Underdog Takes Teamster Fight to Rank and File

Life can seem lonely when you’re running for the presidency of the fabled Teamsters union--particularly if you’re running against someone named Hoffa.

Just take a look at Portland, Ore.-based Teamster leader Tom Leedham. When Leedham came to Southern California this week as part of his underdog campaign for the helm of the union, there was no rally, no fund-raising dinner, not even a coterie of union officials to greet him.

The only people who showed up to welcome Leedham, and to escort him to Teamster work sites, were a modest cluster of rank-and-file members, mostly warehouse and freight guys.

“There’s not one local union official in town who supports Tom. Every place we go is hostile ground,” said Frank Halstead, a Los Angeles warehouse worker who took a day off Tuesday to drive Leedham around Los Angeles.

But Leedham, 47, a populist-style leader who normally stays at Teamster members’ homes while on campaign trips, is comfortable in his role as a man bucking the system. He is going directly after the votes of rank-and-filers, hoping they will ignore the push by local Teamster leaders across the country for James P. Hoffa, son of the legendary Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.

Leedham’s grass-roots campaign mirrors his vision for the union. He champions member-to-member organizing, an approach increasingly touted by the so-called progressive wing of organized labor. It calls for relying more heavily on union volunteers--and less on paid organizers and business agents--to find out what members want and to spread the word about Teamster campaigns, contract negotiations and other activities.

In some respects, member-to-member organizing functions like a workplace version of a telephone tree, with individual volunteers responsible for staying in touch with small groups of co-workers. It is a sharp departure from the traditional “let us handle it our way” approach so common among old-guard leaders in the Teamsters and other unions.

“I’m talking about setting up processes, specific ways for members to get involved,” Leedham said. “I’ve been doing that for a long time, and it works. People get the sense that it is their union, and they get involved in it.”

These days, Leedham is fighting the clock to get his message across to the union’s 1.4 million members. The vote-by-mail election for Teamsters president and 20 other general executive board or trustee positions began two weeks ago and concludes Dec. 3. Already, about 325,000 ballots have been received, and the candidates continue to urge supporters who haven’t yet voted to mail in their ballots.

The ballot shows a third candidate for president, John Metz of St. Louis, but he is not actively campaigning, making the election a contest between Leedham and apparent front-runner Hoffa.

California, with more than 200,000 Teamster members, is crucial to both candidates. At a series of Southern California stops that began Sunday in San Diego and continued the next two days in Orange and Los Angeles counties, Leedham repeatedly sounded his theme of “rank-and-file power.”

For example, when a Teamster bus driver at the Orange County Transportation Authority operations center in Garden Grove complained that rank-and-file union members aren’t given enough information about labor contracts before voting on them, a sympathetic Leedham replied, “You should have rank-and-file members at the bargaining table.”

Those rank-and-file negotiators, Leedham added, could provide fellow members with “written reports every step of the way” in negotiations.

The driver, Gary Stewart, appeared impressed both with Leedham’s answer and his earnest, soft-spoken style. “He seemed trustworthy,” said Stewart, a bus driver for nearly 22 years.

But not all of the drivers were sold on Leedham. James Kinder, an OCTA driver with 24 years behind the wheel, said he thought Hoffa might restore some of the clout the union had decades ago when Hoffa’s father was in office. Restoring that sort of power, and putting the union’s troubled finances in order, have been major themes of the Hoffa campaign.

The younger Hoffa, Kinder said, “has had to have learned something from his father,” who disappeared in 1975 and was presumed murdered by organized mobsters.

Experts say Leedham likely would expand upon the more combative approach to industrial relations adopted by former Teamster President Ron Carey. Despite being widely credited with ridding the Teamsters of much of its long-term corruption, Carey was expelled from the union by federal overseers in July due to his alleged central role in a 1996 political campaign finance scandal.

Leedham’s association with Carey has, at times, put him on the defensive.

The Hoffa camp maintains that Leedham, who otherwise has enjoyed a clean reputation, bears some of the responsibility for the Carey campaign finance scandal, which involved the misuse of nearly $1 million in union funds.

Leedham ran on Carey’s ticket in 1996 and was chosen by Carey six years ago to be director of the Teamsters’ biggest unit, the 400,000-member warehouse division.

“He was part of that ticket, and he should have known,” said Chuck Mack, a Bay Area Teamster leader who is running on the Hoffa slate for western region vice president. “Whether he knew about it or not, he benefited from that money, and has to be held accountable for that.”

But Leedham counters that he has never been accused or even questioned by authorities in connection with the campaign controversy.

In turn, Leedham supporters cite Hoffa’s ties years ago to an alleged mob associate, and point out that federal authorities have disqualified or expelled five original members of the Hoffa slate. They include Mary Lou Salmeron, recording secretary of Local 986 in South El Monte, who was disqualified for allegedly coercing Teamster staffers to provide contributions to her campaign.

A current member of the Hoffa slate, El Monte-based James Santangelo, is contesting a charge by federal overseers that he pocketed an unauthorized union loan of more than $15,000. Santangelo heads powerful Teamsters Joint Council 42 and Local 848.

Hoffa, 57, says he has not been involved in any wrongdoing. His backers note that he was cleared to run for Teamsters president in April by a federal election officer who scrutinized Hoffa’s 1996 campaign. The election official found several finance irregularities, but didn’t consider any of them serious enough to disqualify Hoffa.

Unlike Hoffa, who practiced law before getting a staff job with a Teamster local in Detroit, Leedham started with the union as a rank-and-file warehouse worker in the food industry. In 1986, he was elected head of Teamster Local 206 in Portland, Ore., after waging a successful dissident campaign against the incumbent leaders.

Despite his unassuming personal style, Leedham has embodied the more activist approach shared by many of the new generation of union leaders. He has actively supported a campaign to work with the United Farm Workers union, a historic Teamsters rival, to organize largely Latino immigrant warehouse workers in Washington state’s apple industry.

His militancy was demonstrated through a pair of strikes he helped lead against the Fred Meyer Inc. supermarket chain in the Portland area, including a walkout in 1994 that lasted three months.

Does Leedham have a serious chance to overtake Hoffa? In the absence of a published poll, any prediction is iffy.

Still, Leedham supporters argue that several factors are working in favor of an upset. Among other things, Leedham has the backing of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a grass-roots group that helped bring Carey to power.

Mack, Hoffa’s running mate, calls Leedham “an unexciting guy,” but concedes that “Leedham and his camp have some energy, and they’ve been working hard for several months.”

While Mack predicts that the Hoffa ticket will prevail, he added, “I don’t look for any blowout in this race.”