The American Prospect
volume 12, issue 5
https://web.archive.org/web/20070416094444/http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/5/phillips-fein-k.html
excerpt:
Ever since the McClellan Committee investigations of racketeering in the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has occupied a lurid place in the American imagination. From Jimmy Hoffa to "Tony Pro," from "Red" Dorfman to Jackie Presser, the Teamsters have been known as the id of the labor movement--a seething hotbed of greed, violence, and corruption. Recent Teamsters President Ron Carey and his aides were accused of laundering money from the union treasury for use in Carey's 1996 re-election campaign. The election was overturned, and Carey was banned from the union. This January he was indicted for lying to a grand jury about his role in the scandal. And when Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, ascended to the presidency of the union in 1999, it seemed at first as though nothing had changed since the bad old days.
But in the two years since Hoffa became president of the Teamsters--one of the largest labor unions in the United States, with more than 1.4 million members--many progressive writers and thinkers have hailed the union's transformation. Hoffa's Teamsters have been lauded for participating in the November 1999 demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and for making overtures to Ralph Nader during the recent presidential campaign before finally backing Al Gore (rather than immediately casting support to the Democrats as did the rest of the AFL-CIO). As Marc Cooper wrote in The Nation, the Teamsters are "making a bid to become key players and allies in that progressive blue/green coalition that began to gel out of the gaseous clouds of the WTO protests... . "According to Cooper," Hoffa has surprised many by showing himself to be a potentially powerful ally--rather than a roadblock--in the fight for a progressive national politics."
Certainly, the union is no longer the ossified embarrassment to the American labor movement that it was in the 1980s, the heyday of Jackie Presser. Eleven years of government supervision have flushed the mob out of many locals. And once upon a time, the Teamsters would have endorsed George W. Bush, not Al Gore. (The Teamsters are, however, the only labor union represented on President Bush's Department of Labor transition team--along with the union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis Schintzler and Krupman.)
Even so, the Teamsters remain an odd amalgamation of old and new labor. Despite the union's tough-guy mystique, its real weaknesses are not much different from those that plague the entire American labor movement: decentralization, parochialism, and an inability to organize new workers locally. It's true that such structural problems are difficult to address, but Hoffa does not even appear to be making an effort to do so. The result is that under his leadership, the Teamsters have not yet carried out the aggressive organizing campaigns that characterize the best and most progressive unions in John Sweeney's AFL-CIO. While important, electoral politics and demonstrations like those in Seattle ultimately matter far less than organizing, which is what actually gives workers power on the job and in politics. Hoffa hasn't sent the union back to the Dark Ages. But can he make it into a viable political force?
When the election campaign of 2000 was in high gear, it seemed that the Teamsters had changed a lot since the days when they endorsed Republican candidates for president. On a late afternoon last September, the parking lot outside the Teamsters Local 282 union hall in Lake Success, Long Island, was packed with men and women wearing trademark black-and-gold Teamster jackets. "I Shot the Sheriff"--Eric Clapton's version--blared over the loudspeakers. When Hoffa appeared on stage, the crowd exploded in cheers. He introduced Senate candidate Hillary Clinton. Presented with a white Local 282 jacket, Clinton put it on and twirled for the crowd.
Not everyone in attendance was in cheerleader mode. Scattered here and there were Teamsters wearing "No to PNTR" T-shirts, relics of last spring's World Bank rally where Hoffa had gathered the Teamsters to protest free trade and listen to Pat Buchanan. Some in the crowd also couldn't forgive the Democrats their support of former Teamsters President Ron Carey, who trusteed their local. "Fellows that I worked with for 20 years, they said they were gangsters," said Robert Kelly, a retired Teamster. "Do I look like a mobster? I'm a working stiff." Other unions support the Democrats, but truck drivers are forced to compete with low-wage Mexican workers because of policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. "AFSCME [the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] and the other unions won't be the ones taking the $5-an-hour jobs," Kelly said. When I told him he was being interviewed for an article to be published by a magazine based in Boston, he grumbled about the Kennedys.
But Teamsters like Kelly don't run the show anymore. Today, the union is willing to combine forces with the New Democrats (after shaking its fist at the party over free trade throughout the campaign season), even as it joins with pink-haired anarchists and the larger left to protest international financial power and the liberalization of trade. This suggests how much the union's leadership has changed its style. But at the same time, the strength of a union doesn't come from its position papers. It comes from organizing.
