Coalition Launches Rival Federation
The other Change to Win unions include the SEIU (service employees), UNITE HERE (hotel and garment workers), UFCW (food and commercial workers), the Carpenters, Laborers, and the United Farmworkers.
The Laborers and Farm Workers remained in the AFL-CIO and will participate in both organizations.
This gives the Laborers the right to continue to participate in union structures in the Building Trades. What the Teamster pullout will mean for Teamsters in construction is uncertain. Our construction locals rely on these structures to coordinate and settle disputes with other unions in the building trades
The IBT will save about $9 million a year in per capita dues payments to the AFL-CIO. Half of this will now be spent on dues payments to the new Change to Win federation. The Hoffa administration says the other $4.5 million will be spent on new organizing in our union’s core jurisdictions.
Do you have comments on the Change to Win Coalition? Send you thoughts to:
Teamster Viewpoint
Convoy Dispatch
PO Box 10128
Detroit, MI 48210
Click here: Changing to Win at Overnite?
Click here: AFL-CIO Split? No One Asked Rank and File Teamsters!
Click here: Teamster Viewpoint: Leaving AFL-CIO Threatens Union Solidarity
Who Is Running the Teamsters Union?
Tarpinian is a labor consultant in New York. He attached himself to Hoffa back in 1996 when he campaigned for him, along with another consultant, Richard Leebove of Detroit. He’s wiggled upward ever since.
His long time close associates have eased into key positions of power. Leo Deaner, a Tarpinian associate for many years, is Hoffa’s new Executive Assistant.
Another Tarpinian partner for decades is Dan Kane, an International rep with three sons on the payroll. Another is Jeff Farmer, who came from the SEIU to take over the Teamster Organizing Department. Farmer is the brother-in-law of Sue Mauren, director of the Central Region Public Employees Division. Ron Carver of IBT Strategic Campaigns is another decades-long member of the Tarpinian club.
This crew, who were buddies before they ever met a Teamster, have made quite a home for themselves at the top of the Teamster power structure. They move others out of the way when it suits them.
Mary Hardiman, Director of the Teamster Education Department, with the IBT for 28 years, was summarily fired in August as part of a Tarpinian restructure plan.
Tarpinian gets big bucks to do dog-and-pony shows at the IBT Convention and Unity Conferences, and he’ll get a lot more PR and “education” money now. In return, he holds banquets in New York to give awards to Hoffa and Tom Keegel, who sign the checks to his consulting company. What goes around comes around. What’s going around is your money.
Tarpinian wrote the plan and the script for the Teamsters to leave the AFL-CIO and join Change to Win, which also pays Tarpinian big bucks.
Most importantly, he is guiding the direction of the Teamsters Union. Remember when Jim Hoffa charged that Ron Carey had outsiders (“SEIU”, “mineworkers,” etc.) in positions of power?
Now we have a New York consultant running our union, who only bothers to speak to Teamsters when he has his hand out for money.
Submitted by a Teamster official who prefers to remain anonymous.
TDU Wins Changes in Election Rules
On Aug. 31, U.S. Attorney David Kelley submitted revised Rules to federal judge Loretta Preska for approval, with four changes from the proposed rules issued in May.
All four were proposed by TDU and submitted to the U.S. Attorney by TDU counsel Barbara Harvey.
These improvements are:
• Candidates will now have the right to distribute campaign materials by email, under guidelines to be established by the Election Supervisor. This means that Accredited Candidates can send materials to Teamsters using email addresses held by the union.
• Campaign literature from candidates that appears in the Teamster magazine, in the “battle pages” that TDU originally proposed and won in 1991, will now also appear on the Teamster website.
• To Protect privacy, members will not have to sign their full social security or social insurance number on petitions and other forms, but only the last four digits. This victory was announced earlier.
• Election protests can be filed by email, as well as by fax or regular mail.
TDU’s submission, made on June 2, contained other proposals as well. Most notably, TDU called for a debate between the candidates for General President, to be recorded on a DVD and mailed to all Teamsters. Hoffa successfully defeated this positive proposal, which would certainly increase the percentage of members who vote.
TDU counsel received permission in early September to submit additional Rules proposals to Judge Preska.
We urge all Teamsters to get informed, get involved, and participate in the upcoming democratic process that will shape the future of our union.
Click here: Cracks in Hoffa Unity
Click here: Prepare Now for Winter Delegate Races
Click here: Committee for New Leadership Lays Groundwork for Campaign
Changing to Win at Overnite?
September 25, 2005: In a recent interview with the Associated Press, James Hoffa said that leaving the AFL-CIO would make the Teamsters more successful at organizing the nonunion competition because “we’re more nimble and we don’t have the big bloated bureaucracy.”
Skeptics might wonder if it’s really John Sweeney and his AFL-CIO bureaucracy that has held back Hoffa’s organizing ambitions. Four months have passed since UPS announced it was buying Overnite and the nimble, bureaucracy-free Hoffa administration still hasn’t unveiled its “comprehensive plan to both organize and win a good contract at Overnite.”
It took Hoffa two months just to issue a press release promising a plan. Two more months have passed and local leaders as well as UPS and freight Teamsters have been unable to discover this plan. The IBT billed a special meeting in Chicago as the place where officers would hear the Hoffa administration’s strategy for Overnite—but officers came away empty-handed. In fact, Overnite got just ten minutes on the agenda.
A month later, Parcel Division Director Ken Hall came to a meeting of all the New York state joint councils to brief local officers on the IBT’s Overnite strategy—but the plan, if there is one, remained a secret.
“All Ken Hall told us was that the IBT was really going to need the support of the locals to be successful. No details. No specific requests. Just a general plea for support.” said Sandy Pope, President of Local 805 who attended the meeting. “There were 100 local officers in that room and every one of us understands that UPS-Overnite is a fight that will determine the fate of our union. But we can’t beat America’s number one union buster without direction or leadership from the IBT.”
Core Industries
At the Eastern Region meeting this month, General Secretary-Treasurer Tom Keegel boasted the IBT was “restructuring to become an organizing machine” that would focus on our core industries. Keegel mentioned parking garages and janitorial services—but never trucking.
Asked about organizing targets, Hoffa told the AP, “We want to identify jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.”
Overnite is hardly the only trucking company that won’t be moving its operations to China, but it may be the most important. The fate of Teamster members’ bargaining power in the 2008 UPS and freight negotiations—and the future health of our pension plans—depend in no small measure on the IBT’s ability to put a successful organizing plan into action at Overnite.
Thankfully, some locals are starting to take the lead. In Seattle, Local 174 is forming an Overnite Task Force of UPS and freight Teamsters. The local distributed leaflets to area Overnite workers to give them a union welcome to UPS. Chicago Local 705 is organizing UPS feeder drivers to do outreach to Overnite workers about the importance of having a union behind you when UPS is your employer.
Other locals are organizing similar activities. But it will take more than good local initiatives to organize UPS-Overnite. We need a national plan.
AFL-CIO Split? No One Asked Rank And File Teamsters!
“Before the SEIU withdrew, they discussed the issue for two years, but Hoffa yanked 1.3 million Teamsters out of the AFL-CIO without any kind of consultation with members or local officers. That is not a responsible way to make a decision of this magnitude,” says Local 206 President Bill Zimmerman.
“I’ll be at the TDU Convention to talk with fellow Teamsters about what leaving the AFL-CIO means for our union—and what we can do to build labor solidarity on the local level and change the Teamsters to win.”
Do you have comments on the Change to Win Coalition? Send your thoughts to:
Teamster Viewpoint
Convoy Dispatch,
PO Box 10128
Detroit, MI 48210
Click here: Changing to Win at Overnite?
Click here: Coalition Launches Rival Federation
Click here: Teamster Viewpoint: Leaving AFL-CIO Threatens Union Solidarity
Hoffa Establishes Procedure for Potential Raids on AFL-CIO Unions
This statement appears to point in a dangerous direction. Instead of coming out squarely against raids, it provides a procedure to potentially initiate them, and even hints at a suggested reason: claim another union has a substandard contract.
We hope Teamsters, Teamster officers, and other Change to Win unions will urge Hoffa to adopt a solidarity policy. Every AFL-CIO union should do the same.
The directive to locals states that “…we did not disaffiliate for the purpose of raiding AFL-CIO affiliates at already organized job sites. In this regard, if you are planning any organizing activity in connection with a bargaining unit already represented by a AFL-CIO affiliated union, you must follow the following procedures prior to engaging in further activity:
1. Submit a letter to the General President which sets forth the name of the targeted employer; the location of the targeted employer; the current bargaining representative of the unit; and your reasons for targeting the unit (e.g. adversely affecting the area standards).
2. Courtesy copy the letter to the IBT Legal Department.”
The statement reads quite differently regarding Change to Win unions: it says there shall be no raiding or interfering with the organizing drives of those unions.
The new policy was sent out over the name of IBT General Counsel Patrick Szymanski.
What the Teamster raiding policy will be in practice remains to be seen. Hopefully, the IBT will quickly arrange no-raid agreements with all AFL-CIO unions. We need solidarity with other unions and other workers, regardless of where their leaders line up on the AFL-CIO split.
Hoffa Administration Issues “Whitewash” Report
July 27, 2005: The International Union has released the “McDonald Report” (available on the IBT website) which purports to demonstrate that the Hoffa administration is working hard to maintain a corruption-free union.
However, the report actually does not deal with that issue at all. Instead it is an 89-page denunciation of Ed Stier, who was the Hoffa administration’s own anti-corruption director for five years.
The document was prepared by Edward McDonald, an attorney who works with the Hoffa administration. McDonald specializes in representing white-collar criminals.
His clients include one of the nation’s largest waste management corporations (major Teamster employers), domestic and foreign bank officials, a member of the Saudi royal family, and the former chairman and deputy chairman of the Russian Securities Commission.
He admits in the report, which took 14 months and untold dues dollars to prepare, that he never even sought to meet or speak with Stier.
The McDonald Report claims that Stier never accomplished much of anything, although he was paid millions of dollars in Teamster dues money; that Project RISE, which Stier headed, was a failure; that Stier padded his bills; and that he lacks credibility. It also claims that Carlow Scalf, Hoffa’s now-discredited Executive Assistant, was astute enough to figure all this out, so Stier falsely charged that Scalf stifled anti-corruption efforts at the behest of Chicago Teamster officials.
This raises the question of why the Hoffa administration consistently paid the bills and promoted RISE and Ed Stier for five long years, until Stier started seriously investigating powerful Teamster officials.
So, the Hoffa version boils down to this: The IBT paid $15 million over five years for an anti-corruption program, and got nothing. So now they have paid Edward McDonald a whole lot more, to denounce Stier. (They have not revealed how much McDonald was paid, but reportedly it was about $500 per hour.)
As a result, our Teamsters Union has no anti-corruption program, and no hope of replacing the I.R.B. with an internal clean-up program as long as Hoffa is at the helm. With a record like that, no wonder they need a scapegoat.
Click here for past Convoy coverage of the corruption scandal
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Click here for Ed Stier's April 29, 2004, Resignation letter
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Click here for Stier's April 2004 Corruption Report
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Click here for Stier's July 13, 2005 response to McDonald Report
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Hoffa Caught Using Union Funds for Campaign Poll
On July 15, independent Election Supervisor Richard Mark ruled that Hoffa used union funds to poll carhaulers on how they would rate Hoffa’s job approval. As a result of the violation, Hoffa was ordered to pay $2,000 to the union and to share the results of the poll with opposition candidates who later become accredited.
Hoffa inserted his campaign questions into an IBT poll of Teamsters who work for Allied Holdings, the largest carhaul employer. The members were also asked if they would accept mid-term contract concessions. On June 1 carhaulers got their first wage increase in three years, and Allied balked at paying it. Allied has been losing money (and cutting Teamster jobs) consistently for several years.
The poll questions were written by Hoffa’s campaign consultant, Richard Leebove, and his campaign manager, Todd Thompson. Neither has any experience representing carhaulers.
The election protest was filed by Allied driver and Local 957 member Rob Hackett and by TDU, both represented by attorney Barbara Harvey. Hoffa was represented by his campaign attorney and son, David Hoffa.
Hoffa Corruption Wrecks Possibility of Ending Government Supervision
On July 20, Hoffa’s General Counsel, Pat Szymanski, told the Daily Labor Report that the Hoffa administration has given up its goal of ending federal supervision until at least 2007.
According to the Daily Labor Report, “Szymanski said the controversial conclusion of Project RISE, which might have served as the self-policing mechanism taking the place of the IRB, leaves the union in an inferior position to be able to end federal supervision.”
The article went on to report, “Szymanski said that the damage resulting from Stier’s departure has derailed the union’s plans” to try to end the federal consent order.
Embarrassing Failure for Hoffa
The announcement is an embarrassing admission of failure and a huge retreat for the Hoffa administration, which spent $15 million over five years on Project RISE. Hoffa’s goal was to use RISE as leverage to end the consent order for the Teamsters.But Hoffa’s leverage disappeared when RISE director Edwin Stier and his entire staff of investigators resigned in protest in April 2004, and issued a report blaming Hoffa for stifling anti-corruption efforts, including investigations of organized crime influence.
In the year since then, Hoffa paid another huge sum of union money to Edward McDonald to issue yet another report, supposedly to get to the bottom of the corruption allegations that led to the collapse of RISE.
Instead, McDonald issued a whitewash. The Hoffa administration released a portion of the McDonald report on July 14. It says nothing on the anti-corruption program. It consists solely of a denunciation of Stier, the former federal prosecutor Hoffa handpicked, paid millions of dollars of dues money, and hoped would end federal supervision of our union.
Just a week after the McDonald report’s publication, the Hoffa administration has openly admitted that this effort not only failed, but backfired, making any efforts to end federal supervision of our union pointless until at least 2007.
Union Far from Clean
Hoffa first promised 10 years ago to rid the union of corruption and establish an independent anti-corruption program.After Hoffa’s two terms in office, experts say we are farther than ever from that goal.
The Association for Union Democracy’s Herman Benson told the Daily Labor Report, the Teamsters “are no place with respect to reform and they are worse off than they were before Project RISE. The very guy they hired to do the job now says they can’t do the job.”
So now our Teamsters Union has no anti-corruption program and no hope of replacing the Independent Review Board (IRB) with an internal clean-up program as long as Hoffa is at the helm.
No wonder Hoffa is hunting for a scapegoat and Teamster members are looking for new leadership in 2006.
Click Here for Past Coverage
Feds, IRB Pursue Investigations Shut Down by Hoffa
April 25, 2005: While Hoffa prepares to release a report justifying his shutdown of RISE investigations into organized crime, government investigators and the press are pursuing the leads Hoffa claims are a dead end:
- Joint Council 25 President John Coli is under investigation by the FBI based on the leads Hoffa chose not to pursue including allegations of organized crime influence and benefit fund scams in Local 727.
- The Independent Review Board is investigating Local 714, the 10,000-member local long run by the Hogan family. At least ten people have been summoned to testify as part of the investigation.
The Independent Review Board (IRB) has already acted on other investigations shut down by Hoffa. Joseph Bernstein, a Hoffa ally and Joint Council 25 Vice President, has been barred from the Teamsters.
In another breaking story, The Chicago Sun-Times has linked former Local 726 president Daniel Stefanski with organized crime figures including “mob bookie Nick ‘the Stick’ LoCoco” who is suspected of taking bribes from working Teamsters who wanted full-time jobs or overtime opportunities.
Stefanski is also alleged to have offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who could provide the address of a mob informant that the Chicago Outfit wants dead.
The Sun-Times revealed that Hoffa knew of these allegations but chose not to pursue them for “political reasons.” Stefanski is a boyhood friend of the Illinois Governor and is now on the state’s payroll.
The collapse of Project RISE last year was a public relations nightmare for the Hoffa administration. With headlines screaming, “Mob stigma again haunts Teamsters,” Hoffa hand-picked corporate attorney Edward McDonald to issue a report and save his image.
One year later, McDonald will finally issue his long-anticipated whitewash.
Incredibly, McDonald’s report barely explores the organized crime allegations, according to the Sun Times, which got access to a leaked copy from the Hoffa administration. Instead, McDonald’s whitewash focuses on personally attacking Stier.
The IBT may not be interested in Stier’s findings. But the feds and the IRB are. TDU will continue to inform members on these breaking stories.