The Teamsters' election
Benson, Herman
When Ron Carey learned that he had been elected Teamsters union (IBT) president, his first words, addressed to the old-guard officials who were using the union's treasury as their private...
...In one outstanding instance, they ousted racket-dominated officials from Local 138, a New York local covering grocery chains...
...It gave members a chance to break though the layers of stifling bureaucracy by direct election of officers, and by the judge's insistence on an honest election...
...He is a fine, able, honest union leader, not unlike other decent union leaders...
...A turn of events awaited some power superior to the ruling racketeers...
...An unstated message, delivered to the whole labor movement by the victory of his entire sixteen-candidate slate, carried a broader lesson: for the first time in memory, organized crime suffered a major defeat in the American labor movement...
...The eradication of corruption has been—and remains —one of the great unfinished tasks of American labor...
...Michael Holland, the elections officer, was responsible for running honest elections of convention delegates and of international officers by direct membership vote...
...The act sought more than the conviction of individuals guilty of a "pattern" of racketeering...
...In agreeing to run, especially when his chances of winning seemed remote, Carey put his personal safety on the line...
...But he soon gave up...
...Their principal founders were young Teamsters who had been influenced by sixties radicalism...
...A long and costly trial—it could have dragged out for years—was avoided when the top Teamster brass and the Justice Department reached an agreement embodied in a consent decree signed by federal judge David Edelstein...
...But Lane Kirkland and a battery of AFL-CIO officials joined in a public relations campaign to force the DOJ to backtrack...
...Demoralization and debasement seemed complete...
...The consent decree gave Ron Carey, the opposition candidate for president, a chance to reach the membership through the pages of the Teamsters journal...
...In the face of this unanimous agreement on what would have been a disaster, the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) urged the judge to reject Holland's monstrosities and to insist upon complete government supervision of the whole process from the printing of ballots to distribution, counting, and tallying...
...and Frederick Lacey, the independent administrator, ruled on appeals from decisions of the other two and reported to the judge...
...Jackie Presser, a Teamster president who later escaped prison by dying of cancer, headed up Ronald Reagan's first labor campaign committee and, after the election, was appointed to the president-elect's transition team...
...Once the Teamsters union takes its place in labor's mainstream, a union perhaps as progressive as any other, the shift of this 1,500,000-member union will not by itself alter the balance of political power in America...
...The actual choice, however, was too clear: either cooperate with racketeers against the government's action or cooperate with the government to drive out the racketeers...
...By this time, organized crime was selecting the IBT general president...
...True enough, but its significance is far greater...
...In fact, they came within an inch of outmaneuvering the government and assuring their reelection by fraud...
...but, then, he is a retired labor notable...
...The final returns gave Carey 188,883 votes or 48.48 percent...
...Readmission was an ignominious defeat for the whole labor movement, especially its progressive wing...
...Reuther not only failed, he surrendered...
...On the other hand, if Carey can democratize the Teamsters, that achievement will have significant long-term effects in democratizing other unions...
...PROD lobbied, leveled charges against top Teamster officials, issued a report to union convention delegates revealing the bloated salaries of millionaire union officials...
...The old officials remained in power, ran the union, and continued to collect their salaries...
...The official labor movement chose to ignore the Local 560 case, but it reacted with vociferous hostility to the RICO suit against the Teamsters international...
...Some union leaders remained silent...
...Durham, 129,538 or 33.24 percent...
...There are a lot of honorable people in the AFL leadership . . . we are equal to that challenge...
...The freedom from government intervention sought by the AFL-CIO was akin to the autonomy sought by Southern reaction when federal authorities intervened to protect civil rights fighters...
...even TDU, which sought minor modifications, found his rules essentially acceptable...
...In 1991, with its 15 percent, the opposition set the tone of the discussions...
...Leaders of some unions, especially those who swallowed hard as they supinely voted to welcome the old racket-ridden Teamsters back into the AFL-CIO, may learn a new respect for the power of the rank and file...
...RICO was not aimed specifically at labor racketeering, but it provided the legal weapon against organized crime in the Teamsters...
...TDU had elected a single delegate about ten years before and fewer than a dozen five years later...
...As debate raged in the early days of the RICO suit, some labor officials revisited their radical past...
...But their authority was limited by three court-appointed officers: Charles Carberry, the investigations officer, could bring charges against any member with an established record of corruption...
...Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO president, became a consistent apologist for Teamster officials when they came under fire again from the federal government...
...By avoiding a trial, IBT officials averted that danger...
...Press commentators, startled by Carey's election, reported it as David defeating Goliath...
...Here was an officialdom that had 140 • DISSENT cultivated contempt for a membership that they had easily manipulated for a lifetime...
...For the Teamsters that's bold enough for now...
...In the locals, where entrenched machines dominate by fear and job control, often in collusion with employers, that 15 percent was a notable breakthrough...
...When Ron Carey learned that he had been elected Teamsters union (IBT) president, his first words, addressed to the old-guard officials who were using the union's treasury as their private money market fund, were: "The party's over...
...Towering above this more or less legal apparatus was the sinister, illicit structure of organized crime, easily able to replace any individual soldier who stumbled into prison...
...At the union convention in mid-1991, Ron Carey was nominated as the insurgent candidate for international president by votes of some three hundred delegates, or 15 percent of the total...
...Moreover, as demonstrated in the first months under the consent decree, they imagined that they could outwit the government...
...corrupt individuals should be convicted of crimes but unions should remain free of control...
...ten of them had come out of TDU, including Diana Kilmury, elected a vice president, the first woman to serve on the union's international executive board...
...Hoffa took over and promptly had the union constitution amended to make his regime virtually invulnerable...
...They became a reform caucus...
...The old guard split during the election...
...They denounced the suit as invading the rights of a free labor movement...
...Less than six months later, when the rank and file voted for international officers, not so easily subject to local pressures, almost 50 percent voted for Carey...
...These safeguards led to the overwhelming defeat of the slates supported by the very officials who signed the consent decree...
...Instead of RICO, they insisted, the government could use the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, a much weaker law that offers some protection of democratic rights in unions...
...he failed...
...L 1972, Arthur Fox founded PROD, the Professional Drivers Council, as an organization of over-the-road truck drivers, to campaign for highway safety, a cause that the union ignored...
...If Holland's rules had prevailed, any election would have been a mockery...
...Three years later, the judge gave up...
...and, in one of the more bizarre twists of labor history, he joined the Teamsters in founding the American Labor Alliance, a miscarriage that was doomed at conception and soon died...
...Many have tried...
...Durham was selected by a majority of the old officialdom...
...The fight for that program in the IBT is not over...
...Now that it's all over and the old guard has gone down to resounding defeat, their calculations may seem to have been absurd...
...But there has never been so decisive a setback for corruption...
...In the end, the split was not decisive, for Carey obviously would have won even in a simple two-way race...
...In their years of insurgency, they created a trained cadre of unionists who could be seen at annual conferences where five hundred delegates represented several thousand members organized in local chapters...
...If it could happen to Jimmy Hoffa, it could happen to anyone...
...Over two hundred fifty Congressmen, and candidates for president of the United States, followed by a gaggle of labor leaders, rose to defend Teamster officials from "persecution" by the government...
...For another, it had succeeded in coming up with an attractive, credible candidate...
...There have been upsets in unions before, though not on so grand a scale...
...these difficult defensive days for unions, everyone looks for signs of new hope...
...Department of Justice filed civil suit against the union and its top officials under RICO, the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act...
...And they almost succeeded...
...it proposed the reorganization under court order of institutions dominated by racketeers...
...A militant union controlled by its members can best defend their interests...
...With the concurrence of Lacey, in his role as administrative judge, one corrupt official after another was removed from office and barred for life from involvement in union affairs...
...It was the triumph SPRING • 1992 • 141 of union democracy over organized crime...
...Never before had any opposition broken through the bureaucratic crust to win effective convention representation...
...Mut I think the job can be done...
...Meanwhile, they remained in power...
...To start, not at the beginning, but "only" thirty-seven years ago, we turn to February 24, 1955, when the CIO executive board met to vote on merger with the AFL...
...For one thing, the opposition had at last won substantial convention representation...
...Meanwhile, the Department of Justice continued to pursue Hoffa and finally sent him to prison...
...Walter Reuther, hoping to allay the misgivings of those who were disturbed by the extent of corruption in the older federation, told them, "[I]t will clearly require bold courage to cleanse the labor movement of corruption, and it will require eternal vigilance to keep it clean...
...but as unionists, they were immune to the anti-worker elitism of those days...
...Meanwhile, Carberry's investigation of corruption proceeded apace...
...They faced firings by collusive employers, blacklisting, and physical attack by thugs organized by the IBT general president...
...With the Teamsters transformed, some union activists expect the new administration to lead a mighty surge forward to free the labor movement from its doldrums...
...The Fulton Street Fish Market in New York City now operates under a RICO monitorship...
...For nineteen years, TDU-PROD continued the battle against the mob, without practical or moral support from a single well-known labor leader—with the honorable exception of Victor Reuther, who publicly identified himself with the TDU crusade...
...Above all, they warned, the government's move was part of a reactionary drive to smash unions...
...At the peak of racket power, the Teamsters union, more corrupt than when it was first expelled, was welcomed back into the AFL-CIO without a single dissenting vote...
...However, the labor movement, like the nation, faces vexing political and economic issues that will not be resolved by union militancy...
...Carey had never been identified with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, but TDU rallied behind his candidacy and provided an enthusiastic nationwide campaign team without which the opposition would have been ineffective...
...The forces of corruption proved more powerful than anything that Reuther and George Meany combined could muster...
...By the time the election rolled around, Carberry could report that at least 150 had been axed, not just minor underlings but some of the most powerful and influential of the old gang...
...He was wrong...
...Ken Paff, a young truck driver who had been to college, emerged as a top leader...
...142 • DISSENT...
...Lacey, the independent administrator, was happy with Holland's proposals...
...He proposes to make his own union a clean and democratic representative of the interests of its membership...
...They quickly learned that to force the union to fight for safety, it had to be democratized...
...After the merger, corruption became more extensive and the rackets more firmly entrenched...
...Except for one thing: the forces that were later to overcome the racketeers were gestating inside the union, finally maturing into the most remarkable rank-and-file reform movement ever recorded in American labor history: PROD-TDU...
...it has entered a new stage...
...In hindsight, with victory at hand, that might not seem like much...
...Carey's victory at the top has not eliminated the corrupt elements who still control many big-city locals...
...Such a power emerged and the balance shifted when, in 1988, the U.S...
...the old guard would have been "elected" easily after massive fraud...
...Four years later, a new insurgent group was formed as a nationwide reform opposition, sparked by a group of young rank-and-file Teamsters, mainly in warehousing and local trucking, and later in UPS...
...The government asked the judge to remove all top officers and put the union under the control of a court-appointed trustee, to oust racketeers from the union, and to prepare for the election of officers by direct membership vote in a court-supervised election...
...Walter Shea was chosen by a disaffected minority...
...He helped keep the emerging movement on track, avoiding standard "left" issues, ignoring complex civil wars in faraway places, to concentrate effectively on subjects important to truck drivers and other Teamsters: safety, wages, pensions, grievances, protecting the treasury from crooks, resisting givebacks, and, above all, union democracy...
...His order was upheld by the higher federal courts...
...Just the man required to head the insurgent ticket...
...The precedent for using RICO against labor racketeers had already been established in Teamsters Local 560 in New Jersey, the local run by the Provenzano family for a generation and responsible for the murder of at least two dissidents...
...Now that the dust has settled, all these arguments ring hollow...
...This is not to diminish his role or his ability, because no one in or near the labor movement has yet come up with such a program...
...Judge Edelstein retained final authority...
...Union democracy means a stronger labor movement, and the Teamster reform victory helps prepare for that future...
...It was that combination that toppled the most sinister forces of corruption in our most powerful union...
...In extreme cases, it could dispatch death squads to eliminate dangerous opponents...
...When Hoffa was released from prison and talked of resisting the mob, he was murdered...
...Fox, then a young, liberal Nader attorney, began by recruiting truckers to testify at congressional hearings...
...With Carberry demonstrating that the government meant business, and with an honest election guaranteed by court order, the whole atmosphere in the union was transformed...
...the monitorship failed...
...It is not an easy job, and if you think a united labor movement is going to mean we can sit back and say, we have the declaration, we have the machinery, the job is won, you are deluding yourself...
...If it can succeed there, it can succeed anywhere...
...They surely would have succeeded if Michael Holland, the election officer, had not been overruled by the judge...
...In despair of reforming the AFL-CIO, he took the UAW out...
...After some years of uneasy competition, PROD and TDU united in 1979...
...In this union, murder is familiar...
...There seemed little hope of ever toppling the corrupt system by any force within the union, not even by so dedicated a band as TDU...
...For a fleeting moment, Meany imagined that he could implement AFL-CIO constitutional provisions against corruption and enforce its Ethical Practices 138 • DISSENT Codes...
...The RICO suit was a civil action that itself posed no threat of criminal convictions...
...When Congress adopted the RICO statute, with criminal and civil provisions, it recognized that corruption was debasing national life...
...and Shea, 71,227 or 18.28 percent...
...Early in the process, Holland proposed an astounding set of election rules that would have surrendered control to incumbent local Teamster officials by permitting them to take charge of the distribution, casting, and counting of the ballots—and, at one stage, even of printing the ballots...
...Until the last moment before voting began, they were confident that they could hoodwink Teamsters forever...
...His nomination was a doubly spectacular achievement...
...When the judge overruled Holland and agreed with AUD, a fair election was assured...
...After counting ballots in the locals according to their traditional arithmetic, they would send Holland, sitting in Washington, tally sheets of their own composition...
...After its expulsion from the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, egregiously corrupt, grew stronger...
...At the time, it was an extraordinary first success...
...It has been used effectively against organized crime families, against corrupt businesses, stockbrokers, munitions manufacturers, banks...
...In that case, Judge Harold Ackerman authorized the removal of all local officers and the administration of the local by a court-appointed trustee...
...One former international union vice president, Tony Provenzano, was convicted of killing a union rival...
...As head of the large UPS local in New York, Carey had won a reputation as an independent-minded, talented union leader of integrity —and courage...
...The corrupt system was buttressed by hundreds of suspect dynasties among the union's 615 locals, by layers of bureaucracy piled on other layers, by indirect election of top officers chosen by delegates who were themselves local officers selected in elections they could manipulate, by business agents SPRING • 1992 • 139 appointed from above, by a grievance procedure crafted to crucify dissidents, by extensive powers of repression in the hands of the international president, by millions of dollars in union treasuries at the disposal of the millionaire officials...
...Hundreds of members, assured of some government protection, came forward to run for local office, for delegates, and for national office, campaigning openly for insurgent slates...
...the Department of Justice was willing to tag along...
...Most important of all, Carey's victory demonstrated what combination of forces can overcome racketeering in unions: courageous rankandfile union reformers, supported by civil libertarians outside the union, their rights effectively protected by the power of the federal government...
...Why on earth did they agree...
...The answer reminds us that arrogant power breeds overconfidence...
...Roy Williams, one of his successors as president, succeeded him in jail...
...PROD members were "ordinary," mainstream Americans who don't like to be kicked around...
...That would be nice but not likely...
...They admonished insurgents to shun reliance upon capitalist courts against union leaders...
...All sixteen candidates on the Carey slate were elected...
...However, skillfully using every right protected by federal law, and represented by sympathetic attorneys in court, they persisted...
...Up to now, all failed...
...It was a phenomenal achievement, but it still left the central union power intact, seemingly impervious to change...
...The insurgents kept up a drumfire attack on the mob, ran opposition candidates in locals, published a monthly tabloid, pamphlets, and special bulletins for separate union divisions...
...An extended trial, putting sworn testimony into evidence, could have easily led to criminal indictments...
...In 1958, after Teamsters President Dave Beck, destined for prison on corruption charges, was forced out of office, a federal judge imposed a monitorship over the union to keep Jimmy Hoffa from exercising power as the new president...
...Carey has not produced an arresting new labor program...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
