Fighting for the Soul of the Union Movement

Now that federal monitors have ordered a new presidential election in the Teamsters Union and expanded their investigation of last year’s campaign, they run the risk of defeating their original objectives.

What if the new election or some other upheaval returns the 1.3-million-member union to the control of an old guard whose shady practices forced federal involvement in the union’s internal affairs almost 10 years ago?

To be sure, in the aftermath of the union’s victory in its strike against the United Parcel Service, Teamster President Ron Carey seems the favorite in a rerun of the race he won last year against attorney James P. Hoffa, son of the late union president Jimmy Hoffa.

But Carey, a former UPS driver himself, still faces a rocky road this fall, with congressional Republicans threatening to hold hearings on the Teamsters’ election problems. And much of the establishment media is presenting both sides in the fight for control of the Teamsters as equally scandal-tainted.

This conventional wisdom ignores the difference between small infractions and big illegalities--and glosses over larger issues that Teamster corruption has raised for more than 40 years.

After all, the campaign irregularities apparently committed by Carey’s campaign staff are small potatoes compared to the legal problems of his predecessors: Dave Beck was imprisoned for income-tax evasion; the elder Hoffa was incarcerated for jury-tampering; Roy Williams was convicted of conspiracy to bribe a senator, and Jackie Presser was indicted for embezzlement and racketeering.

But, more important, the Carey-Hoffa brawl is the latest battle in a struggle for the soul not only of the Teamsters Union but the entire union movement.

American labor has always been torn between two philosophies. “Business unionism” emphasizes the unions’ roles as service agencies bargaining contracts and representing workers in their problems on the job. “Social unionism” sees labor as a movement and emphasizes mobilizing the members and building alliances throughout society in support of workers’ economic and political demands.

In most unions, both philosophies co-exist, and corruption is rare. But, for much of the past half-century, the Teamsters have been a special case--business unionism degenerating into downright corruption. In a balanced and often admiring biography of the elder Hoffa, the historian Arthur Sloane writes that, as early as 1941, Teamster leaders made a Faustian compact with organized crime.

While the alliance may have been an inevitable answer to violence from company goons, many local and national Teamster leaders ended up married to the mob. They put gangsters on their payrolls and pension funds in real-estate projects, many located in Las Vegas, run by people who, as Sloane wrote wryly, “were something less than model citizens.”

Meanwhile, the Teamsters became a bloated bureaucracy that mirrored the worst features of oversized corporations and organized crime--nepotistic hiring, multiple salaries for top officers, two private jets and a lavish lunchroom at a national headquarters that came to be called “the marble palace.”

In the union’s heyday during the 1950s and early ‘60s, the Teamsters won wage gains for their membership base in the trucking industry, seeming to vindicate Hoffa’s pledge to rank-and-file Teamsters, “My job is to sell your labor for the top dollar.” Indeed, the Teamsters’ notoriety contributed to the mystique that they were tough because of their ties to the underworld.

But, by the 1980s, deregulation of the trucking industry cost 400,000 Teamsters jobs, and the top leadership seemed soft, not strong. Thus, in 1983, an overwhelming majority of Teamster members rejected a National Master Freight Agreement, negotiated by their leaders, that cut wages for many workers.

Carey gained national prominence as a leader of Teamster members who challenged not only the old guard’s corruption but its coziness with corporate interests. Elected as the insurgent president of a New York local, Carey was hailed in Steven Brill’s 1978 best seller, “The Teamsters,” as virtually the last honest leader in the union. In 1982 and 1985, he campaigned against concessionary contracts the union’s national leaders bargained with UPS, including provisions increasing the use of part-timers--the major issue in the recent strike.

This maverick local leader became president only after federal prosecutors filed charges against the Teamsters under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations law, forcing the national leadership to agree to government-supervised, secret-ballot elections. Carey defeated two old-guard candidates in 1991 in the first election in which rank-and-file members were able to choose their national leaders.

As president, Carey has tried to demonstrate that the Teamsters can build strength through member mobilization, not mob muscle. He has put some 70 locals into trusteeship in an effort to clean up corruption. He has cut his own salary. He has shut down the union’s four “regional conferences”--eliminating a source of multiple salaries for officers. He has downsized the dining room at headquarters to a cafeteria and sold the union’s two jets for $11 million--actor John Travolta bought one plane.

Meanwhile, the new Teamster leadership used some of the savings for organizing, sending rank-and-file members to talk to unrepresented workers in similar jobs. So far, the Teamsters have won over 5,000 mechanics at Continental Airlines; workers at more than 15 terminals at Overnite Transportation; employees at Rhode Island Hospital; subcontractors for Disneyland, and workers at American TransAir, United Express and Southern Air Transport, among other companies.

Most of all, the Teamster reformers have introduced a style of unionism that’s a far cry from the Teamsters’ old emphasis on back-room deals. For example, months before this year’s UPS contract talks stalemated, Carey’s Teamsters surveyed 185,000 members on their priorities (learning that many part-timers wanted full-time jobs), collected 100,000 signatures supporting the union’s demands, held 40 regional rallies and briefed the media on the issues at stake.

All this resulted in a rare union victory in a national strike against a major company. And it may bolster Teamster members’ confidence that they can build their strength through the basics of honest unionism--aggressive organizing, mobilizing and public outreach--without strong-arm tactics.

But, if congressional Republicans are more intent on crushing Carey than continuing to clean up the Teamsters, it won’t be the first time.

Forty years ago, the Teamsters’ internal problems also prompted headlines--and hearings in Washington. A youthful Senate investigator named Robert F. Kennedy probed corruption by Hoffa’s henchmen, the AFL-CIO, under George Meany, expelled the Teamsters--who were not readmitted to the labor federation for 30 years.

But, while Senate Democrats held those hearings on Teamster wrongdoing, Republicans wanted to shift the focus to an unlikely target: United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, a liberal firebrand famous for his frugality and puritanical personal habits.

Sen. Barry M. Goldwater even declared: “Mr. Reuther and the UAW have done more violence to freedom than was accomplished by all the peculiar financial transactions of [imprisoned Teamster president] Dave Beck.” Long after the Senate hearings, Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush were all political allies of the Teamster old guard.

With this history of preferring venal, but tractable, labor leaders to visionaries, it is no surprise that some congressional Republicans might want the old guard to prevail over Carey. But, if federal investigators equate the Teamsters’ new leaders with their old-guard opponents, they’ll run afoul of a law that should not be flouted: the law of unintended consequences.