Strike Violence and Corruption Charges Tarnish Jim Hoffa's 'New, Improved' Teamster Hierarchy

by Reed Larson

FOR RELEASE: October 11, 2001

When self-styled "reformer" Ron Carey took the reins of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union nearly a decade ago, starry-eyed labor pundits immediately declared that decades of rampant IBT official corruption and thuggery would soon come to an end.

Today, as Mr. Carey is being tried for alleged perjury about his role in his 1996 re-election campaign's scheme to embezzle $885,000 from Teamster treasuries, consisting mostly of dues and "fees" workers are forced to pay as a job condition, such punditry is mercifully mostly forgotten.

Meanwhile, a new generation of pundits is repeating the early nineties claims about Mr. Carey, except now the heroic "reformer" at the IBT helm is his 1996 rival, Jim Hoffa.

The hosannas for Mr. Hoffa are providing him and his Capitol Hill allies with a pretext for elimination of the IBT's Independent Review Board (IRB), which a federal court established in 1992 after Teamster officials had admitted the union was corruption-ridden and Mobbed-up.

But it's already glaringly obvious from Mr. Hoffa's record as IBT president that he is no "reformer," either.

In fact, Mr. Hoffa himself now faces, along with other IBT officers, an as-yet unscheduled trial on civil charges of "racketeering activity" under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

A federal court has found that 55 shootings and assaults with bricks and other heavy objects aimed at drivers during the ongoing IBT strike against Overnite Transportation constitute predicate acts "related to attempted murder."

One of the non-striking drivers for the Richmond, Va.-based trucking company who have been viciously attacked is 20-year-employee William Wonder, of Evansville, Ind.

Mr. Wonder took a near-fatal bullet to the abdomen while driving through Memphis, Tenn., December 1, 1999.

Within hours of the shooting, President Hoffa issued a statement claiming that it should convince Overnite to accede to all the IBT hierarchy's strike demands!

"The fact of the matter is, Overnite bears a heavy responsibility here. . . . Overnite can end this strike at a moment's notice with a binding agreement," said Mr. Hoffa.

While denying any Teamster responsibility for the cowardly shooting, Jim Hoffa eagerly exploited it as a "bargaining tool" for obtaining his strike demands.

Chief among these demands was forcing all of Overnite's blue-collar employees to accept IBT bosses as their "exclusive" bargaining agents and, wherever possible, to pay union dues to the IBT as a condition of employment.

Mr. Hoffa seems just as willing to accept help from crooked union officials as from union thugs.

In July, the IRB removed from office Hoffa patron Michael Bane, chief of Local 614 in Pontiac, Mich., for giving "intentionally misleading" sworn testimony about his Mob ties.

Mr. Bane, who had been convicted of embezzlement in the 1970's, was, according to the IRB, caught on FBI wiretaps conversing with Detroit mobsters whom he had claimed, while under oath, not to know.

A few years ago, Mr. Bane was the architect of a move to change the union's constitution to allow Mr. Hoffa to be eligible to run for the IBT presidency.

An IRB report released this summer charges a second close Hoffa associate, William Hogan Jr., head of the Chicago Teamster Joint Council, with accepting a kickback from an employer while agreeing to divert Teamster work in the Las Vegas convention industry to a nonunion firm.

Given the documented signs of violence and corruption in Mr. Hoffa's Teamsters, of which there is only a small sampling here, the eagerness of some politicians as well as pundits to indulge him is bizarre.

For example, Michigan GOP Congressman Peter Hoekstra has called for the abolition of the IRB because Mr. Hoffa has supposedly "cleaned up" Teamster officialdom!

The National Right to Work Committee® has never been an apologist for the IRB. In fact, we have sharply criticized its ineffectiveness in dealing with union violence and corruption under both the Carey and Hoffa administrations.

But today's Teamster brass is far from clean.

And Congress has served as Teamster bosses' partners in crime by granting them the legal power to get rank-and-file unionists fired from their jobs if they protest lawbreaking by quitting the union and withholding their dues.

Congress and President Bush can now take a big step toward ending the cycle of Teamster and other union corruption by working together to pass the National Right to Work Act (H.R.1109/S.873), which would abolish federally-imposed forced union dues.

As Wake Forest University labor-relations scholar Sylvester Petro put it more than 40 years ago, "It is . . . absurd to expect good clean unionism in conditions of extensive compulsory unionism."

But until the Right to Work Bill is passed and signed, politicians and pundits should at least have the decency to acknowledge the ample public record of ongoing violence and corruption in Jim Hoffa's Teamsters.

Mr. Larson is president of the 2.2 million-member National Right to Work Committee®, based in Springfield, Va.