NEWS ANALYSIS : New Teamsters President Must Unite a Two-Class Union

The Teamsters Union, frequently portrayed as a venal monolith, is in fact two classes of people often isolated from each other.

At the top of the nation’s largest trade union is an international executive board, traditionally composed of entrenched and occasionally corrupt regional union leaders who meet periodically at the union’s lavish “marble palace” in Washington. The board members each draw an extra $75,000 a year for their attendance.

At the bottom of the union are people such as Robert Rios, 31, of Whittier, who has been on strike at a warehouse in Vernon for three years, caught in the economic cross-fire between his employer and his Teamsters local.

Two weeks ago, a tough-talking New York Teamster named Ron Carey shattered the upper echelon of the 1.5-million-member union when he was elected president in the first rank-and-file international election in Teamsters history. A slate of reformers loyal to Carey and contemptuous of past Teamsters rulers won 16 of the other 19 seats on the international executive board.

When Carey assumes the Teamsters presidency in January, he and his allies will have the power to dramatically restructure the leadership and political character of the union--at the top.

But what Carey will not be able to do, without years of struggle, is improve the fate of everyday Teamsters such as Rios, whose local has invested $1 million in a strike that it seems unlikely to win.

The union has too many independent layers, and the national economic climate is too hostile for Carey’s election to automatically give the union more vigor, efficiency or clout at the local level, which is where most battles between organized labor and employers are fought.

“He needs every minute of his five years (the length of Carey’s term in office) to consolidate his power,” said Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York who specializes in labor.

In his campaign, Carey condemned the corruption of previous Teamsters regimes--four of the past six presidents have been indicted by federal grand juries--and called for more aggressive contract bargaining and an end to traditional Teamsters practices such as multiple salaries for union executives.

He began running for office two years ago after the Teamsters international executive board, eager to settle a racketeering lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, agreed to let the membership directly elect a president and other board members under the oversight of the federal government. Previously, the president and executive board were elected at conventions where delegates were largely the heads of Teamsters locals. The majority of American labor unions use similar delegate systems to elect presidents.

Carey, who heads a 6,000-member parcel delivery local in Long Island, N.Y., at first was backed primarily by a tiny dissident faction of the union known as Teamsters for a Democratic Union. The fact that he could expand his base, winning a strong plurality against two incumbent executive board members, was a stunning and unexpected accomplishment in a union that has historically treated outsiders with disdain or violence.

Carey’s rise to power was not only one of the most dramatic developments in the history of organized labor, but a full-blown social movement, reminiscent of “the almost instantaneous expansion of the Southern civil rights movement” in the early 1960s, Aronowitz said.

Victory gives Carey a bully pulpit to trumpet democracy in unions and millions of political-action-committee dollars to spend in pursuit of national economic policies more sympathetic to blue-collar workers.

It will take much longer for his influence to trickle down.

Rios voted against Ron Carey, even though Rios is precisely the type of young, committed union man Carey believes can rebuild the Teamsters Union’s image.

Rios is a member of the 10,000-member Local 630 in Los Angeles, one of more than 600 Teamsters locals that represent the union’s members in the United States and Canada. A forklift operator at the warehouse of Smart & Final Iris Corp., a 102-store wholesale grocery chain, he joined 200 warehouse workers and drivers who went on strike in November, 1988, during a contract dispute. Most workers, fearful of permanently losing their jobs, trickled back within a few months. Rios stayed out.

He has a wife and three young children and a fourth due in April, yet says he stays on strike because he cannot forgive what he believes was Smart & Final’s attempt to undercut the benefits owed to its retired workers.

“If everybody keeps stepping on each other, there’ll be nothing but the poor and the rich,” he said.

The choice Rios made in the Teamsters presidential vote illustrates the split personality of the union.

Rios voted for Carey’s bitter rival, international Vice President R.V. Durham of North Carolina. With incumbent Teamster President William McCarthy of Boston retiring because of illness, Durham--running on a slate with several executive board members--was the closest thing in the race to an Establishment candidate. He was backed by most of the nation’s local Teamsters leaders, including the head of Local 630, Jerry Vercruse.

Rios was not swayed by Carey’s contention that the union could be saved only by wiping out all incumbents at the top. He made his judgment based on what he knew about his local. He regarded Vercruse as his mentor and trusts his judgment.

Local 630 has an impressive strike fund--$4 million--and has used about a quarter of it to pay Rios and other Smart & Final picketers up to $200 a week. Full-time picketers also receive another $200 a week in strike pay from the international. The combined strike pay is two to four times what most strikers in labor disputes receive.

The strike is, depending on how you look at it, either a courageous fight or a waste of money that illustrates the lack of economic leverage and strategic planning that plagues much of organized labor. A generation ago, the Teamsters were less vulnerable, but membership has fallen about one third from a peak of 2.2 million in 1978.

Local 630 struck Smart & Final over the company’s determination to break away from a master contract the local maintains with supermarket chains. The contract pays warehouse workers about $14 an hour and includes a union-management health and welfare fund that finances medical and pension benefits. Smart & Final wanted to stop paying into the health and welfare fund and run its own medical program, a common management demand in an era of soaring health costs, and one that has triggered many strikes.

While two-thirds of the work force returned to work after Smart & Final threatened to hire permanent replacements, others such as Rios stayed out to protest the fact that Smart & Final retirees were in danger of losing their benefits because of the company’s decision to start its own health and welfare plan.

A court battle forced Smart & Final to continue funding retiree benefits, but Rios and several dozen others held firm. The union said it will picket Smart & Final until the company signs the master agreement. Some strikers picketed full time. Others moved on to other jobs. Some, like Rios, did both.

Local 630 organized a boycott campaign, attempting to portray its members as victims of a foreign boss--Smart & Final’s France-based parent corporation. Retirees were called on to picket. Today, perhaps only a dozen full-time picketers remain. They hold rallies at a different Smart & Final store each Saturday and urge the non-union replacement workers to become Teamsters.

The union claims that the campaign is costing the employer business. The employer denies it. Union leader Vercruse says the fight is simply too important to quit.

“We won’t let loose of it,” he said.

For all the bravura, the strike remains an example of an effort that might have worked a decade or two ago but is doomed in today’s increasingly anti-union business atmosphere, according to a Los Angeles labor consultant.

Local 630 ran a weak strike and failed to find novel ways to pressure the employer or to publicize the boycott, the consultant said. Once most of the employees went back to work, the momentum faded. Teamsters executives in Washington sent no experts to help.

Unions today represent only 12% of the private work force. Public support for strikers is so mild, and management’s desire to cut costs is so fervent, that strikes generally fail unless the union is capable of a dramatic gesture or creating widespread public inconvenience.

Most unions, fearful that employers will permanently replace their members, avoid strikes at any cost, preferring to work without a new contract while searching for other pressure tactics. The number and duration of strikes have plummeted nationwide. The average length of the dozen biggest strikes in the United States that began in 1990 was 18 days.

What Carey must do to succeed, according to labor analysts sympathetic to his campaign, is to make the international play a more aggressive role in the affairs of locals, and to effectively take over the leadership of hundreds of Teamsters locals by the time his term expires. He can do this only indirectly. Members of locals elect their own officials every three years.

In many locals, reform candidates aligned with Carey are in place; in recent months, Carey supporters won control of a half-dozen locals across the nation. But in many other places, local officials are far more popular with members than the officials of the international who were swept aside this month.

“My hope is he turns around the organization from the bottom up, but I don’t know if he can,” said the Los Angeles labor consultant, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “What if he doesn’t? Then you have an isolated leader in Washington who can’t seem to change things much at the local level.”

There are already some glimmers of conciliation.

Michael Riley, the principal officer of Local 986 in Los Angeles and head of the union’s Southern California Joint Council, is sounding accommodating--even though Riley lost his seat on the international executive board in the election, running as a member of the Durham slate.

“If Carey brings to the international the same drive and vigor he used in his campaign, he should be doing a damn fine job before very long,” Riley said.

While Carey’s name was mud in Riley’s local during the campaign--the Durham slate carried Local 986 by a huge margin--the local’s chief organizer has no problems invoking Carey’s squeaky-clean reputation in future organizing drives.

“The (management) labor consultants I have to compete against won’t be able to talk about the Mafia” in exhorting employees to vote against Teamsters representation, organizer Don Thornsburg said. “I’m going to say that we’ve got a leader that the feds elected. He’s going to make sure nothing like that (corruption) ever happens again. I think we’re going to go through a whole term without indictments.”