[After years of givebacks and autocratic leadership under James
Hoffa Jr, the power of the Teamsters has withered. Rank-and-file
activists are mobilizing against contract concessions, taking over
locals and building a coalition to transform the union.]
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THE TEAMSTER REVOLT AGAINST THE HOFFA ERA  
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David Levin
January 16, 2020
Jacobin
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_ After years of givebacks and autocratic leadership under James
Hoffa Jr, the power of the Teamsters has withered. Rank-and-file
activists are mobilizing against contract concessions, taking over
locals and building a coalition to transform the union. _

Members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union organized to vote no on
givebacks in a contract with UPS. Teamsters for a Democratic Union,

 

Willie Ford listened to the conference call in disbelief from the cab
of his tractor trailer on I-95 as the Teamster election monitor
announced the results of the contract vote covering 250,000 workers at
UPS.

Ford, a leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), and
rank-and-file activists like him, had spent months organizing the UPS
Teamster United campaign to win contract improvements.

But UPS management and top Teamster officials agreed to givebacks,
including a two-tier wage scale for drivers, and spent millions on a
coordinated campaign to promote and push through their concessionary
deal.

Now was the moment of truth.

In a monotone voice, the election official announced the results. By a
54 percent majority, UPS workers rejected the givebacks. Dissident
Teamster activists had done the impossible. Their Vote No campaign had
won.

But it wasn’t over yet. The very next speaker on the conference call
reversed the rank-and-file victory. Citing an obscure loophole in the
Teamster Constitution, Denis Taylor, the union’s chief negotiator at
UPS, declared the contract ratified. Just like that, two-tier
concessions at the largest union contract in the United States were
imposed over the no vote by the members.

“I almost swerved off the road. I felt like I’d been punched in
the gut,” Ford said.

Sixty-three percent of UPS workers in Ford’s local union in North
Carolina voted no, only to be stuck with givebacks.

It was like déjà vu. Two years earlier, 81 percent of the same Local
71 members voted for TDU-backed candidates in the International Union
election, only to see incumbent president James P. Hoffa retain power
by a razor-thin margin of 6,000 votes in a union of 1.4 million
members.

“It seemed they had us no matter what we did,” Ford said.
“I’ve spent the last ten years organizing for change in this
union, and I had just about had it.”

From Vote No to Vote Them Out

Ford geared up for one more organizing campaign. He called up angry
UPS Teamsters in the Carolinas who had coordinated the Vote No effort,
from the big hub in Charlotte to suburbs and small towns like Monroe
and Kannapolis to Florence, South Carolina.

They met in the back room of a Showmars restaurant with drivers and
dockworkers from freight companies Yellow Roadway Corporation
Worldwide (YRCW), ABF Freight System, and Holland Freight.

Over fried fish and crinkle fries, they planned a grassroots campaign
to unite Teamsters who were fed up with being on the losing end of
austerity—wage freezes, two-tier pay, pension cuts, low-wage
part-time work—and build a movement to take over their local union.

It worked. On January 1, Willie Ford and the Rebuild 71 slate assumed
leadership in their local union. In last fall’s election, members
chose Ford over the incumbent president who backed Hoffa and his
concessionary contracts, by a nearly 3-1 margin.

Working Teamsters in North Carolina aren’t the only ones who are
moving from Vote No to voting for change.

In the last year, members have elected rank-and-file activists to lead
Teamster local unions in New York City, Dallas, Richmond, Maryland,
the Quad Cities, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia.

Elsewhere, insurgent candidates came close, suffering narrow losses in
San Diego, Memphis, Toledo, and Madison.

Fresh off the UPS Teamsters United campaign, seven thousand UPS
workers in New York elected a slate of Vote No activists into office.

“We Voted No against the UPS givebacks by 95 percent, but you
can’t win when you’re fighting the company and your own union at
the same time,” said Eugene Braswell, a UPS Teamster and national
TDU Steering Committee member from New York Local 804.

New Local 804 leaders couldn’t do anything to change the imposed
national contract. But in a supplemental agreement covering UPS
workers in New York, the new local leadership negotiated a
$400-per-month pension increase, more full-time jobs for part-timers,
and double-time pay for all Sunday work when UPS begins Sunday
deliveries.

The union has joined with community-labor coalitions like the campaign
against Amazon.

“The biggest difference is on the shop floor,” Braswell said.
“Our old executive board just rolled over for management. Not
anymore. The fight is back in our local, that’s for damn sure.”

Organizing at the Bottom to Win at the Top

Now, the Teamster rank and file is taking aim at the International
Union with the goal of transforming the leadership of the
1.4-million-member Teamsters Union.

At the TDU Convention in November, activists voted to endorse the
O’Brien–Zuckerman Teamsters United slate and to join a coalition
campaign to replace the Hoffa administration with new International
Union leadership.

Ballots won’t be mailed to Teamsters until November 2021, but the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) election starts now.

An election supervisor will be appointed in March, and the campaign
will begin in earnest in June, with a national Teamster-to-Teamster
petition drive to collect 100,000 signatures to make the Teamsters
United Slate officially accredited candidates.

In an age of digital campaigns and online organizing, Teamster
elections are old school, grassroots, and personal. Petitions are
signed in person in break rooms and employee parking lots.

“To get 100,000 signatures, you need to have 150,000
worker-to-worker conversations,” said Nick Perry, a TDU cochair and
petition drive veteran. “That means recruiting volunteers, training
them, building local committees. We’re not just collecting
signatures. We’re building a network and an organization.”

A year from now, activists will test their organizational muscle when
members will vote in a separate election in every local union to
choose delegates to the Teamster Convention. Delegates will officially
nominate candidates and vote on reforms to the Teamster Constitution,
like eliminating the Two-Thirds Rule — the loophole that was used to
impose contract concessions at UPS.

The delegate races are also a trial run for rank-and-file activists
who are looking to take on old-guard local officers in local union
elections.

“We ran for Convention Delegate, and we beat our local union
officers. We built up a network that lasted long after the
election,” Ford said, reflecting on the 2016 Teamsters United
organizing in Charlotte.

“That long-term organizing is why we were able to vote down UPS
givebacks and why members elected us to lead our local,” Ford said.

“We need rank-and-file organization to win this election, but we
also need it to build worker power after we win,” said Frank
Halstead, a grocery warehouse Teamster and TDU cochair from Southern
California. “To really take on corporate power that’s going to
take a lot more than voters. That’s going to take an army of
rank-and-file fighters. The election campaign is boot camp. The real
war hasn’t even begun.”

The Teamsters United Slate is led by Sean O’Brien, an International
Union vice president formerly aligned with Hoffa, and Fred Zuckerman,
the TDU-backed candidate for Teamster president on the Teamsters
United ticket in 2016.

The slate is still in formation. Only six candidates have been named
so far, including Juan Campos, the militant president of Chicago
Teamsters Local 705, and Matt Taibi, a TDU leader and principal
officer of Rhode Island Local 251.

The incumbent Teamster general president, James Hoffa, will almost
surely not seek reelection. Old-guard Teamster officials are wrestling
over who will assume his mantle, including Hoffa slate members Ken
Hall and Kevin Moore, both associated with concessionary contracts;
Rome Aloise, a Bay Area Teamster power broker who is coming off a
two-year suspension from office for corruption; and Terry Hancock, a
Hoffa ally who took over the Chicago Joint Council after another Hoffa
power broker was indicted for taking employer payoffs.

Whoever emerges from this scrum, the TDU-endorsed
O’Brien–Zuckerman Teamsters United slate enter the campaign as the
early favorites to be elected the next leadership of North America’s
most powerful union.

From Economic Crisis to Organizing Comeback

No one could have seen this coming. Flash back ten years. The economic
crisis that followed the housing bubble was wreaking havoc in the
Teamsters.

Overwhelmed by debt at the very moment that credit and business dried
up, the union’s largest freight employer, YRCW, avoided bankruptcy
by slashing workers’ wages and pensions.

The Teamsters’ largest pension fund, Central States, lost billions
in the Wall Street crash. Union pension fund officials teamed with
employers to back a plan to cut the earned pensions of four hundred
thousand Teamsters and retirees.

The Hoffa administration responded to the crisis by going along with
every employer austerity initiative, from concessions to pension cuts
to speedups.

Opposition inside the Teamsters was growing, but it was also divided.
In 2011, Hoffa won a three-way election with 60 percent of the vote.
The TDU-backed presidential candidate, Sandy Pope, was a longtime TDU
leader with impeccable reform credentials. With few officer allies and
no running mates, Pope ran as an independent candidate and finished
third.

“That was a tough time,” Halstead said. “We were able to come
through it because TDU is about a lot more than elections. We never
stop bringing members together, taking on fights, learning lessons,
and organizing rank-and-file power.”

Over the next two years, TDU activists waged rank-and-file campaigns
to stop health-care cuts and raise part-time pay at UPS, oppose
concessions in freight, and save workers’ pensions.

Some Teamster officials who had opposed Hoffa in the 2011 election
retired or fell back into the Hoffa fold. But some began to ally with
the rank-and-file movement. Most important among these was Fred
Zuckerman, the leader of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, one of the
largest local unions representing UPS workers and one of the most
strategically important.

Ten thousand Local 89 members handle up to 8 million UPS packages per
day — roughly one in eight that UPS delivers nationwide — at the
company’s mothership facility, called Worldport.

Zuckerman and TDU initially made unlikely coalition partners. For
years, they butted heads. TDU members ran against Zuckerman in local
union elections in Louisville; nationally, TDU opposed contracts
Zuckerman negotiated covering Teamster carhaulers.

But beginning in 2013, Zuckerman and TDU began working together to
build Vote No campaigns against contract concessions at UPS, UPS
Freight, and the national carhaul contract.

A new coalition was formed to challenge Hoffa — uniting TDU and
activists with Zuckerman and local union officers who opposed Hoffa.
Teamsters United was born.

Teamsters United and the 2016 Election

The 2016 Teamsters United slate was originally headed by Tim
Sylvester, a reform officer in New York. When Sylvester lost his local
union reelection campaign in 2015, Zuckerman became the Teamsters
United presidential candidate.

The number of local officers supporting Teamsters United was small —
less than 10 percent of officials backed the slate — but the
presence of some local officers in the coalition strengthened the
campaign’s credibility and broadened its reach.

Most important, Teamsters United tapped into the anti-givebacks mood
in the rank and file.

Strengthened by coalition and backed by a national network of TDU and
Vote No activists built out of years of grassroots organizing
campaigns, the Teamsters United nearly won the 2016 election.

Forty-nine percent of members voted for Teamsters United, including a
majority in the United States. Teamsters United elected six regional
vice presidents, carrying 57 percent of the vote in the South and 59
percent of the vote in the Central Region.

An incredible 70 percent of the 300,000 Teamsters who work under the
union’s signature national contracts in freight, carhaul, UPS, and
UPS Freight voted against Hoffa.

A majority of rail and airline Teamsters voted for Teamsters United,
too. In fact, every national unit of Teamsters voted for the
opposition to Hoffa.

Ironically, Hoffa was saved by the votes cast by the members who know
him the least. Teamsters who work under contracts negotiated by local
unions, not the International Union, have limited contact with the
rank-and-file movement and have low voter turnout. But they make up a
large pool of 1 million voters, and most followed the lead of their
local officers and voted for Hoffa.

The results exposed a gaping divide between Teamster ranks and their
elected leaders. While nearly half of Teamster members voted against
Hoffa, more than 90 percent of their local union officers backed him.

It is nearly impossible to take power in an International Union over
the opposition of 90 percent of union officials; it is completely
impossible to run an International Union on that basis — a challenge
for the Teamsters United opposition as it looked ahead to the future.

The Hoffa administration faced the opposite dilemma. How do you lead a
union when you are opposed by the majority of the members who work
under every national contract that you negotiate?

Coming out of the 2016 Teamster election, both sides looked for a way
out.

Building a Majority Coalition

Still reeling from his narrow election escape and UPS contract
negotiations approaching, Hoffa turned to the only member of his slate
with militant credentials and proven support among members at UPS.

Hoffa appointed Sean O’Brien to head the union’s Package Division
and lead contract negotiations with UPS. O’Brien carried an
overwhelming 63 percent of the vote in New England in 2016.

O’Brien had proven anti-TDU credentials. He was briefly suspended
from union office in 2013 for making threatening comments against TDU
members who ran for office — and won — in Rhode Island Local 251.

But in a hyper-polarized Teamsters Union that had been defined by a
civil war between old guard and reformers for decades, O’Brien did
something unheard of: he reached out to his political opponents.

In 2017, as part of the lead-up to contract negotiations, O’Brien
visited Teamsters United–aligned locals. In Louisville, he attended
a mass meeting of UPS stewards. “He said, ‘Ask anything you
want’ — and they did just that,” said Local 89 steward and TDU
leader David Thornsberry. They peppered him with questions, including
his role in imposing the 2013 Louisville Air Supplement.

“To his credit, Sean answered frankly and said, ‘I’m not that
guy anymore.’ He said he had learned from that experience and
certainly would not be part of imposing any contract. He impressed me,
and I think a lot of the stewards.”

“Sean came to our local and told our members straight out:
‘Mistakes have been made, and they won’t be repeated.’ That
showed us a lot,” said Matt Taibi, the TDU leader who was elected
principal officer of Teamsters Local 251 despite O’Brien’s
previous efforts.

“Sean wasn’t running for office at that time. He was working for
Hoffa. He reached out to build unity to take on the employers — and
we took the olive branch. Since then, we’ve stood shoulder to
shoulder to win strikes, organizing drives, and contract campaign,”
said Taibi.

O’Brien appointed Teamsters United leaders to the UPS bargaining
committee. But when he insisted on appointing Fred Zuckerman and on
running a rank-and-file contract campaign, Hoffa fired O’Brien.

O’Brien immediately came out in opposition to Hoffa and continued
building ties to local officers who opposed givebacks. While TDU
members and other rank-and-file activists organized to defeat UPS
givebacks nationally, O’Brien led a Vote No campaign in New England.
Nationally, UPSers voted no by 54 percent; in New England, members
voted no by 83 percent.

Last year, O’Brien and Zuckerman announced they would run a
Teamsters United ticket with O’Brien in the top spot.

“When I first heard the news about O’Brien taking the top spot, I
was shocked,” said Rob Atkinson, a construction Teamster and TDU
activist in Pittsburgh. “But I talked with other Teamsters, and we
know that going it alone means going nowhere. I want to be in a
coalition that will take on the bosses and change this union.”

TDU Members Endorse and Look Ahead

It’s November 2019 and 300 activists and leaders gather at the TDU
Convention in Chicago to strategize about what’s next for the
rank-and-file movement.

O’Brien and Zuckerman are there to address the national organization
of Teamster grassroots activists.

At the Convention, they released a 10 Steps Toward a Stronger Union
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in line with the program backed by Teamsters United in 2016, including
grassroots national contract campaigns at employers and coordinated
strategic campaigns that link organizing and bargaining.

Tens of thousands of Teamsters work for multinationals like Waste
Management, Republic Services, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, First
Student, and Sysco, under hundreds of separate local contracts that
are negotiated with little coordination, let alone coordinated action.

Last year’s strikes that paralyzed Marriott in Detroit, Chicago, San
Francisco, and Boston offered a glimpse of a more promising model for
the Teamsters and all of labor.

O’Brien also backed democratic reforms, including protecting
one-member, one-vote elections for top Teamster officers without
adding restrictions supported by Hoffa to keep opposition candidates
off the ballot and ending the Two-Thirds Rule — the loophole that
allowed union officials to oppose contracts that were rejected by a
majority of the members.

He mocked Hoffa running mate Ken Hall for never missing an opportunity
to brag about the $240 million in the union’s strike fund. “Well,
no shit, we haven’t struck anyone since 1997,” O’Brien said to a
standing ovation.

An International Union leadership that embraces the strike weapon
would be a major U-turn for the Teamsters.

The labor movement has seen more strikes in the last two years than at
any time in the last thirty-five — from teachers to grocery
warehouses to hotel chains to General Motors, but the Teamsters have
largely been on the sidelines of the strike wave.

While some Teamster locals use the strike weapon — including, with
frequency, Zuckerman’s Local 89 and O’Brien’s Local 25 — the
International hasn’t won a major national strike since 1997 at UPS,
two years before Hoffa took office.

Outside workshops and in the bar, activists talk and debate. Back
home, activists slug it out on social media. Some blasted O’Brien
for his past actions and criticized TDU for backing a former Hoffa
ally.

“Some people were concerned, and I get it,” says Dave Bernt, a UPS
driver and veteran TDU activist. “We had a lot of the same concerns
about Fred Zuckerman five years ago. We built a partnership through
joint action, and look at everything we’ve accomplished.

“Some on Facebook have suggested that the endorsement meant the
death of TDU. I think they have it exactly backward,” Bernt said.
“TDU is an organization of action. We can’t stand on the sidelines
and abstain from an election that can change the Teamsters and the
labor movement. _That_ is what would be the death of TDU.”

The vote itself is anticlimactic and overwhelming. TDUers voted to
endorse the slate with only two votes in opposition.

TDU activists voted to approve a resolution to maintain the
movement’s independence and rank-and-file approach. The Teamsters
United slate is abstaining from local union elections. But the TDU
Convention voted to prioritize helping rank-and-file activists “run
for local union office and succeed in building progressive locals
after they win.”

Transforming the Teamsters won’t happen without tackling the issue
of race. Only one out of twenty-seven members of the International
Union’s executive board is African American. Of the more than 400
Teamster locals, only twenty are led by African-American principal
officers.

A year ago, that number was sixteen. TDU supported black-led slates in
Charlotte, Maryland, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Memphis — winning
four of the five races.

The TDU Black Caucus organized a national Black Leadership Conference
in 2019 and is planning a national summit at the upcoming Labor Notes
Conference.

“If we’re going to unite the ranks to stand up to corporate power,
we need leadership that looks like the members. That means more
African Americans, Latinos, and women at every level of leadership —
from the General Executive Board to our local unions to shop
stewards,” said Willie Hardy, a retired freight Teamster from
Memphis and the coordinator of TDU’s Black Caucus.

TDU members are gearing up and planning organizing meetings, education
conferences, local union election campaigns, activist trainings,
contract campaigns, and on-the-job actions.

“Winning the International Union election is just a part of it what
we’re about. Our goal is not just different leaders, but more
leaders and a more activist union,” Willie Ford said.

_DAVID LEVIN is a lead organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic
Union._

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