Teamsters Place Limit on Pay for Leaders

Delegates to the Teamsters Union convention on Wednesday put a modest but historic limitation on the union’s controversial practice of paying its executives multiple salaries, passing a constitutional amendment that puts a $225,000 cap on total salary compensation for top leaders.

The union’s unusual salary policy has long been cited as an example of lavish benefits that isolate Teamsters leaders from the rank-and-file members.

Most other unions permit leaders to draw only one salary. However, since the early 1970s it has been common for heads of Teamsters locals to keep drawing their base salary as they take on additional jobs in the union’s bureaucracy of state and regional conferences and on the executive board.

As a result, about 90 Teamsters executives earn more than $100,000 a year through two or more salaries. The highest-paid executive board member, according to the most recently available Labor Department figures, is Daniel Ligurotis of Chicago, a candidate for secretary-treasurer, who earned $538,000 from four union positions in 1989.

Wednesday’s vote was a reflection of how government oversight has contributed to reform of the union. The 1989 consent decree that union leaders signed to settle a racketeering lawsuit did not require salary restrictions, but it mandated the first rank-and-file vote for president in December, making leaders here more politically sensitive.

Delegates overwhelmingly rejected two stronger salary proposals offered by members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union that would have prohibited multiple salaries and set the president’s salary at $150,000. Outgoing President William McCarthy earns $280,000.

One delegate was shouted down when she argued for a stronger limit. Hundreds of delegates booed Laurie Craig of Minnesota, a 31-year-old single mother of two, when she said union executives’ high salaries are unfair compared to the $11.48 an hour she had been making as a machine operator.

Secretary-Treasurer Weldon Mathis of Atlanta, who is retiring from his $250,000-a-year job, said the president “is certainly entitled to one-tenth of what the chairman of General Motors or some other corporation earns.”

The salary amendment imposes the $225,000 limit on all compensation paid to anyone who holds an executive board position. The limit would not apply to multiple-salaried Teamsters executives who hold only local and regional jobs.

The delegates also passed an amendment eliminating the mandatory election of delegates to the convention--a new feature, required by the consent decree, that has made this the first politically open Teamsters convention.

However, Justice Department attorneys overseeing the convention said the amendment conflicted with the 1989 consent decree. U.S. District Judge David Edelstein of New York, who oversees the consent decree, will rule on it next year. The union’s independent administrator, retired federal Judge Frederick Lacey, suggested to reporters that Edelstein would not allow the change.