By David Moberg
The base of the Teamster reform movement in Chicago has long been at United Parcel Service. In 1969 Jackson led workers in a wildcat strike against both the company and union leaders that won workers more control over the shifts they worked and the length of their workday. They and other reformers continued to protest bad contracts and demanded union representation of their grievances and the right to speak out at union meetings. They also objected to second-class treatment of the growing ranks of part-time workers, which the union had permitted as a concession to management. McCormick, who’d started at UPS part-time in 1961, was among those reformers. “My issue was that you couldn’t get anything done with the union,” he says. “It was a company union.”
The Teamsters had been a major power in Chicago for many decades, and they were the largest union in the region (even today, despite losses because of plant closings and bankruptcies, there are still about 110,000 members in 17 different locals in the greater Chicago area). Several of the biggest locals, including 705, had long had special status within the union, partly because Chicago has always been a major transportation hub. Chicago locals could negotiate separate contracts and usually won extras after national negotiations or strikes were over. They also often let others go on strike, then reaped the benefits. All this reinforced their insular mentality and helped local leaders consolidate their hold on power.
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The Teamsters had a reputation for muscle that came from the truckers’ ability to shut down delivery of critical goods. But it was muscle that had delivered mainly when the economy was booming in the 1960s, when the trucking industry had been regulated and industry could pass on the cost of contracts. When stagflation and recession hit in the 70s and 80s and the trucking industry was deregulated, this Teamster muscle went flabby. Union officials began handing concessions to large companies such as UPS and trucking firms, against which they’d once scored major victories. The officials also gained a reputation for signing sweetheart contracts with smaller employers, sometimes persuading companies fighting unionization that they were better off accepting a corrupt union over a more honest or militant one.The union officials collected dues, even the occasional kickback, and the employers got labor peace.
Carey rejected the lavish perks of the “country-club” crowd of Teamster leaders. He not only included rank-and-file Teamsters on his slate but promised that they’d be the heart of the union, involved in everything from negotiating contracts to organizing new members. He appealed to members to take responsibility, to think of the Teamsters as “our union,” not “the union.” It was the vision that had long animated reformers in Chicago, one of the least hospitable spots in the country for Carey.
The worst problems were in the pension fund and the health-care fund, which had been set up in place of health insurance and paid for the local’s clinic. According to an innovative $4 million civil RICO lawsuit filed by the local in 1995–intended “to redress a pervasive, corrosive, and pernicious pattern of corruption in the management of Local 705’s pension and health care funds”–the IRB had found that the two funds improperly paid Ligurotis $120,000 as administrator. After a Department of Labor investigation, Ligurotis agreed to repay the money, then had union executive board minutes fabricated giving him a retroactive pay increase and used that money to reimburse the funds. The suit–which was eventually settled out of court, netting the union $10 million–also alleged that Ligurotis had pumped $2 million in pension-fund money into a short-lived restaurant in the union’s Teamster City building on Ashland Avenue that had been set up by a longtime associate of his who happened to be a convicted felon with ties to organized crime. The suit claimed that the local’s health clinic had grossly overpaid a part-time medical director, also a friend of Ligurotis’s, and alleged that while the lawyer for the health and pension funds was receiving “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the union, he was also working as Ligurotis’s personal lawyer, which “facilitated and implemented Ligurotis’s looting schemes.” The suit also contended that Ligurotis, working with the Luchese organized-crime family, extorted $25,000 from Amerford International Corporation “in return for labor peace in Chicago and concessions involving Amerford employees’ employment rights and welfare benefits.”
Zero and McCormick also pushed the rank and file to become more involved in the union. For the first time, regular union members began serving on every contract-negotiating committee. “The companies don’t like it,” Zero says. “But it’s their contract. They have a right to be there.” They also often understand the issues at stake better than the business agents do. Members also began voting on all contracts in secret ballots; in the past there hadn’t even been ratification votes.
