Teamsters <i> Are </i> Democratizing

The latest political maneuvers among top Teamsters Union officers are intriguing but should not obscure the successes that court-appointed administrators have had in democratizing the giant union and ridding it of top-echelon corruption.

Look at what is happening in the nation’s largest union:

Almost all leaders allegedly tied to the underworld have been removed or have resigned. Delegates to the union’s June convention were chosen in carefully supervised elections. And in December, all members will have the right for the first time to vote directly for their top officers.

It has, though, cost union members well over $15 million since the process began less than two years ago.

The largest single amount--about $6 million--went to lawyers for the international union, primarily attorneys in former President Richard M. Nixon’s old law firm of Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon. They have been battling decisions of a New York federal court judge and the administrators he appointed to supervise the union.

The pricey legal fees must seem unconscionable to the members whose dues pay them. The union members should be mollified by the success of the process, but most of them--an estimated 75%--have not even bothered to vote for delegates to the union convention.

The current election campaigns themselves are costing candidates a total estimated at $5 million. To reach the 1.5 million members, candidates have hired public relations consultants. They are putting out mailings that cost $300,000 or more each, and they are traveling across the United States and Canada to woo votes.

Such high campaign costs can only discourage future potential candidates. The cost to run a campaign for national office is so enormous that only the well-heeled can make such a race.

That doesn’t promote democracy. It may be best to return to the old system under which local union members elected convention delegates and they, in turn, elected the top officers.

Obviously, however, future local-delegate elections--unlike past ones--would have to be supervised as scrupulously as those just conducted by the court-appointed administrators.

But this time, the races for high office are on. And, as often happens in any political battle, the candidates are making some startling twists as they jockey for position.

For example, a goal of several incumbent officers is to unify their ranks against the candidate most of them oppose: the “outsider,” Ron Carey, head of a large Long Island, N.Y., local who bills himself as the only real reformist candidate for president.

Carey, the dissident underdog, wants a more militant union, one more ready to battle employers. He calls inadequate the contract just negotiated with the nation’s major trucking companies by R. V. Durham, a vice president who is the front-runner in the race for the presidency.

Durham’s running mate, Weldon Mathis, shocked all of the candidates last week by withdrawing his bid for reelection as secretary-treasurer.

Mathis, 65, told me that he wants his replacement to be Walter Shea, another leading candidate for the presidency who had long been the appointed executive assistant to past presidents. Mathis believes that his withdrawal will improve Durham’s chance for victory because Durham and Shea could combine their votes against Carey. Mathis then added another surprise: Even if he and Durham had won, he planned to resign after the election.

It took years and millions of dollars to get the first-ever hotly contested Teamsters’ election for top officers. But based on the turnout of members in local-union voting for convention delegates, it seems likely that large numbers will fail to cast ballots in this historic election.

That will be a shame, but the punch line will remain. Union members finally will have the right to control their own still-powerful organization--if they exercise that right.