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Rank and File Revolt Topples Top Teamster
By Tom Herriman
Local 763's new Executive Board holds its first meeting: (left to right) Vice President Duane Tews, Trustee Kirk Vic, Secretary Treasurer Dave Reynolds and President Kirk Stephenson. |
John Rabine, a close ally of Teamster President James Hoffa and a member of the union's international executive board, was voted out by a decisive margin late in December. Rabine had been head of the Teamsters Joint Council 28 and secretary treasurer of Local 763 in Seattle until his defeat.
The new secretary treasurer--the top leadership post of Local 763--is Dave Reynolds, who works in the King County Assessor's office. Kirk Stevenson, a Laidlaw school bus driver, is the local's new president.
The pair say they are committed to restoring rank and file democracy to their union. In recent years, contested elections have been rare, few members attend meetings, and rank and file leaders have been routinely excluded from contract negotiations.
"We want to put the members in charge," Reynolds said. "We're their servants. We want people to get involved and active and to realize the union belongs to them, not to the paid staff or the elected officers."
| Local 174 Election is a Squeaker |
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In another Teamster local election, Local 174 reform leader Bob Hasegawa was defeated by one vote, 3,085 to 3.084, by Scott Sullivan, a UPS driver and the son of a long-time Teamster activist. Sullivan took office on January 1, but Hasegawa has filed a protest with the Federal Election Administrator, who supervises Teamster elections under a consent decree designed to fight corruption in the union. Hasegawa charges that Teamster President James Hoffa illegally took control of the election away from Local 174's Executive Board and put his own personal representative in charge. Federal oversight wouldn't normally apply to a local Teamster election, but Hasegawa is also a candidate for international vice president. By losing his local office he is effectively eliminated from that race. "They surprised us with how good their campaign was," Hasegawa said about his opponents. "They out-organized us on the shop floor in several places," he said, "but I still believe that I won." The 174 election hinges on 17 unopened challenged ballots that Hasegawa thinks will favor him. The ballots were challenged because they were submitted by members whose dues payments were not up to date. Hasegawa says the dues had been deducted from the members' paychecks, but their employer had neglected to send the money in to the union. He also claims that rules in place prior to the election require that the challenged ballots be opened and counted. Hasegawa is also filing election protests with Teamsters Joint Council 28, which meets January 16. Meanwhile, Hasegawa has applied for unemployment compensation and is looking around for something to do. He told The Seattle Press he wants to pursue a goal of building a broad community-labor coalition in Seattle, capitalizing on the momentum from WTO protests and the Ralph Nader campaign and from broad public outrage at the Florida election results. |
Reynolds said his ideas about running for office formed as he listened to members complaining about how their union was run. "I read books, I talked to other members, I met Kirk, and we found we had many of the same problems in our workplaces."
Reynolds got a firsthand look at the local's unresponsive leadership style when he sat on the negotiating committee for the Assessors Office contract. He attended every session except the very last one. "The union business agent and management met secretly," Reynolds explained. "They agreed on the final details of the contract. I was elected [to sit on the committee] by my co-workers, but I was excluded from the final negotiations. This is what I was running against."
Meanwhile, Stevenson has been active in the union in Laidlaw's north-end bus barn for over 20 years. "We had to do a lot of things ourselves, because the established union leadership didn't listen to our problems," he said. "So we fought for and won very strong safety language in our contract--that's one of the bus drivers' biggest concerns. We established our own accident review committee, and only bus drivers, not union or company officials, can be on the committee."
Both Reynolds and Stevenson are members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a nationwide reform group within the Teamsters.
"It was top-down management," Stevenson says. "They weren't responsive to members; it seemed like they thought they were better than us. Innumerable times, the business agent and management would meet behind closed doors to settle disputes or negotiate contracts. The members were excluded from the process."
A Winning Election Strategy
Their election strategy was simple: Get more votes. "We noticed Rabine got around 600 votes every time he ran," Reynolds said. "The first time we ran against him, we got 400. We knew if we could get our message to enough members, we could beat Rabine the second time around."
"We found a lot of discontent out there," Stevenson said. "When we approached members, their first question usually was, 'How do we get rid of our business agent?'" (A union business agent is a paid staff person whose duties include handling members' complaints and problems and negotiating contracts.)
So Reynolds saved up his vacation time for three years and campaigned hard all summer with Stevenson, who had time off because school buses were not running. Reynolds' wife, Karla Kiskilla, signed on as campaign manager.
Campaigning was a logistical nightmare. The local has 4,300 members in more than 300 work places, from Fife in the south to Burlington in the north and as far west as Sultan. Teamster members work at hundreds of different jobs--they may be Paccar material handlers, Seattle Times mailers or Evergreen-Washelli embalmers.
"We talked to more than 2,000 people," Reynolds said. "We asked what their problems were, and we asked them to trust us. We told them we wanted the members to control the union, not paid bureaucrats."
Sore Feelings Fuel The Campaign
Sometimes employers would let Rabine in to campaign, but wouldn't let Reynolds and Stevenson in. "We got a lot of votes when that happened at the North Shore School District. We didn't even talk to most of the people there, but they saw the injustice and they were outraged," Stevenson said.
"That's the way Rabine ran the union," Stevenson said. "If you asked for a copy of the constitution and bylaws, they'd say, 'What do you want that for?'"
"We haven't seen a financial statement since last February," Reynolds added. "They said their computers were down because of Y2K and they hadn't gotten them fixed yet."
Another sore point among the members was Rabine's three salaries. He was paid over $225,000 a year, as head of the Joint Council, head of the Local 763 and a member of the IBT Executive Board. Reynolds says he will draw a salary of $75,000 a year.
In the final vote count, Reynolds got 737, Rabine 639. Also elected were Stevenson and an Executive Board including Duane Tews, an ambulance driver, as vice-president, and Julie Raymond, a corrections worker at Snohomish County Jail, Bob Lovely, support staff at Snohomish County Jail, and Kirk Vic, an Edmonds wastewater treatment technician, as trustees.
Returning To Solidarity, Openness
Reynolds said Rabine violated the labor tradition of unions helping each other. In 1999, Rabine refused to approve a strike of Port of Seattle truck drivers by Teamster Local 174. As a result, drivers from other Teamster locals crossed the Local 174's picket lines.
Rabine dragged his feet and gave very little support to apple workers trying to organize with the Teamsters in 1997 and '98, Reynolds said. He also fought against the shop floor leadership when Teamster members at an Iowa Beef plant near Walla Walla struck against speed-up and unsafe conditions. Rabine tried to silence the elected leaders in the plant by putting the local into trusteeship.
More recently, Reynolds said, Rabine turned his back on the Newspaper Guild strikers at The Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer by settling a contract for the mailers just before the Guild strike began. "Nobody's seen a signed contract," Reynolds said. It's reported that some Times members are bringing internal union charges against Rabine, claiming failure to abide by union by-laws and violation of their contractual rights.
Reynolds and Stevenson say they're going to involve and inform the members at all levels of union decision-making. They plan to set up new committees to study bylaws, finances and political education. They'll hold classes to train shop stewards, something the local has never done before. They'll establish a union web site and encourage e-mail contact--an obvious solution to the problem of a diverse and geographically scattered membership.
"I know we'll make mistakes," Reynolds said, "but we're going to run an honest, open union, with members involved at all levels of decision-making."
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