the sad mistake of sensationalizing what is already sensational enough...

...Union reformers need the continued backing of social reformers...

...I f insurgency is not new in the Teamsters, there is a new kind of insurgency, one that arose even before Hoffa was killed, and no longer confined to isolated groups...

...The story is told simply and movingly by Dobbs, who is at his best in puncturing the Godfather myth of the friendly gangster...

...Yes, because we can count upon a force here that exists only in the labor movement: union reformers organized for the battle...

...It was time for a new look...

...It backed a group of insurgents who preferred union charges against Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons...

...More than eight years ago, a member of Local 299 prepared a list of some 20 opposition groups in various Teamster locals and his compilation was far from complete...

...There were 500 delegates at TDU's 1978 national conference in Windsor, Canada...

...157...

...After seven years, his supporters were driven out of the industry...

...Truckdrivers elected Dobbs to lead their union, not because he and his friends were members of the Socialist Workers party but simply because they could be trusted as honest, effective union leaders...

...Its evolution illustrates the common interest of social reformers and union reformers in union democracy...

...PROD is not a union...

...When Dobbs suggests that the truckers' early victories were enormously facilitated by his own revolutionary principles, his account is curiously old-fashioned...

...If he was cruel, it was against those even more cruel...

...If it can happen to Hoffa," one Teamster said to Brill, "it can happen to anyone...