Reformers Taking Aim at Entrenched Teamsters : Labor: Pro-democracy faction believes its drive to gain control over the nation’s most corrupt union is cresting.

Ken Paff, a UC Berkeley physics student-turned-computer programmer-turned-teacher-turned- trucker-turned labor organizer, looked down from the dais at 500 soul mates in a chilly hotel ballroom.

“Sometimes, just sometimes,” he told them, trying to sum up the last 14 years of his life and many years of theirs, “ordinary people get a chance to make history.”

What happened here last weekend was a story of working-class anger and wistful optimism. A bunch of bruised but idealistic, reform-minded members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters got together and declared jubilantly that their impossible dream of winning control of America’s largest and most corrupt union is finally cresting.

How the story ends is anybody’s guess. What’s clear is that in an era in which the notion of struggle is applied more to pro football than to citizen action, Teamsters for a Democratic Union is one of the most interesting social movements in the United States, a businesslike yet fervent network of truck drivers, warehouse workers and parcel deliverymen taking on the Godzilla of entrenched labor unions.

TDU members provide room and board when officials of their movement visit from out of town. They make substantial donations--contributions and pledges made at last weekend’s 15th annual TDU convention totaled $30,000. They spread the gospel of reform--one member, Steve McDonald, a Northern California supermarket truck driver, claims to have distributed leaflets at 167 teamster work sites on his own time in the last year. “You only have to light up one guy,” he says.

They do all this with a keen indignation, shaped by hundreds of little stories. Most of the stories start with mundane moments in which union business agents or union leaders allegedly failed to stand up to the boss in the worker’s defense, and end with bitter references to the lavish salaries that many Teamster executives draw.

“The strongest, most powerful union in the nation has been brought to its knees by a group of people who have little or more morals,” groused Dennis Skelton, who came to the TDU convention from St. Louis.

The existence of the TDU network, which includes about 10,000 Teamster members around the country, is the primary reason that a reform candidate is given a chance, albeit slight, in next year’s government-supervised election of a new Teamster president.

The scenario that TDU staff director Paff and his reformers envision plays out like this: In the coming winter and spring, members of TDU will be politicking in hundreds of the 633 Teamster locals in the United States and Canada. They hope that will enable them to elect the largest bloc of delegates to the union’s convention next June in Florida.

There, they will amend the union’s constitution with a myriad of democratic reforms, such as mandatory election of all stewards, business agents and contract negotiators, higher strike benefits and a ban on allowing union officers to draw multiple salaries from various offices, a practice which allows more than 150 Teamster leaders to earn more than $100,000 a year. These changes, reformers say, would create more accountability in a union that has been highly centralized since Jimmy Hoffa took over the Teamsters in the 1950s.

And finally, the dream goes, when the rank and file votes on a general president in December, 1991, they’ll elect Ron Carey--the maverick president of a Long Island local who has been endorsed by TDU--instead of the nominee of the Teamster leadership, R.V. Duram, the president of a North Carolina Teamsters local and an international vice president.

This dream is sniffed at disdainfully by the union’s leadership, as well as most labor observers, who note that TDU has only a weak or nonexistent presence in many Teamster locals. It also remains largely unknown to the 1.6 million members of the union, who are “dulled with apathy, as if they are drugged,” according to TDU Detroit-based organizer Don Stone.

In a union in which reformers are still called socialists or kooks, being a TDU member is “like being a gay coming out of a closet,” said TDU member Clay Keloy, a middle-aged United Parcel Service driver in Northern California.

The weekend convention in Southfield tried to counter this with zealous seminars in the grass-roots politics needed to exploit the new government-imposed rules for electing delegates to next June’s convention. TDU members grappled with questions of how to print literature, how to sneak into the lunch rooms of various work sites to post leaflets and shake hands, how to discuss issues like pension reform, how to talk to the many teamsters who are uncommitted or disinterested or plain cynical.

“Learn, learn, learn as much as you can and take it back home with you,” John Braxton, a TDU leader from Philadelphia, urged delegates.

“There are people standing up in the local hall who never did before,” said Dennis Nagle, a warehouse worker in Norwood, Mass.

Conventioneers ate box lunches, attended workshops and paid rapt attention to technical discussions. Some watched a tape of Diana Kilmury, a Canadian teamster who drives movie equipment trucks, being hooted down by delegates to the 1981 Teamster convention as she unsuccessfully proposed an “ethical practices” amendment to the constitution. The TDU members cheered her. When she declared in a speech later in the weekend that there was no room for sexism in the Teamsters, the largely male audience rose to its feet and cheered again. When Carey addressed the convention Saturday night and announced he was selecting Kilmury as the first member of his slate of vice presidents, and she vowed “not to forget where I came from,” they cheered yet again.

They stood and applauded, too, for each TDU member who came forth to describe his or her own progress in leafleting a warehouse or organizing a slate of TDU convention delegate candidates.

The tenor was often more like a revival meeting, or a labor meeting of a half-century ago.

“For the last nine years I’ve been trying to figure out why I survived (a near fatal heart attack). I hope this is what God left me here this long,” said Dave Richards, a retired Pennsylvania truck driver.

“With the exception of my immediate family, I’m more in love with you people than any group of people in the world,” said Gordy Teller, a Seattle teamster.

“Our children’s children are going to look at us and ask what did we do,” said Mauricio Terrazas, an elderly Los Angeles freight driver.

The biggest heroes of the convention were a group of members who last May won the top offices in an 8,000-member Atlanta local that for 30 years had been under the leadership of the family of Weldon L. Mathis, who is now general secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters. Ousted as president of the local was Mathis’ son.

“I’m now vice president of his (Weldon Mathis’) family business,” drawled the new vice president of the Atlanta local, 52-year-old Doug Mims.

Mims’ experiences were typical of what many reformers describe as a union that did not stick up for them.

As a young man, Mims studied engineering at a Florida junior college but had to take a job driving a truck when his wife became pregnant. He became involved in union politics in a Columbia, S.C., Teamster local in the 1970s, supporting a drive to put the local into receivership because of alleged improper handling by its officers.

As a result of those activities, Mims said, he began to be treated poorly by his employer because of his reputation as a union dissident. He said he did not receive the support he expected from union business agents when he filed grievances, and was ejected from union meetings when he complained.

Gripes about this kind of institutional sluggishness are less dramatic than the well-publicized links between some Teamster leaders and organized crime. And they are heard within many unions. But TDU leaders like Mims insist the problems are worse within the Teamsters because well-paid local union officials have become indebted to the powerful national leadership, and are more concerned with self-preservation than the rank and file’s interests.

“The fight for bread and butter issues is directly related to a democratic union,” said Dan La Botz, a TDU founder and author of a newly published book on reform efforts that began in the late 1960s.

With organized labor increasingly regarded as a moribund institution, formal efforts to create more aggressive union policies have also grown inside the United Auto Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, two of the nation’s larger unions. Dissidents there have organized to complain that national union executives are too cozy with management and lack the proper adversarial philosophy.

The Teamster reform drive, however, is the oldest and aims at the most fundamental changes. Remarkably, and in contrast to the UAW and UFCW drives, TDU has been sustained “without the backing of a single influential high-paid union official,” said Herman Benson, the 75-year-old head of the New York-based Assn. for Union Democracy, which keeps tabs on unions that violate the rights of members. “There’s nothing else like that.”

For years, through flyers spread by its members, TDU has lobbied the Teamster rank and file--sometimes successfully--to reject what it considered concessionary contracts negotiated by Teamster leaders. TDU annually combs Labor Department reports to publish a list of the Teamster leaders who draw high salaries.

When the Justice Department proposed putting the Teamsters under government trusteeship several years ago, TDU opposed the idea. It wanted the government to oversee a rank-and-file election for national leadership--something teamsters had never had. Last year, the Teamsters and the government signed a court settlement requiring direct, secret-ballot elections of delegates to the constitutional convention and a second election for president and 17 vice presidents. The presidential vote will be the largest direct election in the United States in 1991, with more eligible voters than are now registered in nearly half the states in the nation.

The fact that TDU had built a national network allowed Teamster reformer Carey, who is not a TDU member but shares many of its goals, to quickly organize a campaign for the general presidency. In the last 12 months he has campaigned in 34 states, usually escorted to factory gates, bowling alleys and other venues by TDU members.

“Without you, I wouldn’t be here,” Carey told the TDU convention Saturday night.

Despite all the optimism voiced at the convention, Carey remains a decided underdog to North Carolina Teamster leader Duram, 60, who was endorsed for president by the majority of the Teamsters’ executive board earlier last month in the wake of current President William McCarthy’s announcement that he will not run for reelection because of poor health.

The leadership’s endorsement ensures Duram of substantial contributions and endorsements from many national and local Teamster officials.

What TDU has going for it is the anger that was reflected constantly through its convention by members wearing “The Party’s Over” buttons. The convention program featured a Mailgram addressed to the current Teamster executive board. It read: “We’re taking back our union!”

“What most of us have dreamed of is now within our grasp,” said Doug Mims, a quiet, slightly built man who is fond of saying he is in a hurry to clean up his union so he can spend more time fishing, when he addressed the convention on its last day. “Never be one to say it can’t be done. Get off your ass.”