The Teamster elections and the fallout for the left
Meyerson, Harold
TWO YEARS into the Sweeney era, the American labor movement seems to have found its own rather rocky rhythm: victory, disaster, victory, disaster. In late summer, the stunning success of...
...For their part, Sweeney's critics will use the allegations to damn the entire Sweeney reformation...
...In his insurgent campaign for the presidency of the Mine Workers, for instance, Trumka took no contributions save those from Mine Workers members...
...The Sweeney regime has managed to change a great deal in a short time, but the movement's proclivity for selfsubversion, alas, continues unabated...
...The transformation has had all manner of ramifications, the most serious of which, as the Shachtmanites see it, is that a number of Shachtmanites have lost their jobs at the Federation...
...Member unions such as the Teamsters and the Steelworkers conducted mass lobbying campaigns...
...Worse yet, the problem does not end with Carey...
...In November, labor's watershed victory over the administration's fast-track proposal was followed, just one week later, by the ruling from retired federal judge Kenneth Conboy barring Carey from seeking reelection...
...He failed to sustain an internal operation that could raise money from rank and filers, and when he came up short, his campaign fell back on the oldstyle mobilization of money rather than the harder work of mobilizing volunteers...
...In his year at the helm of SEIU, Stern has devoted more resources to organizing and hired more organizers than any union president possibly since John L. Lewis...
...He had stopped the timehonored practice of officials pulling down multiple salaries...
...Though the Democrats did not retake the Hill, the Republicans have shied from advancing major new initiatives, and the Democrats thought twice about supporting the administration's latest free-trade panacea...
...The reformation at the Teamsters apparently relied upon the illegal use of Teamsters funds...
...The action at Citizen Action involved only money, not citizens...
...THE TRIUMPHS and travails of the newmodel labor movement illustrate a motif that runs through contemporary liberalism —and runs like this: genuine mass mobilization of the sort that Sweeney & Co...
...THE CAREY scandal is a godsend to Sweeney's critics, though, because Carey's campaign was a cause célèbre for the democratic left, and it is the left where the scandal is now wreaking havoc...
...Trumka and McEntee, the report asserts, at least partly delivered, though it contains no assertion that Stern actually raised any money at all...
...and eventually winning the strike...
...In his five years heading the Teamsters, Carey seemingly had broken the back of the mob...
...One week after that, Carey went on a "temporary, unpaid leave of absence...
...Ed James, an attorney who, Conboy reports, donated $16,000 to Carey, came out of the old Miners for Democracy group, ran Ed Sadlowski's insurgent campaign for the presidency of the Steelworkers, and is the author of a seminal article on union democracy...
...At UPS, he had waged a genuine classic of a strike: polling the members on their preference of issues...
...More broadly, even if the criminal liability in the case is limited to the parties who have already pleaded guilty, the damage to labor's image, not to mention its good name, will be substantial...
...Somewhat less explosively, Trumka, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees president Gerald McEntee, and Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern are alleged to have agreed to raise $50,000 apiece for Carey's candidacy...
...Rebuilding the culture of mobilization, of course, is what John Sweeney's labor movement and Ron Carey's Teamsters were all about...
...I asked Arlook...
...The only thing labor had going for it this time around was that Lane Kirkland's movement had become John Sweeney's, and that, it turned out, made all the difference...
...Manning the ideological battlements taxed the Kirklandites to the utmost...
...HAROLD MEYERSON iS executive editor of the L.A...
...winning a level of public support for strikers unseen in the last thirty years...
...Shortly after the 1996 election, I met with Citizen Action executive director Ira Arlook, who told me excitedly of the hundreds of thousands of phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates that Citizen Action had made in the final weekend of the campaign...
...In late summer, the stunning success of the Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service was followed by guilty pleas from three top officials of the scandal-rocked campaign of Teamsters president Ron Carey...
...Clearly, it is no longer accurate to say that labor failed in its 1996 election ventures...
...The trade union movement in America has a long record of self-inflicted wounds...
...building the strike around their number-one priority —upgrading the income and status of parttime workers...
...The comparison is not as gratuitous as it first may seem, since the erstwhile Kirkland apparatchiks—largely forgotten but not altogether gone since they lost control of the AFL-CIO in 1995—are using the Carey scandal both to assault the Sweeney regime and paint a glowing and unrecognizable picture of its predecessor...
...no one other than Sweeney has done more to transform the culture of American labor from a quiet service organization to a militant mobilizing machine...
...For the Kirkland coven, of course, the original sin of Sweeneyism is ideological...
...And in seeking to consolidate the rebirth of the broad labor movement, some of the movement's leading lights may have been complicit in the campaign to save Carey by any means possible...
...The key transaction, a $485,000 Teamsters contribution to Citizen Action that was secretly to be rebated to the Carey campaign, was so outlandishly outsized—it was eighty times larger than any previous Teamsters contribution to the group, and constituted a hefty chunk of the Teamsters' treasury—that almost no one at Teamsters headquarters was willing to approve it as it moved through channels...
...He had assembled one of the smartest and most successful organizing departments in the movement...
...6 DISSENT / Winter 1998 Sweeney's movement already had coordinators in swing congressional districts, left over from its massive 1996 election operation...
...The seriousness of these latter allegations is unclear...
...It is not to make light of the growing Carey scandal to note that this distinctive Sweeneytime rhythm is vastly preferable to the pattern of events in Lane Kirkland's era: decline, disaster, decline, disaster...
...Despite credible testimony to the contrary, though, Carey insists no one called it to his attention...
...He had placed seventy mobbedup locals—about 10 percent of the union— into trusteeship...
...might prevail unless Carey came up with some last-minute truckloads of mailings, Carey's campaign began to move money around in ways that were plainly illegal...
...The irony here is considerable, for it is precisely the reform wing of labor that now stands accused of shady dealings in the effort to stave off the re-Hoffazation of the Teamsters...
...It placed ads in the districts of wavering congressional representatives...
...mobilizing and uniting over 150,000 strikers across the country...
...None," he answered...
...The practice is not unheard of: in the mid-eighties, Kirkland himself helped raise money for then-United Mine Workers president Sam Church in his unsuccessful effort to stave off the insurgent campaign of a young reformer named Rich Trumka...
...IN THE two brief years of Sweeney's tenure, the record of that machine is already quite impressive...
...have now embarked upon requires resources...
...In the mid-eighties in California, thenSenator Alan Cranston hired legendary United Farm Workers organizer Marshall Ganz to rebuild within the state Democratic Party the vibrant culture of volunteerism that had characterized the party of Cranston's youth...
...And it apparently funneled that money through Citizen Action, whose name had come to belie, at least at the level of the national organization, what this once grassroots organization had in fact become...
...on all other issues of concern to labor, they slept...
...Compare, for instance, Sweeney's success at derailing "fast-track" with Kirkland's failure four years ago to stop NAFTA...
...And when it looked like Hoffa (James Jr...
...Carey campaign consultant Martin Davis alleges that Rich Trumka, the Federation's charismatic secretary-treasurer, agreed to pass on the Teamsters funds...
...Conboy's report details how $150,000 in Teamsters money was passed on to Citizen Action and then back to the Carey campaign through an even more supercharged connection: the AFL-CIO...
...On one hand, the law that bans employers from donating to union candidacies has never been construed to apply with criminal liability to a union leader for soliciting contributions...
...There were excellent reasons why Carey won the left's allegiance...
...What the Friends of Lane omit from this tale is that only those functionaries who were obstacles to the creation of the vibrant new organizing, political, and field programs of Sweeney's Federation were let go, and that the original sin of Kirklandism, as the Sweeney people saw it, was less ideology than narcolepsy...
...Conboy's report makes it clear that Carey would have to have been unconscious not to have known at least the broad outlines of what transpired...
...As baldly stated by the Forward's Jonathan Mahler on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the problem with Sweeney is that he and his ilk have reached out to the left (what's left of it), to suspect characters like leaders of the women's and environmental movements, to foreign unions that failed to pass muster with Jay Lovestone in 1959—in short, that Michael Harrington has replaced Lovestone and Max Shachtman as the household deity of the AFL-CIO...
...DISSENT / Winter 1998 7...
...Above all, at a time when every other source of funds and volunteers within the Democratic Party had largely atrophied, the labor movement could promise to deliver, or withhold, both, with a credibility to which the Kirkland regime could barely aspire...
...In 1993, unemployment and economic anxiety were high, presumably friendly Democrats controlled Congress, and labor was joined in its fight by the nationalist right in the persons of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot...
...Republican Peter Hoekstra will chair hearings this winter that are likely to provide a mix of reform rhetoric and old-fashioned union bashing...
...This time out, unemployment and economic anxiety had subsided, free-trade Republicans were running the Congress, and the anti-freetrade coalition had lost its nationalist component...
...But Carey's tenure was threatened in 1996 when the Teamster Old Guard found a candiDISSENT / Winter 1998 5 date with the magic name of Hoffa...
...Weekly...
...On the other hand, this election was conducted under a court order with more explicit sanctions on fundraising...
...These were all paid phone banks"—paid with union money, the bulk of it legit, but some to be siphoned back to the Carey campaign...
...But Ganz's network took money to build, and Cranston got that money from savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating, for whom he then felt obliged to do the favors that ultimately spelled an end to his career and to Ganz's program...
...And perversely, gearing up a people-based politics often throws you back on the same old moneybased politics you're trying to escape...
...But while Carey was building an impressive level of strike solidarity and organizing zeal, he neglected his own network of supporters within the Teamsters...
...How many volunteers did you have making these calls...
Vol. 45 • January 1998 • No. 1
