Socialist Action /January 1999
Teamsters Notebook
By CHARLES WALKER
In December, the James P. Hoffa forces swept the last of the union's
reformers from the Teamsters Washington headquarters, popularly called the
"Marble Palace." In a three-way race, Hoffa beat the reformers'
slate headed by Tom Leedham by nearly 55,00 votes, or 55 percent to 39 percent.
Hoffa's vote easily surpassed Ron Carey's 1996 defeat of Hoffa by 16,000
votes, or 52 percent to 48 percent. Because Hoffa will be serving the balance
of Carey's five-year term, the union's next election is just three years
away.
Clearly the Teamster bureaucracy scored a big comeback, after losing
the first two unionwide elections since the members first gained the right
to vote for their top international officers in 1989.
However, a preliminary analysis of the vote by the Leedham campaign indicates
that Leedham beat Hoffa in many local unions having heavy to medium concentrations
of UPS and freight workers. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area,
Leedham beat Hoffa in six of seven freight and/or UPS local unions.
Workers in these two primary sectors of the union, freight and small
package delivery, have the most contact with the international union's officers,
staff, and policies. Under Ron Carey, these workers were mobilized several
times in national strikes and job actions.
Hoffa dominated Leedham in the so-called white-paper-contract locals-those
local unions that do not come under the major national master contracts.
Therefore, the international union ordinarily has little or no influence
on their contract negotiations or contract enforcement. While some of these
locals are large, most are small, and even the largest have many bargaining
units of under 100 members.
Reaching all these small units-scattered across the 50 states, Puerto
Rico, and Canada-was virtually impossible in the shortened campaign period
of less than six months. According to the Leedham campaigners, they continued
to gain momentum right up to the last day of balloting, despite being outspent
four to one. As Leedham says, they simply "ran out of time."
Probably the Northwest flight attendants' Local 2000 gave Leedham his
best showing: 3222 to 300 for Hoffa, or 87 percent of their vote.
Large fall-off in voting
It's hard to say for sure, but Leedham may have been hurt far more than
Hoffa by the 60,000 fewer votes cast than just two years ago. For example,
Ron Carey's former New York local gave both Leedham and Carey (1996) all
but a handful of their votes, but there were 1500 fewer votes this time.
The vote drop-off was across the board. Few local unions matched their
1996 vote levels.
No one knows for sure why there was such a drastic fall-off in the mail-in
vote that went out to 1.4 million members. There's some anecdotal evidence
that some members who would never vote for Hoffa also wouldn't vote for
someone they didn't know; that is, Leedham, or the third candidate, John
Metz, who led a stillborn campaign and ended up with 6 percent of the vote.
The New York Times reported: "Teamster officials attributed
the decline to two factors: cynicism arising from the Carey scandal and
the fact that the current campaign did not have the same heat and fire as
the battle between Mr. Hoffa and Mr. Carey."
Cynicism may well have reduced the vote, and Leedham may have been hurt
the most. Hoffa campaigners repeated the government's bogus charges that
Carey had a hand in the money-laundering scandal that was actually perpetrated
behind Carey's back by campaign staffers out to line their own pockets.
In fact, the government has yet to bring criminal charges against Carey.
It's thought that the Feds know they can't get a conviction, because even
a group of government overseers, including the former head of both the FBI
and the CIA, dismissed charges alleging Carey's complicity.
For two years Hoffa campaigners claimed that Carey was guilty of robbing
the members and said that both Leedham and the Teamsters for a Democratic
Union (TDU) were dirty too. Leedham and his key supporters in TDU never
really attempted to refute Hoffa's charges of Carey's corruption. Instead
they focused on getting out their primary message of more rank-and-file
power over the union.
Still, without knowing the truth about Carey's innocence, some Teamsters
may have decided that no one in the race deserved their trust and vote.
A week after the election, Hoffa told the press that his union critics
were "linked to the most corrupt Ron Carey administration we've ever
seen. That really tells you where they are coming from."
Still TDU and Leedham show no signs of rebutting Hoffa's lies about Carey
and the reform movement.
Bureaucrats hid their real record
The bureaucracy won the election, but not because they ran under their
true colors. They never bragged about sabotaging the 1994 UPS safety strike.
They didn't boast that they had given public aid and comfort to the freight
bosses during the first national freight strike in 18 years.
They didn't plead for an opportunity to get back the extra pensions and
millions of dollars in multiple salaries that Carey took from them. They
didn't reveal how they had whined that Carey returned over $120 million
dollars to the members by way of strike benefits.
Instead, they campaigned as "militants" promising to unite
the union's "1.4 million brothers and sisters into an effective force
fighting for economic and social justice."
"Remember," the Hoffa campaign flyers read, "when the
bosses used to be afraid of us? When the word 'Teamster' sent them shaking?
When politicians knew who spoke for working families throughout America?
We were a great union then. And we can be again with your vote for Jim Hoffa...."
No wonder that The New York Times found a red-hot rank-and-file
Hoffa campaigner who said, "We feel like Jimmy's the messiah of the
labor movement. He's for the working-class people, and he's the guy who's
going to rebuild this."
Obviously, the bureaucracy has demagogically decided to adapt to the
members' militancy, as demonstrated most forcefully by the 1997 strike against
United Parcel Service.
For the UPS strike showed the extent that UPS workers-and likely all
Teamsters-are fed up with the bureaucracy's decades of caving in to the
bosses' assault on their standard of living and job protections.
Hoffa has continued his militant posing since the vote results were announced.
He has told the press that "we're going to see a new militancy of the
Teamsters in our negotiations." But Carey set high standards for union
militancy, and that is likely to lead to Hoffa's downfall.
When campaigning, Hoffa often said that he will take action to get the
union out from under the government's control. (But last year on the Larry
King program he also said, "I'm calling for a [federal] trusteeship
of the union.")
Days after his election, he said that "we should start talking [to
the Feds] about a diminished role for the government." The New York
Times said, "Mr. Hoffa's suggestion that it is now time to end
nine years of federal supervision of the Teamsters deserves no serious consideration."
The Wall Street Journal held out hope to Hoffa for a "looser
federal supervision of his union," provided, in part, that Hoffa "pledge
cooperation with Rep. Pete Hoestra's oversight hearings into union involvement
in elections."
Given that Hoffa worked hand in hand with Hoestra to destroy Carey's
reputation, some deal may be in the cards. But it seems more likely that
the government will not withdraw from the union until forced to get out
by the Teamster ranks, if not by the entire labor movement.
Actually, there will be a reduction in the government's supervision of
the union, but it has nothing to do with Hoffa's election.
Under the Consent Decree, the government got the authority to run and
supervise the union's delegate and international officer elections for two
elections. The Feds used that authority to oust Carey from the rerun election,
virtually insuring Hoffa's victory.
In any event, the next election will be run by the Hoffa forces. They
will set the rules, judge who violated them, determine the penalties, and
count the votes!
The members are between a rock and a hard place: From the government
they may get an accurate vote count, but can't vote for Carey, their clear
choice-in the wake of the 1997 UPS strike-to lead them. And from Hoffa they
may get a rigged vote count, given the history of fraud and force in local
union elections by the union's bureaucracy.
Hoffa is slated to put Thomas Pazzi, his campaign manager, on the Teamsters
payroll as his chief of staff. Pazzi is president of Professional Management
Inc., a political consulting outfit in Washington D.C.
From 1985-1989, Pazzi was vice president of Riggs National Bank of Washington,
D.C. For 10 years, Pazzi held the titles of Corporate Planner, and then
Commercial Loan Officer, with the Bank of the Commonwealth in Detroit.
Along with giving business unionism a boost by making a former banker
a top-level union insider, Hoffa is sure to anger rank and filers who remember
Hoffa's attacks on Carey's hiring of a handful of coal miners, two of whom,
Eddie Burke and Rick Blaylock, led the famous 1989 sit-in strike against
Pittston Coal Company.
Pazzi will be joined at the union's offices by Richard Leebove, a one-time
protegé of the fascist felon Lyndon LaRouche. Leebove was identified
by Carey's lawyer in 1990 as "a longtime dirty trickster, propagandist,
and smear artist who has frequently been hired to attack union reform efforts,
including in Detroit-area Teamster locals."
Teamsters won't have to wait long before they see other differences between
Hoffa and Carey:
UPS is welching on the new contract provisions that call for the company
to open 10,000 new full-time jobs. In December, it provoked a strike by
the union's largest UPS local because supervisors were working while UPS
workers were laid-off. The local, by the way, is headed by Leedham supporters,
including a Leedham slate member.
Anheuser-Busch has implemented its harsh "last, best, and final"
contract offer. The 8000 brewery workers desperately need a UPS-style campaign
and mobilization to just get back what they had only a few months ago.
After more than 40 years in which old-guard officials failed to organize
Overnight Transportation, the nation's biggest nonunion trucking firm, Carey
organized 3650 workers. The remaining workforce needs to be organized, and
brought under the national freight contract.
A national carhaul contract expires May 31, 1999. In 1995, Carey led
a successful three-week carhaul strike. Carhaul Teamsters say that the carhaul
bosses are once again looking for concessions to meet their growing nonunion
competition.
How will Hoffa respond to these challenges? I probably got the answer
in a phone call not long ago from a Teamster who witnessed a Diamond Walnut
striker, a Latina, approach Hoffa, seeking his support for their then five-year-old
strike. Hoffa told her: "Get a job!"
Socialist Action /January 1999 |