Teamster tragedy: Carey is dead, long live the reformers - Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention, Nov. 97 - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Jan, 1998 by Jim Larkin

Ron Carey may be a goner, but the reform movement inside the Teamsters lives on. The weekend before Ron Carey decided to step aside as president, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) held its twenty-second annual convention in Cleveland, November 21-23.

Media coverage of the event focused on Carey's brief appearance and farewell speech to 600 rank-and-filers. Some members reacted to their fallen hero's legal troubles by defending him--not unlike Teamster loyalists who closed ranks thirty-five years ago around Jimmy Hoffa, whose son lost to Carey in 1996 in a now-overturned election. But other activists recognized that the future of the reform movement--not the man--should be the focus of the meeting.

And it was. Ken Paff, one of the best labor organizers in the country, a former student activist, truck driver, and TDU founder, gave a fiery address. He condemned the crimes of those "who soiled your great election victory, who betrayed your union, who lined their own pockets," and who set the stage for the "tragedy" of Carey's disqualification as a future candidate. To Paff, the moral of the story was clear: "If you're going to take on Corporate America, if you're going to win major strikes, if you're going to start turning labor around, you better make sure that you're not vulnerable" because of lapses in personal behavior or judgment. "We're here to make sure it never happens again," he said.

Billie Davenport, a flight attendant at Northwest Airlines in Detroit, said the bad news about Carey in mid-November cast only a temporary pall over her victory in a key local election this fall.

"I was in shock and very upset when I heard about Ron," she said. "But the movement has to continue. In order to keep Teamster reform alive, we have to get back out campaigning very soon." Her anti-Hoffa slate garnered 70 percent of the vote in Teamsters Local 2000, which has 9,000 members in ten states.

Butch Traylor, a UPS shop steward from Valdosta, Georgia, agreed. "The reform movement is bigger than any one person--it's bigger than Ron Carey, bigger than Ken Paff . . . We must fight not just to win the next election but to keep our union in the hands of the membership."

TDU has a simple credo: Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down; rely on worker activity, not paid staff; develop the skills and ability of many potential leaders instead of a handpicked few; introduce mechanisms for leadership accountability and membership control.

Unions or community groups that don't follow these steps can end up looking like Citizen Action--a hollow, staff-run shell. By last fall, this one-time voice of the people had attached itself to the Democratic National Committee and the AFL-CIO, and sullied itself by working with Carey's crooked campaign handlers. Saddled with mounting legal costs related to its role in the Teamster election scandal and finding its own fundraising ability severely impaired, Citizen Action recently shut down its national office, laying off twenty staffers.

Contrast this ignominious end to the continued vibrancy of a genuine populist formation like TDU. Rank-and-filers along with leftwing activists launched the group more than two decades ago. TDU survives to this day because of a deep commitment to solid sixties ideas about direct action, participatory democracy, and speaking truth to power.

It doesn't use junk mail, telemarketing, or paid canvassers to recruit new members. It doesn't convene focus groups to figure out what its members think. It doesn't rely on consultant tricks or shortcuts--they don't build workers' power on the job. And TDU isn't seduced by the insider political culture of Washington, D.C., or caught up in labor's pathetic delusions about all the access and influence it has bought with millions of dollars worth of gifts to undeserving Democrats.

John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO could learn a great deal from TDU if it weren't so busy responding to subpoenas, hiring criminal lawyers, issuing press releases, and invoking the Fifth Amendment--as AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka recently did--to minimize its legal exposure in the ongoing investigation of Teamster election violations.

If there's one common characteristic among the technocrats and strategists of the "new" AFL-CIO, it's a general lack of respect for union democracy and rank-and-file activism. That's why some in that crowd were so quick to intervene in last year's Hoffa-Carey contest with bags of cash and kickbacks from union vendors. Their behavior was inexcusable under any circumstances and would have lacked even the appearance of necessity had Carey run the same kind of membership-based campaign that worked so well when he first sought higher office with TDU backing in 1991.

Right before Carey took office six years ago, he dropped a hint of the trouble to come.

Carey and his slate had just scored an upset victory over two old-guard candidates in the first democratic elections the Teamsters had ever held. TDU had been a huge contributor to Carey's success (along with his own hard work and the judicial intervention that produced a historic government-supervised membership vote). TDU members and friends now represented a majority on the union's executive board. However, as they gathered at the George Meany Center in suburban Maryland for a pre-inauguration planning session in late January 1992, Carey's team was nervous.