Sandy Pope For Teamsters President

While the news media focuses on the daily ups and downs of the Republican candidates vying to run for President of the United States in 2012, a different type of Presidential election kicked off this week.

Ballots were mailed out yesterday (October 6) to the 1.4 million members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) labor union, and will be counted beginning on November 14. General President James Hoffa, in office for the last 12 years, is running for reelection, but is being challenged by reformer and democracy advocate Sandy Pope, currently serving as President of Local 805 in New York City. A Pope victory would be a victory for bottom-up democratic decision-making over the top-down autocratic rule exemplified by Hoffa, and would also put a woman in charge of the Teamsters for the first time in their history. Both of these symbols could help improve the image of the Teamsters, and of unions in general, in the eyes of the rest of the country.

For many of us, our image of the Teamsters union was formed by their controversial President in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa, father of the current President. The McClellan Committee of the U.S. Senate held public hearings on allegations of corruption and dealings with organized crime by Hoffa and his predecessor, Dave Beck. John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, was a member of the committee, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy was its chief counsel. After JFK was elected President in 1960, RFK continued investigating Hoffa and the Teamsters as Attorney General, eventually convicting Hoffa of jury tampering and fraud. Hoffa was released from federal prison in 1971 when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence; he disappeared in 1975 and is presumed to have been murdered, although his body has never been found.

Around that same time, groups of rank-and-file Teamsters who felt they had no voice in contracts being negotiated for them by top officials formed a reform group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union. TDU organized members across the country around a set of basic reforms aimed at making the officers more accountable to the membership and less prone to corruption. They also worked hard to rid the union of its connections to organized crime. One of TDU's major points was that the President should be directly elected by the members, rather than by delegates to a convention. The fact that Sandy Pope is today campaigning for the votes of those members is a direct result of TDU having won that democratic reform. TDU is an enthusiastic supporter of Pope's candidacy, and her view of unions being democratically run by its members is consistent with TDU's mission.

Sandy's belief in democratic unionism isn't limited to just the Teamsters. She has a long history of reaching out to members of other unions to share her vision and experience. In 2008 I attended a conference in Dearborn, Michigan sponsored by Labor Notes magazine. Sandy led a workshop I attended on contract negotiations, covering elements of the process from how the negotiating committee should act in front of management at formal sessions to how to rally the membership to support your negotiations. After the workshop was over, she took names and addresses of people who were interested in more resources, and then mailed each of us a package of articles and sample contract language. As a member of my engineering union's negotiating team, I had the opportunity to put some of Sandy's lessons into practice the following year as we successfully negotiated several significant improvements in one of our collective bargaining agreements. This willingness on her part to share what she's learned with members of other unions demonstrates her commitment to helping workers everywhere negotiate for better conditions, and having someone with that mindset leading the Teamsters would certainly have a positive impact on the state of organized labor in this country.

We'll have to wait until mid-November to see if Sandy succeeds in her election bid. In the meantime, you can help by sending her a donation. Current Teamster members can contribute to the campaign's General Fund, while nonmembers can contribute to the Legal and Accounting Fund, as I have done. In addition, if you know or come into contact with any Teamsters (e.g., your local UPS driver), encourage them to cast their vote for Sandy. Just as citizens around the country are demonstrating in favor of more participatory democracy - the right to participate in decisions that affect them - so should our brothers and sisters in the Teamsters demonstrate their support for greater internal democracy.