Transforming the Teamsters
Bornstein, jerry
Transforming the Teamsters JERRY BORNSTEIN "To those who say it is time to reform this organization and it's time the officers stopped selling out the membership of this organization, I say to...
...TDUers descended on the demonstrators with leaflets refuting union propaganda charges and inviting disbelievers to attend the conference as observers...
...Several beatings have already been inflicted on rank-and-file activists around the country, and a group of muscular sergeants-at-arms were on hand at the convention to protect apinst possible trouble...
...They drafted a program of militant contract demands and called themselves Teamsters for a Decent Contract (TDC...
...William Presser recently resigned as vice president of the Teamsters...
...Unlike the UMW, International officers are not elected by the general membership but in convention, and fewer than ten of the 800 Teamster locals reportedly permit direct election of convention delegates...
...The Teamster bureaucracy would like to use the presence of radicals in the reform movement as an excuse to dismiss the TDU as a left-wing plot, but rank-and-file dissatisfaction is too widespread for such an explanation to hold up...
...Circumstances might differ under a Democratic administration, but as one labor attorney pointed out, "The legal spider's web that surrounds labor relations in the United States maintains incumbent union officials in power over the workers they rule...
...But the Teamster reformers appear as courageous as the men and women who first organized the unions decades ago in the face of great adversity, and they pin their hopes on building a mass movement for reform among the 2.2 million Teamster members...
...There are billions of dollars in dues and pension funds at stake, and as the reform movement grows and endangers the entrenched union machine, the likelihood of violence will increase...
...Dissidents know they can expect little assistance from the Labor Department, especially after Secretary of Labor W. J. Usery shared the Las Vegas convention platform with Fitzsimmons and heaped glowing praise on the union bureaucracy...
...Reform leaders are fond of citing the successful overturn of the Tony Boyle gang in the United Mine Workers, but the situation in the Teamsters is quite different...
...The handful of activists who founded the Teamster group obviously provided the spark, for a movement that was just waiting to be ignited...
...The senior Presser has been convicted three times of crimes related to his union activity...
...Jerry Bornstein is a free-lance writer based in New York...
...At the Las Vegas Teamster convention last June, he drew national attention when he was the only delegate to speak against raising Fitzsimmons's annual salary from $125,000 to $156,250 and then was physically assaulted after the convention...
...Some came as delegates from dozens of local groups that have sprung up during the past year and others came as interested individuals seeking help in getting something going back home...
...More than 400 men chipped in enough money to send a four-man delegation to observe the Sandusky meeting...
...The origins of TDU trace back to August 1975, when thirty-five union members from ten cities, including activists from the International Socialists, an anti-Stalinist, Marxist group, huddled in a Chicago hotel room to develop a strategy to combat the Fitzsimmons machine...
...Two women, employes of United Parcel Service, are on the steering committee...
...Some 25,000 union members signed petitions backing the militants' contract proposals, and several locals passed resolutions endorsing all or some of these proposals...
...It is a movement that bears watching, for if the Teamsters can be successfully reformed, dissidents in other unions will be encouraged to follow the TDU's example...
...The Labor Department is not likely to intervene in Teamster affairs except on an after-the-fact basis and under heavy political pressure...
...The TDU faces formidable odds...
...Recent rule changes will make membership participation even more difficult...
...That charge proved ironic when Jackie Presser's father, William Presser, a sixty-nine-year-old international vice president of the Teamsters, made headlines that very day by resigning his post as chief of the scandal-ridden $1.4 billion Central States Pension Fund, after repeatedly pleading the Fifth Amendment during a Labor Department investigation...
...Shortly thereafter, Camarata was the leading vote-getter in local elections for convention delegate...
...In an uncharacteristic display of militancy, Fitzsimmons reacted by calling the first nationwide strike in Teamster history last April...
...An innovative clause in the TDU constitution bestowed full membership rights on members' spouses...
...Another obstacle facing the TDU is the threat of violence...
...They came from as far away as Los Angeles and San Francisco for the founding convention of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a national organization which aims to topple the regime of Frank Fitzsimmons and restore rank-and-file control to the nation's largest trade union...
...only two members have as much as twenty years' seniority...
...The first step, they decided, would be to build a movement around the Master Freight Agreement, which, though it directly covers only 450,000 teamsters, stands as the pattern for the entire trucking industry...
...The Pension Fund board has since been reorganized...
...The resolution on union democracy called for direct election of all union officials, from stewards to international officers, limiting union officers' salaries to the level of the workers they represent, and opening union publications to minority viewpoints...
...The most prominent figure to emerge so far in the reform movement is Pete Camarata, a young loading dock steward in Detroit...
...A forty-year-old trucker from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, traveled to the Kent conference at his own expense "to see if they really meant what they were saying...
...The convention decided to stress the publication of grass-roots newspapers (fifteen such journals already exist in the TDU network), a campaign for bylaws reform in the locals, and running TDU candidates in local elections...
...Some of the retirees said they had been told the TDUers were trying to destroy the pension fund...
...Continuing corruption scandals, the disappearance and probable murder of Jimmy Hoffa, and the wildfire growth of TDC coincided to exert pressure on the Fitzsimmons regime...
...Local 299, where the dissidents are so strong, happens to be the home local of Frank Fitzsimmons and Jimmy Hoffa, and Fitzsimmons's son, Richard,.sits on the local's executive board...
...In the case of the United Mine Workers, repeated protests and calls for intervention were ignored until the union leadership resorted to murder to eliminate a challenger...
...No one seemed intimidated as some 200 Teamster dissidents from forty-four locals in fifteen states convened September 18 and 19 on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, a place where protesters have been known to get gunned down...
...Transforming the Teamsters JERRY BORNSTEIN "To those who say it is time to reform this organization and it's time the officers stopped selling out the membership of this organization, I say to them, 'Go to Hell.' " — Frank Fitzsimmons, president, International Brotherhood of Teamsters A tape-recorded rendition of Fitzsimmons's menacing words echoed over the public address system and everybody in the amphitheater chuckled...
...In 1969, he pleaded guilty to shaking down employers in exchange for promises of labor peace and paid a $12,000 fine...
...Other resolutions dealt with sex and race discrimination, safety and working conditions, and grievance procedures...
...The fifteen- member steering committee, reflecting the composition of the convention itself, is dominated by younger workers...
...In Tannersville, Pennsylvania, for example, a strong TDU chapter was organized after loading dock workers found a crumpled leaflet advertising a dissident meeting in Sandusky, Ohio, some 450 miles away...
...If they want to protect their pensions, they ought to join up with us and picket the Pressers," said one TDU member...
...In two days of sessions, the reformers passed eleven resolutions, drafted a constitution, and elected a national steering committee...
...By June, the TDC, preparing for the long haul, changed its name to TDU and issued a call for a rank-and-file convention at Kent State to consolidate the loose network of dissidents who had rallied to its banner during the contract fight...
...his son, Jackie, was selected to fill that post...
...Camarata led a two-day wildcat rebellion in Detroit's powerful Local 299 when angry workers demanded the right to vote on the contract settlement before returning to their jobs...
...The biggest commotion at the rank-and-file gathering came when Jackie Presser, a Cleveland Teamster official, arrived with three busloads of retirees, union officials, and other loyalists to protest the protesters...
Vol. 40 • December 1976 • No. 12
