Teamsters Wrestle With New Image in Remaking Union : Labor: Under U.S. supervision, doors open for reformists and younger candidates to challenge established leadership at convention.
Lou Riga, the head of a small Teamsters local in San Jose who is anonymous by national standards, stood on the floor of the union’s convention Thursday, asking delegates to nominate him for president.
Chuck Mack, a Bay Area Teamsters leader who is low-key and articulate--contrary to Teamsters stereotypes--is on the verge of becoming a national union leader.
Pete Camarata, who got beaten up 15 years ago, the first time he came to a Teamsters convention as a reform faction’s only delegate, doesn’t feel lonely anymore.
Their stories, being played out this week during the union’s first convention under government supervision, illustrate how the union is diversifying.
It’s fitting that the Teamsters are struggling to remake themselves within the confines of Walt Disney World, where fantasy and reality play tag. The convention, which ends today, is a wrestling match between the union’s “mobbed-up” image and the more mundane circumstances of the bulk of its members. This is a union in which only 8% of the 1.6 million members are long-haul truck drivers and 25% to 30% are women.
In the past, when Teamster executives hand-picked the international president and presented him to the convention for acclamation, they weren’t thinking of people like Riga.
But when the federal court settlement that brought open national elections to the union took effect in 1989, possibilities bloomed. Now a little guy could up and run for president.
Ron Carey, the head of a New York Teamsters local, started immediately with the assistance of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a decade-old reform group. Riga, brimming with reformist ideas--sell the union’s jets, spend the extra money on organizing, establish a Teamsters university--started in 1990 with scarcely anybody’s help.
Riga, whose union pays him a comfortable $118,000 annual salary, raised a few thousand dollars from friends and flew city to city announcing his candidacy. The 54-year-old former truck driver refinanced a second home and put another $20,000 into the campaign.
He borrowed $20,000 more from relatives. He made a 10-minute videocassette and mailed it to all 1,900 convention delegates--most of whom came here already committed to support other presidential campaigns.
He did all of this without any assurance that he would be able to attract the votes of 96 delegates required to be nominated as a candidate in December’s national rank-and-file presidential election. His only visible assets here were about 30 Teamsters from the Bay Area--almost all of them members of an extended family of American Samoans--who drove here to support and cheer him wildly beyond their numbers.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Only 24 delegates voted for him.
In contrast to Riga, Chuck Mack, has climbed the ladder more steadily and figures to wind up higher.
Mack, 49, who wears glasses and has short-cropped, curly hair, has been the chief officer of his Oakland parcel delivery and car-hauling local for nearly 20 years and has headed the 63,000-member Teamsters Joint Council 7 in Northern California for the last eight years.
In an era where Teamsters testimonials can still be arcane--one nominating speech heard here boasted that the candidate in question “doesn’t lie, he’s not a thief and he doesn’t fly first class”--Mack personifies the clean-cut image that Teamsters in the West like to brag about. He’s thoughtful, politically attuned and capable of speeches that are equally reasoned and rousing.
Until the consent decree took effect, however, none of that would have insured that Mack would move up to the union’s executive board. Patronage was reserved for older, more powerful men.
The government rules set dominoes in motion: The union’s Establishment split in half, creating two full slates of executive board candidates, one for R.V. Durham, one for Walter Shea. Political pressure for a clean image encouraged Teamsters executive board member Arnie Weinmeister of Seattle, who earns more than $500,000 a year, to drop off Durham’s slate. Durham asked Mack to take Weinmeister’s place.
On Tuesday, Mack passed his first test. Convention delegates nominated him to run in December for an executive board seat. The consent decree “is the worst bargain struck in U.S. labor history” because it institutionalizes government intrusion in union affairs, Mack said. Yet, he admits, “I probably wouldn’t be a candidate if not for this process.”
Three conventions ago, in 1976, Camarata, then a 29-year-old truck driver and union shop steward from Detroit, was the only convention delegate affiliated with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. On the convention floor, he spoke out against the union’s leadership. This simply wasn’t done.
“I pretty much had to have people with me” throughout the convention, Camarata recalled. “It was a volatile situation.”
It was so volatile that one night during that convention, Camarata was beaten unconscious after leaving a union-sponsored cocktail party.
That incident is one of the reasons Camarata is a hero to many of the 250 convention delegates who came here pledged to Carey.
“We owe you,” a Carey delegate told Camarata at a reception earlier this week. “You did it when it was tough.”
Camarata is conscious of the fact that while unprecedented political interplay is taking place among Teamsters in the presidential fight between Carey, Durham and Shea, an unsatisfying tension remains. Delegates from rival camps hardly speak to on another. They hoot at on another on the floor of the convention and the civil, one-on-one intercourse that is the hallmark of democracy has yet to flourish here. Camarata shaved his head and his dark beard a month ago--partly, he says, because he didn’t want to be as recognizable here.
“I still wouldn’t go to any of the cocktail parties,” he said soberly.