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Ron Carey was the most important trade
union leader to emerge in the last decade of the 20th century
in the United States.
His 1991 election as the first
reform leader of the Teamsters was bombshell that hit the labor
movement and Corporate America.
What made his victory even
more stunning was the role played by the Teamsters for a Democratic
Union (TDU), the longstanding reform group made up of rank and
file Teamsters.
Corrupt and complacent trade
union officers were put on notice their members wanted a different
direction for their unions. While the bosses use to big concessions,
when not out-rightly engaging in union-busting, had to face a
newly revived Teamsters union.
The highpoint of the Carey
administration and the reform struggle in the Teamsters was 1997
strike against package delivery behemoth United Parcel Service.
It was the biggest labor victory
in a generation. At that time, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein
wrote that the strike ended "the PATCO syndrome. A 16-year
period in which a strike was synonymous with defeat and demoralization."
But, for writer Bob Fitch all
this was all a "glittering mirage."
Carey, for Fitch, was just
another corrupt Teamster officer in the mold of his predecessors,
a man who secretly controlled millions of dollars in UPS stock
and an ally of the New York-based organized crime families.
Fitch also dismisses the idea
that Carey banished from the union for leading the UPS strike
as "paranoid," "self-serving," "politically
naïve." "A left-wing conspiracy theory" because
the fruits of the UPS strike were "over-hyped."
While there many things wrong
with Fitch's book, which surveys several unions, I'm going to
focus on those parts that apply to the Teamsters, a subject which
I know best.
The first thing to say about
Fitch's book is that the charges made in it against Ron Carey
are as old as the hills and have been investigated and dismissed
in many cases long ago.
In February1996, retired New
York Times labor reporter William Serrin, then chair of the journalism
department at New York University, wrote an article called Hacks
and Hatchet Jobs, which addressed many of these issues and traced
them back to their source.
Serrin's article was particularly
timely because it appeared in the early stages of a bruising
reelection campaign which pitted the incumbent reformer Carey
against the well-financed and mobbed-up challenger James P. Hoffa,
jr., referred to derisively by reform activists as "Junior
Hoffa."
Among the more fantastical
smears spread far-and-wide (rehashed by Fitch) was that Carey
was an agent of the New York-based Luchese crime family and that
he personally controlled million of dollars of UPS stock through
his father.
The mainstream media spread
with little thought or investigation published these smears about
Carey, this included such venerable institutions as Time magazine,
the New York Times, the Associated Press and National Public
Radio.
Serrin showed quite convincingly
that these false stories emanated from the Hoffa campaign consultants,
particularly, from Richard Leebove and George Geller, former
associates of right-wing cult figure Lyndon Larouche .
They were joined in the effort
by Michael J. Moroney, a former Department of Labor lawyer, who
was fired from his job as an appointed assistant trustee of a
Teamster local in New York.
Leebove had a particularly
nasty history, being employed off-and-on for a decade by mobbed-up
Teamster officials, like Jackie Presser, to attack and red-bait
reformers in the union.
I couldn't help but wonder
if the "Mike Moroney" whom Fitch credits in the acknowledgments
section of his book is the aforementioned "Michael J. Moroney?"
After all that said and done
these charges against Carey were thoroughly investigated and
dismissed by the Department of Labor and the Independent Review
Board (the disciplinary body created by the settlement of the
Justice Department's RICO suite against the Teamsters) and, in
Serrin's words, they received "little attention" from
the press.
Carey defeated Hoffa in that
year's election and went on to lead the 1997 strike against UPS,
which among other things won the creation of over 10,000 new
full-time jobs. Is that just "hype?" I don't think
so. I should know I got one of those new full-time jobs.
However, soon after the strike
Carey was banned from the union, by the same IRB exonerated him
a few years earlier, in early 1998 based upon a series of charges,
also emanating from the Hoffa camp, pertaining to illegal campaign
fundraising methods during the hard fought 1996 election.
Is it "paranoid"
to the think that Carey was banished from the union because he
led a national strike UPS by the government? Absolutely not.
The Republican controlled congress led by right-wing nut Rep.
Pete Hoekstra orchestrated a witch-hunt against Carey that put
enormous pressure on the IRB and the Justice Department to void
the 1996 election and "neutralize" Carey-which they
did.
Hoffa rode this witch-hunt
to power in a "special election" in 1998 against reformer
Tom Leedham, a former member of the Carey slate and Teamster
warehouse director. Hoffa couldn't win an election on his won,
he needed the help of the federal government.
Three years later in 2001,
Carey was indicted by the Justice Department on the very same
charges that lead to his banning from the union by the IRB and
was acquitted of all charges that year soon after the 9-11 terrorist
attacks.
Another veteran labor reporter
and chronicler of Carey's 1991 election triumph, Newsday's Ken
Crowe, described the verdict as a "vindication" of
Ron Carey.
All of this, however, is not
good enough for Bob Fitch, for some reason only known to himself.
So what's Fitch after? It appears
to be TDU.
After spending a full chapter
rehashing lies and distortions about Carey, Fitch then engages
in child-like attacks on the leading activists of TDU and writes-off
the many accomplishments of TDU as "vastly exaggerated."
Maybe for Bob Fitch, but it
has long been recognized by both supporters and opponents of
TDU that if it wasn't for their long struggle it is unlikely
that members of the Teamsters union would have never have won
many of the democratic rights that are unique to the Teamsters.
Most union members in the United States don't have the right
to vote for the top officers of their union and many important
unions don't even have the right to vote on contracts.
Is all this ancient history?
I think not. 2006 is an election year in the Teamsters and the
highly unpopular and unprincipled Hoffa could easily use Fitch's
book to smear the reform movement that is trying to oust him
from power.
Fitch's book is not just bad
reporting and history, it is irresponsible, for someone who claims
that they want a better labor movement in the United States.
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