Reforms Pose Tough Task for Teamsters Winner Carey : Labor: Grass-roots victory ousted notorious union Old Guard. Loss of momentum could bring return to cynicism.

Having toppled the leadership of the Teamsters Union with a storybook reform campaign, union President-elect Ron Carey is basking in his first moments of national celebrity.

Carey’s stunning grass-roots victory is being flatteringly compared to the unexpected outbursts of reform that recently obliterated Soviet and Eastern European dictatorships.

But Carey and the thousands of weather-beaten Teamster idealists who spent the past two years plotting the overthrow of the union’s oligarchy now face an even more difficult task: translating Carey’s pit-bull charisma into nuts-and-bolts changes that will turn a sluggish and notorious union into an aggressive enterprise.

For more than two decades, Carey has been a hero to an isolated group of Teamster reform activists, who found his altruistic, tough-minded leadership of a Long Island parcel-delivery local a refreshing contrast to a tradition in which national Teamster leaders enjoyed huge salaries, pensions and private planes while cutting deals with organized crime.

If Carey can spread his influence throughout the 615 locals in the 1.5-million-member union, he will lift the image and clout of a sagging labor movement that is desperate for a white knight. Failure will allow cynicism to recapture the Teamsters.

As the government-supervised vote tabulation was completed Friday, with Carey maintaining a huge lead over two Teamster Establishment candidates, analysts struggled to explain why the first rank-and-file election in the union’s 88-year history so strongly repudiated the well-entrenched leadership.

Many experts had predicted that because Teamsters have long been apathetic about union politics, their leaders would be invulnerable. Instead, with about a fourth of the membership voting, Carey beat international executive board member R.V. Durham of North Carolina by 48% to 33%. The vote was 188,883 to 129,538. The third candidate, board member Walter Shea of Washington, received only 18% or 71,227 votes, according to totals released Friday night.

More remarkably, the slate of executive board candidates who ran with Carey won 16 of the other 19 seats on the board, which sets international union policy, oversees bargaining of national industry contracts and controls an $80-million-a-year budget. Not a single incumbent remains. Seven of the new board members elected with Carey are working Teamsters, rather than full-time officials in their locals.

The lesson “is that when you have a repressive regime, you never know how strong the democratic forces underneath are until they get loose. Then you’re surprised,” said Clyde Summers, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, who was an adviser to the Justice Department during its 1988 racketeering lawsuit that led to last week’s rank-and-file election. “Members of the Teamsters were somewhat like the Poles or Czechs or East Germans.”

John Climaco, a Cleveland labor lawyer who represented the late Teamster President Jackie Presser, said members were simply “fed up with having their union called corrupt and racketeer-ridden and having a million-and-a-half people painted with a black brush. . . . Carey effectively exploited that.”

Added Tom Geoghegan, a Chicago union lawyer and author of a new book on unions’ weaknesses: “Over the years, most people outside the union have assumed that the kind of leadership the Teamsters have is the kind of leadership that ‘those people’ want, that ‘those people are different.’ But once the membership had a chance to change things at the top, it did.”

Although four of the union’s six past international presidents have been indicted on charges of corruption--including Presser, who died while under indictment in 1988--the large majority of the union’s locals are considered untainted. In addition, scores of Teamster leaders with links to organized crime have been driven out of the union during the 2 1/2 years it has been under federal oversight, a consequence of the 1989 agreement between prior Teamster executives and the Justice Department which settled the racketeering lawsuit.

Carey’s campaign promises include better health care benefits and pensions, an end to corruption and elimination of multiple salaries for union executives. He also pledged to make more aggressive contract demands, which made some trade organizations nervous in the wake of his upset victory.

Gordon Kirby, director of human resources at the California Trucking Assn., said trucking companies are already under economic pressure from the 1991 master freight agreement signed with the Teamsters. He called the contract “a terrible economic settlement for the industry” and said Carey’s pledge to drive an even harder bargain for his members would be “a difficult pill for the industry to swallow.”

Susan Jennik, a lawyer with the Assn. for Union Democracy, said Carey’s election “will help every union organize new members. Right now every organizer has to combat the image of the corrupt Teamster official.”

To make a dent in the Teamsters, Carey’s most militant supporters contend, he will likely have to replace scores of $100,000-a-year “international representatives,” who are supposed to assist Teamster locals with expertise in organizing and other skills but in many cases have been political appointees of dubious value. He will also be urged to replace the panels of Teamster officials who, critics say, represent members in grievances too timidly. And he will have to battle his political opponents, who still control the vast majority of Teamster locals and regional councils.

“He barely has one layer of the union--the top. (That) could spell real chaos. . . . It could mean the union will be substantially weakened,” said one labor lawyer who represents several Teamster locals.

Carey may proceed moderately in changing the union because of his familiarity with a similar reform movement in another union two decades ago.

Carey’s campaign manager, Ed Burke, is a veteran of a grass-roots movement that overthrew the dictatorial regime of United Mine Workers President Tony Boyle in the early 1970s and installed Arnold Miller. The Miller campaign installed many democratic procedures similar to those pledged by Carey for the Teamsters, but the union soon fell into disarray because of poor administration and squabbles between reformers.

Carey, who currently receives $48,000 in salary plus another $18,000 in expenses as president of Teamster Local 804, said he will accept only $175,000 of the $225,000 he is to be paid as Teamster president.

The union reformer, who voted for Republicans Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford for President in the 1970s, also said he will break with Teamster tradition and endorse a Democrat for the presidency next year, but added he had not decided on which Democrat to support.

Interviewed Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he repeated the visceral message he took to thousands of plant gates: “I’m fed up with being embarrassed about the Teamsters Union.”

Times staff writers Stuart Silverstein and Jesus Sanchez also contributed to this story.