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From: Steve Early <lsupp...@aol.com>
CounterPunch, November 12 - 14, 2010
Still Punching at Age 35:
TDU in Chicago
By STEVE EARLY
Chicago--During the 1970s, a small slice of the trade union left was
able to tap into working class discontent and workplace militancy in a
very enduring way. The result, in the unlikely venue of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), was an on-going “Tea
Party” in the best and original sense of that Boston-based organizing
against economic royalists. Just as unruly protests against King George
III in late colonial America didn’t emerge in a vacuum, Teamsters for a
Democratic Union (TDU) was the product of a distinct historical period.
It has, nevertheless, managed to survive over the last 35 years, and
never stopped being a much-needed thorn-in-the-side of Teamster tories.
TDU was launched amid wildcat strikes, contract rejections, and
spontaneous worker protests of all kinds. Its origins are vividly
described by Dan LaBotz and others in a new Verso collection called
Rebel Rank-and-File, about the much-overlooked blue-collar “revolt from
below” that followed the student disturbances of the 1960s (and drew
some inspiration from them). The indigenous militants and
campus-inspired “outside troublemakers” who created TDU attacked big
trucking companies and their corrupt Teamster helpers, a comprador class
well-known for its Mob connections and racketeering ventures. To grow
their fledgling reform movement, TDU founders had to overcome the very
real doubts and fears of fellow workers at UPS, ABF, Roadway,
Consolidated Freight, and other soon-to-be winners and losers in the
industry-wide demolition derby triggered by de-regulating Democrats like
Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy.
Back then, most of the Teamsters I met (while barn-storming for a
dissident group later merged with TDU) wanted to see the IBT cleaned up
and their working conditions improved. But many others, for
understandable reasons, thought that our goals were impossible, or not
worth the personal risk and sacrifice. If “fighting city hall” seemed
hopeless to the citizenry at large, taking on “the hall”—as union
offices are called—looked downright suicidal, given the potential for
collusive retaliation against dissidents by labor and management.
Then and now, TDU’s carefully nurtured organizational culture reflects
the “big tent” approach, not a small sect attitude. Its black, brown,
Asian, and white-working class members come in all political and
physical dimensions. (Triple-X has historically been the dominant
T-shirt size, but we’ll get to a gender-based exception below). Unlike
the right-wing populist network that’s grabbed a great protest movement
brand—and run in the wrong direction with it--TDU has never revolved
around movement stars. In its four decades, the group has boasted many
colorful (even eccentric) characters, skilled soap-boxers, PR-savvy
organizers, and the most effective Teamster president in recent history,
the late Ron Carey, who served from 1992-7. But charismatic leaders,
big-speech-makers, and media hustlers—of the sort now jockeying for
grassroots followers within the GOP--are not central to its membership
recruitment plan. TDU’s brand of “popular education” and local
committee-building stresses self-help, rank-and-file empowerment, and
collective leadership development.
Through Thick And Thin
TDU’s reform candidate recruitment has, on occasion, attracted the
overly ambitious or politically opportunistic. This type tends to move
on quickly, while the hard-core of TDU members has “been able to endure
and make some history, through thick and thin, through victories and
defeat,” as their national organizer Ken Paff said at the group’s annual
meeting November 5-7 in Chicago. The basic message of Teamster reform
cuts bravely against our societal grain, and plainly repudiates top-down
business unionism. In TDU, members are told, “we are all leaders!” As
Paff reminded several hundred truck drivers and loaders, locomotive
engineers, warehouse workers, public employees, and factory hands at the
O’Hare Holiday Inn: “A democratic union, a strong union, means an active
union. Members have to put skin in the game to win a good contract, a
decent pension, or a local union election.”
In Chicago, there was a large contingent of first-time TDU
convention-goers, all attending at their own expense and some
car-pooling from as far away as Burlington, Vermont. In workshops and
plenary sessions, they discussed their own bruising experiences with
management and unresponsive union officials. They also traded survival
tips with TDU’s many canny old-timers, active and retired. Among the
latter were local officers, business agents, shops stewards, and other
experienced activists from locals representing about 200,000 out of the
IBT’s 1.3 million members. In Chicago, New York, Atlanta, San Juan, and
other cities, TDU-backed reform slates are competing in local union
elections and upcoming contests for 2011 Teamster convention delegate
slots. Despite a grim economy, a badly over-stretched TDU budget, and
workplace horror stories galore, the meeting at O’Hare buzzed with
optimism and enthusiasm. That’s because 2010-11 offers more than the
usual opportunities for Teamster boat-rocking, including the chance to
throw some unwanted cargo overboard.
The “load” in question is an overpaid 69-year old lawyer from Detroit,
who is now in his 12th year as Teamster president and wants another
five-year term. James Hoffa receives $362,000 year, including a $60,000
“housing allowance” (because he’s never actually moved to Washington,
D.C. since his election in 1998). He’s surrounded himself with a
controversial coterie of non-Teamster staffers, delegating any
heavy-lifting to them. In TDU’s view, even with professional help, Hoffa
“has no plans beyond his next press conference,” while leaving
dues-paying members to fend for themselves in local fights with UPS,
Waste Management, Coca Cola, and other Teamster employers.
Although Hoffa has a different middle name than his legendary (and still
MIA) old man, he is, quite literally, one of many Teamster “juniors.”
While lots of IBT affiliates eschew blatant nepotism, a surprising
number still operate like the corrupt and thuggish Local 82 in Boston.
That badly-run family business controlled Teamster work at two local
convention centers, plus commercial movers. After years of embarrassing
publicity, Local 82 was finally put under trusteeship this fall, per
order of the IBT’s court-appointed overseers. The proprietors were a
father-and-son team who kept the rank-and-file in line with ex-con
muscle, until TDUers rebelled against them
A Pygmalion Creation
Hoffa’s original bid for the presidency, in 1996, was sponsored by an
extended “Teamster family” of this quality. (Some Hoffa-ites were better
than the Perrys in Local 82; others even worse.) With few exceptions,
IBT officials detested the militant, member-oriented Ron Carey. To oust
him and re-conquer union headquarters, they needed a good front-man,
with a famous last name (even though Hoffa, the younger, lacked any
experience as a local union officer or national leader and never held
more than a summer job as a Teamster). More than a decade later, top
Teamster officials are now openly disgusted with their own Pygmalion
creation. Fred Gegare, a Teamster vice-president, Wisconsin homeboy, and
former Hoffa ally has announced he’s running for IBT president next
year. “"I didn't have a famous father or a silver spoon, but neither did
anyone else in Green Bay,” says “Fighting Fred” (on a campaign website
that stresses his “Midwestern Values” and dislike for Brett Favre
too). “And you know what? We were better off having to prove ourselves
and make our own way."
As the always acerbic Paff points out, “another way a politician knows
his support is way down is when his own running-mate jumps ship and
retracts his endorsement.” That’s just what Tom Keegel, Hoffa’s
long-time secretary-treasurer, did several months ago, when he sent a
sudden retirement announcement to his Teamster pals with the following
warning: “Continuing down the same road as the IBT has traveled in the
last few years will not lead us out of our present difficulties….The IBT
should be run by elected Teamster leaders in whom the members have
placed their trust and not outsiders or anyone else.”
The last time the Teamster old guard splintered in such fashion--blaming
each other for the union’s troubles—was 1991, the year Carey got elected
in a three-way race against two feuding headquarters insiders. So the
question in Teamster reform circles for months has been who should enter
the lists in 2011, when similar lightening might strike again? Tom
Leedham from Portland, Oregon is one of the best Teamster local leaders
in the U.S. With TDU support, he campaigned tirelessly against Hoffa in
1998, 2001, and 2006, garnering between 40 and 36 percent of the vote
each time. Last year, this stalwart standard-bearer for reform told me,
with a grin, that he didn’t want to go down in history as the Harold
Stassen of the Teamsters (or, more valorously and appropriately, as its
Eugene V. Debs)
So the grueling job of running against Hoffa this time has fallen to
Tom’s running-mate last time, who received 100,000 votes in her 2006 bid
to become Teamster secretary-treasurer. Alexandra (“Sandy”) Pope is a
most unusual IBT presidential candidate in any election year. She grew
up in a Boston suburb and became a labor activist in the mid-1970s after
dropping out of Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. She got
involved with AFSCME while working at a state mental hospital in
Northampton. But soon Ohio--then a great hotbed of TDU activity within
freight, steel, and car-hauling companies—lured her away from the public
sector. In 1978, she moved to Cleveland, learned to drive a
tractor-trailer, worked as a driver and dock worker, and helped organize
a successful month-long strike by her fellow steel-haulers. In 1985, she
became a full-time Teamster organizer for Local 407 in Cleveland, a
TDU-friendly affiliate whose president later ran on Carey’s slate.
During the Carey years, Pope served as a Teamster national staffer in
the union’s warehouse division. She worked with Leedham and other
reformers to build aggressive contract campaigns like the membership
mobilization effort that culminated in the 1997 strike by 200,000
Teamsters at UPS. In 1999, went to work for Local 805 in Queens, N.Y.
and is now the president of that 1,200-member local. She’s made
headlines in recent years for leading Local 805’s on-going effort to
assist hundreds of immigrant workers exploited by Fresh Direct, a
grocery provider that fills on-line orders from the Big Apple’s many
millionaire “celebrity shoppers.”
The IBT's Own "Mama Grizzly"
In TDU circles, Pope has her own hard-earned celebrity that her backers
hope will translate into broader voter appeal among 300,000 female
Teamsters. (How could the union’s distaff side not embrace a union
sister whose campaign bio reports that she “is a proud mom with two
kids, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, whose interests include kick boxing,
running, and teaching labor studies”?) Women have virtually no
representation in the top ranks of the Teamsters today. Even at last
weekend’s meeting of reformers, they were relatively few in number. When
TDU’s 54-year old, 5-foot-6 candidate took the stage to rally a roomful
of much huskier male supporters, she received a rapturous reception and
several standing ovations. Some in the audience were proudly wearing her
campaign jacket, emblazoned on the back with the slogan: “Sandy Pope: A
Tough Leader for Tough Times!” Pope paid tribute to her roots in the
reform movement. “You are the people I have learned from and leaned on
for my entire union career,” she told the crowd. She mocked Hoffa’s own
lack of workplace experience, citing her contrasting 20-year record of
contract bargaining and even longer history of new-member organizing.
“Why is Hoffa so afraid of the members and why I am not afraid of the
members?” she asked. “Well, first off, I am a Teamster.”
Pope didn’t minimize the many serious problems facing the union, at the
national and local level. “Corporate America smells blood, “she warned.
“They are moving in for the kill. “ Pensions, full-time jobs, affordable
health care, and decent working conditions are all at risk. The backward
steps Teamster negotiators have taken lately, on all these issues, are
just making it harder to rebuild union strength, Pope charged. “If we
have all these members out there who are dissatisfied, how can we
organize the unorganized? How can we mobilize members for the next
contract if the one they have now is not being enforced by the union?”
As she wound up her speech, Pope rolled up her sleeve, displaying a
well-muscled bicep and a Bread & Roses tattoo on her right shoulder. She
invoked the memory of the great Lawrence, Mass. textile workers strike
in 1912, an IWW-led struggle for both higher wages and a better quality
of life. The crowd went wild. Before the evening was over, the Teamsters
present had raised $52,000 (in cash, checks, and pledges) for TDU and
the “Pope for President” campaign.
To get on the ballot next Fall, Pope must have the support of 5 per cent
of the IBT convention delegates who will be meeting in Las Vegas next
June. By this Dec. 15, she needs to collect 36,000 member signatures to
secure access to the union’s membership list and publish her campaign
literature in the “battle pages” of upcoming issues of the Teamster
magazine. TDU has been punching above its weight-class, almost since
birth in the IBT. So there’s little doubt that its grassroots network
can mount another national campaign that will give Hoffa and Gegare a
run for their money (and Hoffa will have a lot of that, having raised
over $2.5 million for his last campaign). Pope's decision to run, so
far, without a slate, and only against Hoffa has raised a few eyebrows.
When Carey won in 1991, a pro-reform majority on the Teamster executive
board, including prominent TDUers like Diana Kilmury, got elected with
him. Yet he still struggled for the next six years to overcome the
continuing political opposition and outright sabotage of at least half
the officialdom, at other levels of the union.
Pope and TDU plan to cross that bridge--when and if they come to it.
However far she gets toward Teamster headquarters, with sword or olive
branch in hand, Pope is going to have lots of rank-and-file
accompaniment, not to mention many more rounds of grateful applause.
Steve Early is Boston-based labor organizer and journalist who has aided
the Teamster reform movement since the late 1970’s. In 1992, he worked
at Teamster headquarters, while on loan from his own union to the
newly-elected Ron Carey administration. He is a contributor to Rebel
Rank And File: Labor Militancy and Revolt During The Long 1970s (Verso,
2010) and can be reached at lsupp...@aol.com Non-Teamsters can assist
Sandy Pope's campaign by sending a check made out to "Sandy Pope 2011
Legal and Accounting Fund," c/o Box 424, 315 Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn,
N.Y. 11217.)
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