Teamsters Elections Mark Turning Point for Union

Norbert Miller, a salty, middle-aged Teamsters Union executive from Modesto who everyone calls “Nobby,” was politicking.

Since 7 a.m. he had been handing out leaflets outside a big United Parcel Service office in Anaheim that employs a thousand Teamsters, most of whom did not know Miller from Adam.

Miller needed them, though. Desperately.

Beginning this week, people such as those drivers and clerks--rank-and-filers whose opinions have never counted for much in the shaping of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters--will begin deciding who will run the nation’s largest labor union.

For the first time in the 88-year history of the Teamsters, the membership will elect the president and 18 other executive board members--leaders who were previously picked by local union executives at constitutional conventions, where surprises were infrequent at best.

Members will decide, for example, whether Nobby Miller remains merely the head of the union’s Central California joint council or becomes an international vice president.

And so it was that Miller called to the UPS drivers as they headed toward their office.

“Throw the rascals out!” he said, an indiscriminate theme that has dominated an often raucous campaign.

The election is one of the most closely watched and meticulously regulated affairs in the history of organized labor. It is also a turning point for the Teamsters, a once-powerful institution that has been rendered stodgy by the national erosion of labor unions and by the Teamsters’ flamboyant association with organized crime.

Ballots will begin arriving at the homes of 1.5 million union members in the United States and Canada on Wednesday. They were mailed by a court-appointed administrator who has been overseeing the union since 1989, when Teamster executives accepted government control as a condition of settling a Justice Department racketeering lawsuit. Results will be tabulated in Washington on Dec. 10.

Three slates of executive board candidates--virtually all of whom say they favor a break with the union’s corrupt and violent past--have been running hard and hostile for months, distributing hundreds of thousands of leaflets outside many of the 250,000 warehouses, truck depots, factories and offices where Teamsters work at jobs ranging from drivers to airline flight attendants to teachers.

The campaign has been dominated by personal feuds that have split the union’s leadership for years. Hardly anyone blinks an eye when the union’s organizing director, Vicki Saporta, a candidate for international vice president, complains that the ineffectiveness of the union embarrasses her, and that most of the union’s 80 highly paid “international representatives” are political appointees.

“I’m tired of sitting in an office making excuses to people for why things do not get done,” Saporta said.

The October issue of the union’s magazine, which all members receive, contained so much mud--35 of its 50 pages were devoted to campaign ads--that retiring union President William McCarthy condemned many of the ads in a prefacing note as “an insult to the intelligence of our members.”

The reform campaign of Teamster presidential candidate Ron Carey ran a supermarket tabloid-style composite photograph of rival candidate R.V. Durham, regarded as the favorite in the race, showing Durham arm-in-arm with men dressed as mobsters.

In another ad, Durham alleged that Carey “scabbed” on a strike, which prompted a $15-million lawsuit by Carey.

The third presidential contender, Walter Shea, ran an ad calling Durham a liar for suggesting that Shea had been suspended from the union for nonpayment of dues.

Leaflets distributed by the Shea campaign have mocked Bay Area Teamster leader Chuck Mack, a member of the Durham slate who has curly hair, as “Shirley Temple.”

Carey handouts have featured pictures of pigs at trough to characterize the multiple salaries that several Durham and Shea slate members draw for holding more than one job in the union.

Durham fliers have condemned Carey for having registered to vote as a Republican in the 1960s--ironic criticism in a union that has endorsed Republican presidential candidates in the last three elections, breaking with the rest of organized labor.

Last month, the Durham campaign held a fund-raising dinner in Chicago, where two months earlier the No. 2 man on the Shea ticket, Dan Ligorotis, Chicago’s top Teamster, had shot his son to death in a union hall in what Ligorotis described as self-defense. (Prosecutors have not decided whether to file charges.) One of the guest speakers at the dinner praised Durham slate member William Hogan, another Chicago Teamster executive, as a good man by noting that at least Hogan’s children were still alive.

The stakes are high, and not merely because the personal futures of so many union leaders are on the line.

With its $80-million annual budget, its $10-million political action fund, and with members spread through every niche of the economy, an aggressively managed Teamsters Union would have considerable potential to put pressure on employers and politicians.

Nevertheless, out of disgust, skepticism or ignorance, most Teamsters--the best guess is at least two-thirds--are expected to throw their ballots in the trash. In name recognition, the candidates probably all run second to Teamster Larry Fortensky of Local 420 in South El Monte, who received worldwide attention last month when he married Elizabeth Taylor.

A common response he hears from rank-and-filers, said Carey, is: “Who cares who the hell wins? They’re a bunch of bums--and you’re a bum as well.”

Heading the rival slates are:

* Durham, 60, of North Carolina, an ex-trucker who has run the union’s health and safety and freight divisions. Durham is as close to an Establishment candidate as exists in this fractious union. He has the endorsement of outgoing President McCarthy but would just as soon keep that a secret. McCarthy, a stroke-ridden man who spent much of the past year firing his enemies in the union, is almost universally belittled in Teamster circles.

Durham’s slate contains five incumbent executive board members, the most in the race.

* Shea, 62, who has been executive assistant to every Teamster president since Jimmy Hoffa. Shea claims dual insider/outsider status. McCarthy fired him from his job as soon as Shea announced his candidacy. McCarthy’s most bitter enemies flocked to the Shea slate.

Hoffa and two other Teamster presidents who employed Shea as executive assistant--Roy Williams and Jackie Presser--were indicted by federal grand juries. Nevertheless, Shea and his slate members--including Nobby Miller--portray themselves as hard-nosed, back-to-business types who will keep the union clean.

* Carey, 55, the head of a large New York Teamster local that represents UPS drivers. Carey, who has long criticized national union leaders for “selling out” the membership, has been able to organize an impressive grass-roots campaign with the help of the 10,000-member Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

The union Establishment has long dismissed Carey as a loose-tongued demagogue, and he has struggled to expand his support. He has campaigned steadily for two years, recently making an 11-day, 6,500-mile tour through the South and West in what his exhausted entourage called a “West Virginia stretch limo”--an ’84 Dodge.

The anticipated low turnout has focused particular attention on the role of rank-and-filers such as Craig Yabuta and Irv Geller.

Yabuta, a 40-year-old bottler at a Van Nuys brewery, said he had paid no attention to union politics during his 13 years as a Teamster but became interested in Carey’s campaign after more than 200 Carey delegates mobilized at last June’s union constitutional convention.

“The other day,” Yabuta said, still a bit surprised at himself, “I got off work at 11 p.m., got up at 4 in the morning and went to two distributors in Sylmar” to hand out Carey literature to workers.

On Friday, a slate supporting Carey won control of Yabuta’s Local 896, which represents 3,300 bottling workers throughout California. Chris Schweitzer, a co-worker of Yabuta’s, ousted the secretary-treasurer, Chuck Roberts. Seven of eight candidates on Schweitzer’s slate beat incumbents for local offices.

“Without Carey’s campaign, none of this would have been possible,” said Schweitzer, who ran unsuccessfully as a Carey delegate to the union’s convention last spring.

Geller, a 60-year-old bus driver with the Orange County Transit District and a Teamster shop steward, spends his extra time lobbying co-workers to vote for Durham.

Geller does not know much about Durham but he is an admirer of Michael Riley, an executive board member who is also the head of the union’s Southern California joint council. Riley’s support of Durham, Geller said, is good enough for him. Most votes in this election figure to be cast that way.

Watching the fray are people like Jerry Swope, 52, a Teamster since 18, a warehouse foreman on the receiving dock at Certified Grocers of California in City of Commerce, and a man who was having a hard time trying to decide who to vote for.

Swope and his co-workers have the rarest of commodities in this economy: good-paying union jobs that cannot be shipped overseas. They make $16 an hour and have all their medical benefits paid by the company. It is the kind of contract that historically kept national Teamster leaders safe from membership curiosity or revolt, regardless of whether executives were loaning union pension funds to mobsters or paying themselves outrageous salaries.

But union leaders can no longer make their reputations by promising members more, as they did in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Teamster membership has fallen by 700,000 since the late 1970s. Deregulation of the trucking industry has shifted much of the trucking business to non-union companies, diminishing the Teamsters’ hold on that vital industry. More aggressive tactics by employers have made organizing new members harder. Contract “victories” are often defined by limiting employer takeaways.

“So many people are losing benefits,” Swope said. “I would say, to the men that are running for president: ‘Can you help us keep what we have?’ Times are tough. That’s why we didn’t go out in September,” when the union negotiated a new contract for Southland supermarket drivers and warehouse workers. “It’d be nice to get a dollar-and-a-half raise an hour but everybody’s got to realize what’s happening. We’re lucky to have a job, compared to a lot of people.”

Ironically, for all their differences, Durham and Shea at times agree with Carey’s more strident contention that the union is adrift, wasteful at its top levels, and negligent in offering organizers and strategists to the union’s network of 600 locals.

“A lot of resources have been wasted,” Durham said recently to 50 warehouse workers in Los Angeles on their lunch break. “We intend to change that. . . . We will not violate your trust. We’ll never forget where we came from.”

Says Shea: “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters today is a sham. Our leadership is nil.”

The changes in the union have their roots in a 1988 Justice Department lawsuit that proposed taking over the union’s affairs, contending that union leaders were “mobbed up,” allowing organized crime figures to influence key decisions on some labor contracts, investments and promotions.

In 1989, the Teamsters settled the lawsuit by agreeing to let the rank and file choose the president under supervision by court-appointed overseer, retired federal judge Frederick Lacey.

The union’s constitution requires national conventions and leadership votes every five years--as infrequently as permitted by federal labor law. Last June’s convention was the first held under government supervision. Delegates elected by the rank and file nominated candidates for this month’s ballot.

In an effort to win political points for their respective camps during the convention, delegates from the three factions tore the constitution to shreds. They quadrupled strike benefits--revolutionary in a union whose top executives have tried mightily to discourage strikes. They gave members more voting rights on national contracts. They placed the first limits on executive salaries that are now as high as $500,000 a year. They even voted to sell $18 million of private jets that had ferried Teamster executives across the country.

For political operatives, the presidential election is a logistic nightmare because the membership is spread over such a vast area.

The three slates have raised a total of about $1.5 million from supporters, largely within the union. (Employers are prohibited from contributing.) None have raised enough to do a full membership mailing.

What counts are the relationships that run the union’s day-to-day business. In each of the locals, the principal officer decides whom to support and passes the word down through a network of business agents and shop stewards.

“This is like a ward election. It’s all a question of who has the better precinct captains,” said Tim O’Neill, a legislative representative from the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters, on leave to work for Shea.

“It’s like the Miss America pageant,” said Jacob Novikoff Jr., 38, a shop steward at Certified Grocers who is working for the Durham campaign. “The members want somebody in there they can feel comfortable with. They are all hoping that this one (the eventual winner) has nothing (corrupt) in their background.”