LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Ron Carey : The Union President Trying to Create the ‘New Teamsters’

For decades, the scandal-ridden Teamsters Union was dominated by mobsters, its top officers lived in luxury at members’ expense, with salaries that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Three of the union’s former presidents, along with hundreds of lesser officers, went to prison for white-collar crimes. Most members have relatively good contracts, thanks to many competent local officers, but critics charged that too much of union dues was spent on the top officers. The union’s ugly reputation hurt it and smeared all other unions, too.

In 1989, the government threatened to indict many top union officials. To avoid prosecution, the executive board agreed to a government-supervised, secret-ballot election for the top jobs, while other government investigators helped root out most of the remaining corrupt element.

At that point, in came a little-known local union leader, Ron Carey. He and his reformist slate won the closely supervised 1991 election by a narrow margin. Carey was the first popularly elected president--one with no known mob ties.

That was the beginning of the first-ever, serious internal battle for control. Many “old guard” officers around the country were apparently free of the underworld, but they tolerated the mobsters and supported them in office. This crisis in the Teamsters is more than an internal struggle. Last week, a critical bill affecting all organized labor was furiously debated in the Senate. The bill, which was killed by a Republican filibuster, was strongly supported by Carey. It would have prohibited employers from firing or “permanently replacing” workers who go on strike. The “permanent replacement” is one the strongest weapons management has in defeating unions.

Now the union old guard is fighting to oust Carey, or at least weaken his administration, as he restructures the Teamsters and slashes double salaries and large expense accounts. Carey, a slim man, dresses like a conservative businessman. He doesn’t laugh much these days as he criss-crosses the country, meeting with groups of his 1.4 million members to try and hold his hard-won presidency of the nation’s largest private-sector union.

A high school graduate, Carey became a truck driver, served a hitch in the Marines and, by the age of 20, followed the route of his father and became an active unionist. He and his wife, Barbara, have five grown children.

The union’s civil war is continuing, but Carey won a major battle when an independent investigating committee last week cleared him of all allegations of ties to organized crime and corruption, charges made by the old guard.

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Question: The Teamsters have been plagued for years by mob influence and most of that has been eliminated with government help. But now you have been accused by your foes inside the union of having ties to the underworld. What’s going on here?

Answer: It’s utter nonsense. What they are talking about, if you pardon my expression, is the old trick that they hope . . . if they throw enough dirt against the wall, some of it will stick. They figured that since four previous presidents--supported by my opponents--went to prison or were indicted on corruption charges, it would be easy to smear me as the new president. They are lying.

I was elected because our members were sick of corruption--which is what the average person walking down the street thinks when you say Teamster. I’ve established an ethical practices committee that investigates members’ complaints of corruption. I’ve put more than 30 locals in temporary trusteeship so the members could help correct wrongdoing and undemocratic practices. That should help change the public’s view of us. But my opponents don’t seem to want that. They want this union back so bad they could care less if they destroy the union in the process.

Q: Some of your opponents in the union have lost key positions on the international executive board, but they still have powerful roles. Despite their opposition, have you been able to make any other real changes?

A: Yes. For instance, we’ve played a leading role in the fight to bring up wages and safety standards for workers in Mexico instead of bring them down here. We’re fighting for health-care reform that benefits working people and not the insurance companies. The old leaders of this union didn’t do those things. The members voted for reform, for the platform that I put forward, and I’m moving forward on that platform.

Q: You reversed the union’s position in national presidential elections. Was that a dramatic move?

A: My predecessors backed anti-union, reactionary Presidents like Nixon and Reagan and Bush in hopes those Presidents would keep those former union presidents out of jail. That didn’t work for long. But my administration didn’t need or want such help. We supported the Democrat, Bill Clinton, along with the rest of organized labor, because he is at least trying to do more for workers and unions. I appreciate the story that asking working people if they were better off after four years under Bush is like asking whether the chickens are better off under the leadership of Col. Sanders. We are no longer going to be chickens.

Q: What about your goal of reforms. You said you were reforming the union when you and your allies voted to get rid of the four regional divisions that were centers of opposition. Your foes said you were just out to get rid of them, or at least punish them, by taking away important jobs. Didn’t that just increase the internal struggle?

A: I think it did. But I certainly was not doing that because many conference officers opposed me. We were not talking about individuals. None of those who lost hefty salaries as conference leaders were on trial. There were no prosecutors, no defendants . . . . We held hearings about the structure of the union and decided the old structure wasn’t working. It was just an unnecessary, extra layer of bureaucracy. It allowed salaries of $300,000 and more, plus lavish expense accounts and pensions for a small group of officials of the conferences. What they were doing could be done cheaper at the local level, and by our offices at the international union in Washington. It was another step toward democratic reform. The old structure was undemocratic and wasteful.

Q: What about charges that your administration is not doing enough to win new members or get better union contracts? And that when you get into an election with other unions, the Teamsters lose, like the recent union election at U.S. Air?

A: We are doing much more to win new members than my predecessors . . . . We allocated over $25 million to organizing campaigns. They did almost no organizing and never saw that as important. That’s one reason why the union had dropped in numbers--in addition, of course, to trucking deregulation that opened the door for massive numbers of little, non-union companies that got jobs because they were willing to work for a fraction of the rates our drivers get, and with few, if any, benefits. The old guard had two or three organizers on the national staff. We have about 25.

Q: But what about your effort to win the union representation election at U.S. Air?

A: We lost it by a couple of hundred votes, and we were the last of three unions to get involved in that one. You know, you wonder about these folks in our own union who say they care deeply about it . . . but still handed out smut material against us in the U.S. Air election.

Q: What kind of smut material?

A: The smut material about the union, asking workers why would they want to join the Teamsters that has such serious financial problems, and then getting into those lies about me.

There are many other elections going on throughout the country that we’re involved in, and while our membership is still going down somewhat, the rate of decline is half of what it was before.

Q: Your opponents have called you everything from a liar to a dictator and you’ve denounced them with equal fury. Will this infighting hurt the union?

A: Very badly, but in the long haul, this union will be a stronger and more democratic union when this fight is ended.

Q: Workers join unions largely because they want better wages, benefits and job security. Your foes say you are weakening the union. Have your reforms made any difference in these areas?

A: Of course. Among other things, we are using new techniques to win better contracts, such as pressuring management with corporate campaigns that let us get help from workers in other companies, as we did in the strike at Diamond Walnut. We persuaded many candy companies to stop using Diamond Walnut because of the rotten way that company treated its striking workers. We’re getting involved in shareholder meetings to gain some voice in management policies about the company operations and about attitudes toward our members. And we are getting our members involved in the reaching out to community groups, religious groups, women’s organizations and others to say our fight for better wages and conditions is a fight that benefits the whole community.

Q: Your union is having serious financial trouble. Your attempt to raise union dues was defeated by the members and opposed by many of the other officers. What are you planning now to keep the union solvent? Another vote for a dues increase?

A: Well, I think another vote is certainly something that we can look at down the road. First, though, I think the vote itself was important to show we believe in union democracy. In the meantime, we are asking locals to consider other ways of getting needed finances to operate this huge organization, such as getting locals to decide if they want to raise more money from their own members to support strike funds.

Q: Union payment of benefits to strikers were increased from $50 to $200 a week at the last convention, with no plan to pay for the increase. That was a hefty drain on the strike fund. You borrowed money for it. Have those benefits now been stopped?

A: Yes, they have. Yet, we know they’re vital, and that is why we are looking for alternative plans, like the one about local unions volunteering to raise their own strike funds so members can stand up to bosses who don’t believe in treating workers decently.

Q: Your opponents say you’re putting in inexperienced staffers to replace the men and women your allies have called members of the old guard network that ran the union for years. Is that true?

A: No, that is not true. Fact of the matter is, when I came into office, our trade divisions and trade conferences had many staffers who were put there by past presidents. Some of them are still there, and they’re doing a great job. We removed individuals from the international payroll when they would not give up their multiple salaries they were getting by holding at least the titles of more than one union job. But we are moving very qualified Teamsters into very critical positions that are left open.

Q: Despite your claims, didn’t you lose the first major nationwide strike the union had called against the trucking industry in many years, as your foes contend?

A: No. We made some significant economic gains, although we wanted more. But one of the crucial issues was the industry’s insistence on a demand that it be allowed to dump full-time jobs and replace them with part-timers. That not only would have hurt our members, but all workers, since it would have encouraged a terrible trend of employers to hire part-timers and get rid of badly needed full-time jobs. The AFL-CIO called that victory of the Teamsters “a victory for all labor.” I’m proud of that and the other things we are doing. That’s why we are calling our union “The New Teamsters.” It really is.*