Forty years ago this
December, members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) did the
unthinkable. They elected three of their own–rank-and-file coal miners–to top
national positions in the UMWA. The labor establishment was deeply shocked and
unsettled.
This kind of thing was
just not done–and not a single labor organization (with the exception of the
always independent United Electrical Workers) applauded W. A. (“Tony”) Boyle’s
well-deserved defeat in his bid for re-election as UMWA president.
Then and now, rising to
the top in organized labor normally requires waiting your turn (and, when you
capture a leadership position, holding on to it for as long as you can,
regardless of the organizational consequences). For trade unionists who are
ambitious and successful, upward mobility usually follows a long career track
that looks something like this: shop steward, local bargaining committee or
executive board member, local union officer, national union staffer, national
union executive board member, and then national union officer–president,
vice-president, or secretary-treasurer.
Aspiring labor leaders
can most easily make the transition from membership elected positions, at the
local level, to appointed national union staff jobs if they conform politically.
Dissidents tend to be passed over for such vacancies or not even considered for
them unless union patronage is being deployed, by those at the top, to co-opt
actual or potential local critics.
As appointed staffers
move up, via the approved route, in the field or at union headquarters, they
burnish their resumes and gain broader organizational experience “working within
the system.” If they become candidates for higher elective office later in their
career, they enjoy all the advantages of de facto incumbency (by virtue of their
full-time staff positions, greater access to multiple locals, and
politically-helpful headquarters patrons). Plus, in the absence of any
one-member/one-vote election process, most seekers of union-wide office only
have to compete for votes among several thousand usually docile national
convention delegates. In unions that provide geographical representation on
their board, candidates for regional leadership positions can even get elected,
at conventions, with the support of just a few hundred local union delegates.
Either way, candidates who are part of an “administration team” usually win over
independents and rank-and-file slates (particularly in unions where all board
members are elected “at large”).
The MFD’s
Unwelcome Victory
In 1972, the Miners for
Democracy (MFD) blazed a trail directly to the top, under admittedly abnormal
circumstances because the UMWA permits direct election of top officers by the
entire membership. Three years before MFD candidates ran, there was a contested
race of a different sort, involving two longtime union insiders. Fed up with
Tony Boyle’s coziness with coal companies, executive board member Joseph
(“Jock”) Yablonski challenged Boyle for the presidency. Unfortunately, the
election was stolen by the incumbent, although the results were later overturned
by the U.S. Department of Labor. When it came time for a government-supervised
rematch, Yablonski was, tragically, no longer available to run. He had been
assassinated in the meantime (along with his wife and daughter).
Three little-known local
union officers hailing from West Virginia or Pennsylvania–Arnold Miller, Harry
Patrick, and Mike Trbovich–entered the lists instead. They had never been on the
UMWA national staff or executive board but carried the banner of union democracy
and reform anyway. Even though they were running, at the top of the ticket,
against a management-friendly incumbent– soon to be indicted for his role in the
Yablonski murders–the MFD slate won by only 14,000 votes out of 126,700 cast,
hardly a landslide.
From a vantage point
four decades later, the choice between Boyle and the MFD should have been a
nobrainer. But in the rough-andtumble world of trade union politics, the
advantages of incumbency should not to be underestimated, in any era. As a
grassroots organizing project, mounting an electoral challenge to any candidate
favored by the national union establishment is an uphill fight, even when the
bureaucracy itself is discredited or split. Competitive elections (aka “this is
what democracy looks like”) are far more celebrated in the breach than the
observance in organized labor. In fact, within labor’s top officialdom, there’s
no announcement more pleasing to the ears than “re-elected by acclamation.”
Whether that’s healthy for the labor movement is another question.
To explore the rare but
important phenomena of contested national union elections, this article begins
with the MFD saga. It then examines the Teamster presidential election campaign
of Ron Carey twenty years later and reports on the experience of two present-day
local union officers who had the audacity to run for top jobs in their
respective national organizations just last year.
A Partial UMWA
Revolution
The MFD victory and its
tumultuous ten-year aftermath has been variously chronicled by former UMWA
lawyer Tom Geoghegan in Which Side Are You On?, labor studies
professor Paul Clark in The Miners Fight for
Democracy and journalist Paul
Nyden’s contribution to a recent Verso collection entitled, Rebel
Rank and File. As Nyden notes, the
election that thrust three rank-and-filers into unfamiliar jobs in a
disfunctional national union headquarters in Washington, D.C., “channeled the
spontaneous militancy arising throughout the Appalachian coal fields” during the
previous decade. In the 1960s, miners staged two huge wildcat work-stoppages
protesting national contracts negotiated in secret by Boyle (with no membership
ratification); in 1969, 45,000 UMWA members participated in a statewide
political strike which accelerated passage of new federal mine safety
legislation and creation of the first West Virginia program for compensation of
miners disabled with “black lung.”
According to Nyden,
candidates backed by the MFD, a group founded at Yablonski’s funeral in 1970,
“succeeded in ousting one of the country’s most corrupt and deeply entrenched
union bureaucracies” because they had key allies inside and outside the union.
In the coalfields, “wives and widows of disabled miners, the Black Lung
Association, the wildcat strikers, and above all the young miners who were
dramatically reshaping the composition of the UMWA constituted the backbone of
the campaign.” Also aiding the MFD was a skilled and committed network of
community organizers, former campus activists, journalists, coalfield
researchers, and public interest lawyers, some of whom would later play
controversial roles as headquarters staffers for the union.
The UMWA had been run in
autocratic fashion since the 1920s when John L. Lewis crushed the last major
rank and file challenge to the leadership, a campaign mounted by progressive
miners like John Brophy and Powers Hapgood. So when the MFD took over, the
institutional context was a smaller scale union version of the political turmoil
following recent Arab Spring uprisings or any similar overthrow of a
dictatorship in place for many decades.
The new leaders
inherited formidable internal and external problems that would have been vexing
for anyone in their shoes. They succeeded in the project of structural
democratization and, for a time, more competent union administration. But
membership expectations in the crucial area of contract negotiations and
enforcement were not met. As the 1970s progressed, new UMWA organizing
initiatives failed to counter the coal industry’s systematic “de-unionization,”
a process that continues unabated today.
An Erratic
President
Within the union, the
conservative Boyle forces quickly regrouped and maintained their own baleful,
disruptive influence. The three top MFD officers fell out among themselves, with
the best and youngest of them–Harry Patrick–leaving the UMWA after a single term
of office in 1977. Arnold Miller’s weak and erratic presidency became an
unmitigated disaster; in 1977-78, 160,000 miners had to battle UMWA headquarters
and the White House while shutting down the bituminous coal industry for 110
days . Highlights of that struggle included two contract rejections and a failed
Taft-Hartley back-to-work order sought by Jimmy Carter.
To this day, the MFD
experience (for those who remember it) remains a Rorshach test for how one views
sudden regime change in labor, engineered from below. Some MFD veterans, who
were ex-coal miners, blamed (and even red-baited) “the outsiders” for what went
wrong. By the late 1970s, most of the college educated non-miners, who were
swept into influential positions by the MFD’s victory, left in frustration over
the failings or political setbacks of their friends and allies. Some went on to
work for other unions, most recently the Service Employees International
Union.
Washington, D.C., labor
insiders viewed UMWA turmoil as proof that “inexperienced” people should never
be allowed to run a major union. On the labor left, the shortcomings of the
Miller Administration have always been attributed to its unwillingness to
empower fully the rank-and-file. If only “the MFD hadn’t been disbanded” and top
officials had been willing to embrace the right to strike over grievances and
employed the militancy of the UMWA’s wildcat strike culture, rather than
clashing with it, the outcome would have been different.
Some semblance of
stability and forward motion was not restored until a second-generation
reformer, Rich Trumka, took over as UMWA president in 1982, after defeating a
former Boyle supporter who replaced Arnold Miller when he retired for health
reasons in the middle of his second term. Trumka gained valuable experience as a
headquarters legal staffer during Miller’s first term. Plus, he had the street
cred of working underground before and after his initial tour of full-time union
duty in Washington, D.C. But even with steadier, more skilled hands at the
helm–and an inspiring strike victory at Pittston in 1989–the union has remained
on a steady course to near total marginalization; its actual working membership
today is only about 12,000.
History Repeats
Itself in the IBT?
The most high profile
challenges to the leadership of other major industrial unions, in the 1970s and
1980s, did not take the form of pure rank-and-file insurgencies of the MFD sort.
Instead, they looked more like Jock Yablonski’s break with Boyle in 1969. In the
United Steel Workers and Auto Workers, two dissident regional directors in the
mid-west, Ed Sadlowski and Jerry Tucker, challenged their respective union
establishments. Both called for reform while serving as national executive board
members, after winning those positions in elections that were initially stolen.
Both were forced out of top leadership positions after trying to move up or just
get re-elected. Tucker fell victim to tight control of convention delegate
voting by the UAW “Administration Caucus,” which has ruled his Detroit-based
union for six decades. With some former UMWA reformers assisting him, Sadlowski
ran strongly, but unsuccessfully, for USWA president in 1977 balloting involving
nearly 600,000 of the union’s then 1.4 million members.
A campaign like
Sadlowski’s was impossible in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
when that union picked its top leadership at national union conventions heavily
influenced by organized crime. As part of the settlement of a controversial
Justice Department anti-racketeering lawsuit in 1989, the IBT was forced to hold
its first-ever direct election of officers and board members two years
later.
Fortunately, the IBT was
the longtime turf of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which campaigned
for this more democratic method of voting. TDU was launched just a few years
after the MFD, as a vehicle not just for electioneering but for long-term
rank-and-file organizing. In the IBT two decades ago, there were no credible or
trusted defectors from the national leadership like Ed Sadlowski or Jerry
Tucker; but, helpfully, the Teamster “old guard” became badly splintered. Two
rival slates formed, composed of existing IBT executive board members, wellknown
regional officials, and other principal officers of large Teamster
locals.
For fifteen years, TDU
had been conducting unofficial, bottom-up “contract campaigns” and helping
Teamsters democratize their local union by-laws and run for local office. TDU
helped assemble a full slate of executive board and officer candidates headed by
Ron Carey. Carey was an ex-Marine and militant leader of United Parcel Service
(UPS) workers in New York City; his vocal criticism of Teamster corruption had
turned him into a pariah among fellow local union officials (only several of
whom agreed to run with him). Most of Carey’s running-mates were TDUers who had
never held any union position above the level of shop steward or convention
delegate.
As Newsday labor
reporter Ken Crowe recounted in Collision: How the Rank-and-File
Took Back The Teamsters, the 400,000 Teamsters
who cast their ballots in 1991 were participating in the largest
government-supervised union vote since the MFD ousted Tony Boyle. Carey garnered
very little delegate support at the IBT convention where presidential candidates
were nominated that year. So Teamster employers, the AFL-CIO, and the mass media
were all much surprised when he won the union presidency with 48% of the
membership vote. Carey’s largely rank-and-file slate swept all but one position
on the union’s executive board.
The Rise (and
Fall) of Ron Carey
Anyone who had
experienced the MFD years at UMWA headquarters and then spent some time in the
IBT’s “Marble Palace” in Washington, D.C., after Carey became president could
not help but feel a sense of deja vu. Carey inherited a hostile and
disfunctional national union bureaucracy; at the local level, scores of Teamster
affiliates were cesspools of corruption, headed by crooks and thugs of all
sorts.
Like the Boyle forces in
the UMWA, Teamster regional barons remained bitter foes of the new reform
administration. They had been ousted from the executive board, stripped of
costly perks, and then deprived of additional paychecks for their multiple union
positions by a TDU-backed reformer. Much of the Teamster officialdom, while not
corrupt, nevertheless feared and disliked Carey’s strong commitment to rallying
the rank and file in contract campaigns and strikes. That approach to union
bargaining was perceived as undermining “local autonomy”– i.e. the ability of
IBT officials to negotiate any kind of sweetheart contract with
management.
A Teamster counter-revolution began brewing almost immediately. It produced
the 1996 presidential candidacy of James P. Hoffa, a lawyer from Michigan who
had never been a working member of the union, except in summer jobs arranged by
his father when he was IBT president. Hoffa senior was one of the best-known
labor leaders in the nation before he was imprisoned in 1967, later pardoned by
Richard Nixon, then kidnapped and killed by the Mafia in 1975.
Carey defeated Hoffa in
1996–by a mere 16,000 votes–but in a tainted fashion that sadly turned
reform-oriented rule into a mere interregnum in Teamster history. Carey’s career
came crashing down in “Teamster Donorgate”–a re-election campaign financing
scandal that ensnared many, inside and outside the union, including Rich Trumka,
then secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.
Trumka took the Fifth
when he was questioned before a federal grand jury about the federation’s role
in a complicated contribution swap scheme arranged by various Carey campaign
consultants, vendors, or union staff members. Most pled guilty, while one, the
Teamsters’ political director, was convicted and jailed. Carey himself was
forced from office and indicted for perjury; denying any knowledge of the
transactions, he was later acquitted. Trumka was never charged.
But, in collective
bargaining, Ron Carey was no Arnold Miller. Before Carey was forced out in late
1997, Teamster reformers, working in his Washington and in the field, still
managed to pull off the biggest, best-organized strike of the decade. Under
Carey, the IBT orchestrated an unprecedented mobilization of 200,000 UPS workers
that ended in a widely supported 15-day national workstoppage. It was widely
hailed as just what the labor movement needed to go on the offensive again.
Unfortunately, when the 1996 election was overturned and re-run, Hoffa won the
first of his now four presidential campaigns. In each election, until last
year’s race, the local officer running as TDU’s candidate got more than a third
of the vote, while agitating for a return to the militancy and membership
mobilization of the Carey years. Hoffa and his leadership team have taken a less
adversarial path. Much to the dismay of some Teamster dues payers, the current
Teamster president has also helped solidify his support by condoning (and
contributing to) the collection of multiple union salaries by Teamster
officials, a practice that drains the IBT treasury of $12 million a
year.
The IBT’s Latest
Three-Way Field
Mounting dissatisfaction
with Hoffa’s now fourteen-year year reign spawned not one, but two local union
challengers, who went the distance in the IBT’s latest direct election battle.
Despite more than two decades of federal court oversight, Teamster conventions
still reflect the culture of an unrepentant one-party state. So when supporters
of Sandy Pope, a local president from Queens, N.Y., and Fred Gegare, a local
president and dissenting Teamster board member from Wisconsin, went to the
microphones to speak on behalf of their respective candidates (or any other
issue) in Las Vegas last June, they were drowned out by the thunderous boos of a
pro-Hoffa crowd numbering more than 4,000.
A TDU supporter since
the late 1970s, Pope was photogenic, articulate, and a tireless campaigner with
a substantive critique of Hoffa’s record. She also had a solid personal resume
featuring actual Teamster work experience, followed by years of full-time union
service as an effective organizer, international union representative (under
Carey), and elected leader of a model Teamster local. Gegare similarly stressed
his own rank-and-file background, as opposed to Hoffa’s lack of it; his attacks
on “Junior” had the additional bite of coming from someone who was, for years, a
Hoffa backer and leading mid-western member of his administration.
\Both Pope and Gegare
were, in their own way, intent on forcing an important debate about the future
of the union. But, in Las Vegas, where each Hoffa critic was nominated with
about 9% of the delegate vote, the pro-Hoffa delegates, alternates, and guests
weren’t much interested in listening to them. When the two opposition candidates
went to the podium for their 20-minute nomination acceptance speeches, their
audience immediately dwindled to their own combined delegation of about 300;
everyone else walked out of the hall.
Barnstorming around the
country, in a grueling campaign for anyone with local union responsibilities,
both fared much better. Their combined anti-Hoffa vote among the 250,000
Teamsters who cast ballots last fall was twice the percentage they got among IBT
convention delegates. But, in a blow to TDU, Gegare (who was running with a near
full slate of running mates) got 23%–taking more votes away from the reform
movement’s past base of support than he did from Hoffa’s
constituency.
As a result, Pope–who
was running alone, just against Hoffa–placed a disappointing third, with 17%.
The 70-year old incumbent was re-elected, with 40 percent of the vote, for
another five-year term. As TDU organizer Ken Paff points out, Hoffa’s huge
fund-raising advantage explains a lot about the results. The Teamster president
“raised $3 million, according to his slate’s financial reports, most of it from
officials who owe their positions or power to him,” Paff wrote in Labor Notes.
In contrast, Pope raised about $200,000, “could afford a mailing to less than 20
percent of the union’s membership” and relied on volunteer phone banking for her
GOTV effort. Hoffa “did multiple mailings to the 1.3 million members, the bulk
of them devoted to vicious attacks on Sandy Pope.” Hoffa also benefited from
controversial IBT- funded robo-calling that was ostensibly non-partisan and
aimed at boosting turnout but subtly reinforced his core campaign message about
“unity.” Both Bill Clinton and Danny DeVito taped messages urging Teamsters to
vote, which 20% did.
This lowest ever
turn-out–and the cost of direct elections every five years–is now cited, by
Hoffa supporters, in their revived drive to switch back to the old Teamster
method of electing top officers and board members at convention. In response,
defenders of “the Right to Vote” note that the twoyear administrative costs of
the most recent direct election add up to about the same amount the IBT spends,
in a single year, bestowing additional pay-checks on favored officials already
receiving one or more for their local or joint council positions. As a
percentage of Teamster dues income over five years, argues TDU, “democracy costs
less than one half of one percent of your dues!”
A CWA Convention
Challenge
A few weeks after the
Teamsters vacated Las Vegas last summer, local union delegates from the
Communications Workers of America (CWA) came to town to pick their own national
officers and executive board members. Although only convention delegates, rather
than the entire membership, get to vote on the union’s top leadership, the
culture of CWA convention elections is relatively democratic, if still tipped
very much in favor of incumbents and de facto incumbents with headquarters
connections and backing.
For example, it’s not
unusual, although difficult, for the president of a large local, who has never
been tapped to serve on the national union staff, to run successfully against an
incumbent CWA vice-president in charge of one of CWA’s fourteen geographical or
occupational groupings. The odds are better when there’s an open executive board
seat, like the one won last year by an African-American president of a large
telephone local in Texas. He defeated a top assistant to the previous CWA
executive board member from District 6, which covers a five-state
region.
In 2011, however, Don
Trementozzi, a telecom local president in New England, became the first local
union leader in thirty years to run for a CWA national officer job. (The last
such challenger, also from Texas, actually succeeded when two headquarters
officials vied for the same vacant position as Executive Vice-President.) Last
year, to save money, CWA eliminated this EVP slot–a position held, at the time,
by 20-year national union employee and former CWA District 7 leader, Annie Hill.
Hill teamed up with incumbent President Larry Cohen to run for
secretary-treasurer, when the holder of that office decided to
retire.
In the normal course of
events, the Cohen-Hill “unity team” would have been chosen by acclamation, due
to the long political coat-tails of the widely-respected Cohen, who made it
known that he also plans to retire in 2015. But Trementozzi, like Pope and TDU,
wanted to force a debate about issues–in this case the breakdown of CWA
bargaining coordination and solidarity within AT&T, the union’s largest
employer three years ago.
No Time For
Debate?
A 52-year-old native of
Rhode Island, Trementozzi is a Verizon customer service rep and former activist
in AFSCME and the IAM, who was elected president of CWA Local 1400 in 2002,
after running on a reform slate. He was involved in last year’s strike at
Verizon and serves as a member of the regional union committee trying to
negotiate a new contract covering 45,000 VZ workers from Massachusetts to
Virginia. Last February, Trementozzi announced his independent candidacy for CWA
secretary-treasurer with a statement redolent of union populism from the past.
Dubbing his effort “Save Our Union 2011,” Trementozzi declared that CWA “needs
more people in the top leadership who can better reflect the perspective of
those of us closest to the membership, who must deal with rankand- file concerns
every day.” (Seehttp://www.saveourunion2011.org/)
In their low-budget
campaign, Trementozzi and his backers blamed Hill for AT&T bargaining
miscues in 2009. Taking a supportive and conciliatory stance toward the top of
the administration ticket, Trementozzi argued that “President Cohen needs a
stronger partner in Washington than he’s going to end up with for the next four
years if Annie Hill becomes secretary-treasurer.”
Unfortunately,
Trementozzi’s appeal for “ticketsplitting” as “the way forward in CWA” failed to
sway delegates from the union’s flight attendant division, newspaper guild,
manufacturing sector locals, and public employee bargaining units in New Jersey
that Cohen helped organize three decades ago. Save Our Union (SOU) drew support
primarily from telecom locals in upstate New York and New England, plus unhappy
AT&T local officers in other parts of the country (including leaders of the
largest telecom local in Texas). SOU’s total campaign budget was about
$7,000.
The day before the vote,
Hill haughtily boycotted a candidates’ forum that Trementozzi had arranged so
the two could finally have a face-to-face debate. Taking a leaf from Hoffa in
the Teamsters, Hill had earlier refused to make any joint appearance with her
opponent, via conference calls or in person, before delegates anywhere in the
country. Instead of debating in Las Vegas, Hill handed out a list of “Cohen-Hill
supporters” that included the names of more than 70 union staffers, lawyers, and
executive board members who were not even delegates or eligible to
vote.
CWA convention rules
unfairly limited “Save Our Union” speakers to just the two delegates who
nominated Trementozzi and then second his nomination. They were granted a total
of four minutes to make the case for electing him. There was no time allotted
for either secretarytreasurer candidate to address the delegates before the
convention recessed so secret balloting could begin.
About 1,100 delegates
cast votes based on the membership strength of their locals. Hill received 276,
769 votes (or 74.5% of the total), while Trementozzi got 94,733 (25.5%). While
Sandy Pope and other TDUers will be resisting efforts to make the 2011 Teamster
presidential race the last one decided by a popular vote, Don Trementozzi and
other SOU supporters have a more modest procedural proposal to make. They’d just
like to change CWA’s convention rules, in 2013, so any future contenders for top
union office get the same twenty minutes to make a nomination acceptance speech
that Teamster candidates had. In CWA, they believe, most delegates might even
stay in their seats to hear what the opposition has to say.
Steve
Early worked for 27 years on the national staff of the Communications Workers of
America in the northeast. In 2011, he was an active supporter of Don
Trementozzi’s “Save Our Union” campaign for CWA secretary treasurer. Early also
aided Ron Carey’s successful candidacy for Teamster president and, while on loan
from CWA, served on Carey’s headquarters “transition team” in 1992. In the mid-
1970s, he was a headquarters staff member of the United Mine Workers when MFD
candidate Arnold Miller was president of that union. He is the author most
recently of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor from Haymarket Books,
and can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com. This piece
originally appeared in Social Policy, Winter, 2012, Volume 41, #4,
For Social Policy subscription information, see http://www.socialpolicy.org/)
