A Song for Sandy Pope

Just the other day, singer-songwriter John Paul Wright of Louisville, KY, uploaded his latest song, “Ain’t No Easy Run (Sandy Pope)” onto YouTube. He was on his way home from the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) convention in Cleveland when the sight of tractor trailers barreling along reminded him that Sandy Pope was once a truck driver.
As the title of JP Wright’s song implies he sings about Sandy Pope’s campaign to oust James P. Hoffa from the presidency of the Teamsters.
With the ballots in the mail and supporters making calls from phone banks to turn out her voters, we will find out next month whether Pope can fulfill her goal of getting 150,000 Teamsters to vote for her. As JP Wright sings to the individual Teamsters listening: “One vote for Pope and the election’s won. Hoffa’s days are done.”
If the turnout for this election is similar to the 2006 election, then 150,000 would assure a victory for Pope. What she has going for her is a base of support from TDU, which is worth 90,000 to 100,000 votes, the rest would have to come from new Teamsters who want to create a rank and file activist union, from women attracted to a woman candidate, from those old timers disenchanted by Hoffa’s performance as president over the past 12 years.
Among the disenchanted is Fred Gegare, currently an international vice president and the third candidate for the presidency. Gegare decided to run against Hoffa over what he considered his disastrous handling of union finances, contracts and pensions.
The only hope for a change of direction in the Teamsters is Sandy Pope. She comes from the reform milieu with the promise of instilling activism in the Teamsters both internally and externally as did Ron Carey in the victorious strike against UPS in 1997.

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SANDY POPE wins the first round of Teamsters 2011 election

Sandy Pope won the first round of the Teamsters 2011 election—the media battle before and after the convention--walking across James P. Hoffa like he wasn’t there. Fred Gegare, the third candidate wasn’t even in the running.
Media success is crucial to foster name recognition. Hoffa has had his thanks to his dad. No doubt that Sandy Pope’s appeal to journalists is the fact that a woman with a black belt in karate is running for the presidency of a union with a reputation of burly, big-bellied men who drive trucks.
Hoffa, unlike Sandy Pope, has never driven a truck as a real rank and file Teamster. He does have the belly that goes with the old out-of-date image.
Before last month’s Teamsters Convention in Las Vegas, Sandy Pope scored with a major piece about her in The Nation and on public radio stations across the nation via an interview on The Story with Dick Gordon.
During the convention, the New York Times, CNN, and ABC featured her. After the convention, she managed to wind up in a big story in The Sunday Times of London.
The assumption is that the combination of support by a large bloc of Teamsters local leaders and his incumbency makes Hoffa an almost sure bet to win another five years in the presidency.
But there are factors at play that could cause that sure bet to stumble. Sandy Pope is getting the needed name recognition, she has the support of the potent reform group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, she has a substantial record as a local union leader in New York City as well as a background as a working Teamster and organizer, and in addition, the issue that made her attractive to journalists could very well bring in votes from the women who make up 20 to 25 percent of the union.
And, the decision of Midwestern Teamster leader and International Vice President Fred Gegare to run for the presidency against Hoffa could change the outcome of the 2011 election. There is the possibility Gegare could win and the probability he will take a substantial number of votes away from Hoffa.
In his acceptance speech on July 1 as a presidential candidate at the convention, Gegare contended that Hoffa betrayed the members by allowing United Parcel Service to withdraw its employees from the Central States Pension in 2007 in exchange for making it easier for the IBT to organize the 12,000 workers in UPS-owned Overnite Trucking.
Without UPS, which has created its own plan, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars every year into Central States to fund its workers’ retirement, the storied pension fund is in serious trouble, according to Gegare, who is a fund trustee.
Gegare said that he told Hoffa at the time: “Don’t let it happen. You’re going to destroy everything your father built. You are going to ruin the foundation of this great organization...You ain’t going to see the tsunami coming if you let them take 45,000 participants out of Central
State Pension Fund.” Gegare told the convention, “They gave the farm away to UPS...That’s criminal. I’m telling you,
we cannot afford it. I got four retired for every
one working.”
Gegare sounded a warning to the union as a whole: “
Let me tell you something. If Central States goes down, there’s going to be a domino effect from the New England pension fund, Central PA, Central States, and the Western pension fund, because we all got the same top employers. If they did it to me, I keep telling the members, they’re going to do it to you. You got to get involved.”

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Fred Gegare’s June Surprise

With the Teamsters 2011 convention a little more than three weeks away, Fred Gegare has come up with a June Surprise: Aaron Belk, the late Ron Carey’s executive assistant, has been added to his Fighting for the Members Slate as a candidate for Southern Region vice president.
Aside from rising from a loading dock in Memphis to the top of the Teamsters’ hierarchy by being elected an international vice president on Carey’s reform slate in 1991, Belk distinguished himself in trying—though unsuccessfully—to block the political contributions in 1996 that resulted in Carey’s downfall. At a 1998 Congressional hearing, Belk testified: “I can hold my head high and I can look at myself in the mirror each morning knowing that I did my job to the best of my ability by turning down these large contribution requests and by refusing to support and condone the actions of the 1996 Carey campaign staff and their consultants.”
At the end of this month, we’ll find out whether Gegare, currently an international vice president, will make the 2011 Teamsters election a three-way race by overcoming the barrier facing all outside candidates of being nominated for president by winning the votes of five percent of the 1,700 or so delegates to the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas.
James P. Hoffa, the incumbent international president, and New York Teamsters Local 805 president Sandy Pope are expected to be the other two candidates in the fall election. Hoffa, barring the unforeseen, certainly will be nominated. Pope has the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the nationwide reform group, whose support was crucial to Carey two elections in 1991 and 1996 to the presidency of the Teamsters. Last month, Pope announced she had enough delegates pledged to be nominated.
Pope is running alone—without a slate—hoping to win the votes of the rank and file by contrasting her history as Teamster over the past 33 years—working as a selector, a truck driver, a local union organizer, an international staffer, and finally elected president of a local—against Hoffa’s scant background with summer jobs as a Teamster while in college and later as a lawyer. He was elected international president in 1998 primarily because he was the son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa. Gegare—who has 39 years of experience at every level of the Teamsters—split with Hoffa last year proclaiming his leadership was disastrous.

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IBT Election Supervisor to Hoffa: tsk, tsk

Richard W. Mark, the official overseeing the Teamsters 2011 International union election, issued his decision today (March 15, 2011) on the Hoffa campaign’s attempt to use the IBT’s treasury (in the form of jobs and benefits) to buy off the opposition led by Fred Gegare. The penalty imposed amounts to tsk, tsk.
Tsk, tsk has a variety of meanings: You should be ashamed of yourself or perhaps, I disapprove of what you are doing or have done.
In sum, Teamsters International President James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy Hoffa) and some of his cohorts were found by Mark to have offered jobs and at least one extra pension to three Teamsters officials, IBT Car Haul Director Fred Zuckerman and International Trustees Henry Perry and Frank Gallegos, in exchange for their support or for not running in the 2011 Teamsters International Election.
Kenneth Conboy, the Teamsters Election Appeals Master, ordered Mark to come up with a punishment short of denying Hoffa the privilege of running for reelection. Why? The crucial element: the three refused the offers.
Back in 1997, Conboy was the official who barred Ron Carey from running for reelection in 1996 for his supposed involvement in a scheme to misuse the Teamsters’ treasury in his election campaign. Five years later—and somewhat too late—a federal jury found that Carey was telling the truth when he swore to federal agents and a Grand Jury that he knew nothing about the dirty deal. A tsk, tsk wasn’t imposed on Carey, but as part of his pre-trial punishment he was not only barred from running for reelection, but was expelled from Teamsters membership.
Mark’s remedy for the failed dirty deal: “The Hoffa campaign and each candidate on the Hoffa-Hall slate are ordered to cease and desist from using union resources to conduct campaign activity.”
In addition, Mark ordered the posting of a notice to Teamsters members across North America saying: “The Election Supervisor found that before and during May 2010, IBT officials associated with the General President Hoffa’s campaign offered IBT jobs, including salary and benefits, to three individuals in exchange for a promise to support the Hoffa campaign in various ways.”
While the Hoffa folks might be embarrassed by having to face the members who actually read the notice, the sentence imposed by Mark falls far short of Gegare’s demand that Hoffa be disqualified as a candidate.

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A TALE OF TWO TEAMSTERS PRESIDENTS

Two Teamsters presidents, the late Ron Carey and James P. Hoffa, have both been accused of using the union’s dues money to enhance their chances for reelection.
Each contended they were innocent. The difference in their cases is that after an extraordinary investigation that lasted five years, Carey was cleared by a federal jury of charges that he lied in denying he knew about the scheme to swap $885,000 of Teamsters dues money in exchange for contributions to his reelection campaign. Hoffa has yet to be exonerated.
Through the years, Carey’s cries of innocence went unheard as he was barred from running for reelection and then summarily dismissed from Teamsters membership by the union’s Independent Review Board.
Anyone who attended Carey’s trial in the fall of 2001 would say he was proven innocent rather than found not guilty. His defense team including the late Mark Hulkower, Reid Weingarten, Bruce Bishop and Bob Hauptman absolutely destroyed the government’s case in the process of proving it was based on the lies of a witness providing false testimony to avoid a prison sentence.
Now Hoffa is facing the prospect of experiencing what the late Teamsters President Jackie Presser called the hot seat of the union’s presidency.
Hoffa and members of his current slate are accused of offering lucrative jobs and at least one extra pension to three Teamsters officials, IBT Car Haul Director Fred Zuckerman and International Trustees Henry Perry and Frank Gallegos, in exchange for their support or not running in the 2011 Teamsters International Election. The payoffs, apparently to last for one year, would have cost the IBT treasury at least a quarter of a million dollars—and that doesn’t include the value of the extra pension offered to Zuckerman.
The three, who are to be commended, declined the offers—for whatever reasons: perhaps integrity or perhaps they just couldn’t endure the way Hoffa was running the union. Zuckerman and Perry currently are vice presidential candidates opposing the Hoffa slate in the upcoming IBT election.
IBT Election Supervisor Richard W. Mark uncovered the attempted misuse of Teamsters’ dues money during a six-month-long investigation ordered by Kenneth Conboy, the Teamsters Election Appeals Master. In a strange decision, Mark said there was nothing he could do about the unsuccessful scheme because Zuckerman, Gallegos and Perry refused to go along—and didn’t collect any money.
Expressing his dismay over Mark’s failure to punish Hoffa and company, Perry told the Memphis Commercial Appeal: “It was like, you go in the bank, you pull the gun, you hear the police coming, you run out. You didn't commit a crime.”
Conboy, in effect agreed with Perry’s assessment by ordering Mark to go back to the drawing board to impose a penalty but one short of disqualifying Hoffa as a candidate.
In issuing that directive to Mark, Conboy maligned the memory of Ron Carey by saying “In that case, Ron Carey, the IBT president elect in 1996 knew of a scheme to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars of union funds for the benefit of his campaign.” Conboy either is unaware of the exoneration of Carey by the Manhattan federal court—or isn’t willing to acknowledge that the subsequent evidence emerged to show that Carey should never have been disqualified.
In the same vein in light of the outcome of his trial, I have never understood why Carey was not reinstated as a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Mark now has the burden of figuring out what his solution should be for Hoffa and company’s failed attempt to use the members’ money in their reelection campaign.
Hoffa must also be wondering whether the Teamsters Independent Review Board will investigate the case and wallop him with a penalty that could end his bid for the union presidency.
Fred Gegare, who filed the original complaint that ultimately resulted in Mark’s investigation and is running against Hoffa for the presidency, contends that just like Carey, Hoffa should be disqualified from running again and expelled from Teamsters.
Sandy Pope, the New York Teamster running for the presidency, said in one on her releases, “It’s an open secret that Hoffa uses our dues money to reward his supporters—and to funnel them extra salaries in exchange for campaign contributions. But this is the first time the problem has been officially documented.”


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THE DAME, THE NAME, THE DISENCHANTED

If I were a twitterer, this would be my offering for this year’s race for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters:
The 2011 Teamsters election summarized: The dame (Sandy), the name (James), the disenchanted (Fred).
The dame, of course, is Sandy Pope, president of New York Teamsters Local 805. Dame can be use as a term for a woman, but I am using it in the expansive concept of a woman of accomplishment. In the United Kingdom, they bestow the title on female high achievers—and that’s what Sandy is. Sandy is a real Teamster having worked her way up from the hard jobs of selector and truck driver.
The name, obviously, James P. Hoffa, the son of Jimmy Hoffa, an earlier Teamster president of some repute. James P. rode his father’s name into the Teamsters presidency in 1999. His claim to being a Teamster comes from summer jobs in his college years and then becoming a lawyer for various IBT entities a couple of years after graduating from law school.
The disenchanted candidate is Fred Gegare, another real Teamster up from the rank and file from Green Bay Wisconsin, who was a vice president on Hoffa’s team until he stunned Teamsters through North America last summer when he announced he could no longer endure Hoffa’s pitiful performance as general president. He says on his campaign website: “"Over the last twelve years, James Phillip Hoffa has proven that running a union of 1.4 million members like a family fiefdom is disastrous. He has shown that the Teamsters Union will not be successful as long as it is run from Washington, D.C. by unelected lawyers, consultants and personal assistants. Just like Hoffa, they have never done the work of real Teamsters. Just like Hoffa, they are more concerned with taking care of themselves than about fighting for the members."
Another shock to Hoffa came last July when Tom Keegel, secretary-treasurer of the IBT, announced he would retire instead of running again on the Hoffa slate. Keegel warned that the Teamsters were being led in the wrong direction and said “"I do not claim to have all the answers, but I do know that continuing down the same road as the IBT has traveled for the last few years will not lead us out of our present difficulties or help us avoid the problems yet to come."
In my latest novel, THE TRUCKERS, there are two characters who seem to be very much like two of the real life characters in this year’s IBT election. The rank and file candidate, Carolyn Gordon, a tough, fearless woman who heads a small Truckers local in Colorado, is running against Steve Staski, a minor television and film actor. Steve is the choice of the Old Guard because he can run on the name of his famous father, Steamer Staski, The Truckers who was murdered on a picket line.
The rank and file leader Helmut Knall says to a doubting aide who thinks Carolyn doesn’t have much of a chance against the Staski name: “We’re going to get a million dollars worth of free publicity because she’s so young and she’s a woman.”
“Like Little Stevie gets because he’s a Staski and an actor,” the aide says.
Knall replies: “The difference is he acts tough. Gordon is tough. And don’t forget she made a name for herself, while he inherited his.”

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.

Ron Carey’s successor

A big, burly, bearded Brooklynite UPS worker named Tim Sylvester inherited the late Ron Carey’s prestigious mantle as the rank and file reformer of Teamsters Local 804 in an election triumph on Dec. 3 that can only be described as breathtaking.
Sylvester won the presidency of Local 804 with his Members United Slate ousting the incumbents by a vote of 2,348-1091, a margin of more than two to one. Local 804 has 8,000 members and covers UPS’ crucial New York market.
While his victory was stunning, it came not by chance, but by building a movement in Local 804 to oppose concessionary contracts and to demand the local’s officers keep the membership informed instead of in the dark about negotiations—reflecting the philosophy of rank and file participation espoused by the ever-militant Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Sylvester and Jim Reynolds, his partner in transforming Local 804 are affiliated with TDU. Reynolds was elected Local 804’s secretary-treasurer on the Members United Slate.
Carey’s career can be broken into three shining rank and file reform moments: his election to the presidency of Local 804 in 1967; his election as General President of International Brotherhood of Teamsters with crucial support from TDU in 1991; and the great victory over UPS on the picket lines and at the bargaining table in 1999, again with the backing of TDU in an era when most unions were fearful of striking.
The 52-year-old Sylvester, who has been a Teamster and a UPS worker for 30 years, matched Carey’s 1967 achievement in ousting the current administration from Local 804, now headed by Howie Redmond, a long-time an ally of Carey who transferred his allegiance wholeheartedly to James P. Hoffa when he won the general president’s seat in 1999. Hoffa came to power after Carey was dumped from office on corruption charges—later proven to be untrue. Ousting an incumbent local Teamsters administration is the equivalent of defeating a sitting Member of Congress; it can be done, but not easily.
Whether Sylvester blossoms into a candidate for General President of the Teamsters will depend on luck and his performance as the top officer of Local 804. The next election for General President of the Teamsters will be in 2011—not much time for Sylvester to jell into a star with a national reputation for leadership.
But the next candidate backed by TDU to run against Hoffa and his allies in Washington will have to be someone just like Tim Sylvester, a Teamster leader up from the rank and file with a hunger to craft an activist union.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.