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Title: Reforming the Teamsters Author: Jon Bekken Date: 1993 Language: en Topics: Teamsters, reform, trade unions, US, Libertarian Labor Review Source: Retrieved on September 13, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050913093544/http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr14-24/15e.shtml Notes: From Libertarian Labor Review #15, Summer 1993
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.