Teamsters Union Singing a Tune of Glasnost These Days

The 1.6-million-member Teamsters Union is going through a series of wrenching changes that are comparable in some ways to the social and political upheaval taking place in the Soviet Union.

For the first time in nearly 40 years, rank and file dissent is widespread and leaders of the nation’s largest union at all levels are beginning to talk openly of the disagreements.

These are two of several clearly visible signs of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), the phenomena that are shaking the Teamsters as they are, on a far grander scale, the Soviets.

It is too soon say with any certainty that the encouraging changes in the Teamsters Union, or the Soviet Union, will be either fundamental or permanent. Nevertheless, those that have already occurred have immense potential.

And it is high time that the union reforms itself.

The Teamsters Union has been investigated more intensively than any other union in American history. Formed 89 years ago, its past has been marked with secrecy, nepotism and violence.

Outsiders, disgusted with the connection between some top Teamster officials and organized crime, have tried for years to break those ties--without success.

Among the many powerful outside, would-be Teamster reformers were President John F. Kennedy and his brother, the crusading Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a host of Senate investigators, the late AFL-CIO President George Meany, backed by the vast majority of the nation’s other unions, and legions of local and federal grand juries.

The connection between several top officers of the Teamsters Union and organized crime was the key reason for the enactment in the late 1950s of federal laws that restrict, unfortunately, the freedoms of all unions.

The Teamster-mob linkage led to the ouster of the union from the AFL-CIO in 1957, although the federation finally gave up that tactic and readmitted the union last year.

Its current president, the apparently terminally ill Jackie Presser, has been indicted on charges of fraud and embezzlement. Three of its past presidents have been imprisoned. Hundreds of its lower-echelon officials also have been sent to jail.

All the same, evidence continues to surface that there are still some Teamster connections with mobsters.

In 1985, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime declared it to be under the influence of the underworld.

The Reagan Administration had planned a particularly stupid way to deal with the Teamsters, which has supported President Reagan since his first presidential campaign.

In a move more appropriate for a totalitarian country than a democracy, the Administration planned to take over the entire union. It would have swept under a government-run trusteeship all of the union’s vast membership and the many honest officers, along with the few allegedly linked to mobsters.

That ham-handed plan has now been dumped as unfeasible, and nobody seems to know exactly what the Administration will do next with its new-found zeal to clean up the union that was Reagan’s only major supporter in organized labor.

But it seems that nature and forces inside the union are having a real impact.

Presser, 61, who officially is only on a leave of absence, has just undergone one brain cancer operation and may need more brain surgery. He also had a cancerous tumor on his lung removed recently.

With such severe medical problems, he almost surely is not going to resume the presidency, even if he ever gets well enough to go on trial and convinces a jury he is innocent of the charges against him.

Weldon Mathis, 62, the bright, soft-spoken, acting president and Presser’s presumed successor, is in good health. In his 30 years with the union, he has never been connected by any law enforcement agency with organized crime, an important distinction between him and the union presidents since 1952. The clear indication that Mathis will be the next top officer of the Teamsters is one harbinger of substantive change in the union.

Another is the recent overwhelming membership vote against the union’s single most important contract, the master freight agreement with the nation’s trucking industry.

The top officers declared that the pact had been approved even though it was rejected by 64% of those voting. It was the first time a pact approved by the executive board has ever been turned down by a majority of the members.

However, an undemocratic provision in the union constitution requires a two-thirds majority to reject a contract, so it was signed. The dissident Teamsters for a Democratic Union has filed a lawsuit to overturn the two-thirds rule and set aside the agreement.

The 21-member executive board, including Mathis, rejected the first master freight agreement, negotiated primarily by Jack B. Yager, who substituted for the ailing Presser as chief union negotiator.

When Yager came back with another agreement after further bargaining with management, Mathis and a majority of the other board members were said to be unhappy about it but felt they had no alternative but to accept it and ask for membership approval.

That move by Mathis, even if logical, undermined his credibility as a reformer. But he insists that the union constitution allowed him no legal alternative.

Presumably, he could have forced another round of bargaining with management, but he probably felt that it would have been fruitless because management knew it was in a good bargaining position, since it would be hard to get the needed two-thirds vote.

Equally indicative of the changing nature of the union is the fact more than 30% of the local-level leaders opposed the contract, leaders who traditionally almost automatically accepted decisions by the top officers.

Another sign of glasnost : By a 54%-to-46% margin, the Teamsters voted against a contract with United Parcel Service. But it, too, was declared valid by the international union officers because opponents didn’t muster the necessary two-thirds majority. That contract is also being challenged in the courts.

Also rare is the open feuding going on among members of the international executive board itself, the supreme governing body of the union between conventions, which are held only once every five years.

Differences at the top became apparent when some of the executive council members opposed the trucking industry contract, some say just to undermine Mathis.

Even more dramatic was the fact that eight of the executive members didn’t show up for a special board meeting May 16 to discuss the implication of Presser’s request for medical leave.

Some let it be known that they were boycotting the session to show increasing dissatisfaction with Mathis.

There was no public explanation of the arguments among the top officials, but presumably they reflect a power struggle for dominance in the giant union.

Nevertheless, while the fight is being waged largely in secret despite the signs of glasnost , several sources insist that Mathis already has enough support on the executive board to be chosen to head the union when Presser leaves the post.

There also has been a revolutionary shift in the politics of the union.

Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the giant union has usually supported Republicans for president, and it has not endorsed any Democratic presidential candidate for the past 20 years.

This year, as an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, it will endorse the Democratic nominee, who almost certainly will be Michael S. Dukakis.

The political shift is not due to the influence of the AFL-CIO. Reagan’s repeated anti-union actions and appointments were largely responsible, and it’s probably too late for any teamster to get presidential help in criminal cases, which seemed to happen under both Nixon and Reagan.

Mathis has denounced the Reagan Administration on several occasions, most recently in a bitter criticism of the president for his “uncaring and wrong” veto of the omnibus trade reform bill because the president didn’t like a modest provision that would have required many employers to give workers a 60-day notice of a plant closure or massive layoff.

The importance of the revolution inside the Teamsters is perhaps best gauged by Ken Paff, an insider and constant critic who has been leading a small reform movement for more than a decade.

Paff, national organizer for the Detroit-based Teamsters for a Democratic Union, was scornful about the apparently clean record of Mathis, saying that if Mathis did not know about criminal influences in the union “he had to have deliberately looked the other way or have been too stupid to notice.

“But Mathis does present a respectable image and he is articulate. We are encouraged,” Paff said. “It certainly looks as if things have loosened up and gains are being made at the local level.”

The militant reformer added that “we are especially encouraged by the overwhelming vote against the trucking industry contract because, as we in TDU have preached for years, real changes must come from the rank and file.”

With some notable exceptions, the union has won reasonably good wages and job conditions for many workers. If its mob ties are really are severed, and the honest men and women who make up the bulk of the union’s leadership around the country take over, glasnost and perestroika can make it not only the largest but one of the best unions in the country.