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Libertarian Labor Review #15
Summer 1993, pages 17-23
Reforming the Teamsters
by Jon Bekken
Ron Carey began his five-year term as president of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters Feb. 1, 1992. Carey and his
reform slate--heavily backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union
(most of Carey's slate, though not Carey himself, were TDU
members)--swept the elections, in a three-way race in which barely
a fourth of the Teamsters' 1.5 million members voted--half of them
for Carey. The election capped a 17-year struggle to reform the
Teamsters, but was made possible only after the government put the
union under federal trusteeship (in March 1989) under U.S.
racketeering laws. The effort to reform the Teamsters union has
been taken as an example by many other union activists who find
themselves in corrupt or undemocratic business unions--indeed the
foremost advocate of this union reform movement, Labor Notes, is
firmly aligned with TDU. The Carey/TDU experience is thus important
not only for what it means to members of the Teamsters union, but
also as an example of where efforts to reform the business unions
are likely to take us.
Although the Teamsters began as a union for drivers of horse-
drawn wagons, today they organize anybody they can get dues from--
truck drivers, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, flight
attendants, state employees, etc. The Teamsters' International
(U.S. and Canada) Executive Board can place local affiliates in
receivership for corruption or mismanagement, but otherwise has
little authority over Teamster locals. Locals pay $3.90 a month to
the International, the bulk of members' dues stay with locals or
with powerful regional boards. About a fifth of IBT members are
covered by national contracts, mostly United Parcel Service
workers. Teamster benefit plans and grievance boards are controlled
by regional Teamsters conferences, most of which remain solidly in
the grip of old-guard officers backed by entrenched local union
bosses. Regional (conference) officers are elected by local union
officers, not by the membership--just as national officers were
before the government take-over.
A Nest of Thieves
That the Teamsters was thoroughly corrupt is a truism so well-
known that it hardly needs repeating. Three of the most recent six
previous presidents went to jail, a fourth died while under
indictment for embezzelement, and a fifth led the mob drain the
union's pension funds. Carey's predecessor (who has thus far not
been indicted for any crime) rigged contract procedures to give his
son-in-law the union's printing work. But in recent years mob
control of the Teamsters had weakened -- whether as a result of
repeated prosecutions of mob-affiliated Teamster leaders or because
the weakened union (since deregulation the Teamsters no longer
control interstate trucking) and its looted pension plan were no
longer as attractive as other rackets.
And the extent to which the union is being cleaned up is
easily over-stated. To Carey's credit, he has dumped the jets and
limousines that symbolized the lavish lifestyle of his
predecessors, and also dumped many double- and triple-dipping
Teamster officials from the headquarters payroll. (These
hardworking piecards simultaneously held down two or more full-time
jobs with the Teamsters on the local, regional and national level;
when Carey dumped them from the headquarters payroll they were
forced to fall back on their second jobs, from which they have
become bitter opponents of the Carey regime.) Carey replaced the
double-dippers and other opponents with labor activists who support
his policies.
In many ways the Teamsters are just as corrupt as ever.
Outright control by the mob is, by and large, passe--especially as
this sort of corruption invites critical attention from the
government trustees still overseeing the Teamsters. Long-entrenched
mob regimes have been ousted from several locals, and other
Teamster officers have been ousted for using union treasuries as
their personal checking accounts--among them New York Teamster boss
Barry Feinstein. (Interestingly, the New York Times and other union
officers were unstinting in praising Feinstein as a labor statesman
as he was being forced from office.)
But government-run locals have not shown themselves to be
notably committed to improving wages or working conditions, or to
conserving the members' dues for legitimate union purposes. Instead
the government is systematically looting the Teamsters and making
the union even more subservient to employers than it was under mob
control.
Under the consent decree which old guard Teamsters officials
signed to keep themselves out of jail, a three-person Independent
Review Board is supposed to investigate corruption charges and
recommend appropriate action to the appropriate local, regional
and/or "international" union bodies. If the Board isn't satisfied
with their action, it has the right to conduct its own hearings and
take whatever action it chooses, subject only to appeal to the
courts. One board member was appointed by the Teamsters, a second,
former judge Frederick Lacey, by the government. The two were
supposed to select a third by mutual agreement, but when they
couldn't immediately agree the government appointed former CIA and
FBI director William Webster to the "neutral" seat--a finer
exemplar of dirty tricks and corruption would not be easy to find.
Webster sits on the Board of Anheuser-Busch (as well as the
Pinkerton Agency) and thus is indisputably a member of the
employing class. Worse still, he is not only an employer--he is an
employer of Teamsters! So the government has given the bosses the
swing vote in deciding "union" policy.
To add insult to injury, the government refused the Teamsters'
very reasonable request to limit the amount of money Lacey could
soak their treasury for. Having witnessed Lacey's high-spending
ways in the two years Lacey oversaw the union as federal trustee,
Carey was reluctant to give him a blank check. Lacey charges the
union $385 an hour (about $775,000 a year, if he works a 40-hour
week); Carey, by contrast, makes "only" $175,000 (after he cut the
salary by $50,000). Carey asked that Lacey be limited to no more
than $50,000 a year in fees, but Lacey demanded and got a minimum
fee of $100,000 plus expenses with no upper limit. Even the
highest-paid Teamster bosses never soaked the working members for
that much.
Some union reformers (most notably the Association for Union
Democracy) have defended the Independent Review Board as necessary
to ensure that local and regional officers do not abuse members'
rights, though criticizing its cost and the Webster appointment.
But having government officials determine union policy, settle
union grievances, determine who will hold union office and dictate
union rules is corruption of the worst sort. At least the members
have somewhat of a chance (however slim) fighting against mobsters
and bureaucrats; with the government running their union they are
left powerless when the bosses attack.
While Carey has vigorously denounced this government
interference, his record of opposing corruption is unimpressive. In
one of his last actions in his guise as federal trustee, Lacey
vetoed Carey's attempt to appoint one Ronald Miller as
international union representative on the grounds that the
"appointment would further a racketeering activity--the extortion
of the rank and file's right to a democratic union." Despite
Carey's reputation as a union reformer, it seems that he is willing
to turn a blind eye to harassment of union dissidents when those
doing the harassing are his supporters.
Teamster Local 30, in Pennsylvania, is home to newly elected
(on the Carey slate) Teamster General Secretary-Treasurer Tom
Sever, Miller (local business agent), and Tom Felice, a persistent
critic of the Sever administration. When Felice was laid off from
his job, he had to find another job in its jurisdiction in order to
maintain his membership. He found a job but Local 30 officers would
not sign the necessary paperwork, so Felice lost the job and was
forced out of the local. When he sued, the federal judge hearing
the case ruled that Sever and Miller "without doubt... acted in bad
faith" and forced him from the union through "despicable" "bullying
tactics." Lacey decided that violating rank-and-file rights
violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
(under which the government took control of the Teamsters).
This decision is interesting on at least two counts--on the
one hand it nicely illustrates Carey's disregard for the democratic
rights of rank-and-file Teamsters; on the other, it marks a
dramatic extention of government power. Under the logic of this
ruling, any union dissident whose civil liberties were violated in
their unions could turn to federal prosecutors and ask them to
bring criminal or civil charges. But at the same time, the logic is
easily extended to allow prosecution of union officers and seizure
of unions for virtually any violation of government policy--say,
refusal to handle non-union goods or honoring a picket line (indeed
there is far more precedent for such an interpretation of RICO than
to support Lacey's innovative reading of the law).
A Model Piecard
Carey himself is the very model of the piecard. He has been a
full-time union bureaucrat since 1967, representing United Parcel
workers in Long Island. (Though in fairness, Carey got his start in
the Teamsters as a UPS driver, unlike that other darling of the
union reform crowd, Rich Trumka, who put in only a few months in
the mines working a summer job before going on the UMW payroll as
a staff attorney.) By all accounts, Carey proved an effective union
president, and he got 97.5 percent of his local's vote for IBT
president.
Since taking control of the Teamsters international, Carey has
generally argued for a more militant posture--threatening strikes
and boycotts in situations where his predecessors might have called
for cooperation or concessions. The new administration has promised
programs to educate local officials on labor-management cooperation
schemes, a major organizing drive, and concerted efforts to involve
rank-and-file members in the ongoing fight for a new contract from
United Parcel Service (last time around, the Teamsters granted
major concessions).
The catch is the word "promised." Teamster watchers report
that the UPS effort has been sidelined by attempts to work through
often-hostile local officers, and that very little actual
mobilizing work has been done. And the Carey administration is
handicapped by a major financial crisis. The old guard spent
millions of dollars on court battles to keep themselves out of jail
and in office, and millions more on high salaries and lavish perks.
They took $34 million out of the strike fund to cover these
deficits. Although Carey has cut spending on officers, legal fees
and perks, many of his programs will cost money--and a UPS strike
would exhaust the depleted strike fund in only two weeks.
Carey has also pressed for a more powerful International union
structure. Where the Teamsters have always been a decentralized
federation of largely autonomous locals, Carey's vision calls for
a centralized structure with a powerful president (himself).
Carey's General Executive Board has unilaterally amended the
Teamsters' constitution to give the president the power to appoint
the chairperson and other members of the grievance panels that
administer the Teamsters' national contracts. The Teamsters
constitution apparently gives the Executive Board the authority to
amend any section of the constitution dealing with contract
bargaining, ratification and enforcement on its own authority,
without a vote by the membership, although some Teamster officials
have challenged this interpretation. Jack Yager, for example, who
chaird the policy committee of the Teamsters Central Conference,
has declared that he will continue to appoint grievance chairs in
the conference and would simply ignore Carey's attempts to assert
his power in this area. In response, Carey filed internal union
charges against Yager April 23 seeking his removal from office.
Carey charged Yager with signing sweetheart deals with Flint
Special Services and Wintz Parcel, undermining efforts to "reform"
the grievance procedure, and charging unauthorized Central
Conference assessments on local unions. Yager has denounced the
proceedings as an attempt to silence critics of the new regime.
Clearly the old guard officers and their appointees have done
little if anything to defend members' rights through the grievance
process (though in part this may be due to problems inherent in
trying to resolve these issues through regional and national panels
far removed from the actual grievances, rather than on the shop
floor through direct action). But at the same time, Carey's effort
to pack these panels with his own loyalists is unlikely to do much
to empower the rank-and-file. It will, however, greatly strengthen
the powers of the central bureaucracy over the lives of working
Teamsters--and there may well come a time when rank-and-filers will
learn to regret that power (whether exercised by Carey or his
successors).
Teamsters for a Democratic Union
Ten of Carey's 14 slate members were TDU members, and TDU
handled most of the get-out-the-vote activities. Carey's entire
slate was elected, and so TDU now ostensibly controls the
Teamsters' executive board. Those TDU activists find themselves in
an awkward position--to the extent that they carry out their reform
agenda, they must encourage the rank-and-file to be more active and
to challenge old guard Teamsters officials. Indeed, TDU is
organizing election challenges against several local officers (with
mixed results). They are also pressing for changes in local union
bylaws in an attempt to ensure fairer election procedures.
This, of course, has the effect of further polarizing Carey's
relations with local and regional officials who control the union's
pension funds, grievance panels, and most of its contracts. Joint
Council 53, for example, recently passed a resolution calling TDU
"a cancer eating away at the teamsters' union" and demanding that
Carey keep his officers away from locals in its jurisdiction. If
Carey and TDU are to revitalize the Teamsters from above, they need
the cooperation of those officials--at the very least they need
them to stand aside. On the other hand, if they wish to redirect
the Teamsters over the long haul, they need to replace old guard
officials at all levels. So Carey's administration has moved
slowly, trying to woo over as many old guard officials as possible.
Although Carey replaced virtually the entire UPS grievance panel,
for example, he left the freight grievance panel largely intact.
Some Teamsters have protested the retention of "business as
usual" officials who have failed to enforce basic contract
provisions for years. But you will be hard-pressed to find such
concerns expressed in the TDU newspaper, Convoy-Dispatch. TDU's
paper attacks the "half-truths, distortions and outright lies about
our International leadership," supports efforts to raise Teamsters
dues (or at least the proportion going to the International), backs
efforts to shift power from locals and regions (in the hands of
their enemies) to the International (in their hands, at least for
the next few years), and praises "this great union of ours."
TDU's sudden switch from rank-and-filism to operating as the
administration caucus in union politics was predictable. Despite
efforts in TDU literature to portray itself as a spontaneous
response to a series of sell-outs by a mob-ridden union
bureaucracy, TDU represented a continuation of efforts by
Trotskyists to bore from within the Teamsters union and capture it
for their leadership. Members of International Socialists were
among the many leftists who sought out jobs in unionized heavy
industry in the late 1960s and 1970s as part of a strategy to
implant their ideas among the workers. IS ultimately adopted a
strategy of deep entryism in which their "socialism" became all-
but-invisible as they focussed instead on gaining influence by
organizing around short-term reforms.
These borers benefitted from an upsurge of unrest in the
Teamsters: steel haulers were demanding their own union, nearly
50,000 wildcat strikers demanded better contracts, and Ralph
Nader's Professional Drivers Council (PROD) was pressing the
Teamsters to take on health and safety issues--and soon expanded
its focus to corruption and union democracy. With its supporters
spread across the country, a dedicated core of activists used to
spending long hours on organizational activities and the ability to
draw upon IS resources to help get their efforts off the ground, IS
members were in a strong position to take charge of this effort and
reshape it in their own direction. They began with a single-issue
campaign around the 1976 freight contract--and with about three
dozen Teamsters (by no means all of them ISers) in 14 cities. But
they distributed tens of thousands of leaflets and struck a cord
among Teamsters determined to halt their eroding wages and working
conditions. TDU was formally organized in the aftermath of this
campaign, at a September 1976 meeting in Kent, Ohio. To quote from
TDU's account of the founding convention's approach:
They rejected the strategy of "dual unionism" or
secession from the Teamsters whioch some other reform
groups had avocated... They decided that TDU was not
going to confine its activities to the truck drivers and
dock workers in the freight industry... Finally, the men
and women who founded TDU committed themselves to fight
for real democracy in the Teamsters. They demanded that
the members have the right to elect everybody from union
steward to General President.
The Fraternal Order of Steelhaulers (FASH) had been the most
prominent of those advocating secession. They figured they had
enough unity among their fellow workers to build a genuine,
fighting union if they could just get the Teamster bureaucrats off
their backs. Unfortunately, this program brought them up against
the Teamsters bureaucrats, the employers (who hardly wanted a
militant union), and TDU--which ultimately persuaded them to
abandon their efforts to build their own union which could improve
their conditions immediately in favor of a long-term (pie in the
sky, when you die) boring-from-within strategy of trying to take
over the entire International. In 1979, TDU merged with PROD and
began lining up local officers, either by signing up existing
officers or by electing "reform" candidates.
Those early victories reinforced an already existing tendency
to focus on taking over the union offices, rather than building a
genuinely democratic, grassroots union (a strategy more easily
accomplished outside the Teamsters, of course). In 1980, TDU
activist Dave Wolfinsohn warned that, "Uncertain that they can spur
direct action against the employers, some TDUers have tended to
seek substitutes... In particular, there is a tendency to look to
union elections, to alliances with dubious union officials, and to
protracted lawsuits." He saw the original IS strategy as revolving
around building a "movement from below" with its own independent
existence, not merely serve as a front for the sponsoring party.
The TDU structure and newspaper were intended to give this movement
coherence and some visibility.
Despite the pivotal role IS has played in building TDU, it
would be a mistake to attribute too much importance to IS's
political agenda. While IS has been able to use its position in TDU
to push its pet hobby horses and to expand its influence into other
unions through the IS-owned-and-operated Labor Notes, in many ways
IS remade itself in response to the demands the TDU strategy placed
upon it. Originally IS was a fairly open, left Troskyist party. But
Trotskyist politics proved an obstacle to organizing rank-and-file
Teamsters (and indeed to IS's boring from within the labor movement
as a whole), and the politics were quickly reduced to attempts to
reach out to minority workers and occasional bouts of
internationalism (although this can be abandoned when opportunism
demands--TDU raised no objections to Carey's fiercely nationalistic
flag-waving, America-first rhetoric).
Even the traditional Trotskyist chimera of the Labor Party was
kept out of the TDU program (although IS advocated it fervently in
their magazine, Changes (now merged into Against The Current), and
in Labor Notes). Instead, TDU and IS have bulled inexorably toward
"pragmatic" policies--particularly towards efforts towards
electoralism and alliances with "out" officials. IS underwent a
split over these issues, and entered a seemingly irreversible
decline resulting in large part from its submersion into union
reform efforts. IS could not recruit effectively in the unions it
operated within for fear of alienating the rank-and-file, but so
much of their energy and resources went into boring-from-within
that IS by and larged ceased to function in the outside world. The
result was that IS became increasingly irrelevant to its own
members (once the union reform efforts got off the ground they were
largely self-perpetuating) and to broader movement politics. And
so, a few years ago, IS (after rejecting a proposal to bore from
within Democratic Socialists of America and take that organization
over) dissolved itself into a new "multi-tendency socialist
organization," Solidarity -- which brought former IS members,
exiles from the Socialist Workers Party, and freelance Marxists
into a looser, but larger organization.
IS's collapse is of little concern to syndicalists. Far more
important is the ways in which its policies diverted Teamster rank-
and-file efforts from attempting to build shop-floor resistance to
the bosses into the seemingly easier channels of electing
"reformers" to union office or revising union bylaws. Over the
years TDU had many successes with this strategy--that is, several
TDU-backed candidates did in fact become union bureaucrats (and
many union bureaucrats made alliances with TDU). With the U.S.
government take-over of the Teamsters, TDU was able to follow the
logic of this position into the union's highest levels.
But there is little reason to expect that these TDU Executive
Board members will make much diference. As Wolfinsohn noted 13
years ago, "Anyone who takes top office... without having first
built an independent organization of the rank and file (not just
voters) committed to direct action by the ranks... will hold office
but not be able to do anything with it." He pointed to the
conservative influence of the entrenched bureaucracy, to the
inability to win against the bosses without strong rank-and-file
action, and to the sorry results of TDU's early forays into union
elections. TDU won several elections in 1978, only to see the
"rebel" bureaucrats quickly assimilated. TDU's emphasis on working
within the Teamsters structure led it not only to reject secession,
but also to undermine efforts to build wildcat strikes (instead
pressuring the bureaucrats to call official strikes--even when
successful, the bureaucrats controlled the resulting strikes and
settled them on their own terms).
TDU relied upon lawsuits, union elections and appeals to union
officers instead of organizing the rank and file to act in their
own behalf. Efforts by more militant members to broaden this
approach were uniformly rejectedas irrelevant or likely to scare
off potential recruits. TDU's 1981 convention rejected efforts to
declare TDU support for the right to strike (even where prohibited
by contract), to publish articles in the TDU Convoy Dispatch on
direct action tactics such as the secondary boycott, and even
defeated a motion to require candidates for union office who run
with TDU support to sign a statement saying they would stick by its
program. (This motion was prompted by the fact that several dozen
TDU Teamster office-holders refused to vote or speak for TDU
positions at Teamsters conventions or to otherwise visibly support
the movement which helped them into union office).
Today TDU sits atop the Teamsters, but they are having little
more success in pursuing their policies. Where local officers
genuinely want to put up a fight they can make a difference--
primarily by not getting in the way. But few union bosses are
interested in restructuring their locals or regionals to give more
power to the rank-and-file, or in doing anything else that might
endanger their cushy jobs. And many Teamsters locals are totally
impervious to change from below--structured in such a way that
membership control is inconceiveable. Many, perhaps most, Teamsters
are members of large amalgamated locals that administer scores of
contracts covering workers at different companies in a wide variety
of industries, often scattered over vast territories. Members
rarely meet Teamsters members outside of their own workplace; even
if they were able to mount an effective electoral challenge to the
entrenched incumbents (hardly likely under the circumstances), this
organizational model separates the "union" local from its
membership in ways that are extremely difficult to overcome. But
these locals are not run by reformers, they are run by veteran
bureaucrats who run their fiefdoms like businesses, collecting the
dues (and paying themselves handsomely from the proceeds), making
sure the members don't get too uppity, and often undercutting other
union locals in their dealings with employers so as to get as many
dues-paying members as possible under their umbrella.
Boring from Within
In fairness, TDU never was a syndicalist organization -- it
aimed not to abolish the capitalist system, but rather to make the
Teamsters union a more effective weapon in the battle for a bigger
piece of the pie. But it is often pointed to as an example of what
revolutionaries might accomplish were we only to switch our efforts
from the admittedly difficult task of building revolutionary unions
to the seemingly easier route of transforming the business unions
from within. In many ways TDU has been successful--the "reformers"
have taken control of the highest levels of the "union" (though
their control is far shakier at lower levels), even if they have
had to make major compromises to do so.
For more then 100 years, syndicalists have debated the merits
of boring-from-within and of revolutionary unionism. The borers,
originally inspired by their success in capturing control of the
French CGT (though that control proved remarkably weak when put to
the test--it proved much easier to capture union office than to
build genuine working-class organizations), argued that it was
necessary to go where the workers were and to work within their
existing organizations to convert these to a more revolutionary
position. In practice, this has generally translated into a policy
of seeking union office, since business unions are run by their
officers and any "pragmatic" attempt to change their direction is
thus seemingly easier to direct from the top than from the bottom.
Those who rejected this strategy have been denounced as
impossibilists, divisive and sectarian.
But nonetheless the majority of the syndicalist movement has
always rejected this boring-from-within strategy, recognizing that
it is incompatible with our basic principles, and ineffective to
boot. Instead we have argued for building revolutionary unions. The
boring from within strategy necessarily implies that there is
nothing fundamentally wrong with the business unions--that with a
change of officers or a little tinkering with the bylaws they could
be made into effective working-class organizations. But
revolutionary unionists know that nothing could be further from the
truth.
The business unions are based upon fundamentally flawed
premises--that labor and management, at some basic level, have
interests that can be harmonised, and that workers are incapable of
running their own unions. While we support workers--whether members
of business unions or not--whenever they find themselves engaged in
the class war, we recognize that the business unions are organized
not to prosecute the class war but rather to smooth over disputes.
They are dues-collecting machines, whose continuity and stability
rely upon a passive membership and industrial peace. The prized
accomplishments of business unionism--their cadres of full-time
union officers, their mandatory dues check-off, their national
arbitration procedures, government-certified union representation--
are directly contrary to the real interests of the workers whose
dues support the business unions, and indeed were developed
precisely to circumvent workers' control of their own
organizations.
Revolutionary unionists propose a fundamentally different
concept of unionism--one based upon the workers ourselves,
organized at the point of production. We recognize that anti-
hierarchical, democratic organizations cannot be built within
hierarchical organizations -- let alone from the hierarchy itself.
Revolutionary unionism requires that we develop new ways of
pursuing our struggles and our vision for the future -- one based
on direct action and self-organization.
Sources:
Convoy-Dispatch, monthly newspaper of Teamsters for a
Democratic Union.
Frank Dobbs, "Can Carey Reform The Teamsters?" The Nation,
Feb. 15 1993, pp. 192-95.
Peter Kilborn, "Carey Takes the Wheel." New York Times
Magazine, June 21 1992, pp. 26-33, 46.
Phil Kwik, "After Nine Months, New Leadership is Transforming
the Teamsters." Labor Notes, Nov. 1992, pp. 1, 10-11.
Laura McClure, "The New Teamsters." Dollars & Sense, April 1993.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union, "The Fight for Reform: The
Origins of TDU." Detroit, TDU, no date.
Union Democracy Review, quarterly newsletter of Association
for Union Democracy.
Dave Wolfinsohn, "TDU: Problems & Prospects." Against The
Current, Fall 1980, pp. 33-43.
Steve Zeluck, "The TDU Convention--And the Fight Against Give-
Backs." Against The Current, Spring 1982, pp. 35-39.
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