REBEL TEAMSTERS

...The new leader of the largest union in the Western world, it seems, hired a nonunion firm to do a $30,000 paint job on the outbuildings and fences of his 350-acre Missouri farm...

...So under this onslaught, Teamster leaders tell the rank and file, please don't expect much from the new contract...

...Dozens of companies have refused to pay contract-mandated cost-of-living raises...

...The Master Freight covers some 300,000 Teamsters and serves as a model for scores of tandem contracts governing thousands more...

...It's all shining chrome on the outside, rust underneath," says Frank Greco, a New Jersey truck driver and a long-time rebel in TDU...

...They talk first of unenforced contracts, insulting new productivity pushes, and steady erosion of their hard-won job security...

...But eventually PROD squared off with the union establishment over corruption, sellout contracts, and pension ripoffs...

...My union brothers," the President said, "I hope to be in team with the Teamsters, and with all of America's working men and women pulling for a more prosperous America...

...With about 8,000 dues-paying members across the country, TDU is well-organized but small...

...But then Jones's parent corporation promptly put the company—and its 2,800 employes—out of business...

...In one workshop, TDU staff member Rob Fram took on a member who was arguing for strikes to combat the "voluntary loans...

...the union, in the spirit of emergency, may agree to an even earlier date...

...The union officials see themselves as bosses...

...The rebels battle the brutal machine he built, but they do what they can to regain the militant spirit he represented, a spirit that even many Teamsters who have little time for TDU sense has waned...

...Fold in the current momentum of employers against labor generally and the result is frightening for Teamsters...

...The delegates rubberstamped the leadership's program in Las Vegas, however, and spent much of the convention denouncing TDU...

...They're all being conciliatory to the employer," says Larry Kudla, a thirty-year-old cement truck driver from Queens, New York...

...TDU favors an industry-wide hiring hall approach to the layoff problem: the mandatory use by employers of a master list of Teamsters out of work before hiring from the street could take place...

...With a Manhattan construction boom on, there is plenty of work in Local 282, where the Kudlas drive...

...TDU was brought to life in Cleveland, by working reformers and some young militants who wanted a national organization to unite several strands of Teamster discontent...

...Most members were older men—young drivers seemed less conscious of safety and health, and less aware of the cost to the body of long hours behind the wheel—and PROD was generally more conservative than TDU...

...I've got a dog at home that does a lot of tricks, but I can't get it to play dead," one speaker bellowed in Detroit...

...Initially strongest among dock and warehouse workers and carhaulers, the rebel organization merged in 1979 with the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), a group that had grown out of a 1971 Ralph Nader conference on truck safety...

...Dozens of unionized mid-size firms, like Jones, have closed down...

...Business is awful in Local 247 in Detroit, where Dave Wolfinsohn hauls cement, but still he agrees...

...Williams had been indicted just before the Las Vegas convention began, and the day it adjourned the Kansas City newspapers published an interesting story about him...

...They may not give in to industry demands for wage rollbacks, but they may have to take seriously employer insistence on reductions in cost-of-living increases and changes in work rules...

...Even in the Teamsters labor people know better than most that determined movements can start from something small...

...The house went dark and the answer appeared on a monumental screen overhead...

...one day and 3 p.m...

...It is no fault of the Teamsters, of course, that the trucking industry is undergoing trauma, nor have the rebels of TDU articulated the perfect union response...

...Neither do they allow for any slack when all employes are working at full capacity...

...A steering committee of Teamsters from across the country sets policy, and the full membership votes on major positions at conventions...

...The backbone of the union, freight industry workers covered by Jimmy Hoffa's National Master Freight Agreement, have almost kept up with inflation in the last ten Michael Hoyt, a free-lance writer living in New York City, specializes in labor news...

...In job security, for example, the dissidents called on the union to move against the growth in the number of "double-breasted" companies, those that open nonunion divisions and then see to the slow shrinkage of the union side...

...Thousands of workers in a number of industries, including the rolling sweatshop of trucking, rolled into the middle class...

...TDU has also demanded union action against another threatening trend, the hiring of part-time workers, or "casuals," while full-time Teamsters are out of work...

...Moments later, they voted down a cost-of-living adjustment for forty-five-dollar-a-week strikers, though the "yes" vote for the motion was loud enough to show that the hypocrisy was lost on few of the conventioneers...

...The old actor did it on film...

...The dissidents soon moved to a second-floor office above a drugstore in Detroit, sank roots deep into the city's tradition of strong unionism and rebellion, and began to grow...

...Even some healthy firms are exploiting the crisis to force down wages and fiddle with work rules to gain advantage in an ever meaner contest for business...

...To the rebels in TDU, though, these deals and givebacks will not do the job...

...Beck, who is in his eighties, gave the only fiery speech of the week, urging the delegates to "consecrate themselves to the cause of labor...

...Despite the arrival on the trucking scene of many new small firms, deregulation has hastened a trend toward greater concentration in the industry...

...The flexible week can simply mean weekend work for straight pay...

...Now the trucking industry is in chaos...

...At the outset, PROD's intention had been to work from within the union and to "prod" the government to adopt stiffer safety rules and enforce them...

...Teamsters fear a further splitting of the Master Freight Agreement...

...REBEL TEAMSTERS Fighting to reclaim 'Reagan's kind of union9 BY MICHAEL HOYT Everyone at the Teamster convention in Las Vegas last summer wondered how Ronald Reagan would do it—acknowledge his debt to the union, which had endorsed his Presidential candidacy, yet not appear too close to its new leader, Roy Williams, so freshly indicted for trying to bribe a Senator...

...The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 liberalized route restrictions for existing haulers and made it easier for newcomers to get: into trucking—all in the name of increased competition...

...Some guys even call them boss...

...New, small, mostly nonunion operations have sprouted up at almost double the pre-deregulation rate, while the handful of very large carriers that dominate the business have rapidly expanded the territories they cover...

...years, now earning up to twelve dollars and change an hour...

...They'd break your heart...

...They just won't roll over and play dead...

...His work has appeared in The American Lawyer, In These Times, and New Jersey Monthly...

...We haven't made any new jobs...

...Some 100,000 Teamsters, a good fifth of the union's general trucking membership, are laid off...

...It can mean a shift starts at 8 a.m...

...They believe the comfortable and cynical old men who run their union now cannot win for them anymore...

...The presumably murdered leader's name was mentioned just once at the Las Vegas convention—to far louder cheers than Ronald Reagan's— by his predecessor, Dave Beck...

...And with chronically depressed conditions in such major shipping industry sectors as construction, auto manufacturing, steel—and, of course, with a general recession settling in—there is less of a shrinking pie to share, least of all with workers, newly vulnerable in the tabulations of cost-cutters these days...

...Well, TDU Teamsters are like my dog...

...Besides granting relief to troubled companies, the Teamsters have tried to cut deals to ease the trucking crisis...

...But construction in Detroit is still down 60 per cent," he said...

...They raised Roy Williams's salary to $225,000 plus expenses and attached a full cost-of-living adjustment clause to shelter him from the ravages of inflation...

...that only an active, educated, and militant rank and file can do the job...

...All of this benefits the employer, but tends to wreck the worker's home life—and weaken his union...

...It has framed a lasting debate on union governance, a debate that all of labor, desperate for its bearings these days, keeps an eye on...

...All we've done is transfer what jobs there are from high wage and good condition jobs to low wage and bad condition jobs...

...But it was easier in the past, in a comfortably regulated industry that hauled for an expanding economy...

...Jimmy Hoffa first won the national contract in 1964 and tried to widen and strengthen it in succeeding negotiations with shippers, always hewing hard to a belief that every low-paid segment of the trucking industry was a potential wedge for employers eager to keep the others down...

...They talked union in workshops on such things as the National Master Freight Agreement, pensions, grievance procedure problems, anti-union harassment and red-baiting (a special hazard of TDU membership), legal rights, and campaigning for local office—the road the organization hopes to take to power...

...Williams has talked of a "two-tier" contract, with Teamsters at marginal firms earning less than those at the profitable giants...

...The "flexible work week," for example—which some employers already have implemented and more want— means different things under different contracts, but basically ties an employe's schedule to the volume of available work...

...With the Teamsters leading off an important round of national labor bargaining in 1982, internal union issues come into especially sharp focus...

...As far as it goes, this "pork chop" unionism has worked fairly well for three decades...

...The most militant action taken by the most militant people is to file a grievance when an employer asks for individual relief...

...In many cases, it obviously is...

...The Las Vegas convention was followed by a smaller one in the fall, held in Detroit by dissidents who are a warning signal of some members' discontent...

...But it is clear that the Teamsters' cutting edge, the Master Freight agreement, is going to be dulled...

...We've just substituted bad jobs for good ones...

...Hoffa's memory divides the Teamster heart, including TDU's, whose members fight for and against the man's legacies...

...These are frightened people and they are not going to strike...

...They closed with 500 Teamsters, in denim, polyester, tweed, and leather, singing "Solidarity Forever," a startling sight in this era of labor retrenchment, Jf...

...Without such resistance to assaults on their union, say the dissidents, trucking firms would be free to pour profits reaped from givebacks into nonunion or part-time work, or into the rate wars that no one can stop...

...The strong will become stronger and the weak shall not prevail," says a trucking industry analyst for a Cleveland investment firm...

...Roy Williams's 1981 indictment (the fourth in an illustrious career) was for allegedly doing something for the membership—trying to bribe Senator Howard W. Cannon of Nevada to block the deregulation law...

...He shook his fist and pounded the podium just a few yards from Salvatore Provenzano, brother of Tony "Pro," the man suspected of ordering Hoffa's death, and a symbol of the Mafia corruption festering in the union today...

...A Cleveland short-haul driver took it further: "If we give up everything to these small companies we're going to end up working for the big companies for nothing...

...Twenty years ago, as soon as he assumed the Teamster presidency, Hoffa tinkered with the union's wiring—its constitution...

...The nonunion workers let a sandblasting machine overheat, and Williams's fences and half his farm burned down...

...Each governing level was made accountable to the top— Hoffa—and democracy became, suddenly, little more than an illusion except in isolated locals...

...It seems we should get down and kiss the employer's knees for providing us with a job, when the point is that without us getting up at five in the morning and turning the key in the truck, there's no place for that employer...

...To some they are the strategies of men who have come to think more like employers than the stewards of working people...

...The contract, however, has been compromised in recent years with special riders and exceptions—and some outright sweetheart deals...

...The biggest problem here is local unions competing with each other, undercutting each other with special riders and deals and sweethearts to get the work," Wolfinsohn said in a TDU convention workshop...

...Teamsters fear that the worst Master Freight agreement in memory will soon be signed, taking effect in April...

...To working Teamsters these rules are not abstractions...

...It's difficult for the worker to know if the boss's familiar cry of pain is real...

...Such listings naturally fail to differentiate between a strong twenty-two-year-old and a weak fifty-four-year-old...

...Bosses," says Kudla's craggy-faced father, Walter, a Teamster for thirty-nine years...

...There is always a bottom of such a list, even when a shift is working at a superhuman pace...

...many agreed, however, that this was not a line of thought that Teamsters whose jobs were on the line would be quick to follow...

...The Teamsters finally slowed that practice in September, when, through a grievance procedure, a wage-cut plan was rescinded at Jones Motor, a medium-sized trucking firm based in Spring City, Pennsylvania...

...To date, the union's only visible benefit for endorsing Reagan has been the appointment of an anti-deregulation attorney, Reese Taylor of Nevada, to head the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC...

...the next...

...The leaders of the Teamsters run Reagan's kind of union: content with the role of junior partner to the corporations, devoid of a social vision, isolated from the rest of labor, and not burdened by an active rank and file that can make it hard to cut the sort of deals the leadership says the times demand...

...You're talking about a disaster," Fram said...

...You should have seen some of the letters we'd get from guys screwed out of their pensions," said a former PROD staffer...

...In the case of truckers it can mean off-time that's not truly the driver's own—he must "babysit the phone," as truckers put it, or risk losing work...

...The strategies that seemed to emerge at the TDU convention called for unified negotiations with the freight industry, rather than individual deals made firm by firm...

...So far, rates have done what the law intended: Shippers are competing with discounts as high as 30 per cent...

...In such a climate, labor costs naturally figure as a key variable...

...TDU does not think small: the idea is to build a rank-and-file movement within the union that will someday have what it takes to meet and reverse the power flowing from the old men at the top, an almost dictatorial power that is the legacy of that old ghost of an enigma, Jimmy Hoffa...

...Taylor has taken some steps to slow the pace of new company and route approvals...

...Many weaker, generally middle-sized companies are going out of business...

...People in these situations are talking about running and hiding, giving up everything to keep their jobs, even decertifying the union...

...Worse, more than 100 firms have tried to negotiate "voluntary loans"—as much as 21 per cent of the weekly check— not through the union but with individual employes...

...The delegates gave the flickering image a standing ovation as it faded from the screen, and spent the next five days crushing reform moves by day and partying at night in casinos built with loans from the members' pension fund...

...Teamsters for a Democratic Union, or TDU, as these reformers call their organization, are troubled by the awesome corruption in their union, to be sure, but corruption is not the main topic when they gather...

...TDU, by contrast, met like old-time tent revivalists in Detroit, planning and passing the hat for the cause...

...Still, TDU members say bad times call for creativity and holding actions, not a wholesale retreat from principled unionism...

...It has not set 1.9 million Teamsters on fire, but neither has it died like the fragmented Teamster reform organizations of the past, nor unraveled into the individual strands of Teamster anger that make it up...

...The sense of the TDU convention was that in the long run, relief and givebacks for marginal firms would not save jobs...

...Teamsters are apprehensive of the spread of other management practices that put them on a productivity treadmill—the use, for example, of lists ranking worker production, to harass those toward the bottom...

...The bargaining momentum has, of late, been on the side of employers and the trend will continue under Roy Williams in the current trucking crisis, a crisis that springs from more than one source: Deregulation has led to murderous competition for what business there is after a three-year slump in shipments in a weakening economy has left much less to fight over...

...In six years—more if you count its gestation period—TDU has gained a foothold in the country's largest union and continued a struggle that a somewhat restive membership can ignore only with effort...