The defeat of Carey and TDU, the assumption of Hoffa Jr. to power, and the coming expansion of the scandal around the Teamsters to the AFL-CIO is, indeed, a tragedy. The American labor movement, if not the world, would be a far better place if Carey had won a democratic election, and reformers continued to lead the Teamsters. And because the Carey/TDU/reformer slate not only ultimately lost the union leadership, but violated the fundamental rules of union democracy, as well as the law, in doing so, it is a tragedy of far greater dimensions than a loss to Hoffa in a democratic election would have been. The very cause and currency of union reformers and union democracy activists in the Teamsters has been dirtied and sullied, transformed into one more in a series of self-serving regimes who had no respect for the principles of union democracy.
In other words, this is a Greek tragedy. There were political flaws in the main characters of this drama that led to their downfall. By this I do not mean to endorse the explanation given by the TDU/Labor Notes leadership, that it was the personal failings of Carey, his close advisors within the Teamsters, and the top AFL-CIO leadership that led to this catastrophe -- a 'cult of personality' explanation, not fundamentally unlike that Kruschev offered for the crimes of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Whenever I have seen the TDU/Labor Notes folks address the issue -- and that itself is a rare event; for a long time, there was nothing but denial -- we are told that the Carey leadership were "vacillating," not entirely principled forces who did not want to rely upon the rank and file; as a consequence, they ran to the manipulative, mass marketing denizens of the Democratic Party like Mike Ansara [a history of 40 years of Ansara on the left, starting with SDS and going through Citizen Action is conveniently ignored] and met their doom. [See, for example, Kim Moody, "THE BUSINESS UNION SHORT-CUT: WHEN WILL WE LEARN? at http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/gewerkschaft/kim.html.]
But Carey was prepared to win by any means necessary, and would have happily relied solely upon the TDU network if he thought it could do the job. [Remember that Carey's initial victory was in a three man race, in which the 'old guard' had split.] The problem was that he, and virtually all inside observers, were convinced that they were on the verge of losing a democratic election without a major influx of funds to employ capital intensive [i.e., direct mail, direct phone calling], as well as labor intensive, campaign efforts. The entire scheme to steal and launder members' dues into Carey campaign funds worked out by the Carey folks, parts of Citizen Action and almost certainly parts of the AFL-CIO leadership was designed to finance the capital intensive efforts.
So the facts on the ground just don't support the TDU/Labor Notes explanation. Remember also that 10 of the 14 members of the Carey slate elected in 1992 were TDU members. It just doesn't wash to say that the election debacle was the result of 'betrayal' of the TDU bloc by the Carey forces -- TDU had a majority of the folks at the top. One has to ask what was the organizational problem that allowed a minority to do what it did?
Nor does the likes of Fitch have a clue about what went wrong in the Teamsters. To toss Carey and Trumka into the same pot as DC 37's Charlie Hughes or the Laborer's Cioa, to not understand that the very virtue of Carey was his opposition to the obscenely corrupt, organized crime elements that had ruled the Teamsters for decades, as Fitch does, is to show a fundamental inability to understand the nature of the forces, and the balance of the forces, that contend within the labor movement. As right as Fitch might be to insist that the Labor Notes/TDU analysis that sees bureaucracy as the fundamental problem of union democracy and the union movement is not very helpful or insightful, as correct as he is that the problem of bureaucracy and the problem of democracy are quite distinct, at least the TDU can translate that flawed analysis into a program and a movement that had a real impact on unionism. Where, exactly, do Fitch's pronouncements leave you?
IMHO, the central tragic flaw of the Teamsters' catastrophe was an inadequate theory and practice of union democracy, and not simply among the Carey leadership, but also among the TDU leadership. When someone has functioned in a democratic organization with institutional checks and balances, the first question one asks about what happened in the Teamsters is this: "how could sums of money in six figures be spent by a small number of individuals without the entire leadership knowing of and approving such expenditures?" What was lacking in the Teamsters, what neither Carey nor the TDU put into place, was the organizational underpinning and infrastructure of representative democracy, a significant part of which is checks and balances. The TDU -- and not simply Carey -- never saw it as important: the TDU is usually dismissive of such matters as questions of "formal democracy." They rely upon condemnations of "formal democracy" as "bureaucratic," and seek to replace it with a notion of "substantive democracy" which, in a flawed old left conception, is understood as "direct democracy." It is a long story, and this is already a long post, but that is a tragically flawed conception of democracy, one which has led the left, again and again, up blind alleys. It always leads to a conception of democracy as purely instrumental, to notions of democracy as simply the exercise of power. Democracy becomes when "we" are in power. This was the TDU/Labor Notes contribution to the Teamsters' debacle, one with which they have still not come to grips.
> There are times when I cannot tell the difference between union posts made
> on LBO and the rightwingers at freerepublic.com. This whole focus on the
> indictments and even the implication that Trumka is some kind of bad guy is
> sort of nauseating.
>
> Yes, Carey and crew panicked in the election against Hoffa Junior and cut
> some ethical and legal corners which are disgusting, but frankly are par
> for the course in most election systems for government - ie. steering
> resources to those who help out the reelection of incumbents. And it's
> worth remembering that Hoffa Junior did the exact same thing, just in a
> technically legal way. The incumbent, overpaid corrupt status quo local
> leaders used assessments from their salaries (paid out of Teamster funds,
> with those assessments often demanded in pretty coercive ways from
> superiors) to fund Hoffa's campaign, a campaign that had twice the funding
> of Carey.
>
> It's a tragedy that Carey lost and bad the way folks tried to save him, if
> only because it was stupid, but to even place this act anywhere in the same
> category as the usual corruption and illegal activity associated with some
> unions is ridiculous. Yes, incumbent protection is a slippery slope for
> progressives to ever support, but the goals here were pretty damn pure,
> even if the methods weren't.
>
> So it will be a tragedy if Trumka, one of the more progressive AFL leaders,
> is indicted.
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010129/434c71b8/attachment.htm>