Old Guard Wants to Smite the Reformer : Teamsters’ Ron Carey is targeted by low-level officials resentful of his changes.

Ron Carey is under intense attack these days by those he battled two years ago to become president of the giant Teamsters Union. Carey helped clean out the mobsters, and is still battling old-guard leaders who tolerated mob dominance for decades.

The government-supervised election that Carey won was held after the union’s former leaders agreed to it to avoid prosecution on racketeering charges.

The union was crime-ridden for years. Its top officers supported anti-union presidential candidates Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. They were accused of making sweetheart deals with some companies.

Now, Carey, the progressive reformist, is in trouble. The union is spending more on everything from new organizing drives and higher strike benefits than it receives in dues from its 1.4 million members. One of Carey’s foes estimates that nearly 70% of the entrenched, lower-level officers of the union oppose him, despite his clear victory when all members voted in the union’s first-ever referendum.

Carey has not been good news for anti-worker management, either. He and his allies have started waging highly visible, readily justified fights against reactionary companies. He backs strikes by personally joining picket lines and boldly proposed a dues increase--first in a decade--to keep paying $200 weekly strike benefits (raised from $50) and push more reforms.

Carey and his allies have initiated major, badly needed organizing campaigns to make up for the loss in recent years of nearly 500,000 members--losses that came largely because of intense anti-union campaigns by management and the creation of thousands of small, non-union trucking companies made possible by trucking industry deregulation.

The reformists not only made a 180-degree turn in the union’s national-level political stance by backing moderately liberal Democrat Bill Clinton, but they also are intensifying their fight for universal health care, labor-law reform and a broad, liberal legislative agenda.

Some of the most vicious attacks on Carey are coming from men like Alfonso D’Arco, a one-time member of the Luchese crime family who quit the mob and began talking to law-enforcement. D’Arco claimed that Carey himself had links to the underworld--an unsubstantiated accusation that Carey calls “smut.”

More important to his reputation is support from Michael H. Holland, a former general counsel of the United Mine Workers of America who was named by a tough federal judge to supervise the first referendum in the union’s 89-year history--one member, one vote. All past presidents were elected at tightly controlled conventions.

“There is simply no believable evidence that Carey is anything but the upstanding, honest trade unionist that I have found him to be,” Holland told me.

The union is still being supervised by a court-appointed independent review board that includes former FBI Director William H. Webster and a former federal judge, Frederick B. Lacey. The board itself says it has been given no credible evidence to support the claim that Carey is linked to the underworld.

Several long-time Teamsters officers say they don’t believe that Carey was linked to gangsters. But he is facing different attacks from them and other lower-level Teamsters officers who tolerated mob leadership even though they themselves were clean and usually effective unionists at local and regional levels.

They complain that Carey isn’t an effective leader, appoints “outsiders” who have had no experience with their union to top posts and that he is now jeopardizing the union’s future by calling for a nationwide membership referendum to boost union dues without first holding a convention. The convention could also pass resolutions undercutting him by taking away much of his authority as president.

Carey’s plan to let all members vote on the increase is a daring risk--like holding a nationwide referendum on whether voters want a tax increase. If the dues hike is defeated, the strike fund would be out of money by next June and the union’s general treasury would run dry next year. The proposal is being denounced by Carey’s foes, putting them in open rebellion against him.

It would be a sad chapter for the union movement if the Teamsters’ first-ever reformist president--the first elected by a majority vote among all members instead of by delegates to those carefully managed union conventions that allowed mob domination for so many years--is rejected.