Ron Carey
To understand why Ron Carey
matters, ignore what he says and listen to how he says it. There are only two
acceptable accents for a contemporary American leader--Sincere Southern
(favored by Bill Clinton and every other pol who's ever lived south of New
York) and Flat Corporate (preferred by CEOs). But Carey speaks neither. The
Teamsters president delivers speeches and strike ultimatums in an accent best
described as a Queens Bray. Hearing him on the news this week was a shock: How
long has it been since such a broad, brassy voice has been broadcast to the
nation? Or, to pose the question another way, how long has it been since anyone
outside a union hall paid attention to a union leader?
But while
Carey is the first union official in a generation to intrude on America's
public consciousness, and while the UPS strike is the most important and
disruptive walkout since Reagan busted the air-traffic controllers in 1981, the
Carey backlash is already under way. Carey's difficulties began last fall, when
he narrowly defeated James Hoffa (son of the Late Unlamented) in the Teamsters
presidential election. Hoffa accused Carey of campaign-finance irregularities.
The Justice Department began probing whether Carey's political consultants had
laundered union dues into his campaign chest. (One consultant has already
pleaded guilty to a conspiracy count.) Now Sen. Fred Thompson's committee is
investigating allegations that the Teamsters PAC engaged in a dirty quid pro
quo with the Democratic National Committee: The PAC steered funds to state
Democratic parties in exchange for Democratic donations to the Carey campaign.
Meanwhile, a federal election monitor is refusing to certify Carey's victory
because of the investigations. The New Republic and the Wall Street
Journal are stepping up attacks on Carey and his consultants. And now, most
damningly, some conservatives are contending that Carey instigated the UPS
strike in order to distract attention from his own troubles.
Carey does not deserve the mud. In an organization infected
by crime, cowardice, and greed, Carey has been a beacon of honesty, courage,
and restraint for 30 years. To appreciate Carey, you must understand the
union's depravity. From the early '50s until a federal takeover in 1989,
racketeers dominated the Teamsters. Of the six presidents who preceded Carey,
three went to jail (including Hoffa), and a fourth died while under indictment.
The union czars lived fat on union dues: In the mid-'80s, president Jackie
Presser squandered $650,000 on a party where he costumed himself as a Roman
emperor and entered on a litter borne aloft by four muscled men. The union's
local bosses were no better: The "barons" padded their payrolls with family
members, paid themselves enormous salaries (as much as $500,000 a year), took
bribes from employers in exchange for sweetheart contracts, siphoned pension
funds into mob-run operations, and generally screwed their rank and file.
Carey
didn't. A UPS driver and the son of a UPS driver, Carey was first elected chief
of the Queens, N.Y., UPS local in the late '60s, and he has run it cleanly
since then. He took an extremely modest salary--less, famously, than the French
chef at the Teamsters headquarters. During the '60s and '70s, Carey took his
local to the pickets against UPS, and won huge concessions. When national
Teamsters leaders negotiated weak contracts with UPS during the '80s, Carey
opposed them. When mobsters threatened him, Carey defied them. Again and again,
Carey's colleagues returned him to office with huge majorities.
Carey had a small moment of national fame in
the mid-'70s, when Steve Brill's The Teamsters depicted him as one of
the union's only incorruptible bosses. But it was a surprise when he upset two
old-guard barons to win the union's first fair, open presidential election in
1991. As president, Carey has continued his upright ways. He has slashed his
own salary by a third, sold the union's fleet of private jets, and canceled the
conferences at five-star Hawaiian hotels. Backed by the federal monitors, he
stripped 70 corrupt locals of their autonomy, placed them in trusteeship, and
purged hundreds of local officials for consorting with mobsters. In just five
years, Carey and his allies have almost banished corruption from a union that
was filthy to its bones. His 1996 re-election over Hoffa, an unabashed champion
of the barons, may have been the final nail in the coffin of the old guard.
Carey has
also fought to restore labor's national credibility: He spearheaded the
campaign to oust longtime AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland and replace him with the
dynamic John Sweeney. Last year, Teamsters membership rose for the first time
in a decade. Carey's history is a bulwark against the recent charges. There's
little doubt that his consultants broke election laws and no doubt that
Democratic officials prefer Carey to Hoffa, but that certainly doesn't mean
Carey licensed or even knew about campaign hanky-panky. He's a man who's spent
30 years refusing opportunities to corrupt himself: Why would he start now?
Which brings us to the charge that the UPS strike is a
Carey smokescreen. One can debate endlessly about the merits and demerits of
the walkout (and that is exactly what Walter Oi and Thomas Geoghegan are doing
in Slate's "Dialogue" titled "The UPS
Strike"), but it's hard to claim that Carey trumped up the strike. Carey
has long objected to UPS' employment of part-time workers and its widely
disparate pay scales, two concessions that the old, corrupt union leaders
granted, and which are at the heart of the current strike. Carey has spent
months rallying the rank and file behind the strike and, UPS' protestations to
the contrary, he seems to enjoy overwhelming support from the picketers. (Union
advocates give Carey special credit for picking an opportune moment to strike:
The booming economy means that UPS is losing $35 million a day during the
strike, and the tight labor market will make it difficult for the company to
find replacement workers.)
Carey is, deservedly, a great
hero of New Labor, yet a certain pathos clouds his achievements. What exactly
has Carey accomplished? He has not been indicted. He has sacked some crooked
colleagues. He barely eked out a victory over Hoffa, a mediocre bully. And he
has led a strike whose aims are embarrassingly modest by the standards of old
labor: a piddling raise, a few more full-time jobs, and a small change in the
pension plan. But this is organized labor in the '90s, where even a hero must
aim low.
