NEWS & LETTERS, December 1997
Column: Workshop Talks

Lost faith in workers lets U.S. drop Carey

by John Marcotte

Just four days after the UPS strike victory, the government voided Ron Carey's election as president of the Teamsters. Two days after the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters took the lead in defeating Clinton's "fast track" for a trade deal to expand NAFTA, the government barred him from running for re-election.

New York area UPS workers know Carey not only as the International president, but as their Local 804 president of many years, who has led them on strike many times over the years, years when the corrupt International rolled over for UPS, and only Carey and NY walked out. One New York UPS driver put it this way: "I have to think the strike and the government removing Carey is related. To put it very simply: the government put him in, the government took him out." He explained that he didn't mean the government really put him in, but made it possible for him to win by holding the first ever general election for Teamsters president in 1991. He added, "The fact is they don't like any labor leader getting too powerful."

Other drivers, when questioned, felt there had to be some connection between Carey's successes and the government's actions. They questioned why, after investigating Carey for so long, they are only just starting to investigate Hoffa now. Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. lost the election for union president last year against Carey, and drivers asked, "What about the several million dollars that Hoffa received supposedly from bake sales, why wasn't that investigated?"

There is no doubt the Teamsters have made powerful enemies. Alan Greenspan and Wall Street live in fear that American workers will win higher wages. This is why they are happy when more of us are out of work. The UPS victory for part-time workers--which is where all of America is headed--kicked them right where it hurts. This was followed up by a punch to the gut, denying Clinton the "fast-track" authority every president since Ford has had, to make a trade deal at the expense of U.S. and foreign workers and the environment.

This is the tragedy. Just when the labor movement won these two victories, it was dealt a tremendous blow by its own internal contradictions. By the time Carey had stepped down as union president, and then been brought up on internal union charges of stealing $885,000 from the union treasury to finance his own re-election schemes, it was clear "Mr. Clean" was not so squeaky clean after all. The tragedy is that Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the courageous rank-and-file group that battled for over 20 years to clean up their union and stood up to goons and intimidation, put all their eggs into Ron Carey's basket, becoming little more than a re-election committee for Carey.

CHOOSING CONSULTANTS OVER WORKERS

These rank-and-filers were the ones responsible for Carey's 1991 election, the first democratically elected president of the Teamsters. Yet Carey lost faith in the rank and file, and turned to media consultants and Democratic Party operatives for his re-election, and finally to stealing from those who trusted him to finance a money-laundering scheme that apparently involves the Democratic Party, and goes all the way up to AFL-CIO President Sweeney and secretary-treasurer Trumka. Whether or not the government's moves against Carey have some connection to the recent labor victories, the fact is it is Carey's actions which opened the door to the government intervening, and it was Carey who invited the Feds back in to monitor all the union's finances, after five years of being free of such control. The fact of TDU, a genuine rank-and-file reform movement, and labor facing an internal contradiction at the very moment of victory, makes it all the harder for labor to see a way forward.

This is much worse than just an attack from outside. Carey was elected as the reformer. His philosophy of unionism has been to organize, such as at Overnite, and to recognize that rank-and-file workers are the best organizers. As opposed to this, Hoffa stands for retrogression--a moving backwards to a kind of unionism based on a powerful labor dictator. His message to workers is sit back, don't organize, I will walk in there and deliver the goods for you. Hoffa was put up to run by corrupt and mob-dominated locals. Yet Carey and Hoffa are not absolute opposites.

If Carey really believed in the rank and file he would not have turned to media consultants instead of to them, much less stolen from them. And while Carey did remove the leaders of some 60 corrupt locals, corrupt locals that supported him were not touched, which is what has enabled Hoffa to spin the Big Lie, presenting himself as an outsider and a reformer. If your local leaders were lousy but they supported Carey, you were just out of luck.

Yet if Carey is a reformer, this mess is less a question of abstract corruption than of where the logic of a kind of philosophy of unionism leads you. Sweeney, with help from Carey, became the "reform" head of the AFL-CIO, and what have they done? They've spent 30 million dollars trying to buy Congress back from the corporations. The victory over "fast track" was bought with three-quarters of a million of union money going to line politicians' pockets. Carey's fall from power shows the limits of their philosophy as labor leaders. They want to play the corporations' and politicians' own dirty game but how can workers win at that? You lay down with dogs you get fleas, and it looks like Carey got the fleas--and a few jumped on Sweeney and Trumka too.

Neither Carey nor Sweeney has ever broken with the AFL-CIO's history of giving only lip service to civil rights for Blacks. I wrote in my last column that a labor movement that ignores the fact and does nothing about a large percentage of American workers being criminalized by both the criminal justice system and the immigration laws cannot be a new beginning. Labor is still in need of a totally new beginning. There are possibilities within the UPS strike victory to build on, but they do not lie in old-style unionism, neither Carey's brand nor Hoffa's.

DANGERS AFTER REFORM VICTORY

The question facing us after this blow to labor coming from within, is how do we ensure that some new bureaucracy does not take over after we win our union or our reform slate gets in? Workers and rank-and-file movements over the years have had too many experiences with this, which the reader could find in the bound volumes of N&L going back to 1955, and even before that in the autobiography of Charles Denby. Or as a freight driver said about Carey, "It's a shame. As soon as they get in, they start to put their hands in the money. And Hoffa's waiting to get in. You got the fox in the chicken coop." This can be very demoralizing.

The alternative N&L holds out is for workers to be armed with a philosophy that understands WHAT LABOR is under capitalism and what it COULD BE--human self-activity, creative human power that is its own end--in a new society, a philosophy that sees beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois wealth and getting a piece of the pie to the possibility of a new human society, where labor would be something altogether different. And no one would do our thinking for us.

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