Teamsters: Changing to Win?

by WILLIAM JOHNSON

Chances are you haven’t heard of Silver Capital, a
small, now-defunct Chicago-based company that used to
manufacture mirrors, frames and glass-cutting boards.

Silver Capital’s workers were mostly Mexican immigrants,
working for substandard wages and zero benefits—no
healthcare, no pensions, no sick days. And no matter
what the auto companies tell you, manufacturing work is
not fun. Silver Capital workers suffered severe injuries
(fingers chopped off, limbs gouged) and rarely saw a
dime of compensation.

If only they had a union, right? Actually, Silver
Capital workers did have a union. They were members of
Teamsters Local 743, a 13,000-member local representing
workers throughout Chicago. "The union never helped
anybody," says Marcela Garcia, who worked at Silver
Capital for seventeen years.

"You’d go to them with a problem, they’d say, ’It’s not
my problem. Talk to the company.’"

So when Silver Capital announced in September 2004 it
was closing down for good—and offered employees like
Garcia little to no severance—workers took matters into
their own hands. They struck: a one-day walkout without
union approval.

Union leaders responded quickly and decisively. Local
743 vice president José Galvan (who did not respond to
calls for comment) went straight to the picket lines—
where he told the workers that if they didn’t get back
to work pronto, he’d call immigration.

State of the Union

Welcome to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters
(IBT), a 1.4-million-member behemoth of a union led by
the man with the biggest name in labor: James P. Hoffa.
While Hoffa’s grip on the union remains strong, he is
facing an election challenge at the IBT convention in
June from reformer Tom Leedham, principal officer of
Local 206 in Portland, Oregon. The contest is one that
ought to command the attention of the broader
progressive community, since a healthy Teamsters union
is key to a revived labor movement.

On paper the IBT is a force to be reckoned with; every
day, hundreds of thousands of Teamsters load, ship and
unload the goods that keep America’s corporate powers
fully stocked and in the black. With members handling
cargo at critical points throughout the US economy’s
supply chain, the IBT has enormous potential power.

And though Hoffa, IBT secretary-treasurer Tom Keegel and
four IBT international vice presidents refused to
comment for this article, they have not been shy about
trumpeting their commitment to building labor power,
organizing new members and restoring "Teamster pride."
Hoffa was a major player in the drama last summer when
the AFL-CIO split and the IBT defected to labor’s new
Change to Win Federation. So why are Local 743
officials—lauded by Hoffa for their "proven and
experienced leadership"—intimidating immigrants and
cutting deals with management at a little mirror-making
company like Silver Capital? The short answer is,
Teamster leaders often have a complicated agenda. Or, as
Leedham argues, "There’s a big disconnect between the PR
coming from Hoffa and the reality of what’s going on in
our union."

According to the PR, things are looking up for the
Teamsters. Last October Hoffa announced that the
Teamsters "may be the only [union] growing." IBT
organizing director Jeff Farmer says that Teamsters
organizing activity "has ramped up" and adds, "the
commitment of the leadership of our union to organizing
is as high as it’s ever been." Now’s a good time to put
those claims under a microscope.

Thinking Big

Greg Tarpinian, executive director of Change to Win,
says that the IBT isn’t just talking about organizing:
"At Cintas, the biggest laundry company in the world,
the Teamsters have a campaign with UNITE HERE [the
hotel, restaurant, and garment workers union]. The
Teamsters are working with SEIU [the service employees
union] on organizing school bus workers across the
country. The Teamsters are as active as any of [Change
to Win’s] affiliates."

Farmer adds, "We have to do more—that’s part of the
reason for the split. We’re taking on major
multinational employers in huge industries, and there’s
no silver bullet. If there’s any hope, it’s to think on
a scale like never before."

Thinking big—big unions, big campaigns, big ideas—
seems to be the hallmark of the Change to Win unions.
SEIU vice president Gerald Hudson gave a talk during the
lead-up to the AFL-CIO split in which he outlined SEIU’s
vision for restructuring the labor movement; his refrain
was "Size matters."

Says Tarpinian, who’s been an adviser to Hoffa, the
heads of other Change to Win unions and New York
Governor George Pataki, "We’re focused on growth. We
realize that without rapid remedial action, we won’t
have the critical mass necessary to reverse course....
As far as restructuring the Teamsters for growth,
Hoffa’s done more than any Teamsters president." The
problem, says Leedham, is that the Teamsters aren’t
growing. "It’s all been rhetoric and press releases.
Check with the National Labor Relations Board. Hoffa
hasn’t been winning anything."

The Teamsters have indeed been losing members on Hoffa’s
watch, though they’ve kept their membership numbers
level at 1.4 million since 2001 by absorbing smaller
unions in the railroad and printing industries. (The
AFL-CIO grew slightly, from 13.2 million to 13.6
million, in the same span of time.) According to the
NLRB, the IBT, which won over 400 private-sector
organizing drives in 1998, won only 248 in 2004. And
according to the union’s own reports to the Labor
Department, the Teamsters have lost about 150,000
members since Hoffa’s 2001 re-election. Given that a key
tenet of the Change to Win program is building power by
organizing in "core industries," the IBT’s lackluster
organizing record in trucking is especially worrisome.
Sandy Pope, president of IBT Local 805 in New York, says
the Teamsters’ power comes from "the truckers and UPS.
If we don’t shore up that power, the whole union
suffers."

Truckers, as Pope suggests, have enormous power. As
manufacturing jobs continue to be outsourced and
offshored, truck drivers—who move auto parts from
manufacturers to suppliers, groceries from warehouses to
retail outlets—have more and more potential to disrupt
the global chain of goods and services. Industry expert
Michael Belzer, an associate professor at Detroit’s
Wayne State University, calls trucking "the glue that
sticks the economy together." Edna Bonacich, a professor
at the University of California, Riverside, who
specializes in supply-chain issues, says that companies
like Wal-Mart—which depend on the timely delivery of
goods from offshore manufacturers—rely heavily on
truckers. "There’s a vulnerability there," she says. "If
any group in this supply chain were to go on strike, it
would cost [the companies] millions. A coordinated
strike could cost them billions."

Bonacich’s theory was borne out in the spring and summer
of 2004, as port truckers on the East and West Coasts
launched a series of strikes—without the backing of any
major union—that shut down ports across the country and
severely disrupted the flow of imported goods.
Unfortunately, while coordinated supply-chain disruption
may be labor’s greatest source of leverage in the global
economy, Bonacich believes that "organized labor has not
risen to the occasion." In trucking, while corporations
have focused their resources on gaining control over the
supply chain, Teamsters leaders have elected not to
focus at all. "We have from A to Z in our union, airline
pilots to zookeepers," president Hoffa told The Nation
in August 2005. "We will always be a general union."

Indeed, Hoffa’s organizing approach has become
increasingly scattershot, with some of the IBT’s biggest
organizing victories coming in healthcare and the public
sector. In recent years, says Belzer, "there’s been so
little activity in trucking organizing that there isn’t
anything to write about."

Centralize to Win?

In the Teamsters, says Pope, the Change to Win approach
seems to have less to do with organizing core industries
than with "a push to centralize the union, taking power
away from the local level." Both Pope (who’s running for
vice president on Leedham’s slate) and Tarpinian note
that the IBT has a long tradition of local union
autonomy, and that this tradition does not fit neatly
with Change to Win’s focus on centralized strategic
planning. UNITE HERE general president Bruce Raynor—one
of Change to Win’s architects—says this can be a
weakness when it comes to national campaigns. "Local
autonomy has to give way to centralized, national
leadership," says Raynor, "when you’re going up against
a centralized national corporation."

Leedham agrees with Raynor that "we need national
coordination to beat national employers." But, he
argues, "strong campaigns are built from the bottom up,
by involving local leaders and mobilizing Teamster
members." Leedham says that "the Hoffa administration’s
approach is to air-drop staffers from DC.... They bring
cookie-cutter marching orders but don’t offer any real
resources."

Given Leedham’s emphasis on the bottom-up approach, it’s
not surprising that his "Strong Contracts, Good
Pensions" slate has been endorsed by Teamsters for a
Democratic Union, the reform caucus that’s been a
consistent critic of the Hoffa administration. Tarpinian
believes TDU is "not that relevant," noting that
"Teamsters leadership is elected by the rank and file.
It’s a democratic organization." But formal democracy
and functional democracy are not the same thing. Which
brings us back to Chicago and Local 743.

As you can imagine, Silver Capital workers like Marcela
Garcia were not happy when their union officers sided
with management. All this happened during a union
election year, while longtime 743 and TDU member Richard
Berg was leading a campaign to unseat Local 743
president Bob Walston’s administration (including José
Galvan). Garcia decided to join Berg’s "New Leadership"
slate and run for vice president.

When the ballots were first counted in October 2004, the
election was too close to call, but it looked like Berg
would come out on top. So Local 743 officials stopped
the count and ordered a new election. "The rerun was a
complete sham," says Berg. The New Leadership slate
filed charges with the Teamsters’ Chicago Joint Council
25 and the International, which responded with a
deafening silence. They also filed charges with the
Labor Department, which, shockingly, proved more
responsive. On August 12, 2005, the department sued
Local 743 for election fraud. But the appeals process
moves slowly, leaving New Leadership in limbo.

About That Gorilla

"Corruption in the union," says Dan Scott, principal
officer of IBT Local 174 in Seattle, "comes in a lot of
shapes, sizes and forms." With the Teamsters, though,
even after a decade of federal oversight, when people
hear the word "corruption," they usually think about the
mob. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the search for
Hoffa Sr.’s body—recently resumed at a Michigan horse
farm—continues to get headlines from coast to coast.)

Scott, who’s also running for vice president on
Leedham’s slate, says corruption remains "a very
significant issue. It’s important when we try to
organize new workers. Management’s unionbusting
materials often feature the history of the Teamsters and
its ties to organized crime. People want to know they’re
joining a clean union."

Shortly after he became IBT president, Hoffa assembled a
task force to investigate and eliminate Mafia influence
in the IBT. Led by former US Attorney Ed Stier, Project
RISE began in 1999 with Hoffa’s blessing. A couple of
years in, however, Stier says, he began to experience
"resistance and outright interference" from top-level
Hoffa advisers. On April 29, 2004, Stier and the entire
staff of Project RISE resigned in protest. The IBT
remains under federal supervision, and Project RISE has
yet to be replaced.

According to Sandy Pope, there are still "remnants of
the mob" in parts of the union, but the perception of
corruption can be equally damaging. "People get mad that
we’ve spent millions of dollars bringing people in to
clean up the union—and what has it accomplished? For
the membership’s benefit, we need to figure out how to
clean up our union ourselves."

Changing to Win?

It’s hard to imagine labor gaining a foothold in the age
of Wal-Mart without a strong IBT. To many truckers,
however, the union is a thing of the past.

Today, says Edna Bonacich, "the big, over-the-road
trucks are mostly nonunion. The intermodal part of the
industry [truckers who transport goods from one part of
the supply chain to the next—from ports to warehouses,
for example] has become nonunion."

The de-unionization of trucking has coincided with
steady job growth.

According to Michael Belzer, there are more trucking
jobs today than ever before. As employment has
increased, says Belzer, working conditions have
deteriorated. "Compensation overall has likely declined
by about a third, and working conditions are very
tough...and drivers are not making enough per mile to
make ends meet, so they just work more hours, drive more
miles."

After six years of stagnation under Hoffa’s leadership,
it’s not just the veteran reformers who are getting
restless. Some of Hoffa’s supporters from the union’s
powerful freight (trucking) division, including eastern
region freight director Dan Virtue, have reportedly
broken ranks and are looking to challenge Hoffa. IBT
vice president Tom O’Donnell, who raised more than
$100,000 for Hoffa’s last campaign, has announced his
opposition and may run for president—or ally with
Leedham.

As an incumbent wielding substantial resources, Hoffa
remains a formidable opponent. His spokespeople maintain
that Leedham lacks the support to mount a serious
challenge. However, Leedham supporters won more than
half of the convention delegate elections they
contested, setting the stage for heated battles at
June’s convention and in this fall’s IBT elections.

Divisions within the Teamsters may seem just another
symbol of organized labor’s continued fragmentation. But
the most important split inside the movement remains the
chasm between union leaders and the rank and file.

Bridging that gap is the core of Leedham’s vision for
rebuilding the Teamsters.

"Workers want clean unions," says Leedham. "Workers need
to know that the organizations they are a part of are
democratic. In every area—organizing, winning the best
contracts, political action—the more we can involve
rank-and-file workers, the stronger the labor movement
will be."

The upcoming IBT elections will have serious
consequences within and beyond the union. A strong
Teamsters union would be a powerful weapon in the fight
for all working people. But the Teamsters need to clean
up their own house before they can rebuild labor’s.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060612/johnson