Teamster Deal: Poor Solution

The formula that the Justice Department has proposed for settling its ambitious racketeering lawsuit against the Teamsters Union is inadequate. In its attempt to rid the nation’s largest union of corruption without a costly and time-consuming trial, the Justice Department is both going too far and not far enough. The likely result is that the Teamsters, whose documented ties to organized crime have made it practically a subsidiary of La Cosa Nostra, will once again elude real reform.

In its original complaint last June the Justice Department sought to oust the Teamsters’ entire governing board and to place the union under court trusteeship until free elections could be held. The suit, based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), was a last-gasp effort to achieve in civil court what the Justice Department had failed to achieve by prosecuting dozens of Teamster leaders and their allies in the mob. But the spectacle of the federal government’s moving to take over an entire union, even one as tainted as the Teamsters, alarmed other labor leaders and inspired demands from 250 members of Congress that the Justice Department abandon its high-handed campaign.

Now the prosecutors are backing off. As Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson has reported, the Justice Department has indicated that it will settle for the resignations of about half a dozen members of the 18-man board and a pledge from the survivors to institute internal reforms, including a secret-ballot election of the union’s president. But that formula isn’t much of a solution.

For the government to force out members of a union board, chosen under procedures previously sanctioned by the government, sets an antidemocratic precedent. And it might mean little change in the union’s character, because the bylaws permit Teamster President William J. McCarthy to appoint like-minded replacements. McCarthy has denied having personal ties to the New England Mafia--as his predecessor, the late Jackie Presser, once told the FBI--but at the very least he has been blind to the Mafia’s penetration of the union. McCarthy recently admitted that he had never even discussed with other Teamster officials the charge of mob influence by the President’s Commission on Organized Crime. Where has he been? In a hermetically sealed room?

The Justice Department’s willingness to allow the next Teamster president to be elected by a secret ballot of union convention delegates is also troubling. Those delegates are often appointed, not elected by the rank-and-file, and letting them vote in secret would make them even less accountable to the membership. The most democratic way to choose a Teamster president would be through a one-man, one-vote election of the entire membership. That is the course urged by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the 8,000-member organization that has long been a thorn in the Teamsters’ side. Some experts contend that the current leadership is so entrenched that a challenger could never win a plebiscite, but that has not been the case with the United Mine Workers, which overcame a long history of corruption and violence through popular elections. Many individual Teamsters hate the idea that their union is synonymous with the mob; they should be given a chance to vote their corrupt bosses out of office.