Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

July 3, 2005 Sunday
Chicago Final Edition

SECTION: BUSINESS ; ZONE C; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: Hoffa strikes chord as a reformer;
AFL-CIO dissidents praise Teamsters chief, but critics say he should clean his own house first

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin, Tribune staff reporter

BODY:
Up on the stage, the shining stars of organized labor's revolt were heaping endless praise on Jim Hoffa. He is the man, said the leaders of the small band of dissident unions, to help them in their fight against gutless, slow-moving labor leaders. With shouts and with arms raised, Teamsters brought the room to a boil.
"Hoffa, Hoffa, Hoffa," they chanted as James P. Hoffa, who six years ago inherited his father's mantle as the Teamsters' leader, stood up at the Teamsters gathering in May in Las Vegas.
For Hoffa and the other union leaders, whose revolt threatens to rip apart organized labor, the speeches were a demonstration of the unity that links five dissident unions within the AFL-CIO, the federation that loosely holds together the nation's major unions.
But for the 63-year-old union leader and his 1.4 million-member union, it marked another notch on Hoffa's rapid ascendance to the rank of scrappy reformer.
This is no surprise to Teamsters officials or Hoffa's colleagues among the dissident unions. But it is confounds Hoffa's longtime foes in the Teamsters, who complain about failed strikes, cronyism, officials' bloated salaries and lingering corruption under Hoffa. Before fixing organized labor, they say he should fix his own union.
"He is someone who has been among the most friendly within labor to President Bush. He came into office as a defender of the old guard within the Teamsters, running on his father's name. And as for militancy, the only strikes he has called have been at Overnite and at Red Star, and they both ended in terrible defeats for the union," said Ken Paff, head of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a small watchdog group within the union.
When Hoffa took office, few would have imagined him to one day emerge as an ally of outspoken progressive union leaders like Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union, says Cornell University labor expert Rick Hurd.
When Hoffa first ran for his job in 1996, campaigners for former Teamsters President Ron Carey painted him as a front man for the corrupt union officials and mob types who once used the Teamsters as their piggybank. And the image found some resonance outside of the Teamsters.
Ironically, Carey's backers were so intent on winning that they broke union and federal laws, and Carey's victory was overturned, leading to a re-election and Hoffa victory.
Then last December, Hoffa plunged into labor's civil war with a proposal for changing the AFL-CIO. The union was replying to a call by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney for suggestions.
Faced with a threat last year from the SEIU, the AFL-CIO's largest union, to quit the federation, Sweeney had quickly embraced the SEIU's complaint, saying he, too, wanted changes.
"We put our proposal halfway between where Stern and the AFL-CIO was," said Teamsters attorney Pat Szymanski. "We didn't think there should be a split in organized labor."
But Sweeney and his supporters didn't accept the key issue of the Teamsters plan, which echoed the dissidents' conviction that labor's salvation lies in organizing. The Teamsters wanted the AFL-CIO to rebate half of the dues unions pay annually so unions could beef up their own organizing efforts.
That didn't make sense, however, to a number of unions, who felt that political spending is equally as important as organizing and who feared that the AFL-CIO would go bankrupt.
"The AFL-CIO leadership counted on isolating Andy Stern and that became a miscalculation when Jim Hoffa and the other union leaders got into the mix," said Greg Tarpinian, a consultant for the Teamsters.
But so, too, the dissidents had counted on more unions joining their bandwagon, the Change to Win Coalition. Eventually, the Carpenters union, which had quit the AFL-CIO several years ago, joined. That brought the number of dissident unions to six.
But by early this year, it was clear that the 70-year-old Sweeney had enough votes among the 13 million members of the labor federation to win re-election at the AFL-CIO's convention July 25-28 in Chicago. That was a critical issue since the dissidents made Sweeney's replacement a goal as well.
Among the Teamsters list of what needs to be done in labor's behalf is an old and personal gripe for the union.
Ever since a consent decree signed in 1989 to avoid a government takeover because of mob control and corruption within its ranks, the government has kept a day-to-day eye on the union, and the Teamsters have picked up the nearly $3 million annual tab for it.
The Justice Department has steadily rebuffed the union's requests to end the monitoring even though the Teamsters created their own investigative arm, staffed by former federal prosecutors and investigators. That $15 million effort collapsed in April 2004, when its leader charged that Teamster officials had thwarted his work, especially investigations into ties between organized crime and several Chicago locals.
The pressure to kill the Chicago probes came from Hoffa's office, claimed Edwin Stier, the former head of the investigative team.
Teamsters officials said they seriously doubted Stier's claims. But they hired Edward A. McDonald, another former federal prosecutor, to examine Stier's charges, including the alleged union cover-up.
McDonald, speaking from his New York City office last week, said he had turned in a report a while ago and had also written a version that could be released without incriminating anyone.
The decision to release the report, he said, was up to the union.
Jack Cipriani, a Teamsters vice president from North Carolina, explained that the union wants to make sure the report is accurate before releasing it. "You will see it in a very short period of time," he added.
John Wilhelm, the second-highest official in Unite Here--the product of the merger between the hotel workers and needle trade unions, and one of the dissident unions--doubts the report will unveil any high level wrongdoing.
"It is literally impossible to hide anything in that union," said Wilhelm, citing the presence of the government-appointed monitors.
As for Hoffa's commitment to cleaning up his union, Wilhelm pointed to how Hoffa handled the revelation several months ago that Carlow Scaif, his executive assistant, and a loyal supporter from Detroit, had wrongly received $69,000 in housing allowances from the union.
The union's government monitors had settled on a 60-day suspension for Scaif from the union as punishment. But Hoffa, as Wilhelm noted, "terminated him from the union."
It wasn't the first time someone close to Hoffa had run into trouble.
Three years ago the union's monitors banned Dane Passo, a former Chicago Teamster and campaign worker for Hoffa, from the union for his role in a plot to drive down wages and benefits for Las Vegas Teamsters to help a Chicago-based company.
When Teamsters officials talk about how Hoffa has changed the union since taking over six years ago, they point to his dedication to organizing.
The union passed a dues increase in 2002 that has brought in an added $53 million yearly, and half of that money has been slotted for organizing.
Until then the union barely did any national organizing; today there is a $12 million-a-year effort, union officials say. And the extra $5 million that the union would get back from the AFL-CIO under its rebate proposal would make a "huge" difference, said Jeff Farmer, the Teamsters organizing director.
"We view this very much as a work in progress," Farmer said, referring to the union's new organizing efforts.
To be sure, the union's numbers have hardly skyrocketed.
It has added 135,000 new members in the last few years, but 130,000 of those new dues-payers come from two small unions that merged with the Teamsters. The union also lost 3,000 Southwest Airlines mechanics and 10,000 Northwest Airlines flight attendants in 2003 when they bolted for other unions.
When the Teamsters gathered in May in Las Vegas and the heads of the other dissident unions got up to talk about what's ahead, there was little quibbling about new starts or problems, however.
It was not that kind of moment.
"And when Jim Hoffa talked about taking on the AFL-CIO, everyone listened. So give it up for Jim Hoffa," shouted SEIU president Andy Stern, turning toward his colleague.
"Hoffa, Hoffa, Hoffa."