Free-for-All Election Indicates That Democracy Has Come to Teamsters : Labor: Under a government-supervised process, three of the union’s national leaders, plus James R. Hoffa’s son, are battling for president.

To a degree scarcely imaginable a few months ago, democracy in all its messiness has come to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, long a bastion of centralized power.

Three national Teamster executives, each a solid part of the union’s establishment, are running against each other for the presidency of America’s largest trade union as an unprecedented, government-supervised campaign kicks into high gear. Backbiting is breaking out all over.

To further complicate the fray, the son of James R. Hoffa, the most famous Teamster of them all, jumped into the race in late February despite doubts about his eligibility.

As far as winners go, there are no safe bets. The best bet, at the moment, seems to be that when the 1.6 million members of the Teamsters vote for president and 17 executive board members in a secret ballot election in December, they’ll choose R. V. Durham as their leader. Durham, a courtly, 60-year-old international vice president from North Carolina, is backed by a strong majority of his colleagues on the executive board.

Durham, who is now negotiating the Teamsters’ national freight-hauling contract, is regarded as a sharp-minded man with no taint of the corruption that led Hoffa and three other past Teamster presidents to be indicted by federal grand juries. Hoffa and two others--Dave Beck and Roy L. Williams--were convicted.

An out-in-the-open struggle for leadership of the Teamsters was just what the U.S. Justice Department was seeking two years ago when it settled a major corruption case against the union. The government hoped that democratic voting procedures would end the insulation of top Teamster officers from a rank and file that often complained of nepotism and misuse of power.

In exchange for the government dropping civil racketeering charges, the Teamsters’ executive board agreed to submit to microscopic federal oversight of the way the union elected national officers this year. The settlement included special rules allowing a court-appointed administrator to dismiss members found to have brought “reproach” upon the union--a power the administrator has invoked more than 60 times.

However, even the most zealous clean-up-the-Teamsters advocate could not have predicted the internal chaos that has occurred the past few months.

Last fall there was only one declared candidate for president--Ron Carey, head of a Long Island Teamster local representing United Parcel Service drivers. Carey, 54, an avowed reformer who had alienated himself from most established Teamster leaders by decrying corruption, had already spent nearly a year organizing his campaign.

The incumbent president, William McCarthy, 71 and in poor health, had yet to commit himself. It was presumed that if he did not run, he would throw his weight behind another candidate who would be unanimously endorsed by the executive board and cruise to victory.

Wrong.

When McCarthy announced last October that he wouldn’t run, the executive board quickly split into factions.

The majority, including McCarthy, endorsed Durham for president and the union secretary-treasurer, Weldon Mathis, for re-election. Mathis had narrowly lost to McCarthy in 1988, when McCarthy was elected by the board to replace Teamster President Jackie Presser, who died in office.

Within weeks of Durham’s endorsement, McCarthy’s executive assistant, Walter Shea, 63, announced his candidacy. Shea, who also had been an assistant to three other Teamster presidents, was regarded as the candidate most closely associated with the Teamster old guard.

McCarthy sent an immediate signal to Shea indicating his disapproval of Shea’s candidacy: He fired him.

McCarthy also removed Shea’s running mate, Daniel Ligurotis of Chicago, as director of the union’s Central Conference, and Shea’s political ally, Joseph Trerotola of New York, as director of the Eastern Conference.

“It’s all coming apart at the seams,” said a labor lawyer familiar with the union. “These guys are every bit as petty as we thought they might be. Not having run a democratic election before means they don’t know how to play power politics, how to do the behind-the-scenes stuff, working out your deals.”

To proponents of union democracy, who believe that one reason for the decline of organized labor in America is insufficient accountability of union leaders, the fuss is welcomed.

The New York-based Assn. for Union Democracy, which originally criticized federal oversight of the Teamsters as insufficiently tough, recently called the process “an astounding achievement.”

One comparison speaks volumes. At the Teamsters’ last convention, in 1986, delegates shouted down an attempt by reform elements to create a permanent union ethics committee, an in-house body to investigate corruption. These days the idea is a major plank of Durham’s campaign. The adjective “democratic” is prominent in his literature, while Shea proclaims: “I simply won’t tolerate corruption.” A long-time dissident group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which backs Carey, complains that its message has been co-opted.

The split in the Teamster leadership occurred as rank-and-file Teamsters in 630 locals began voting on the makeup of the 2,000 delegates to the presidential nominating convention in Orlando, Fla., in June. Traditionally, leaders of each Teamster local have automatically become convention delegates. This year special delegate elections, certified by federal monitors, are being held. In Orlando, any candidate nominated for international president by 5% or more of the delegates will be placed on the December ballot.

While delegates pledged to Carey have been elected in a few locals, including a small freight-drivers local in Los Angeles, incumbent officers of Teamster locals have won most of the delegate seats so far certified by the government. Some of the candidates have pledged themselves to Durham’s self-styled “unity” ticket. Others may make up their minds in Orlando.

In a delegate election in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., in late January, a slate pledged to James P. Hoffa, 49, son of the late Teamster president, swept all delegate and alternate slots--even though Hoffa had yet to officially declare himself a candidate for union president. The Hoffa slate easily defeated a Carey slate.

The younger Hoffa is an attorney who is an administrative assistant for the Teamsters’ Michigan Joint Council. His father disappeared in 1975 during a campaign to return to union power after convictions in the 1960s for jury tampering and mail fraud. He is presumed dead. Yet his reputation lingers as a leader who expanded the strength of the Teamsters in the 1950s and 1960s by negotiating lucrative contracts. The name is still regarded as a powerful lure to many Teamsters.

That was not lost on William Genoese, director of the union’s 35,000-member airline division. A week after the Hoffa delegate slate’s victory, Genoese, 64, announced his own candidacy, pointedly identifying himself as a “long-time ally” of the elder Hoffa and asking the younger Hoffa to run on his national slate of executive board candidates. Allegations continued flying. Genoese and his supporters criticized the Durham slate as one that is weak and that includes officials likely to be removed from office by federal overseers. Durham’s supporters said Genoese was running for president only because he was in danger of being fired from his airline-division job. Shea and his supporters filed suit against McCarthy, accusing him of using the union’s magazine to push Durham’s candidacy.

Durham broke with McCarthy at an executive board meeting, engineering the rejection of a candidate pushed by McCarthy for a vacant seat on the executive board. Mathis proposed that the board investigate McCarthy over an allegedly rigged $3.8-million printing contract that the union awarded to McCarthy’s son-in-law. The proposal lost when the board deadlocked 7-7.

Then last week Hoffa declared his candidacy for president, saying he believed that he could unify rank-and-file support in the crowded field.

This being a Teamsters election, there had to be another complication, and there was: Hoffa did not appear to meet the Teamsters’ own constitutional requirement, which says candidates for president must have worked “in the craft” in jobs such as truck driving or have been union officeholders for two consecutive years. Hoffa is several months shy of the requirement.

The government’s Teamster election administrator, Michael Holland, has yet to make a decision on Hoffa’s eligibility. The candidacy could produce a confrontation at the convention. Hoffa’s supporters say they may attempt to amend the constitution there to make Hoffa eligible--a vote that would provide an unexpected but interesting test of the sentiments of the elected delegates.

Michael Riley, a Teamster international vice president who heads the union’s Southern California joint council and is a member of Durham’s slate, said he is not worried about the Hoffa candidacy. “I don’t think it changes anything,” Riley said. “I am supporting a team made up of incumbents. The strongest team is an incumbent team.”