Labor Marches Left, and Trips

...To camouflage the money's ultimate destination, the plan in one instance apparently called for Teamster funds to be contributed to Citizen Action, a left-wing group, which would in turn make a contribution to the Carey campaign, in part by working through yet another channel, a telemarketing firm owned by Michael Ansara, a former Students for a Democratic Society leader...

...Indeed, labor has instilled a measure of fear in Democratic politicians by aggressively attacking incumbents who break ranks on critical issues, trade measures in particular...

...Many of labor's bright new staffers could just as easily pursue their goal of rearranging the American social order through Greenpeace, People for the American Way, or NOW...

...They are also effective at mobilizing human beings— one useful talent learned in their radical youth...

...Here, then, was a classic, if maladroit, money-laundering operation...

...He was one of the best-known radicals at Harvard during the late 1960s and gained notoriety as the organizer of the action in which student radicals cornered and thoroughly menaced Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...

...She did so, but this money, too, was returned, reportedly because the woman was an employer, and employer contributions to union elections are illegal...

...The progressives who increasingly dominate labor staff positions are linked by friendship, marriage, and past causes to other progressives in the labor movement, in activist groups like Citizen Action, in the Democratic party, and in the Clinton administration itself...

...With a more-or-less unified labor movement providing the money and manning the phone banks, this coalition could put real muscle behind the presidential campaign of Dick Gephardt...

...A second pillar of the funding operation involved non-Teamster labor sources...

...Ansara's pedigree is the most intriguing of the three...

...To be sure, John Sweeney made a public point about the direction of new labor by joining Democratic Socialists of America, founded by the late Michael Harrington, a splinter of the old Socialist party...

...In these early projects, Ansara was often joined by another former student radical, Ira Arlook...

...Indeed, a test could come rather soon if Trumka is forced to resign as AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer...

...The great dividing line continued to be foreign policy...

...Whether of the old or the new variety, the Left has treated the institutions of bourgeois society with disdain, including the traditions of organized labor...

...In fact, Ansara was regarded as a "moderate" within SDS...

...Carey's misdeeds, however, are of a different character from the bribery, jury tampering, and racketeering that plagued the pre-reform Teamsters...

...Ansara was something of an anomaly within the New Left in that he not only talked about the importance of "winning over the masses" to the antiwar cause, but actually made a try at recruiting the working class to a left perspective through grass-roots organizing campaigns...

...Party officials reportedly tried hard to accommodate this arrangement...

...In the two years since Sweeney's election, the new leadership's signal achievement has been the transformation of labor's public image...

...Wherever it succeeds, decline, loss of credibility, and internal strife soon follow...

...Furthermore, labor's rebirth was ascribed to the movement's openness to the energy and creative thinking of the political Left...

...They operate not so much as a movement as a network...

...The three are prominent members of the progressive political network: Nash founded Common Cause in Mississippi, while Davis has been involved in numerous liberal-left causes through his direct-mail operation...

...Among New Party officeholders is Barbara Quindel's husband, Roger, a county supervisor in Milwaukee...

...Instead, he aligned himself with a faction known as Revolutionary Youth Movement II, a group that, among other things, advocated a biracial alliance of white radicals and the Black Panthers...

...Indeed, former mineworker staffers filled many of the Teamsters' top administrative positions, a source of resentment among longtime Teamster officials...

...Another figure facing the prospect of criminal prosecution is Rich Trumka, the AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer and the Left's favorite union leader, who has been linked to the money-laundering operation by the consultants...

...Quindel, it turns out, was active in leftist causes in Massachusetts at the same time Ansara and Arlook were involved in their community-organizing projects, and she was later active in insurgent union politics in Detroit...

...Despite a bally-hooed, and quite expensive, campaign to organize the unorganized, labor still suffers from the pre-Sweeney pattern of membership decline in the private sector and only modest gains among public employees...

...Quin-del is today a member of the New Party, a labor-oriented, somewhat radical organization that has had electoral success in several communities...

...Desperate for funds, the Carey campaign made the fateful decision to look outside the union's ranks...

...Until it suffered the taint of the Teamsters case, Citizen Action boasted an impressive record as the organizational center for progressive causes...

...There is no identifiable leftist program for the remaking of the American system beyond a generalized support for an increased role for the state and limits on the power and mobility of capital...

...On the political front, labor failed in 1996 to attain its major objective, the return of the House to Democratic control, despite massive spending and targeted attack ads against vulnerable GOP incumbents...

...The Teamsters were one of the last unions to throw their weight behind the Sweeney insurgency...

...While not always illegal, the involvement of non-members in union elections is regarded as a breach of one of trade unionism's core unwritten rules...

...They went so far as to ask a wealthy Filipino woman, whose contributions to the Clinton campaign were disallowed because of her status as a non-citizen, to give the money to Carey instead...

...Trumka has pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which until recently was cause for automatic expulsion from the federation...

...Most of the information about this scandal has come from the guilty pleas of three consultants to Carey who are said to have masterminded the money-transfer scheme: Jere Nash, Martin Davis, and Michael Ansara...

...While this may be true of Nash, it is certainly not true of the Left generally...

...The generation of student radicals that once heaped scorn on the work ethic has advanced steadily to positions of influence in the universities, the media, and the Democratic party...

...Or if Gephardt failed to catch fire, a more radical alternative, such as Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone...

...Under the leadership of AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney, labor had shed its previous churlishness towards the advocates of radical causes...

...The money, therefore, was given to the AFL-CIO, which in turn made the donation to Citizen Action...

...In his years as president of the Service Employees, he hired many leftists to work as organizers and political operatives, but kept the union squarely within the labor mainstream on issues of institutional importance...

...Carey was elected Teamsters president in 1991, after waging an aggressive reform campaign...

...There is also the question of what, precisely, constitutes the Left's agenda today...

...Public knowledge of the intervention can fatally compromise a union official who benefits from the outside help...

...Trumka's mineworker team eventually gravitated to other labor entities, including the AFL-CIO and, especially, the Teamsters...

...Labor's suspiciousness continued through the 1980s, even as the AFL-CIO moved somewhat to the left, promoting tax-and-spend legislation and government regulation at a time when the Democratic party was moving to the center on domestic issues...

...a Carey endorsement of Donahue might have changed the result and the subsequent direction of the labor movement...

...Yet a strange phenomenon seems to accompany the Left on its journey to power...

...They were especially furious that Quindel postponed her decision to void Carey's victory until after the Teamsters had won the UPS strike...

...As the story of the Carey funding scheme has unfolded, some on the left have made semi-hysterical predictions that the affair will lead to the collapse of the project of recasting labor along more openly progressive lines...

...Already, Citizen Action has closed its national headquarters because of a fund shortage that resulted directly from the Teamsters scandal...

...The feeling was mutual: Labor leaders like Meany and Kirkland regarded the New Left as an enemy and worked assiduously to keep leftists out of the labor movement and to reduce their influence within the Democratic party...

...The new labor movement was younger, less white and male, more militant, and eager for audacious experiments...

...Until last week, when a federal monitor barred Ron Carey from seeking reelection as president of the Teamsters, the revival of the trade-union movement was regarded as the most exciting development on the liberal-left in years...

...The history of labor's relations with the Left follows a distinct pattern, in which radicals bring vitality and creative energy in the short term, but inevitably demand that labor adopt an adversarial stance towards the American system...

...Sweeney himself is guarded, even sphinx-like, in his pronouncements...

...Notable here is the corporate campaign, which entails a public-relations offensive to embarrass an employer, its directors, or large institutional investors...

...According to the Conboy report, Carey determined that, having already given $475,000 to Citizen Action, he could not justify an additional $150,000 contribution...

...Carey reportedly agreed to make a large contribution from the Teamster treasury to the Democratic National Committee and the 1996 Clinton campaign, in return for a contribution to his own election campaign...

...Ron Carey faces the possibility of indictment...

...For an official of one union to involve himself in the election of another union is tantamount to a country's interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign state...

...Is a similar fate in store for organized labor...

...Generally, however, today's labor progressives spurn identification with various left-wingery...

...In 1996, he was challenged for the presidency by James P. Hoffa, the son of the late, legendary leader and a much more imposing figure than other potential challengers among the Teamster old guard...

...Eventually, $100,000 of the money found its way back to Carey, while the rest remained in the bank accounts of Citizen Action and Ansara's telemarketing firm...

...The collapse of communism has removed the albatross of anti-Americanism from the Left's shoulders...

...The record of subsequent years is not unimpressive...

...But in the new configuration, the Left has achieved a position of influence it hasn't enjoyed since the Popular Front era, when Communists controlled a number of unions and were a formidable presence in many others...

...In addition, officials from other unions raised money for Carey...

...The group is said to have spent $7 million towards the defeat of congressional Republicans last year, a huge sum for a relatively unknown organization...

...He never went underground or advocated the mindless violence favored by the Weathermen...

...First, the Teamsters began to play a more active role in the AFL-CIO, from which the union had been expelled in 1957...

...The end of the Cold War thus removed an important obstacle from the Left's path...

...It is to the cause, not the institution, that the Left attaches its loyalties...

...But the new generation of labor leadership has fewer scruples in this area: Leaders of two of the AFL-CIO's largest affiliates, Gerald McEntee of the State, County, and Municipal Employees and Andy Stern of the Service Employees, were both named as having raised money for Carey...

...Hoffa's people claimed that Quindel and her monitor staff—drawn, for the most part, from leftist circles—consistently favored Carey, who won only narrowly in 1996...

...Second, the Republican party was deprived of its only significant labor beachhead...

...Arlook, Ansara, and other leftists whose names have surfaced in the course of the Teamster investigation can no longer be said to occupy the political margins...

...Ansara also worked for Ramparts magazine, where his major project was a massive and ineptly argued study of the CIA, never published...

...Where the Teamsters had often supported GOP candidates under Jimmy Hoffa, Roy Williams, and Jackie Presser, Carey guided the union towards endorsements of Democratic candidates, and he gave money and volunteers to the Clinton campaign and Democratic efforts to regain control of Congress...

...Trumka was elected to the labor federation's number-two position after serving as a reform president of the Mineworkers, where he established a reputation for militancy and for his tough, smart, and very left-wing staff...

...He was executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy...

...Old-line unionists like Meany and Kirkland would never have involved themselves in another union's internal affairs, no matter how seriously they regarded the outcome...

...In his guilty plea, Jere Nash asserted that, until his involvement in the Carey campaign, he had followed a code of political ethics in which the concept that the ends justify the means played no part...

...Quindel removed herself from the Teamsters case this past September, after her ties to the New Party were revealed, and she was replaced by Kenneth Conboy, who issued last week's report disqualifying Carey...

...Finally, there was an abortive attempt to raise money for Carey through the Democratic party...

...The Left has also benefited from the disintegration of the sectarian organizations that once dominated progressive politics...

...His first vehicle was an organization called People First, which he ran out of Dorchester, a working-class community to which he moved after Harvard...

...On the other hand, the loss of the Teamsters, coupled with a possible change of leadership in the Laborers' Union, where President Arthur Coia, a Sweeney supporter, is under federal pressure to step down, could affect the balance of power in any future internal struggle...

...The Teamsters scandal has now placed the image of a reborn trade unionism in jeopardy...

...There is no reason to doubt that the pattern will repeat itself...

...According to the report of Kenneth Conboy, the federal monitor who issued the judgment against Carey, an elaborate plan was concocted in which funds from various sources were to be funneled to the Carey campaign through circuitous, and in some cases illegal, channels...

...In that contest, Sweeney was evenly matched with the federation's secretary-treasurer, Thomas R. Donahue...

...To take just one example, Karen Nussbaum, head of the newly created Women's Department of the AFL-CIO, is married to Ira Arlook...

...Last, and most important, Carey was instrumental in ensuring Sweeney's election as AFL-CIO president in 1995...

...Yet in the wake of the defeat of fast-track trade authority, labor's clout with congressional Democrats has seldom been higher...

...They have matured into skilled political technicians who are adept in the use of the latest developments in telemarketing, vote targeting, polling, advertising, and other modern electioneering techniques...

...Arlook's name has figured prominently in the Teamster scandals because of his role as director of Citizen Action, the organization at the center of the money-laundering operation...

...Within the Democratic party, labor was the sole organized voice for a hawkish foreign policy...

...It was readmitted in 1988...

...Despite his popularity with the AFL-CIO leadership, Carey was unable to consolidate control of his own union...

...From the point of view of trade-union tradition and federal law, this is the most serious allegation: the transfer of Teamster funds—union-dues money, in other words— to Carey's campaign...

...If the Left has an overarching objective, it would seem to be at the level of political strategy, where it is working to forge an organic link between the unions, the activist community, and the liberal wing of the Democratic party, forestalling the party's complete Clintonization...

...He may follow a similar course as AFL-CIO chief...

...At the same time, labor has stepped up the use of unorthodox tactics to win concessions from employers...

...Understandably enough, Quindel's history did not inspire confidence in the fairness of the federal election-monitoring process...

...New Leftists like Ansara and Arlook once regarded the labor movement as a retrograde institution, a rest home for incompetent white men, a bulwark of the Cold War...

...His problems reflect the theme—all too familiar in recent Washington histo-ry—that if a crime was committed, it was for the good of humanity...

...Marxists, the proponents of identity politics, third-party champions, environmentalists, the veterans of pro-Sandinista campaigns—all were kept at bay by Sweeney's predecessors, George Meany and Lane Kirkland...

...The long march, it turns out, often leads to a dead end...

...During a two-week period in the fall of 1996, according to the report, nearly $900,000 in political contributions went from the Teamsters' general fund to various cause organizations, all as part of the Carey campaign's money-swap scheme...

...Clearly, there will be casualties before the case is finished...

...Federal monitoring of Teamster affairs had turned the union into a paragon of internal democracy, and as the election date approached, Carey received soundings from the field indicating that victory was by no means assured...

...Those involved range from top labor officials to the upper echelons of the Democratic party to the powerbrokers of the political Left...

...A number of unions have given contributions to the New Party, including, it is reported, the Teamsters...

...To the public, Arch Puddington works for Freedom House in New York...

...Although the direction taken by labor since Sweeney's election has its detractors, most trade unionists seem willing to continue in it, especially with labor now the single most influential force within the Democratic party...

...Today, unionism's foreign-policy objectives center on trade protectionism and the restriction of multinational corporations, not on the trials of unions in Poland or Latin America...

...Although fissures had developed within labor over Central America, labor continued to support an anti-Soviet policy and a robust defense...

...His ascendancy was to have widespread repercussions...

...the case, with its revelations of money laundering and fraud, may suggest that the new labor movement is not much different from the old one...

...But it is unlikely that the current troubles will divert labor from its present course...

...One interesting member of the network is Barbara Zack Quindel, the woman who served as the first federal monitor in the Teamster election...

...People First later metastasized into Massachusetts Fair Share, a grass-roots operation that concentrated on issues like utility rates and rent control...

...In Carey's case, outside intervention entailed a scheme to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to his election coffers...

...But if the past is any guide, serious problems are certain to emerge in the labor-left alliance over the long haul...

...On more substantive matters, however, the record is mixed...