The Teamsters’ Long-Shot Candidate

Ron Carey, the militant head of a Teamsters Union local in New York City, is moving quickly across the country as an insurgent trying to oust the entrenched national leaders of the scandal-ridden Teamsters Union.

Carey, a 22-year officer of his 6,000-member local, is a long shot. But even if he doesn’t win, other honest candidates may come forward because, at last, a new democratic election system gives them a chance.

In 1988, a federal judge took control of the Teamsters after the Justice Department had sued all 18 members of its ruling body, the International Executive Board, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The government said the Teamsters had made a “pact with the devil,” giving mobsters continuing influence over union operations.

The judge installed a panel of three lawyer-administrators to do three jobs: supervise the union, continue an investigation of leaders accused of various crimes and set up a democratic election process.

So far, Carey is the only officially declared candidate for president of the 1.5-million-member union. He predicts that he will win the only secret-ballot election in the union’s 91-year history.

First, he must finish gathering about 40,000 signatures from supporters to show that he is a bona-fide candidate. Under the new election rules, the signatures will entitle him to some much-needed early publicity in the union’s magazine, the Teamster.

He also has started seeking support from many of the 650 local unions that will begin in September to elect delegates to the international union’s 1991 convention. Candidates need only 5% of the convention delegates’ votes to get their names on the ballot that will be mailed to all members. That should be fairly easy for Carey to do.

His biggest hurdle is to persuade a majority of the rank and file, most of whom have never heard of him, that he is the person to clean up the Teamsters and that he has a real chance of winning. Few want to back a candidate who seems to be a loser, even if they oppose the incumbents.

It’s never easy to oust incumbents in corporations, government or unions, but it is particularly difficult in an organization the size of the Teamsters, with locals throughout the United States and Canada.

Just to mail one piece of campaign literature to the entire membership would cost an estimated $250,000, and so far Carey has raised only $150,000 for his entire campaign. His own income is $45,000 a year.

Carey had hoped that the election rules would be more favorable to him than they turned out to be. Michael Holland, the court-appointed election supervisor who devised the rules, did battle against the political machine of late Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and helped Richard Trumka become president of the United Mine Workers of America in a successful rebellion against the old guard of that union.

But the rules are generally fair, and if Holland makes sure that there are no abuses in local elections for convention delegates, Carey will have his shot. Depending on who decides to oppose him, the national referendum could be a clear test of the membership’s desire to clean out leaders tied to the underworld.

Carey has some advantages. Few candidates for office in any union have received as much news coverage as he is starting to get as he travels across the country. He is campaigning against corruption in a notorious union, and that makes good copy.

The attention seems to be helping him raise funds inside and outside the union. While in Los Angeles last week, he met with, among others, Academy Award-winning film director Oliver Stone and Stanley Sheinbaum, the influential publisher and economist.

Carey cannot accept campaign funds from employers, but big-name liberals who are employers can help him meet potential contributors and those who are not employers can make contributions. The bulk of the $1.5 million he hopes to raise must come from rank-and-file Teamsters, however.

Another possible advantage: William J. McCarthy, the incumbent president, is almost certain to be a candidate. Unlike most of his predecessors, McCarthy has not been convicted of any crime. But he is 71, in poor health and has several powerful enemies among high Teamster leaders. Infighting atop the Teamster pyramid has been increasingly bitter of late.

But Carey has to face the political fact that incumbent officers have long had ties to local and regional union leaders--and many of those leaders are unlikely to suddenly sever those ties to support a long shot. But their support is important, if not crucial, to the success of a dissident.

That doesn’t mean that the local and regional officers are corrupt. Most are honest, but they haven’t revolted against unsavory top officers before, presumably because in a revolution everything is destabilized and their own reasonably secure positions might be jeopardized.

So perhaps Carey or some other dissident can incite a real revolution in the union, as Lech Walesa did when he created the Polish union, Solidarity.

If that fails, some of the honest incumbents could reform the union if they would just use the new election system to clean up their own house.