Reforming the Teamsters by Dianne Feeley
The most important event in the 1996 U.S. labor calendar was the re-election of Ron Carey as president of the Teamsters, the argest union with 1.4 million members. With about 35% of the Teamsters returning their mail ballot, Carey defeated challenger Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. by 52% to 48%.
In 1991 Carey swept into office after the Teamsters agreed to a government-supervised mail ballot election and the old guard ran two candidates. Elected on a platform that combined cleaning out the Mafia-domination and corruption of the union with encouraging membership participation, Carey began by lowering his salary $50,000 and selling off the union's jets and limousines. He established the policy that no national Teamster officer could receive more than one salary. In 1994 he abolished the four Teamster regional conferences, a mechanism whereby officers received multiple salaries and pensions. Carey has put 67 locals into receivership, kicking out corrupt leaders and giving locals a chance to rebuild an alternative leadership
Carey established an organizing campaign to reach out to as yet unorganized workers, opposed NAFTA and helped local Teamsters launch community outreach and corporate campaigns, providing more muscle in strikes and negotiations. He took Teamsters out on strike in order to secure contracts with three nationa employer groups (freight, carhaul and United Parcel Service).
So why did Carey win by such a small percentage? Because the powerful group of officers who he attacked still retain their office at a local level. They used their resources to try to make a comeback, and spent $2 for every dollar of the Carey campaign. They put up a unity candidate, Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. who has an instant name 14 International Viewpoint recognition as the son of the union's former leader (but has never worked as a Teamster). Hoffa developed a nostalgic campaign slogan: Restore the Power.
Under the impact of federal deregulation of the trucking industry over the past twenty years and as employers have aggressively set up non-union trucking companies ("double-breasting"), Teamster power has diminished. While Hoffa campaigned for a return to the glory days when American labor was riding high in the saddle never mind the level of corruption), the reality is that those days are long gone, no matter who is president.
As Gillian First, a Teamster trom Minneapolis and member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) stated, "Most members want the same thing: a tough union leadership that will fight the greedy corporations. People voted for Hoffa thinking he'd do that." And Carey pointed out that the opposition was forced to adopt the reforms he had initiated.
Hoffa did well in the Midwestwith his father's old base (Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City), and where there is still a large concentration of powerful old guard leaders. Carey won decisively in the East, South and Canada, and narrowly in the West. Carey's slate will probably win all but five or six positions on the
Executive Board.
The twenty-year old reform movement, TDU, supported the Carey slate in both the 1991 and 1996 campaigns. Following Carey's first victory, TDU saw some of its demands for democratic reforms implemented
It described the Teamsters under Carey's leadership as a sandwich, with a responsible and democratic leadership at the highest level and a rank-and-file movement operating at the bottom--but with a corrupt and undemocratic middle. Although progress has been uneven, over the last few years TDU has been able to win more local elections and build a political culture at the grassroots.
Hoffa may have lost the election, but he and the old guard aren't planning on just walking away. They have sent aside $100,000 to finance a leader offensive to challenge the election in court.
As Ken Paff, national TDU organizer, pointed out, "The Hoffa campaign's aim is to undermine the Teamsters' new democratic system. They're trying to create a phony news story that will linger on. They want to cast doubt on an election process that was probably the most legitimate in union history.
The media-from the New York Times to Labor Notes - saw the election as a rank-and-file Teamster referendum on the reform agenda The reformers won and so the reforms will continue.
But the Teamsters still have a big battle ahead. The first battle may be around the United Parcel Service contract, which expires this summer. Half the UPS Teamsters are part-timers who have second-tier wages and can't get full-time jobs.*
tract establishes a procedure whereby if management wants to move production to an outside supplier, it must provide the local union with access to information about costs and additional time to prepare a competitive bid. That is, the local union is given the opportunity to match—or undercut—-the supplier's bid.
Another disturbing aspect of the pattern contract is that it allows the companies to pay lower wages when they buy a formerly non-union business. In these cases, the company are to pay the new UAW members the "prevailing" wage in that industry or geographic area. So the UAW leadership has made a deal with management - if you bring these workers into our union, we'll accept them at a lower wage.
The UAW leadership has accepted the Big Three's terms, even if they still argue over some details. The terms include a tiered industry, even in its unionized section, and the union's continued cooperation with Taking on Labor in A Union Town
In July 1995 the more than 2,000 workers at the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA)-which publishes the Detroit Free Press (owned by Knight-Ridder) and Detroit News (owned by virulently anti-union Gannett)-went out on strike. A Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), hammered out in 1989, allowed the "competitive" dailies to share certain expenses and even joint editions on Sundays and holidays. At the time both papers claimed they were losing money.
So the unions had agreed to concessions in 1989 and 1992, with the promise of a better contract once the DNA was on its financial feet. Since the JOA went into effect the typographical union lost more than half of its members, the drivers and distribution managers lost 300 members and the mailhandlers 65. But as contract negotiations opened for the 1995 contract, the DNA was clearing $1 million a week.
The DNA submitted its contract proposals in a take-it-or-leave it manner, insisting on unlimited subcontracting of maintenance work; eliminating jobs, overtime shifts and work jurisdiction rules; outsourcing; as well as introducing merit pay for reporters — a system designed to weed out independent-minded journalists.
A year and a half into the strike the company has lost $300 million. According to independent auditors the papers' readership and advertisers are down by 30-40%. However both Knight-Ridder and Gannett are able to sustain the losses because they have other newspapers and television stations. Clearly corporate management from its national headquarters is dictating strike
Evidence has been uncovered that the DNA began planning for a strike five years ago, when it filed with the Justice Department a secret amendment to the Joint Operating Agreement, which would allow the DNA to publish joint editions during a strike. Management never seriously bargained with the unions, who represent the reporters, photographers, graphic artists press people, handlers, truck drivers and delivers. Instead they hired Vance Guards — a strikebreaking/security firm — and brought in "replacement" workers. The DNA notified suburban police four months before the workers walked out that it was "preparing for and has paid more than a million dollars in overtime pay to the police department in Sterling Heights, where one of their printing plants is housed.
Forced out on strike, the workers have found tremendous community support. When the company approached the churches, synagogues and mosques to be distribution centers for the newspapers, religious leaders refused. Instead they called on the company to negotiate a fair contract and have become one of the distribution centers for the Detroit Sunday Journal, a forty-page weekly tabloid produced and distributed by strikers and their friends. For the past six months the Journal, with its press run of 165,000, has been financially self-sustaining?
Although the strikers and their supporters have not been able to stop production of the dailies, there have been a number of creative actions. Early in the strike there were Saturday night mobilizations of up to 5,000 at the printing plant (the Sunday paper is the most important of the week). One Saturday night management went so far as to hire a helicopter to fly the papers out—a very inefficient and expensive method. These actions delayed delivery trucks papers were delivered hours late. But these mobilizations were suspended by the union leadership in an attempt to prevent the DNA from obtaining a court injunction that would slap the unions with heavy fines.
A second set of Saturday night mobilizations, involving several hundred strikers and supporters, continued for months to block the newspapers from being delivered out of key distribution sites. The DNA attempted to blame Vance guard and police vio lence on the strikers. Eventually the unions demobilized these actions as well.
Nonetheless strikers, unionists from nearby plants and offices and community activists continue to
USA * walk picket lines and organize walk throughs" at stores that still advertise in the papers. Other actions include singing Christmas carols at the homes of company executives and well-known scab reporters, the occupation of suburban news bureaus, blocking of the driveway at the Port Huron plant of USA Today (a national paper also published by Gannett, taking over the lobby of the Michigan State office building, and organizing a "Santa doesn't scab" demonstration in front of the DNA holiday party.
The religious community has sponsored a number of candlelight walks and vigils as well as a 24-hour hunger fast led by personality Dick Gregory. More than 250 people representing various constituencies of the Detroit community — including Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and City Council President Maryann Mahaffey — were arrested in weekly sit-in actions held over the course of last spring, AFL-CIO President Sweeney and Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka have also been arrested.
Newspaper workers and unionists in a number of other cities have picketed USA Today and other newspapers owned by Gannett. Strikers have also appeared at Gannett shareholders' meetings.
In the course of the strike, a core of strikers who want to develop a winning strategy has emerged and been supported by community activists. For the second time strike activists have succeeded in getting the presidents of the six striking locals to lobby
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WORLD MORO AFL-CIO President John Sweeney for a national mobilization of labor in Detroit. The event would be called Solidarity Day III (previous marches were held in Washington in 1981 and 1991). Sweeney and the AFLCIO Executive Council turned down an earlier proposal, in part because of the federation's involvement in the 1996 elections, where it [mis]spent $35 million "educating" its members to re-elect Clinton and a Democratic Congress. Unions Have Their Head in the Sand
Unlike most industrialized countries, in the United States unions generally do not fight to improve the living standards of working people as a whole. While this reality is rooted in the determination of the U.S. ruling class to oppose unionism, the unions themselves have not continued to wage the battle. Instead, unions individually bargain various benefits for their own members. This reinforces the individualism of the society where if one is "smart," one has a good job with decent benefits and if one is "stupid" or "lazy" one has less because presumably one "deserves" less.
These individual benefits' package doesn't transfer if one leaves the company. Many low-wage and part-time workers don't have any benefits. That explains why nearly 40 million people, most of them workers, aren't covered by health insurance. In the United States health care is not a public good, but simply another commodity. With the reorganization of the health care industry as it searches for greater profitability, the new AFL-CIO hasn't been able to formulate a working-class solution to this serious problem.
True, Congress finally increased the minimum wage, which by July 1997 will rise to $5.15 an hour. But mainly because President Clinton and the Democrats needed an "issue" to clobber the Republicans with. The minimum wage, in real terms, had hit a fortyyear low. Community organizations and unions at a local and state basis have been fighting to raise the wage through "living wage" ballot initiatives. For example, in California voters passed a $5.75 minimum; in Oregon voters passed a $6.50 minimum.
In addition, in 1996 the federal Welfare Reform Act, after passing the U.S. Congress, was signed by President Clinton. This act ended a sixty-year-old guarantee of aid to the poor, however minimal that has been. Now recipients are being sent to work in order to have benefits continued, largely in public 16 International Viewpoint sector jobs previously held by union workers.
This direct replacement of union labor with non-unionised "workfare" at substandard wages occurred because unions did not strongly oppose its implementation. Many workers have accepted the propaganda that people on welfare-overwhelmingly women and their children—are too lazy to work.
Union education programs could have confronted the stereotypes working people have. Unions could have attempted to examine the myths that working people have about who is on welfare and how much welfare costs. Unions could also point out that driving one million welfare recipients into the low-wage work force will result in decreasing the average wage for the lowest one-third of the workfare by nearly 12% (Economic Policy Institute statistics). Unions could educate working people about how "workfare" is just another name for the subminimum wage and show how it is part of the overall attack on workers' wages and benefits.
In June 1996 1,400 delegates from hundreds of local unions and seven national unions founded a Labor Party.' It isn't a party in the conventional sense because it is still such an unusual idea in the United States that working people should have their own party and run their own candidates. Instead it is more of an advocacy group, that has announced its intention to become a party. Although President Sweeney has indicated that while he is "personally dissatisfied with the Democratic Party he doesn't believe a labor party could work. Unlike his predecessor, however, Sweeney won't try to stifle the Labor Party by ordering labor councils to stay away. That gives the union movement the political space it hasn't had in fifty years.* [DF] 1. See "History in the Making," International Viewpoint, September 1996, (p.27).
South Korea
On December 27th, 350,000 manual workers put down their tools in South Korea's biggest ever labour protest. In the next four weeks, the protest over unjust labour laws spread to white collar workers, many in sectors that had never gone on strike. The outlawed Korean Confederation of Trade Unions has established itself as the leading labour organisation, and the leading force for democracy, in a country that will never be the same again. Jean Dupont Hardest hit by the protests was the automobile industry, which saw four major plants - Hyundai, Kia, Ssangyong and Asia - shut down completely. So was the world's largest shipyard, Hyundai Heavy Industries, and South Korea's second-largest shipyard, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Heavy Machinery Ltd. South Korea is the world's sixth-largest car maker with a daily production capacity of 10,000, of which 4,000 are destined for overseas markets. The country gets about a third of the world's commercial shipbuilding orders. Strikes in these key companies have a knock-on effect to production across South Korea's export-led economy.
Most of the strikers work, directly or indirectly, for Daewoo, Hyundai, LG or Samsung, the four chaebols (conglomerates). which control one third of economic output, and half of export sales. Hyundai, for example, makes ships, cars and building equipment, runs department stores, and sells insurance policies.
The strike came at a time when export-led growth is slowing down. The top capitalists and politicians are frantically talking about deep reform of the country's industrial, social and cultural fabric to "re-invent" the economy. Economists were already predicting a record $20 billion trade deficit in 1996, and by the day the strike started, stock market prices had plunged to their lowest level in three years. The strike itself has reduced production by an estimated $2bn.
At the centre of the dispute was a reform of the paternalistic labour code, giving businesses greater freedom to lay off workers and reschedule work hours. The chaebols were demanding this flexibility so that they can concentrate on their core activities, and sell or close down less profitable divisions. The new legislation also made it easier for employers to "claw back" some of the high wage increases' which have been won since in-
in the streets dependent trade unions imposed themselves in the mid-80s. Round one
The strike erupted as soon as workers discovered that the government had secretively introduced the new legislation, without a parliamentary debate. The illegal but tolerated Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) quickly emerged as the main force organising local strike action, coordinating at the regional and national level, and speaking to government and the media on behalf of the strikers. Formed only two years ago, the KCTU controls most of the more militant unions at automobile, shipyard and other major export plants.
The old (and new) labour codes formally prevent the union from organising wherever the government-sanctioned Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) is present. But independent unions have blossomed since the democratisation of the 1980s, and the government-sanctioned FKTU only really represents poorly-organised workers in smaller enterprises. The participation of so many FKTU workers in the general strike despite their union's initially hesitant position is one of the striking aspects of the conflict, with implications for the future of the labour movement in the coming years.
After a pause for the end-of-year holidays, KCTU President Kwon Young-gil launched the "second wave of general strike" on January 6th. Metal, auto and construction workers' unions, the Hyundai Federation of Trade Unions, and professional and white collar workers' unions launched an indefinite stoppage. Many of the white collar unions, representing insurance and financial companies, had not taken any action in the first wave. At least 150 KCTU unions, and 191,000 workers took part in the second wave of the strike. As well as workplace activities, many attended the regular public rallies held in the country's 19 major cities.
Broadcasting workers at both major media networks walked out. And hospital workers at the country's 24 major hospitals resumed their strike following a brief return to work over the holidays.?
The key demands of the second wave" were the repeal of the anti-worker labour laws and the National Security Planning
Agency Act, an apology from President, Kim Young-sam, and the resignations of the entire cabinet of Prime Minister Lee Soo-sung, and of Lee Hong-koo, Chairman of the ruling New Korea Party. Growing social support
During the second wave of the strike, militants across the country observed a growing interest, and sympathy of the population and other social organisations. In Seoul, workers were joined by many ordinary citizens, non-union workers, and students in their regular four kilometre march from downtown Jongmyo park to Myong dong Catholic Cathedral, where the KCTU has set up its strike headquarters, to avoid
The National Council of Churches set up a pan-Christian task force for the re-amendment of the labour laws. A national body of Catholic priests decided to place strike posters in each church compound, open the churches as sanctuary to striking workers, and to hold special masses in support of the strikers. A key Buddhist monks' organisation formed an emergency task force.
The Association of Lawyers for a Democratic Society made an official application for access to records of the extraordinary session of the National Assembly that rushed through the problematic legislation. The University Professors Association for Democracy began a campaign to collect 2,000 signatures of university professors calling for the nullification of the errant laws. Similar efforts were undertaken by doctors and performing artists. Outreach tactics
Recognising the importance of wining public opinion in this unprecedented national crisis, and with the constant threat of a return to severe repression of democracy and labour activism, the strikers quickly developed innovative ways of reaching out to the nonstriking majority.
On January 7th, 15,000 striking workers gathered at Jongmyo Park, then dispersed in groups of 10-20 to distribute leaflets and hold public meetings at over 100 shopping centres, department stores, subway and railway stations across the capital. The KCTU Newspaper Department printed one million copies of a special strike bulletin aimed at the general public. Similar actions were repeated in the 20 regional capitals.
On January 8th, striking unionists held a "special day with ordinary people". Unionists at automobile service companies offered free servicing at 27 temporary check-up points across the country. Members of the KCTU Provincial Council in Chullabuk-do visited various rural villages hit by the recent heavy snowfall to assist in the recovery work. And other unionists, mainly in the special industrial estates, zones, and complexes, will conduct a clean-up campaign in the nearby environmentally distressed areas. Meanwhile, white collar unionists held their own mass meeting in downtown Seoul. The idea was to mark the full entry of white collar workers into the general strike.
Thursday 9th January was designated as a day of protest against the ruling New Korea Party (NKP) of President Kim Young-sam. Strikers held protest rallies in front of NKP branch offices throughout the country.
Over 1,000 broadcasting showered the headquarters of the ruling party with thousands of eggs, and shouted and sang slogans calling for the impeachment of the NKP for the anti-democratic way it "voted" the labour and national security laws. Most of the eggs were donated by local
The following day, the theme of was "the robber government," and the authoritarian, underhand way in which they had passed the repressive labour and national security legislation. As it was Friday, it was decided to invite strikers and their supporters to bring their cars into the heart of each city, blocking traffic to demonstrate popular feeling. On Saturday, 11th January, unions and social movements called on citizens to participate in simultaneous local and regional rallies. On Sunday, KCTU unions organised "strolls" and picnics, to re-enforce the message that the strikers were ordinary people, and that this side, at least, was not looking for violent confrontation.