Team Stirs : Southland Members Reflect General Split Over Leadership Vote

His tattooed arms crossed, Charles Poper listened intently as James P. Hoffa, son of the late Teamsters leader, stood in a blue truck pumping his fists in the air and promising to invigorate the nation’s largest private-sector union.

“I wonder if this is the man who can change things around,” said Poper, 49, an Orange County bus driver disenchanted with his local union and the lot of the working man. “At this point, I haven’t decided, but he may get my vote.”

Members such as Poper--who cares about his union and is certain to vote but remains uncommitted--figure to make the difference in the election this fall for president of the storied and controversial union.

And few places will be as important to the two contenders, Hoffa and incumbent Ronald R. Carey, as Southern California. The region is home to about 140,000 Teamsters, or 10% of the union’s total membership.

A clearer picture of the race will emerge next week at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters convention in Philadelphia, where delegates will nominate candidates and vote on finance issues and proposals for institutional reforms that have been at the heart of the Carey and Hoffa campaigns.

Analysts say the West Coast may prove to be the swing vote, at the convention and in the November mail-ballot election for president. Carey, 60, hails from New York and seems to have a lock on the East, whereas Hoffa, a 55-year-old native of Detroit, has strong support in the central region.

But in Southern California, long the Teamsters’ West Coast power base, the leadership is split. And so apparently is the membership.

“There are many sitting on the fence,” said Raul Lopez, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 396 in Covina. Lopez is supporting Carey, even though his 9,000-member local is affiliated with Joint Council 42, an umbrella group of 19 locals that is firmly behind Hoffa.

Both Hoffa and Carey see the Southland as crucial to their success.

“It’s very important to us,” Hoffa said in a recent interview in Orange County, where nearly 100 people turned out for a rally. “We’ve got to touch the members.”

Carey, who took office in 1992, also has been moving through freight barns and warehouses in the Southland, shaking hands with workers and raising donations. Carey’s camp said a recent independent poll of members commissioned by his campaign found that nationally, he has a 19-point lead over Hoffa.

Hoffa dismisses those poll results, and he says the convention will provide a gauge of where he and Carey stand.

But Steve Wattenmaker, a spokesman for Carey’s campaign, said that’s not necessarily true. At a similar convention in 1991, he said, Carey garnered just 15% of the delegates but then went on to win the mail ballot election by a commanding margin over runner-up R.V. Durham of North Carolina.

“It’s one thing to elect delegates, another thing to get a secret ballot at your home,” Wattenmaker said.

Carey, a former United Parcel Service truck driver in New York, won a five-year term on a grass-roots campaign to clean up the corruption-marred union. In fact, his path was paved in 1989, when Teamsters leaders settled a federal racketeering lawsuit by agreeing to allow the rank and file to elect delegates to the convention and vote directly for national leaders.

Hoffa, a stocky man who has his father’s piercing eyes, for years worked as a union lawyer in Detroit. In 1993, he quit his law practice and last summer announced his candidacy during a taping of the “Larry King Live” TV show in Los Angeles. Hoffa has won instant recognition because of his name, which represents a legacy of both Teamster strength and corruption.

Throughout his campaign, Hoffa has attacked Carey for the union’s declining membership and financial woes, including a strike fund that went broke in 1991 because the weekly benefit for strikers increased from $55 to $200. Carey says he has staunched the long decline in membership--which peaked at about 2 million in the 1970s--thanks to organizing victories at freight companies and at public agencies such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than 1,100 classified supervisors recently voted to join the union.

Carey also says that he inherited the union’s financial problems and that he has returned millions of dollars to local unions by eliminating unnecessary layers of bureaucracy.

At the upcoming weeklong convention, the 1,700 delegates are likely to take up matters relating to union leaders’ powers and salaries, the right of members to directly elect leaders through secret ballots, and a proposal to change part of the union’s name, a seemingly minor issue that has become particularly divisive.

Carey, for example, supports the notion that “Brotherhood” be dropped from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to acknowledge the women in the ranks. But Hoffa and his backers argue that the word is as much a part of the union’s tradition as the horses on the Teamsters’ emblem, which reflect the era when members rode horses to haul goods.

Among Teamsters leaders and delegates in Southern California, the Carey and Hoffa camps are divided almost along county lines.

Ed Mireles, head of Local 952 in Orange, set the stage two years ago by pulling out of Joint Council 42 of Los Angeles and forming a separate council based in Orange County. Mireles said the secession effort was spurred by dissatisfaction with the Los Angeles joint council, but the move had Carey’s blessing, and Mireles is now running for a vice presidency on Carey’s slate.

Mireles’ Joint Council 92 currently has 10 Teamsters locals, including some from Los Angeles County, with about 50,000 members. All of those locals have elected convention delegates committed to Carey--a reflection, Mireles says, of the rank and file’s will.

Hoffa says that, if elected, he will dismantle Joint Council 92, which he called an inappropriate gerrymandering move. Mireles retorted that Hoffa would have no constitutional authority to do so.

Los Angeles-based Joint Council 42, which has nearly twice as many locals and members as Joint Council 92, has long been controlled by Mike Riley, whose salary and domain have been reined in by Carey in recent years.

Riley, who declined to comment, has thrown his weight behind Hoffa but is not on the slate for national elections. Mary Lou Salmeron of Local 986 in Los Angeles, which is headed by Riley, is running as a trustee on Hoffa’s ticket.

Salmeron, who has risen from a clerk to an office manager in her 28 years as a Teamster, says she’s backing Hoffa because “he has his father’s gumption and the ability to negotiate.” But she said it would be foolhardy to assume that members will heed their leaders’ endorsements.

“There are some [members] who won’t even talk to me,” Salmeron said. “You really don’t know who they’re for. There’s a lot of people who are undecided.”

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Teamsters at a Glance

Teamsters membership grew during the three decades leading up to the 1980s and then declined. Membership has stabilized somewhat in the 1990s. Most Teamsters are blue-collar workers, and the union has tried to organize mor white-collar workers.

MEMBERSHIP FIGURES

MEMBERSHIP BY INDUSTRY: includes manufacturing, service, soft-drink bottling, breweries, dairy, bakeries, newspapers, TV, film and other industries.

Source: Teamsters union