Newhouse News Service, May 10, 2006, Wednesday

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Newhouse News Service

May 10, 2006 Wednesday 3:59 PM EDT

SECTION: FINANCIAL

HEADLINE: Dissent Simmers As Teamsters Union Prepares for Elections Next Month

BYLINE: By ALISON GRANT.
Alison Grant is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at agrant@plaind.com.

BODY:
When the International Brotherhood of Teamsters opens its convention in Las Vegas next month, General President James P. Hoffa will face dissident opposition.
To some, Hoffa's re-election seems a given. Challenger Tom Leedham, after all, has tried twice already to topple Hoffa. He lost in 1998 with 40 percent of the vote and again in 2001 with 35 percent of the vote.
But Leedham supporters think his moment has arrived.
They say Hoffa, son of famed Teamsters leader James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa, is weakened because his administration:
Allowed cuts in benefits, such as a "30-and-out" retirement guarantee, when employers sought concessions in the huge Central States Pension Fund. Hoffa says he has no control over the fund's operation, but his critics point out that the chairman of the fund's union trustees is a vice president on Hoffa's slate.
Botched an organizing drive at Overnite Transportation, the largest non-union trucking company in the country, by launching a reckless strike that lasted three years. Hoffa called off the strike in 2002 but said organizing the company is still a top priority. UPS bought Overnite last year and rebranded it as UPS Freight, which remains nonunion.
Failed to rid the Teamsters of federal oversight imposed in 1989 to flush out mob control. Hoffa campaign spokesman Richard Leebove said the government rejected the Teamsters' internal anti-corruption program. Leebove said that getting a "friendlier administration" in the White House after Bush could lead to a settlement.
Leedham needs the backing of at least 5 percent of 1,800 convention delegates 90 of them to win a spot on the ballot that will be mailed to 1.4 million Teamsters in October and tallied at an unspecified date in November. He is certain he has enough.
"(Hoffa's) popularity's way down, his promises are tattered," said Ken Paff, who heads the rank-and-file Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the grass-roots strength of Leedham's campaign.
Leebove says Leedham is nothing but a spoiler candidate, the "Ralph Nader of the Teamsters," who is draining resources from the union with a doomed underdog fight.
During the current Hoffa presidency, Leebove says, the union has balanced its budget for the first time in 10 years; negotiated important contracts such as the 2003 National Master Freight Agreement and 2002 United Parcel Service agreement; lobbied in Washington for policies such as banning Mexican trucks from hauling goods within the United States; and pushed a dues increase that helped replenish a strike fund with more than $70 million and yielded $25 million a year for organizing.
Despite their differences, Hoffa has joined Leedham in being portrayed and presenting himself as a reform-minded leader.
Hoffa opponents say his new image covers up more of the same: lackluster organizing, big officer salaries and residual corruption.
Others say Hoffa is reshaping the Teamsters into one of labor's most forward-thinking unions. And they wonder if, by doing so, he has neutralized the Teamsters' dissident wing.
Hoffa, who turns 65 this month, looks like a burly truck driver but actually gained his union experience during a 25-year career as a Detroit labor attorney, much of it spent representing Teamsters. He also worked five years as administrative assistant to the president of Teamsters Michigan Joint Council 43.
Hoffa became general president in a 1998 election held when the government removed reformist Ron Carey from office over a campaign funding scandal. (Courts later acquitted Carey of criminal wrongdoing and dismissed a multimillion-dollar civil suit brought against him by Hoffa.)
In his early years in office, Hoffa behaved like a pre-Carey throwback the head of a conservative union that would work things out for its members, cut deals and apply leverage, said Cornell University labor expert Richard Hurd.
As the Teamsters continued to suffer membership losses, however, Hoffa began to align the Washington-based union with the progressive flank of the labor movement, Hurd said.
The shift accelerated in 2005 when the Teamsters broke from the AFL-CIO to join the Service Employees International Union, a leader in aggressive organizing, in the new Change to Win federation.
"It's a lot harder to build a viable coalition to challenge Jim Hoffa when he's already doing a lot of the tactical things that his opponents supported," Hurd said.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, questions whether partnerships between international unions like the SEIU and Teamsters register with rank-and-file members, compared with wage and benefit issues.
Leedham, 55, was a warehouseman before becoming principal officer of Teamsters Local 206 in Portland, Ore., 20 years ago.
Admirers call him articulate and telegenic, and say he is campaigning for a bottom-up revival of the Teamsters.
"I think we're moving in a direction that is very dangerous as we begin to control the union from Washington, D.C.," he said. "The Teamsters have been a strong union historically because (local unions) have a lot of autonomy."
Leedham calls for restoring benefit cuts in the Central States and Western pension funds, and a major push to organize UPS Freight.
Hoffa sold members short in negotiating the 2002 agreement with UPS itself, Leedham said. He said Hoffa guaranteed in writing that members' benefits would be secured for the life of the freight and UPS agreements. "He lied," Leedham said, "and hundreds of thousands of Teamsters have had their benefits cut."
"That's absolutely not true," Leebove responded. "The pension has admitted that it was caught short by the perfect storm of a collapsing stock market, 9/11 and the closing of large employers."
Leedham also urges eliminating dues waste noting that the number of Teamsters officers getting multiple union salaries has increased from 18 to 148 since Hoffa took over. The Teamsters for a Democratic Union says 368 officials make more than $100,000.
Leedham emphasizes that the Teamsters' power depends on organizing UPS Freight. If the company isn't unionized, he warns, employers will use it to undercut Teamster leverage in any future strike at UPS.
As for the Teamsters' affiliation with the breakaway Change to Win federation, Leedham says it hasn't neutralized his reform platform. "I think if anything members are as curious as I am as to what the real reasons were for splitting up the labor movement."
Hoffa said last summer that his union left the AFL-CIO because the federation rejected a proposal to rebate some dues to union affiliates so they could use the money for organizing. But some found the explanation odd and wondered if a power struggle was behind the Teamsters' move.
"I get the sense that the Hoffa administration doesn't quite have the same level of unity that he had" in the 2001 election, said Rob Hickey, who has studied the Teamsters as an assistant professor of industrial relations at Queen's University in Ontario.
Lichtenstein said an upset is conceivable. "Hoffa has a lot of bluster, but there's a couple of notable things he's failed at and a certain amount of discontent," Lichtenstein said.
But Harley Shaiken, a University of California at Berkeley professor specializing in labor, said Leedham has an uphill battle.
"A lot depends on what Leedham emphasizes in the campaign and what base of support he has from local leadership," Shaiken said. "There's a lot of imponderables between now and the November election."