The election of James P. Hoffa as president of the nation's largest union has been greeted by many on the left as nothing short of a disaster, though many of the Teamsters voting for the man did so in the expectation that he would bring added clout to the union in its dealings with the bosses. CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski met a couple of Teamsters at a gathering of the Association for Union Democracy in New York, where one of them said, "I really think they [ie, the bosses] are going to be afraid of him". The record suggests this man be cruelly disappointed.
Before he took control of the Teamsters, James P. Hoffa was favored by Congressman Peter Hoekstra and other Republicans bent on choking off union spending in politics. Now Hoffa vows to support Republicans and create the biggest PAC in labor, because, he says, it's money that gets Congress's attention.
In his campaign against Tom Leedham and the Rank & File Power slate, Hoffa got the assist of management under Teamsters contract at UPS, Anheuser-Busch, Roadway, Strohs, USA Waste, Certified Grocers, Lipton Co., Fleming Foods, Price Club/Costco (and that's just the group that was reprimanded and fined by the court-appointed Election Officer). Now he pledges he'll usher forth a "new militancy" against employers. (This is the same man who first opposed the 1997 UPS strike and didn't have the nerve to debate Leedham.)
Following the annulled 1996 Teamsters election, federal monitors fined Hoffa's campaign almost $200,000 for filing false financial reports and forced "Junior" to sever his ties with the man behind the campaign's dirty tricks, Richard Leebove. Years earlier, Leebove was also one of the brains behind BLAST, a goon squad that physically assaulted reformers in Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Now Hoffa, whose own chicanery in 1996 is still under internal review, calls for an end to government oversight of the Teamsters and proposes to hire former FBI agents as the union's private investigators. It's not likely that those corrupt Teamster officials who either sponsored Hoffa or ran on his slate (men pulling down annual salaries to the tune of $468,407, $274,527, $225,000 and so on) would be the first targets of his "watchdog" efforts.
No question, Hoffa's victory is bad news all around, but one needs a sense of perspective. After all, he's not the only thug in organized labor. The others just operate under less of a spotlight. For some time now, there's been talk that a Hoffa takeover of the biggest union in the country could spell the end for the Sweeney team at the AFL-CIO. It's true that John Sweeney could not have risen to power in 1995 without the Teamsters, but this is not 1995; unseating an AFL-CIO establishment is not a simple project. Perhaps as insulation against a possible challenge, Sweeney got union delegates in 1997 to extend his term from two years to four, meaning his next election will be in 2001, the same year Hoffa has to defend his own seat. Sweeney didn't get where he is because he's a radical visionary or audacious leader but because he's an expert politician. After playing to his left the first two years or so of his tenure, he's lately been more conscientious about mollifying the right, the pork-choppers in the state federations of labor and the international unions who've had it with all the talk of organizing and "street heat," had it with the militants who threaten their comfortable way of doing business. Internal union democracy is not an issue for the AFL-CIO, whose first concern is to make sure no one defects. The Teamsters pay $7 million a year in per capita dues to the federation, a fact undoubtedly in the forefront of Sweeney's mind when, immediately after the election results were posted, he declared that Hoffa "has the potential to be a great leader". (For a sense of the turnaround, recall that Sweeney's second, AFL secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka, is still under investigation for shuttling money into Ron Carey's re-election campaign against Hoffa in 1996.)
For rank-and-file democrats in the Teamsters, it's not the end of the world, either. The road to reform is a long one. The road to radical reform is longer still. When Ron Carey became Teamsters president in 1991, Teamsters for a Democratic Union found itself in a delicate position, almost as the party of the party in power. That had its up side-the Teamsters did become a fighting union-and down side, as loyalty required assent when "union democrat" came to mean anyone who won without rigging an election, anyone who supported Carey; as the "reform" label became so malleable that finally even Hoffa could wear it.
In the interim between Carey's disqualification and Hoffa's victory, TDU returned to organizing pitched challenges in local elections, winning control of many locals formerly in the hands of Hoffa men, and realizing that maybe it's time to pay a bit more attention to the union's marginalized ranks, particularly the low-wage Latinos under Teamsters contracts. In the presidential race, activists working the field for only five months held Hoffa to 55 percent of the vote, denying him his longed-for landslide. However ugly things get, too much has happened in the Teamsters for Hoffa to achieve total rollback. Right now, his mentor and former boss, Larry Brennan of Michigan, is being investigated for using members' dues to finance his own local election.
Two others from Hoffa's winning slate could also soon find themselves thrown out of their new jobs and maybe out of the union, one of them (Tom O'Donnell from Long Island) for hiring a convicted felon, paid through his wife, to work on the 1996 Hoffa campaign. But even if he and his cronies were suddenly to follow every law to the letter, Junior Hoffa is liable to make countless slips that disappoint the members.
He remains the darling of the Wall Street Journal, the friend of business bosses, a labor leader who's never organized a thing in his life. That's deep history, and for the reform crowd it heightens the political challenge, even more than the institutional one. CP
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