Runs Largest Local in Colorado : Woman Teamster Chief Works for Reform

The young woman in jeans, tennis shoes and the vest with “TEAMSTER” on the back was oblivious to the stares she attracted in the bar where most patrons were dressed in tweeds and silk.

“When it becomes just a job, I’ll quit,” said Linda Gregg, her voice rising above the buzz of lunch-time conversation. “Once it stops being a crusade, it’s over as far as I’m concerned. It’s too hard.”

A few heads turn. There is faint recognition. Perhaps some had seen the newspaper photographs of her walking picket lines in Denver.

Gregg, 31, is secretary-treasurer of Local 435 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. That makes her the most powerful trucker in Colorado, representing 4,200 dues-paying members of the largest Teamsters local in the state.

Her motto is: “Don’t Mourn, ORGANIZE.” She developed that creed while working in factories and warehouses, through seven years of Teamsters membership and two bitterly fought campaigns for election to her office.

She has bucked Teamsters International President Jackie Presser throughout her tenure and she is one of the most visible members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a Detroit-based movement to reform the 1.6 million-member union.

Internal Watchdog Group

TDU claims about 50 chapters with a nationwide dues-paying membership of about 8,000. It bills itself as a watchdog organization aiming to revise the way Teamster leaders are chosen. It also wants more clout for the rank and file and wants to rid the Teamsters of any criminal elements.

At the Teamsters’ convention last May, Gregg was one of 24 --out of 2,000 delegates--who voted against Presser’s reelection.

“I think my reputation in the union is as a reformer, a dissident, a fighter,” she said. “I guess that reputation preceded me at the convention. Throughout the meeting, as people got to know me, they’d say things like ‘You’re not as bad as I thought’ and ‘Gee, I thought you’d look more like a witch.’ ”

Linda Gregg is sometimes bemused by her effect on people, especially opponents in the union and business negotiators across the bargaining table.

“I am a female, single-parent forklift driver with a magna cum laude degree from Duke University. I am also head of a Teamsters local. I do not fit the stereotype.”

Eyes Opened at Duke

For the first two-thirds of her life, there wasn’t much to indicate a future as a labor leader. The oldest of four children, Gregg came from what she calls a “somewhat conservative, mainstream Republican” family. Her father was an investment counselor; her mother was a schoolteacher. Born in New Orleans, she moved with her family to Connecticut when she was 15.

She earned top grades and showed athletic prowess through high school--basketball remains more a passion than a hobby. She chose Duke, at Durham, N.C., for its pre-med program, but soon switched to political science.

“It was at this wealthy, Establishment university in the heart of a poor city with a big black population that I began to realize what was happening around me,” she recalls. “I’d been sheltered, but I woke up to the real world there, and realized that working people have to gain dignity and good benefits for themselves. Nobody’s going to hand it to them.”

She got a part-time job as a dishwasher in a nursing home. Her first taste of organizing came with a unionizing effort at a Durham hospital.

“The workers were poorly paid and had no good benefits, and I felt I had to get involved. A teacher said, ‘If you want change, do something.’ ”

That first experience redirected her life.

“I discovered that what I’d been trained for was to work for a big corporation, but I didn’t want to do that any longer,” Gregg said. “Instead, I went to work for a non-union factory, making steel doors, in conditions which were absolutely horrible.

“I started a reform committee there, but the turnover was high, there were a lot of transient workers. My solution was to organize, but the committee changed from week to week. Soon I left too.”

Joined Rubber Workers

Her first unionized employer was a rubber factory in Denver. There, she joined the United Rubber Workers and had a job making “chicken fingers” used to pluck chickens and “hog paddles,” which are used to scrape the hair off pig hides.

She joined the Coalition for Labor Union Women and started speaking at meetings.

Gregg lost her factory job in a layoff, but got another driving a forklift on the night shift at a food warehouse. It was 1980. She joined the TDU and met her husband, a former Teamsters official, walking a picket line. They have a son, now 4 years old, but the marriage has ended in divorce.

From the time she joined the Teamsters, Gregg said, she was an outspoken critic of Local 435’s leadership.

“There was an atmosphere of stifling dissent, and members felt too many deals were being cut. There was an air of confusion and uncertainty.”

When no one stood to run against the incumbent secretary-treasurer, a slender strawberry blonde with pale blue eyes stepped forward.

“Although my union is 95% men, the fact that I was a woman didn’t seem to be the issue. Reform was,” she said.

The final tally was 744 to 697. Gregg had an underwhelming mandate of 47 votes.

First Election Challenged

She was sworn in in January, 1985, but her opponent challenged the election. A regional union review board denied his protest, but Teamster International headquarters in Washington sided with the incumbent and ordered a new election.

The second time, Gregg won by 308 votes.

And, unlike the first time around, the whole slate of reform candidates sailed into office with her.

“The old administration was in an ivory tower, and what the secretary-treasurer said was the way it was. There was no rank-and-file input,” said Ed Vialpando, a 17-year veteran of Local 435. “The old Teamster image was a guy with a beer in one hand and cigar in the other, telling us what to do.

“Linda has brought democracy to the union, she has opened up the lines of communication. She goes to the members, and now the members make the decisions and she executes them.”

Gregg said she believes the Teamsters’ executive board and Presser, “made a mistake when they made me run again. The rank-and-file members were very upset at the international union leadership for stepping in and overturning what we all saw as a democratic election. I think the interference backfired.”

Gregg has become a high-profile, often-quoted spokeswoman for organized labor. Recently in Colorado, a grocery store chain filed for bankruptcy and left 208 Teamsters out of work. Gregg is fighting for a new contract to protect those union members, whose average age is 46, if the company is sold.

Example of Job Loss

“Collectively, those people who work out there at the grocery warehouse cover 3,000 years of service and experience,” said Gregg. “There are a lot of people out of work who would gladly replace current workers. It looks bleak for the future.”

Gregg’s first term in the $37,000-a-year secretary-treasurer post ends next December. She says six-day weeks and 12-hour days come with the job, but she keeps vowing to learn to balance her time between work and her son, Brian.

“I’ve even been to a couple of Denver Nuggets basketball games this year,” she said proudly.

She keeps several changes of clothes in her small office, since a day’s schedule could take her from picket line to bargaining table to the governor’s mansion.

She runs the local from an executive-type chair that her predecessor purchased for $800. On the matching, oversized desk is a coffee mug given to her on her first day on the job. On it is the motto: “They’ve found something that does the work of five men--one woman.”

An old photo of former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa is on the wall, and the bookcase is crammed with trophies awarded to various Teamster athletic teams. Otherwise, there are no frills.

Set Up Strike Fund

Gregg has initiated several programs for the local. One of her first acts was to establish, with membership approval, a strike fund. She also set up a food bank to help Teamster families temporarily without income.

Local 435 now routinely sends out questionnaires on membership needs, and has increased the number of meetings and labor rallies.

Vialpando, one of the 208 grocery workers who lost their jobs, said that Gregg also is leading Local 435 toward closer relations with other unions, in order to forge a united labor front.

“In the past, we only had one weapon, and that was the strike,” Vialpando said. “Now we can fight management on its own terms by utilizing their tools --community support, the media, the law. Linda Gregg understands that, and she is teaching us how to do it.”

Jack I. Moore, director of labor relations for the nonprofit, Denver-based Mountain States Employers Council, disagrees. As one of eight negotiators for the council, which represents about 1,000 dues-paying companies, he has faced Gregg across the bargaining table. He said that her approach to bargaining has frequently been “strike first and think about it later.”

“I’ve spent a lot of hours with her, and from our standpoint, we have not been totally displeased about having her across the bargaining table,” Moore said. “We found her to be inexperienced and not seemingly always working in the best interest of her membership.”

“Once in a while, I get discouraged because this job is very hard,” Gregg said. “Usually those thoughts come in the middle of the night as I pore over a briefcase of paper work, or after I’ve had an anonymous phone call.

“I try to step back and think why I’m doing it. If it is to save someone’s job who was unjustly fired, I remember why. This is my crusade. I know it’s all worth it.”