Teamster tragedy: Carey is dead, long live the reformers.

• Author: Larkin, Jim
• Position: Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention, Nov. 97 - Cover Story

Ron Carey may be a goner, but the reform movement inside the Teamsters lives on. The weekend before Ron Carey decided to step aside as president, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) held its twenty-second annual convention in Cleveland, November 21-23.

Media coverage of the event focused on Carey's brief appearance and farewell speech to 600 rank-and-filers. Some members reacted to their fallen hero's legal troubles by defending him--not unlike Teamster loyalists who closed ranks thirty-five years ago around Jimmy Hoffa, whose son lost to Carey in 1996 in a now-overturned election. But other activists recognized that the future of the reform movement--not the man--should be the focus of the meeting.

And it was. Ken Paff, one of the best labor organizers in the country, a former student activist, truck driver, and TDU founder, gave a fiery address. He condemned the crimes of those "who soiled your great election victory, who betrayed your union, who lined their own pockets," and who set the stage for the "tragedy" of Carey's disqualification as a future candidate. To Paff, the moral of the story was clear: "If you're going to take on Corporate America, if you're going to win major strikes, if you're going to start turning labor around, you better make sure that you're not vulnerable" because of lapses in personal behavior or judgment. "We're here to make sure it never happens again," he said.

Billie Davenport, a flight attendant at Northwest Airlines in Detroit, said the bad news about Carey in mid-November cast only a temporary pall over her victory in a key local election this fall.

"I was in shock and very upset when I heard about Ron," she said. "But the movement has to continue. In order to keep Teamster reform alive, we have to get back out campaigning very soon." Her anti-Hoffa slate garnered 70 percent of the vote in Teamsters Local 2000, which has 9,000 members in ten states.

Butch Traylor, a UPS shop steward from Valdosta, Georgia, agreed. "The reform movement is bigger than any one person--it's bigger than Ron Carey, bigger than Ken Paff . . . We must fight not just to win the next election but to keep our union in the hands of the membership."

TDU has a simple credo: Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down; rely on worker activity, not paid staff; develop the skills and ability of many potential leaders instead of a handpicked few; introduce mechanisms for leadership accountability and membership...