Let New Teamsters Chief Do His Job

Ron Carey ended his first year as president of the Teamsters Union on Monday with many achievements but continued strong internal opposition that is encouraged by two powerful outsiders.

Ironically, the two men helped make it possible for Carey to become the first Teamster president in decades who was democratically elected and had no ties to the underworld.

They are 82-year-old federal Judge David Edelstein and Frederic Lacey, who until recently was the government-appointed chief administrator of the union.

“Why are they trying to destroy my credibility, for what purpose?” Carey fumed the other day in a telephone conversation.

Edelstein, a U.S. District Court judge for the southern district of New York, and Lacey were the key figures in democratizing the union and purging it of the mobsters who have plagued it for so many years.

But after winning last year’s bitter battle for the presidency, Carey is having a hard time uniting the union because of continued opposition from many regional and local officers.

Although--with rare exceptions--they have no mob ties, most of them were part of the old guard that supinely accepted the presence of the underworld in the union’s top ranks. They generally opposed Carey’s election and now often openly oppose many of his actions.

Carey is steaming because these opponents are getting help, albeit indirectly, from Edelstein and Lacey by their unremitting criticism of him.

The judge is still responsible for enforcing the court order that led to Carey’s election. Lacey is now the government representative on a new independent review board that continues to supervise the union.

While they presumably are not trying to deliberately destroy Carey’s credibility, as he suspects, they are certainly hurting it as he tries to get cooperation from the old guard to run a clean union.

Many of the old guard leaders, who are among the highest-paid union officers in the world, see Carey as a threat to their own powerful positions.

So, even though they, like Carey, want an end to government supervision of the union, their criticism of Carey is enhanced by the judge when he insists that continued government supervision is necessary to “free the union from the stranglehold of corruption.”

Remarks like this wrongly imply that Carey is doing a lousy job of fending off any revival of mob activities and corruption in the union.

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Carey’s critics in the union aren’t challenging him about corruption, though. They complain instead that he is inexperienced and that his appointees are often outsiders who don’t know the key people on management’s side, or even many of the local union leaders.

When I asked Carey about such complaints, he laughed, saying: “Thank God! That means my appointees don’t know the company people who used to make back-door deals with locals. We are in a new era, and those back-door deals are over with.”

Some of the biting attacks on Carey by Lacey may seem petty, but they hurt him. For instance, Carey wants to show he is not a big spender like those among his predecessors who were allied with mobsters and were also profligate with the union’s money.

So Carey boasts about several money-saving decisions, such as the one he made to sell two luxury jets and a stretch limousine that were used by former top Teamster officers.

That will save the union more than $2 million a year, and Carey says the money is being used to increase union organizing to try to regain some of the more than 200,000 members the Teamsters have lost since 1980.

Instead of praising Carey for that and other positive steps, Lacey claims credit for himself, insisting that he urged the elimination of the jets and the limo before Carey acted and ignoring the fact that Carey took the action.

It is a small matter, but it helps Carey’s internal critics when they say he isn’t doing much, if anything, to help the union.

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More insidious are some of Lacey’s other attacks on Carey. Lacey snidely remarked recently that “I got better cooperation from the last administration than I got from these people.”

The “last administration” he referred to was allegedly still under mob influence. And “these people” are Carey and the other reformers who defeated the last administration in the 1992 election.

There are still small pockets of corruption in the union, but government law enforcement agents say they appear to be no more prevalent than the corruption found in business, politics and other segments of our society, which are rarely taken over and run by the government, even when some of their leaders are convicted of crimes and fined or imprisoned.

The union’s new leaders ought to be allowed to try to run the union without further close, daily government supervision, which is almost always inimical to democracy.

Edward Burke, the union’s appointee to the government-dominated independent review board, agrees there are a few unsavory characters still in power in some Teamster locals.

But Burke says Carey has set up a system to clean them out and has already taken over five locals suspected of retaining corrupt leaders.

Carey has also appointed the union’s own Ethical Practices Committee, whose 15 members took office only after they were thoroughly investigated by a reputable investigative firm. The company, Decision Strategies, is headed by Bart Schwartz, who was chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in New York. Schwartz and his agents continue to investigate any allegations of corruption in the union.

There can be no absolute, permanent guarantee against corruption. But the system set up by Carey to root out any remaining corrupt elements and prevent any future corruption or invasion by mobsters is sound enough to allow elimination of the government’s role in supervising the union and allow it to be free and independent, as it should be.