Get High-Priced Help Out of Teamsters

Outrageous things are still going on in the once mob-dominated Teamsters Union even after corrupt top leaders have been kicked out by government-appointed administrators and replaced by honest, democratically elected officers, including the union’s president, Ron Carey.

The cause for outrage now is not the union leaders, but the continued government control of the union and the role still played by Frederick Lacey, who was the government’s chief administrator of the union.

What is there to complain about Lacey, a former federal district judge who led the remarkably successful effort to democratize and clean up the giant 1.4-million-member union?

For one thing, he is grossly overpaid compared to Carey, the union’s president. Lacey and his law firm got even more than Carey’s overpaid predecessors, including the late James R. Hoffa, who have long been damned for salaries that were shamefully high for leaders of a nonprofit organization supposedly dedicated to the needs of working men and women.

In 1989, several members of the union’s executive board were facing prosecution on various charges. To avoid that threat, the entire executive board agreed to give outside administrators control of the union.

Lacey’s fees for his services may surprise, but not shock, corporate lawyers. But the union’s members, who earn hourly rates from $4.50 to $20 or a bit more, must have been shaken when they learned that they were paying Lacey $385 an hour, plus a generous expense allowance and fringe benefits that amount to about 30% of his fees.

Since he took over as chief administrator, Lacey and his New York law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae have raked in almost $1 million a year from the union. In contrast, Carey’s salary is $175,000 a year, far less that previous presidents, who took salaries of about $225,000 a year and ran that up to $500,000 a year by “double dipping”--holding more than one job in the union.

Lacey might also be called a “double dipper.” While holding his job as the Justice Department’s union administrator, he was hired by the department to examine its handling of a criminal investigation into $5 billion worth of secret loans to Iraq and possibly covering up U.S. involvement in those loans.

To nobody’s surprise, after a short investigation, Lacey found no wrongdoing by the department that hired him to investigate it.

Some in Congress called it a whitewash of the “Iraqgate” scandal, and President-elect Bill Clinton has indicated that he wants further investigation.

Furthermore, what are we to think about the fees Lacey charged New York state as a special master to redraw the congressional and state legislative maps?

New York Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams denounced as “excessive and abnormal” the $450 hourly fee demanded by Lacey and his law firm. The respected New Jersey Law Journal says that “compared to Lacey’s bill (to New York), the Teamsters may be getting a bargain.”

While Lacey’s investigation of the Bush Administration role’s in Iraqgate seems to have been less than thorough, nobody has questioned his basic integrity or the work he did for New York and as administrator of the Teamsters. But since one of the sins of the Teamster officers has been their high salaries, Lacey’s fees for his work should not go unchallenged.

And now his job with the Teamsters should be terminated. It isn’t over yet, even though his term as chief administrator has expired.

Last November, Lacey’s friends at the Justice Department appointed him as its representative on a special three-member Independent Review Board created to continue supervising the union.

Lacey, like the two other board members, is now being paid a minimum of $100,000 a year. Edward Burke, the union’s board member, says he will not take more than $100,000. The third member, William Webster, who was picked by Lacey, hasn’t said what he will do.

If Lacey works on the job for about three months at $385 an hour and thereby reaches his minimum, he can bill the union at the same rate for his overtime hours.

Originally, Lacey was to be the government representative on the board, and he and Burke, the union appointee, were to pick a neutral third member.

Burke, a union activist, proposed as the neutral such highly qualified, widely admired men as former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall.

Lacey bluntly rejected Marshall and every other name Burke suggested. Then, with the help of a federal court judge, Lacey was able to name Webster as the board’s neutral.

The trouble is that Webster, former head of the FBI and the CIA, is an honest man but has had no experience with unions or even labor-management relations other than as head of the two agencies.

More troubling is his management orientation. Webster, a partner in a prominent Wall Street law firm, is on the board of Anheuser-Busch, whose workers are represented by the Teamsters. That alone is a clear conflict of interest for him as a judge of the union’s actions.

Webster is also on the board of Pinkerton Security & Investigation Services, which once was notorious for helping employers break union strikes by using tough goon squads known as “Pinkerton’s men” to beat up striking workers.

Pinkerton’s reputation has improved considerably in recent years, but it still provides guards to help struck employers.

All in all, it is outrageous for the high-priced Lacey and Webster to continue the job of policing the union. The powerful Independent Review Board should be abolished.