The best and the worst of American unions

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1987 by Steven Waldman

If there's rank and file discontent with Presser it's difficult to tell since his rise to the presidency has rarely been inconvenienced by a democratic election. Presser's union career began when his father, a national Teamsters official, appointed him secretary-treasurer of local 507 in Cleveland. (That local hasn't held a contested election in 17 years.) In 1981, the Teamsters general executive board appointed Presser a national vice president and in 1982 made him president. He wasn't "democratically' elected until last June at the quinquennial national convention. If the power of incumbency weren't enough to assure his election, the dominance of delegates from mob-dominated locals made him a formidable candidate.

Despite the odds, the reformist TDU has made some progress, scoring victories in scattered local elections in addition to contract votes. One of the most hopeful events occurred in 1985 when Linda Gregg, a forklift operator from Denver and a member of the TDU policy board, was elected secretary-treasurer of the Denver local. Not surprisingly, the national Teamsters board overturned the results and ordered a new election. The second time Gregg swept the entire TDU slate in with her.

Sheet Metal Workers' International Association, Local 28--The building trades have always been--and still are--among the least racially integrated jobs in the country. To a great extent this isn't because of racist companies or indifferent government officials. And it's not because the jobs are too highly skilled: the percentage of accountants that are black is higher than the percentage of carpenters who are. It's because of unions. One of the worst examples is New York City's Local 28, which has shown unparalleled creativity during its long history of keeping out blacks.

Efforts to force Local 28 to integrate began in 1948, when the New York State Commission Against Discrimination ordered the union to drop its "caucasian only' contract clause. The local changed the words, but not its process of selecting apprentices, the first step toward full union membership. All new apprentices had to be sponsored for membership by current ones. All of the current ones, of course, were white. And all construction hiring came through the union. By 1964, there was still not a single black worker in the union. When the state Commission on Human Rights and the state Supreme Court ordered Local 28 to admit some blacks, the union refused.

Over the next 22 years, various courts held the local in contempt of court orders and civil rights laws, but the union discovered other ways to keep out blacks. It administered entrance exams that tested knowledge of classical music, Shakespeare and, in one case, asked which president was assassinated by Leon F. Czolgosz (it was McKinley). The union then refused to abide by the scores when minorities received "unfair tutoring' and passed in unreasonably high numbers.

The local also defiantly ignored city attempts to integrate the construction trades. In 1968, the city delayed 26 contracts worth more than $6 million because Local 28 had not supplied city contractors with a single non-white worker. Two years later, the city began requiring contractors to employ one minority trainee for every four journeyman members. One local refused until the end to comply: Local 28. In early 1974, the city tried to assign six minority trainees to sheetmetal contractors working on city projects. Local 28 members put down their tools and stopped working in protest.