New Teamsters Tack: Democracy

The price of democracy is usually high wherever it rears its beautiful head, and the price is certainly mounting rapidly in the Teamsters Union.

Nearly 600 Teamsters locals in the U.S. and Canada are holding closely supervised elections to select delegates to the union’s 1991 international convention in preparation for its first-ever direct membership vote for new top officers.

Three court-appointed administrators have already helped cut almost all of the union’s longstanding links to the underworld by filing charges against 66 officers and three local unions. Some officers have been ousted, others forced to resign. Some cases are still pending and new ones are being filed.

The administrators also inaugurated an era of democracy in the Teamsters.

The price for those laudable achievements includes millions of dollars from union dues to pay for the administrators and their staffs and for the union’s legal fees incurred by the officers who mistakenly have been fighting many of the administrators’ actions.

More money will be spent by the growing number of candidates battling each other for the first time as they vie for top offices. Maybe the referendum will help democratize the Teamsters, though that isn’t clear. In general, however, referendums in huge unions such as the Teamsters discourage potential candidates because they have to raise large sums to reach the widely scattered membership. Almost every other union avoids that kind of costly referendum by having their local unions democratically elect convention delegates who, in turn, elect the high national officers.

More dramatic than the election procedure and the cost involved are the furious feuds democratization has sparked among leaders and would-be leaders struggling to hold or get top positions in the nation’s largest union.

Ironically, some hopefuls are making the same kind of corruption charges against their opponents--though fortunately with less justification--that they once denounced as slanderous when the accusations came from outside the union and landed many former officers in prison.

A few are making such accusations covertly, using words from a court-appointed administrator to back them up.

For instance, the other day some labor writers around the country, including this columnist, received a packet of legal documents from an anonymous union source in New York.

The documents included a ruling by one of the administrators, Frederick Lacey, who used inflammatory language to veto what on the surface, at least, seemed to be a fairly noncontroversial move by the union officers.

The officers wanted to convert into a grant a 1984 loan of more than $4 million from the international to one of its divisions, the Western Conference of Teamsters.

It was probably legally necessary for Lacey to use the language he did, but his words make effective, though unfair, political ammunition to fire at one slate of candidates.

Lacey said converting the loan to a grant “would constitute or further . . . racketeering activity within the definition of (the law). Thus, I am vetoing it.”

He didn’t explain how converting the loan to a grant would constitute racketeering, but his language can hurt the officers who wanted to make the conversion.

Those officers include Weldon Mathis, the incumbent secretary-treasurer who is running for reelection, and others who are supporting him, including Arnie Weinmeister, director of the Western Conference, and Mike Riley, head of the Southern California Joint Council of Teamsters.

They all swore in affidavits that the loan was approved by the late Jackie Presser, then president of the union, with the understanding that it would later be converted to a grant.

Such a conversion may have been improper since it was initially called a loan, perhaps to temporarily disguise the deal to get it approved quickly by all of the officers. But Lacey doesn’t even try to explain how that is racketeering since no one pocketed any of the money for personal use or for payoffs to racketeers.

Nevertheless, reporters reading Lacey’s words could accurately write that the administrator had accused Mathis and his supporters of racketeering. Obviously, the person who covertly mailed the Lacey decision hoped to see it in the press to discredit Mathis and hurt his election chances.

Whether secretly or openly, however, the candidates are unsparing in their attacks.

Last week, retiring President William McCarthy fired Walter Shea, his executive assistant, after Shea told McCarthy that he was a candidate for the union’s presidency. Shea has held the same post for decades under three previous Teamsters presidents.

McCarthy is supporting Mathis for secretary-treasurer and R. V. Durham for president. McCarthy also took away Shea’s union-paid car, credit cards and his office, saying Shea was “disloyal.”

Shea protested, calling it “unadulterated political retaliation.”

Foes of Shea counterattacked, charging that he is controlled by 80-year-old Joseph Trerotola, a vice president from New York who has never been charged with any crime but who has been named in government reports as an underworld contact.

The charges and countercharges in this bizarre union battle are so many and complex that, assuming they want to, union members may not be able to sift out and elect honest leaders.

Maybe, however, the democratic process will work so well that the members will choose wisely and complete the reforms the administrators have made so that the union can function more effectively than ever, with no renewal of ties to mobsters.