Underdog Persists for Teamsters Chief

Taking on one of the most recognizable names in labor can be lonely work. But Tom Leedham is at it again, running his second underdog campaign against Teamsters President James P. Hoffa in a contest to be decided within two weeks.

Outspent 7 to 1, backed by only one staffer and a few volunteers and ignored by most media, Leedham nevertheless insists the odds are with him.

“I think we’re going to win this, I really do,” he said during a three-day swing through Los Angeles last week. “It just feels entirely different this time.”

Leedham, a former warehouse worker who rose through the ranks to become a national vice president under former Teamsters President Ron Carey, took 38% of members’ votes in 1998. He said his pledges to step up union organizing and reduce salaries of top union executives are resonating with the rank-and-file.

More than anything, however, the vote will be a referendum on the performance so far of Hoffa, an attorney who capitalized on his father’s name and promised to “restore the power” to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters three years ago.

Hoffa’s campaign spokesman, Richard Leebove, said he has done just that by raising the union’s profile in Congress, unifying regional councils and cultivating a relationship with the media.

“Jim Hoffa’s name ID among the American people is 20 times greater than [AFL-CIO President] John Sweeney’s,” Leebove said. “That’s important to members. They take a lot of pride that their leader is quoted in the papers and appearing on ‘Meet the Press.”’

Leebove also said the nation’s political mood favors incumbents, even in union jobs.

The Hoffa campaign has polled members periodically but would not discuss findings other than to claim a “comfortable margin.”

Leedham and his supporters, on the other hand, said members are disillusioned with Hoffa’s handling of several major contract negotiations, including those covering Anheuser-Busch Cos. workers and Northwest Airlines flight attendants. A nationwide strike launched against Overnite Transportation Co. in 1999 has fizzled, and the union’s share of freight trucking--once its core business--continues to slide.

Hoffa also failed to raise the union’s $55 weekly strike benefit, as promised in the campaign, and the number of Teamsters officials collecting more than one salary per person grew by 141, Leedham said. Moreover, Hoffa’s administration was embarrassed last spring by a kickback scandal in Las Vegas involving two close associates.

The two, Chicago Teamsters chief William Hogan Jr. and Dane Passo, a personal aide to Hoffa, were charged by a federally supervised oversight panel with trying to shift convention tear-down jobs to a nonunion Chicago firm. Hogan and Passo have taken leaves from the international union pending an internal investigation but continue to work for their locals. They have denied any wrongdoing.

Ending Corruption Through Organizing

Despite the allegations, detailed in a 192-page report released in May, Hoffa insists the union is as free of corruption as any organization of its size and has demanded an end to the U.S. government’s 12-year oversight of the Teamsters. “There can be no more justification for supervision,” Leebove said. “This is the fourth election for the Teamsters since ’91. There is no more democratic union in the country.”

Leedham said that it’s too soon, that the way to end corruption in the union is to organize aggressively and cultivate new leaders from the growing membership. Yet, he said, the international’s organizing budget was cut by two-thirds under Hoffa. Even as the labor movement as a whole grew, the 1.4-million-member Teamsters shrank by about 11,000 members.

“The international isn’t organizing anything anywhere. The only thing happening is at the local level, and it’s hit or miss,” Leedham said. “This is not 1955. We’re dealing with multinational conglomerates, and we’re not keeping up with them. They’re growing, and we’re shrinking.”

Leedham, 60, said that for all those reasons, his prospects are better now than in 1998, when he had just five months to campaign for the special election. Results of an earlier match between Hoffa and Carey were thrown out after a campaign fund-raising scandal involving Carey was uncovered.

“In ‘98, the most-asked question was: ‘Who the heck are you?”’ Leedham said, laughing, as he stood outside a chain-link fence surrounding a Roadway Corp. truck yard in Commerce. “Now we’re getting a much better response at the gates and through the phone banks. People seem more involved.”

The union’s diversity--ranging from flight attendants to low-wage factory workers--makes any blanket pronouncement hazardous. Several researchers who follow Teamsters politics declined to guess the outcome.

A Dramatic Contrast in Campaign Spending

In less than two weeks, the question will be moot. Ballots were mailed to all 1.4 million Teamsters last month, and members have about a week to return them. About 300,000 already have been received, and officials expect 100,000 more ballots to arrive during the next week.

Federal election supervisors will begin the count Nov. 13 and should have results within three days.

With hundreds of thousands of ballots outstanding, Hoffa and Leedham, who is still a local Teamsters officer in Oregon, have been campaigning hard in recent weeks to encourage members to vote.

The Hoffa campaign has relied mainly on a $1.2-million blizzard of mailings and phone calls. Leedham, with his austere budget, has taken a more grass-roots approach.

He shuns hotels, instead staying in guest rooms of truck drivers and factory workers around the country. As he hit workplaces near Los Angeles on Thursday, Leedham pointed to a volunteer’s trunk, stuffed with fliers and videotapes, and joked, “This is our Southern California campaign office.”

Lean and energetic, Leedham, the son of a newspaper pressroom supervisor, is a low-key but determined campaigner, often starting his rounds at 3:30 a.m.

Last Thursday, his schedule included stops at two United Parcel Service facilities, two trucking hubs, a sanitation plant and a 150-employee warehouse in Commerce.

At the warehouse, he milled around a food truck in the employee parking lot with primarily Spanish-speaking packagers on their break.

Four volunteers fanned out and soon found themselves explaining not only Leedham’s candidacy but also the role of the union. Several employees said they hadn’t seen a union representative in years. Most were only vaguely aware of an election in the Teamsters, although they should have received ballots in the mail weeks earlier.

The next stop was Roadway, where drivers filed through a gate in ones and twos, sometimes stopping to shake Leedham’s hand. Leedham is pinning his hopes on these drivers, who were solid Hoffa backers in the last election, but the sentiment was hard to read, even among the drivers themselves. Asked to handicap the election, two veteran drivers guessed a 70-30 split on the vote. But each picked a different winner.