It’s well known in labor circles that the 2020’s opened with a tremendous resurgence of rank-and-file activism in the workplace. Beginning with 2021’s “Striketober” and sparked initially by the hardships of the pandemic and emboldened by the labor shortages that followed, that upsurge targeted union and nonunion workplaces alike. Among the collective bargaining breakthroughs in already unionized workplaces, two of the most important involved the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and the United Auto Workers (UAW). In 2023, the IBT won a historic contract with its largest employer, UPS, without having to follow through on its threat to strike. During that same year, the UAW won greatly improved contracts with the “big three” domestic automakers following a creatively designed and well-executed 43-day strike.
Less well known is the connection between those two developments and the struggle for union democracy in the Teamsters that began almost 50 years ago with the founding of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). I tell the labor law side of that story in my recent article, “At the Intersection of Federal Labor Law and Rank-and-File Activism: A Legal History of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.” But you don’t have to be a labor law geek to appreciate the links between greater democracy in unions and a stronger labor movement. TDU's rank-and-file activism embodies a bottom-up approach to labor organizing focused on organizing within unions to make those unions—and the labor movement as a whole—more democratic, less susceptible to corruption, and more effective at representing their members in the workplace and in the larger community. In that context, TDU is perhaps the most important and enduring rank-and-file movement ever to emerge from the ranks of American labor. TDU was founded in 1976, a year after Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and at a time when organized crime’s grip over what was then the nation’s largest private-sector union was nearing its peak. TDU’s tenacity in the face of every kind of retaliation, and its commitment to effectuating change by organizing and mobilizing the union’s rank and file, has been an inspiration to reformers in many other unions, including, most recently, the UAW.
Before TDU came on the scene, the most noteworthy success of a union democracy movement in a major union involved the 1972 victory of the Miners for Democracy slate over an old guard that was so corrupt and autocratic the UMW’s president, Tony Boyle, was later convicted of hiring hitmen to murder the initial opposition leader, Jock Yablonski, and his wife and daughter. A few years later, in a close national election in the United Steelworkers, reformer Ed Sadlowski’s Steelworkers Fight Back slate nearly toppled ineffective incumbents unable to protect their members against major declines of the American steel industry. But those two unions were among a minority of American unions who elected their top officers by the direct votes of their members. Most American unions, including the Teamsters at that time, elected their top officers by the votes of convention delegates, a majority of whom were already part of the incumbent power structure and subject to many forms of pressure from above, both carrots and sticks, to vote the incumbents’ party line.
During its first dozen years or so, TDU knew its prospects for replacing the IBT’s top officers by winning a vote at an IBT convention were near zero. As a result, TDU focused its organizing on areas where rank-and-file Teamsters did have access to direct membership votes, such as seeking to amend local union bylaws to provide for elected rather than appointed business agents and shop stewards, and running reform slates in local union officer elections. TDU’s organizing around the negotiation and ratification of Teamster contracts, particularly its “Vote No" campaigns against the ratification of concessionary contracts agreed to by the union’s corrupt and lethargic leadership, may have been most important. While those campaigns often involved local contract fights, it was TDU’s organizing around national contracts like the UPS, car haul, and National Master Freight agreements that helped build TDU into a truly nationwide rank-and-file movement.
In one of its earliest and most effective efforts, TDU shocked both IBT president Jackie Presser and the national business press with its successful campaign in 1983 to defeat amendments to the national freight contract that would have made deep pay cuts and established two-tier wages under that contract for the first time with no assurances the concessions would save Teamster jobs. The resulting headline in TDU’s newspaper reported the vote this way: “Members: 94,086, Presser: 13,082.” That victory demonstrated TDU’s ability to organize and mobilize the Teamster rank and file on a far greater scale than previously believed. It gave TDU reason to believe it also could succeed in mobilizing Teamsters to elect reform candidates to the IBT’s top national offices if the rank and file ever won the right to vote directly for those officers.
In 1985, TDU formally adopted the goal of winning direct member elections of the IBT’s top officers. By the time of the IBT’s 1986 convention, TDU had collected nearly 100,000 signatures on petitions urging the International to make that change. Unfortunately, TDU’s proposal was rejected by Presser and the convention’s delegates. We'll never know whether further TDU organizing around that proposal would have carried the day at a later IBT convention. The reason is that shortly after Presser’s reelection at that 1986 Convention, federal prosecutors brought an ambitious lawsuit under RICO, the federal racketeering statute, seeking to drive the mob out of the Teamsters.
Mafia infiltration of the IBT had reached a point where the mob was no longer just raiding pension funds, taking bribes to sell out the members, and embezzling from union treasuries. The mob had actually picked Jackie Presser to be the IBT’s president. Decades of prosecuting corrupt individuals had proven insufficient. Convicted racketeers were simply replaced by more people cut from the same cloth. Federal prosecutors were looking for more transformative remedies to root out organized crime from the labor movement. The RICO statute, which authorized federal courts to order the “reorganization” of any entities, including unions, that had been infiltrated by the mob, became the Justice Department’s weapon of choice in its war against organized crime.
This was Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, however. His anti-union administration had already destroyed one national union in its union-busting response to the PATCO (air traffic controllers) strike in 1981. The prosecutors’ proposal of a full-blown federal trusteeship over the IBT raised legitimate fears on the part of the Teamsters and others in the labor movement that, purportedly like some villages during the Vietnam war, the government was going to destroy the IBT in order to “save” it.
TDU also opposed a full trusteeship over the IBT, but it agreed some type of RICO “reorganization” was needed. Even before the government filed its case, TDU and its lawyers were communicating behind the scenes with the federal prosecutors urging them to seek a remedy that could help the IBT’s members clean up their union for themselves. Instead of a trusteeship, they called for a court-ordered switch to direct membership votes for the IBT’s top officers in elections supervised by court-appointed monitors who would make sure the vote was conducted fairly. TDU’s response to the government’s proposed remedy was best summarized by its slogan, “No Mob Control, No Government Control, Right to Vote.”
TDU’s efforts succeeded in greatly influencing the terms of the 1989 consent decree that settled the case. It ordered the switch to direct elections that TDU had been working for, starting with the 1991 election. That was only the first step. TDU continued to play a critical role in further shaping the details of the judicially-enforced remedy and organizing rank-and-file Teamsters to take full advantage of the openings it created. Once the new election rules were in place, TDU’s focus turned to organizing Teamsters to get involved in the election process: to run for convention delegate so a reform slate could be nominated, to circulate petitions to get candidates accredited, to raise money for candidates, and of course, to get out the vote.
A reform slate, headed by Ron Carey, the president of a large New York area UPS local and endorsed by TDU, ultimately won a close, three-way race for the IBT’s top offices and International Executive Board. Although Carey was never a TDU member and according to one journalist “carefully kept himself at a distance,” his reform slate included ten TDU members, including the first woman ever elected an IBT vice president. TDU had become, in effect, Carey’s campaign organization, based in the network of experienced and battle-tested rank-and-file activists all over the country that it had built over the prior fifteen years. As one of Carey’s lawyers put it, “TDU has a network of very dedicated and hardworking activists. It is the only network out there.”
Carey’s reform administration was a breath of fresh air, not just for the Teamsters but for the labor movement as a whole. For example, the IBT waged a strike against UPS in 1997 that became one of the biggest and most successful strikes in recent labor history. And the support Carey gave as IBT president to John Sweeney’s “New Voice” slate in the 1995 AFL-CIO leadership election led to that insurgent slate’s victory over the Federation’s incumbents for the first time in over a century. Support for the New Voice slate also came from Richard Trumka, then head of the UMW and a beneficiary of democracy’s triumph in that union in 1972. Trumka would later serve as president of the AFL-CIO.
Unfortunately, that breath of fresh air didn’t last. When running for reelection against an old guard reunited behind the candidacy of James P. Hoffa, son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, Carey brought in outside political consultants to run his campaign. They set up an elaborate unlawful scheme to launder union funds for use in the campaign. Carey failed to stop them. These scandals resulted in Carey’s expulsion from the union and James Hoffa holding the IBT’s presidency for over twenty years. This was a setback to reform in the IBT and a major embarrassment to TDU.
Nevertheless, TDU regrouped and continued doing what it had always done: fielding reform slates in local union elections, exposing corruption in corners of the union where it remained, organizing around the ratification of Teamster contracts, and backing reform slates in each direct election of the International’s officers. TDU always understood that the democratizing effect of direct elections did not require that challengers win the election. As Clyde Summers, a founder of the union democracy movement, put it, “[p]ractices and policies may be modified to meet the criticism and lower the level of discontent. Although the incumbent oligarchy stays in power, it becomes responsive to the election returns.”
Sometimes, lightning strikes twice, as it did in the IBT in 2021. Teamsters voted reformers into its top offices for a second time. Like Ron Carey, the new IBT General President, Sean O’Brien, was never a TDU member but understood the value of joining forces with it. Once in office, the new administration picked up right where the reformers of the Carey era had left off – by winning a major collective bargaining victory over UPS, the union’s biggest employer.
In fact, when you take recent developments in the United Auto Workers into account, it appears that lightning can even strike a third time. Since World War II, the UAW had generally been seen as a paragon of progressive unionism. But throughout those years – until everything blew up in an avalanche of corruption scandals and RICO cases during the late 2010s – it was run as a one-party state by the same “Administration Caucus” that had run the union since the days of Walter Reuther, the UAW president from 1946 to 1970.
The UAW’s RICO scandals, however, produced a remedy largely modeled on the consent decree that TDU had helped shape in the Teamsters’ RICO case more than 30 years earlier. That remedy produced similar results in the UAW. In March 2023, UAW members elected a slate of reformers to the union’s top offices in the first-ever election of those officers directly by the members rather than by convention delegates. Two years earlier, the members had voted for that change by a near two-to-one margin in a referendum conducted pursuant to the UAW consent decree. As in the IBT a generation earlier, changing the way the union’s top officers were elected led to the replacement of entrenched incumbents by reformers looking for new ways to rebuild the union’s strength. Upon taking office, the most immediate challenges the UAW’s new reform administration faced were contract negotiations with the big three automakers. Those negotiations led to the 2023 strike that became the most successful strike in recent UAW history.
Direct elections are no panacea for the problems of union corruption and entrenched and autocratic “old guards.” They alone cannot mobilize a rank-and-file movement to fight for better representation and a stronger labor movement. But when, from time to time, the conditions are right for a rank-and-file insurgency, as they have been in this post-pandemic period, the direct elections of top union officers offer those insurgencies much greater chances for success than do elections by convention delegates.
