US-LABOUR: Teamsters Vote Could Be Key to Union Reform

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 2 1997 (IPS) - Another election battle has begun for union leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) featuring the same two candidates who faced each other one year ago, but at a radically different time for the labour movement.

Last year when incumbent IBT President Ron Carey faced Jimmy Hoffa Jr, son of late Teamsters’ leader, the victorious Carey was the face of a new, reformist union leadership, while Hoffa was linked to the corruption-tainted Teamsters ‘Old Guard’. The election also was held at a time when organised labour, which now boasts membership of only slightly more than 14 percent of the U.S. workforce, was in clear decline.

All that has changed now. Carey has been forced to fight Hoffa anew after the U.S. government last month declared his ‘reformist’ slate had used illegal campaign donations to change the outcome of last year’s vote. It is Hoffa who has charged Carey as being a candidate tainted by corruption charges.

Ironically, thanks in no small part to Carey himself, the U.S. labour movement has been able to brag about one of its most prominent victories in years: the Teamsters’ successful two-week strike last month against the United Parcel Service (UPS) package- delivery firm.

The stakes for the re-run election, which are likely to be held within the next four months, are accordingly higher.

“It would be a tremendous blow to the whole resurgence of the labour movement if Hoffa were to be elected,” said Carl Biers, director of the Association for Union Democracy, a New York-based group which monitors the labour movement.

The old guard of the IBT, which backs Hoffa, is blamed by union reformers for its past corruption, which led the U.S. government in 1989 to accuse the Teamsters of being a subsidiary of organised crime bodies like the Mafia. A Hoffa victory, Biers said, would bring those leaders back to a commanding position over the 1.3-million-member IBT, and over organised labour as a whole.

Carey’s backers, however, may have only themselves to blame following the revelation by court-appointed investigator Barbara Zack Quindel that the 1996 Carey campaign received 221,000 dollars in illegal donations from a shell group, ironically called Teamsters for a Corruption-Free Union (TCFU). That money was then used to fund the mailing of pro-Carey literature to Teamsters voters in the election’s closing days.

“TCFU-funded mailings could have persuaded at least a small percentage of Carey-slate supporters to cast their ballots and therefore may have affected the outcome of the election,” Quindel reported on Aug. 22.

Quindel did not find Carey personally responsible for any illegal activity, and he remains free to run again. Carey last week denied any wrongdoing, and criticised the TCFU mailings as “a scheme by outside consultants to rip off the union and line their own pockets.”

The government is expected to approve Quindel’s report next week, paving the way for a re-run of the Carey-Hoffa battle, and all of the local leadership elections won by Carey’s backers, within the next four months.

“It’s an unfortunate setback at a moment when the morale of the labour movement was very high,” Biers said.

Hoffa contends that recent union successes, especially the two- week strike by 185,000 Teamsters against UPS and the parcel giant’s subsequent concessions on its new five-year contract with the union, have nothing to do with Carey. “After six years of Ron Carey, the Teamsters union today is on the edge of bankruptcy and is hopelessly divided,” he told reporters last week.

For some union analysts, both candidates are flawed. A Hoffa win would bring the IBT back under the control of organised crime, argued Robert Fitch, a former union organiser and consultant to the Communications Workers of America. But Carey’s victory would only keep in power someone who “plays off one group of Mafiosi against another,” Fitch added.

In the old days, he claimed, the Mafia and other groups were directly involved in choosing Teamster leadership. Ever since the IBT agreed to a government consent decree in 1989 requiring that the union clean up its act, the Teamsters have tried to wipe out the illegal practises of the past, from racketeering to strong-arm tactics and even murders of dissenters (Jimmy Hoffa Snr. himself disappeared mysteriously in the 1970s and is presumed dead).

Carey also ended such notorious habits as the use of private jets by Teamster leaders and the negotiation of secret deals with companies’ management, Biers noted. But at the same time, Fitch said, growing government oversight over the Teamsters has brought a new problem: “The regulators start working for the regulated.”

In this case, President Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party has attracted attention for its close ties with Carey, under whom the Teamsters’ political action committee last year donated 2.5 million dollars to Democratic candidates. Carey’s campaign manager, Jere Nash, also worked for Clinton’s re-election campaign last year, Quindel said in her report. (Carey later denied knowledge of Nash’s work for Clinton while the IBT did not respond to requests for further information).

Even Quindel has been accused of a conflict of interest in her investigation of the fairness of last year’s election: her husband sits on the board of directors of Citizen Action, a group linked to the fund-raising improprieties, Fitch noted.

Still, Biers said, Carey’s woes are a far cry from the Teamsters’ corrupt past. “The whole concept of the reform movement has been to clean up racketeers, give members information, and have input between the leadership and the rank and file,” he argued.

That growth of union democracy, he contended, helped foster the solidarity essential to the UPS strike. In turn, he added, the gains in the UPS contract negotiations improve Carey’s hopes to win the new election: “If there had been a re-run without the UPS victory, I think it wouldn’t look so good for Carey.”

A Carey loss, in turn, would be a blow to Clinton and the Democrats, the main beneficiary of Teamster support following two decades of IBT backing of the opposition Republican Party. “Under Hoffa, the union would probably revert to its Republican past,” Fitch said.