>Are you not talking about different types of corruption? Carey does not
>seem to have been anything to have personally benefited himself other than
>to try to get reelected. The other people mentioned here were engaged in
>personal enrichment. Right?
Right. But as even Kim Moody of Labor Notes - longtime TDU boosters - conceded <http://www.laborers.org/Labornotes_226.html>:
>Carey, too, must share some of the responsibility. All that happened
>did so under his presidency. He hired the consultants. In choosing
>old style money-driven electioneering in 1996, he, in effect, chose
>business union methods over the rank and file campaign advocated and
>conducted by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
>
>The consultants hired by Carey were the conduit to labor's old ways
>of doing things. What the whole bunch did was introduce the old
>back-room political culture into a Teamsters' union that was
>fighting to get past all that.
>
>Carey was, in turn, drawn further into this swamp. The federation
>officers, consultants, and politicians are so rooted in that old
>culture, they probably didn't even know they were corrupting
>something. And that points to the problem.
>
>Business unionism and its culture of bureaucratic functioning and
>top-down dealing is so familiar and so ingrained that both its
>high-placed practitioners and rank and file victims often don't even
>notice it at work.
Fitch, of course, rejects the use of "bureaucracy" to describe U.S. unions, since bureaucracies are effective and follow fixed procedures. Instead, he says they're patronage machines.
Doug