September 11, 2007: Local 743 President Richard Lopez has broken the record for the shortest tenure by any Teamster official.

Richard Lopez was appointed Local 743 President on September 1. Nine days later, he was not nominated for any office. In fact, he slinked out of the nominations meeting early.

Members, hungry for change in a local notorious for its corruption and weak representation, nominated the New Leadership Slate, a full slate of reform candidates headed by Richard Berg, Eugenia Alvarez, and Larry Davis.

Ballots go out in two weeks to the 12,000 members and will be counted on October 22.

Richard Lopez’s tenure as Local 743 President began with a press release from the Hoffa PR department, praising Lopez’s leadership skills. His presidency was effectively brought to a close five days later when he was indicted for stuffing the ballot box in the last local election.

No new press release is expected from Hoffa with this latest information—but Local 743 members are responding to the news anyway. Members across the city are mobilizing to turn out the vote for the 743 New Leadership Slate and elect the honest, hard-working union representatives that Local 743 Teamsters deserve.

Only massive voting fraud prevented the election of the New Leadership Slate in 2004. The Department of Labor will be conducting this year’s election, making ballot box stuffing almost impossible.

The members of Local 743 have their future in their own hands and they’re taking advantage of the opportunity. For more information about the election, visit www.743newleadership.org.

Click here to download the latest flyer from the 743 New Leadership Slate.

Click here to read more about the indictment of Local 743 officers.

September 11, 2007: Bobby Hogan, the secretary treasurer of Chicago Local 714, has been charged by the Independent Review Board (IRB) with bringing reproach upon the union. Hogan is charged with hiring a business partner of his father, Billy Hogan. It is up to the Hoffa administration to conduct a hearing, or to pass the matter back to the IRB for a hearing.

The Hogan family has run the 9,000-member local for decades as more or less a “family business.” Billy Hogan, who was James Hoffa’s first choice for running mate in 1996, was banned from the union by the IRB in 2002 for trying to engineer a sweetheart deal between Las Vegas Local 631 and a business partially owned by his brother, Michael Hogan.

Bobby Hogan made $232,043 last year from the local and as vice president of Chicago Joint Council 25. He may soon be banned from the union and move on to other family enterprises, but the Hogan family will likely still control Local 714: James Hogan, Bobby’s uncle, is presently the president.

Bobby Hogan employed Robert Riley, a long-time close friend and business partner of Billy Hogan. The IRB charges that Bobby was well aware of the association between Riley and the banned Hogan. They were in almost daily phone contact, regularly ate together, and sometimes traveled to Pennsylvania on business.

Their business partnership is in Devon International Trading. Devon’s business includes deals with Teamster benefit funds. So Billy Hogan, who made millions of being a Teamster official, still makes money off his Teamster connections, in addition to his nonunion business holdings.

September 7, 2007: Local 743 President Richard Lopez and other officials have been indicted on charges of rigging their local election. Now reformers are preparing to run and win this fall.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago announced today that four Local 743 officials were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to steal ballots to rig the 2004 local union election.

The local’s top officials are dropping like flies. President Robert Walston mysteriously resigned two days ago. His replacement, Richard Lopez, has now been indicted along with two business agents, Cassandra Mosley and Mark Jones, and an organizer, David Rodriguez.

“This proves that our New Leadership Slate won the last election. We intend to win again this fall,” said reform presidential candidate Richard Berg. “We’re going to see this through to the end until all Local 743 members have the representation they deserve.”

The New Leadership Slate will nominate a full slate to run for office on Monday, Sept. 10.

The defendants are charged with trying to steal not one, but two local union elections, held just a few months apart. The indictment charge officials with diverting hundreds of mailed ballots to friends and relatives and then casting the ballots for their “Unity Slate.”

Local 743 officials stopped the balloting in the first rigged election with the New Leadership Slate ahead in the vote count. The ballot box was sufficiently stuffed in the second election to keep the incumbents in office.

Soon, these officials may be out of office and in jail.

The future is considerably brighter for the 12,000 working Teamsters of Local 743. The future is in their hands. With the Department of Labor supervising their local election and a strong reform slate in place to run, Local 743 members have the chance to take back their union.

For more information on the New Leadership Slate, visit www.743newleadership.org.

Click here to read the Chicago Sun-Times article: "Teamsters official charged with stealing election."

September 6, 2007: The National Labor Relations Board ordered the reinstatement of a fired Teamster reform activist.

The board has also ruled that a Local 854 official violently threatened a TDU member and shop steward.

This victory for Teamster reform activists came when the National Labor Relations Board overturned on appeal an earlier ruling by an NLRB administrative law judge.

The case shows that even under the worst of circumstances, TDU members can enforce their legal right to organize for fairness on the job and in the union.

Beating a Campaign of Terror

When school bus drivers and Local 854 members began organizing in 2002 to elect their shop stewards and enforce their contract, Consolidated Bus Transit and Local 854 responded with a wave of retaliation against Teamster reformers.

Drivers were followed. Their tires were slashed and windshields smashed. Drivers were suspended and even fired.

TDU took legal action and won numerous decisions against both Consolidated Bus Transit and Local 854, protecting the rights of working Teamsters to organize on the job and in their union.

On Aug. 31, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of TDU members on two final issues that were in front of the board on appeal.

Local 854 Teamster Juan Carlos Rodriguez has won his job back with tens of thousands of dollars in backpay. As a result, driver and TDU leader Juan Carlos Rodriguez won the right to return to his job at Consolidated Bus Transit. Rodriguez had been fired in March 2003 in retaliation for his union reform activity.

The NLRB ordered that Consolidated Bus Transit reinstate Rodriguez and pay him “for any loss of earnings and other benefits he may have suffered as a result of the unlawful action against him, plus interest.”

Rodriguez will return to work with full seniority and tens of thousands of dollars in backpay.

Teamster Official Guilty of Violent Threat

If Juan Carlos Rodriguez was the big winner as the result of the NLRB’s ruling, then Local 854 President Danny Gatto is the big loser.

After shop steward Jona Fleurimont’s windshield was smashed by hammer-wielding thugs, Gatto told Fleurimont, “If I had a beef with you, I wouldn’t break your windshield. I’d break something else.”

The BLRB ruled that Local 854 President Danny Gatto violently threatened shop steward Jona Fleurimont and tried to goad him into a fight. The NLRB ruled that Gatto illegally and violently threatened Fleurimont, saying “Gatto’s comment was a thinly-veiled threat of assault. Whatever remained implicit in that comment about the immediate and physical nature of the threat quickly became explicit when Gatto tried to goad Fleurimont into starting a fight.”

Gatto’s persecution of Fleurimont didn’t end there. After Consolidated Bus Transit fired Fleurimont in retaliation for his union activity, Gatto instructed Local 854 legal counsel to oppose a settlement reinstating Fleurimont to work. Gatto failed—and legal action by TDU won Fleurimont his job back with more than $20,000 in backpay.

October 9, 2007: Thanks to TDU, International Union Vice President, and former Local 237 president Carroll Haynes is being forced to repay more than $100,000 in improper payments. Haynes received the payments from the company that manages the Local 237 health plan.

Local 237 launched an internal probe after Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) brought the improper payments to light.

As part of our preparations of the $150,000 Club, our annual report on Teamster salaries, TDU uncovered that Haynes received a $54,500 "stipend" in 2006 from the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP). Further investigation has revealed that Haynes received more than $106,000 in payments from HIP and Emblem Health since 2005—not including payments he received in 2007.

Following an investigation by outside counsel hired by Local 237, Haynes will return the payments. The final amount is still being determined.

"Did Local 237 officials really need to pay for an outside investigation to realize that it's wrong for our President to take $100,000 in payoffs from a health insurance company? That just shows how out of touch they are with the members," said Bernadette Bradley, a Local 237 member and leader of the reform group, Members for Change. "Thankfully, we've got TDU to be a watchdog for us."

It remains to be seen what, if any, action our International Union will take on the matter. This is the second time that TDU has caught Haynes taking improper payments. In 2003, Haynes was forced to pay back thousands of dollars after he took total salaries in 2001 in excess of the General President's salary—a violation of the Teamster Constitution.

"Making a millionaire pay back the money he was caught taking is not much of a deterrent," TDU Organizer David Levin told The Chief, a weekly newspaper for New York public employees. "What happens to him is going to send a message to other Teamster officials. Will Hoffa's message be, 'You will be held accountable,' or 'Go ahead, take your shot at the cookie jar because nothing really bad happens if you get caught'?"

Click here for The Chief's report "Ex-Local 237 Head Got Improper Fees"

There's a fly in the ointment that threatens to disturb Mayor Daley's carefully crafted plan to guarantee labor peace through the 2016 Summer Olympics.

By a vote of 279-172, Teamsters Local 726 voted Wednesday night to reject the unprecedented, 10-year deal that would lock in the prevailing wage for 8,000 members of the building trades.

The contract apparently fell victim to a power struggle within Local 726. The union represents 2,000 city employees, including truck drivers, equipment dispatchers, foremen, booters, garage attendants and cashiers.

Employees fighting to unseat the union's existing leadership team lobbied against the deal, arguing that it undermines seniority and opens the door for massive layoffs at a time when Daley's new 21st Century Commission is exploring the idea of privatizing garbage collection and the city's water filtration plants.

"We're all truck drivers. We always had citywide seniority. Now, they want to make it departmental seniority. If a guy has 30 years on with Streets and San and they decide to privatize sanitation, all those guys with all those years are gone," said truck driver Vincent Tenuto Jr., who lobbied against the contract and is among those hoping to unseat the union's executive board.

"There's a clause in there that says the mayor could subcontract our jobs out. We want that removed. We have 2,100 jobs in 2007. We expect to have 2,100 jobs in 2017. They're also taking away our seniority so they can put anybody they want wherever they want. It feels like legalized clout."

Jim Franczek, the city's chief negotiator, could not be reached for comment, nor could Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon.

The Teamsters' thumbs-down vote was disclosed hours after Daley bragged to reporters about his ability to guarantee labor peace.

"Many of your articles said, 'This is going to be a very, very difficult year. Oh my God. We've got the CTA unions. We've got the city unions. We have unions from the Board of Education. Oh, there's going to be chaos. There's going to be a crisis. They're not going to work together. There's a difference between the mayor and all these unions,' " Daley said sarcastically.

"What happened? . . . . It all worked out because we sat down with the belief that we can work with our unions -- a 10-year agreement. It's amazing. They want stability. We want stability," he said.

 

Click here to read the article on the Chicago Sun-Times Website.

On August 29, the 2000 Teamsters who move the city of Chicago rejected a ten-year contract that would have put their future at risk. Now they are demanding Local 726 hold a meeting to hear what the members want fixed to protect their jobs.

"The Local 726 leadership agreed to terms that would put our jobs and seniority in jeopardy," said Vince Tenuto, a leader of the Fighting for the Future movement, which has informed and organized Local 726 about the contract and their rights as Teamsters.

"Master seniority would be weakened. And there is no protection against privatizing jobs. Ten years! We need job protection so in ten years, our jobs won't be gone." said Joe Vercillo.

Local 726 Teamsters work in sanitation, at Chicago's airports, and in electrical, water, sewer and transport departments. They do skilled and sometimes dangerous work, and provide critically important services for three million Chicagoans, and deserve a contract that provides them job security.

Other city unions have agreed to ten-year contracts that Mayor Richard Daley claims will deliver "labor peace" in the run up to the 2016 Olympics.

Fighting for the Future is a movement of Local 726 members who will nominate a slate in October to replace officials who have lost touch with working Teamsters.

You can learn more about this movement at www.fightingforthefurture.com.

Click here to see the Chicago Sun Times article on the contract rejection.

August 23, 2007: By Richard Berg: The 11,000 hospital, custodial, clerical, and manufacturing workers of Teamster Local 743 will get something they haven’t had recently: a fair local election. And Teamster reformers are pushing hard to give Local 743 members a choice in this election. I’m proud to be running for principal officer on the 743 New Leadership Slate.

Weak Representation

Our local has weak contracts and poor representation. The employers smell weakness and they run all over us. But we can turn these problems around:

• Members at the University of Chicago are fed up with a weak contract. They’re organizing their own contract campaign. When we win we’ll put the power of our union into all of our contract fights.

• At Provident Hospital, members couldn’t get a BA to return their phone calls even after a member was fired. We’re going to cut bloated salaries so we can hire more union representatives. We’ll make sure BAs return calls, and we’ll fix the local’s automated phone system so members can talk directly to a real person.

• At the University of Chicago Hospitals and many other places, our local doesn’t have enough stewards. We’ll increase the number of stewards, let members vote them in, and create a new stewards’ training program.

Stepping Up the Campaign

Changing the local’s leadership won’t be easy. The officers are used to getting paid not to work. They got a wake up call in the last election—they may not work hard for the members, but you can bet they’ll work hard to protect their jobs.

The incumbents are stepping up their campaign, and so are we. Members of the New Leadership Slate are taking vacation time to campaign, and we’ve already hit shops all over Chicagoland.

Our slate won the last election, but the officers stole it: The local admitted to mailing hundreds of ballots to the wrong address and instead sent them to their supporters, including management. The Department of Labor stepped in and now there will be a neutral election, with ballots mailed out in September.

At the gates, spirits are positive. Members want change. One nursing home worker told me, “We all voted against them last time, and this time we’ll make it stick.”

This local needs new blood and new ideas from working Teamsters. The incumbent Local 743 executive board had their chance, and they squandered it on their own high salaries while ignoring the members and running the local into the ground. When the members turn out to vote, we’re going to turn this local around.

Richard Berg is a candidate for Local 743 President.

July 12, 2007: General President Hoffa is the sugar daddy to many, but when it comes to multiple salaries Local 63 officials have a special place in Hoffa’s heart.

Led by International Vice President Randy Cammack, no less than ten Los Angeles Local 63 officials get a second union salary from the International Union.

Together, these ten took home more than $1.4 million from Local 63 and the International Union in 2006.

Multiple Salaries

Hoffa pays multiple salaries to nearly 200 officials who already make other full-time salaries. This money could be used for organizing or contract campaigns.
Instead, Hoffa uses our dues money to buy something even more important to him: political loyalty. Officials making multiple salaries are a “Who’s Who” of Hoffa campaign donors.

If an official doesn’t kiss enough Hoffa butt, they are off the gravy train. After the 2006 election, Hoffa removed Larry Brennan, Dennis Hands, Jim Ayers, Carlos Ramos, Dan Virtue, Jerry Halberg and others for failing to toe the line.

Hoffa’s attorney said that Virtue was fired because he wanted to win NMFA standards at UPS Freight and DHL. To Hoffa, standing up for our national contracts is a reason to be fired.

Perhaps some of them figured they work for the members, and not for Hoffa. No worries for the Local 63 all-stars on that front.

We’ll report all the facts and figures—and what this spending means for our union—in the August $150,000 Club issue of Convoy Dispatch.

July 12, 2007: The International Union and New York Local 237 are investigating International Vice President Carroll Haynes over tens of thousands of dollars in payments he received from an HMO that does business with the Teamsters.

The union investigation came in response to a report in last month’s Convoy Dispatch. Research by Teamsters for a Democratic Union uncovered that Haynes received $54,500 as a “consultant” to Health Insurance Plans (HIP) of New York, the plan that provides benefits to Teamster Local 237 members.

Haynes served as Local 237 President and a trustee to its benefit funds at the time he took the payments from HIP. He resigned as Local 237 president in April.

Local 237 Investigates

Haynes’ successor at Local 237, Gregory Floyd, told the Chief-Leader newspaper that “on advice from counsel, he had not spoken with Mr. Haynes” since the HIP payments were uncovered.

Haynes served on the board of directors of HIP and on the HIP Foundation board of directors. The stipend came from the foundation board. Floyd, who also serves on the HIP New York board, said he did not receive a stipend and would not accept one.

Haynes has routinely made over $300,000 from his multiple salaries and pensions. In 2003, TDU caught Haynes taking a higher salary than legally permitted by the Teamsters Constitution. After charges were filed, Hoffa allowed Haynes to get off by repaying the $8,000 overpayment, claiming it was a “clerical error.”

Now, Haynes is under investigation for his “consulting” fees.

“We are going to wait and see if it’s permissible to accept stipends,” Floyd said. “At this point we’re not sure, because HIP provides health benefits to the city and does our prescriptions.”

$54,500 ‘Consulting Fee’

TDU uncovered the $54,500 “stipend” on an LM-30 financial disclosure form that Haynes filed with the Department of Labor. By law, union officials must report any income that comes from an entity that does business with their union. The law is intended to flag any conflicts of interest or undue influence that could compromise a union’s ability to properly serve its members.

Local 237 has hired an attorney to investigate whether a technical violation of the Teamster Constitution or Local 237 bylaws occurred.

The larger question is whether a Teamster officer and benefit fund trustee should be taking $54,500 from an HMO that makes millions through its contract with our union’s largest local.

In the old days, vendors made payoffs to officials under the table. Today, they pay “consultant fees.” Does that make it right?

Many city unions in New York contract with HIP and union officers have long served on its board of directors. But while Haynes bagged more than $50,000, officers from other unions—including those from the United Federation of Teachers and AFSCME—did not accept any fees.