Socialist Viewpoint

By a unanimous vote the AFL-CIO delegates to the 24th Biennial Convention held in Las Vegas this December called on the government to end its 13-year intrusion inside the Teamsters Union. They called the use of the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 in the labor movement “an anti-trade union weapon allowing the government to pick who should run the union and thereby undermining rank-and-file members’ right to elect union officials.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happened when government agents removed then-Teamsters president Ron Carey from the union’s ballot. The government had to know what everyone else knew, that James P. Hoffa would replace Carey. So in that sense the government did “pick who should run the union.”

The resolution, however, is not aimed at defending Carey. Indeed, his name is not mentioned. Neither is the real reason for the government’s attack on Carey even mentioned: Just four years ago, in 1997, the Teamsters Union took on the largest trucking company in the world, United Parcel Service. The strikers beat UPS and inspired the widespread respect and admiration of the American working class, union and nonunion alike. The UPS strike victory was based on mobilizing the ranks. It was based on an active membership fighting for meaningful aims, chiefly the elevation of the lowly part-time worker, often a minority or a woman.

It’s no accident that the Teamsters Union led that fight. For a time, the union’s long-entrenched bureaucratic hierarchy was partially disabled by a democratic, militant leadership, led by Ron Carey, recently a local union officer and often at odds with the union’s coziness with bosses and wise guys. Carey said that he wanted to lead the union because he was embarrassed by the union tops’ misdeeds.

We knew that same kind of embarrassment when the heads of all major unions and the AFL-CIO chieftains turned their backs on Carey when in the wake of the UPS strike he was ousted from the Teamsters Union for life by court-appointed agents. One wonders if the union tops in Las Vegas, including Sweeney, had second thoughts about their perfidy, knowing that twelve jurors, some of them union members, had exonerated Carey.