The Teamster haul.

The successful Teamster strike at UPS gave a huge boost to the labor movement, which had suffered one lost strike after another--from PATCO to Hormel to Staley to Caterpillar to Bridgestone/Firestone. For the past fifteen years, employers have told workers they had to take wage cuts, they had to take downsizing, they had to take part-time work with no benefits, they had to take anything that corporate America hands them. Finally, a union with the guts to take on a fight and the strength to sustain it, said, "No, we won't take it anymore."

The organized defiance by the Teamsters was an inspiration to millions of American workers. "In a library in Alameda County, California, part-time clericals who want full-time work to support their families are comparing themselves to UPSers," Jim West wrote in Labor Notes. "In Detroit, a contingent hospice nurse working full time without any job security thinks the same thing."

The rightwing media, including The Wall Street Journal, suggested that Ron Carey, head of the Teamsters, concocted the strike at the last minute to save his reputation. But that's not what happened, according to Labor Notes. "For at least nine months before the contract expired, the international organized for the campaign," West wrote. "They hired rank-and-file activists from UPS centers as coordinators; mapped out an extensive one-on-one communications network; surveyed members on the issues; published fliers; prodded locals to hold before-work rallies; and put some rank-and-filers on the national bargaining committee."

Much of the credit for the success of the strike goes to the reform movement within the union, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. It was these activists who got union members fully engaged in the process of preparing for the strike.

To an extent not seen in decades, hardly any union members crossed the line. That's what brought management to its knees.

But now, the momentum from the strike has dissipated as a result of a foolish scandal in Carey's office. In last year's tight election campaign against Jimmy Hoffa Jr., some Carey consultants engaged in fundraising hanky-panky that caused the federal overseer to invalidate Carey's election victory. The consultants allegedly funneled some $220,000 in illegal contributions through intermediaries to the Carey campaign. Some of these contributions allegedly amounted to kickbacks from Teamster contracts.

The consultants and intermediaries who contaminated the Teamster election have a lot to answer for. Several of these guys were liberal types, working with established public-interest groups. It is disgusting to find the-end-justifies-the-means mentality at play on our side of the fence.

Now they've given their friends a bad name. They've tarnished the reformers who backed Carey and who led the effort to clean up the sty they inherited from the old Hoffa forces. They've tarnished organized labor itself by fueling all the old stereotypes about labor corruption. And they've also tarnished Carey, assuming he wasn't directly involved in the scandal himself, which he may yet turn out to have been.

What looked like a long day of sunshine for labor quickly turned into a shiner.

It would be the ultimate tragedy if, in the coming election, Hoffa and the old, corrupt, reactionary clique took hold of the union again. It wouldn't do the Teamsters any good; it wouldn't do organized labor any good; it wouldn't do the progressive movement any good. And it would be a terrible, unjustified setback to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, who worked so hard for so many years to bring about reform. They were the ones largely responsible for getting Carey elected the first time in 1991.

Back then, Carey was the reform candidate. But because of this scandal, he may have a hard time holding onto that mantle.