Out with Crooks & Gangsters

In the Roulette Room of Miami Beach's Monte Carlo Hotel one morning last week, the leaders of big labor closed in on the chief of their biggest affiliate, hefty, bullet-headed Dave Beck, president of the 1,400,000 Teamsters. With the Auto Workers' Walter Reuther looking over his shoulder, A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany laid it on the line: "Look, Dave, you brought this on yourselves. We wouldn't have had to take this up now if you guys hadn't refused to testify."

What the Teamsters had brought on themselves and on unified labor in general was an all-out drive by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council to rid its house of crooks and gangsters before Congress acts to expose them. Chief provocation was the Teamsters' recent defiance of the Senate 1) by refusing to cooperate with a subcommittee inquiring into labor racketeering, and 2) by assuring all officers that the union would not punish them for pleading the Fifth Amendment if called to testify (TIME, Feb. 4)--a defiance which contributed to the creation by the Senate last week of a special, well-financed ($350,000) committee to make a full-scale study of labor corruption.

Out for a Drive. Minutes after Meany's outburst, the 29-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. council, with Dave Beck the sole dissenter, adopted a new and revolutionary code on government investigations into labor racketeering. Its point: although every individual has the constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment if called to .testify, union officers who take the Fifth have no right to hold their jobs. The policy is now binding on all A.F.L.-C.I.O. affiliates and locals under threat of expulsion.

This done, the council got down to cases on the matter of self-policing. With Dave Beck absent (explained Beck's aides: Mrs. Beck was ill, and Dave decided to take her out for a drive), it unanimously adopted a tough ethical-practices code. Highlights:

Welfare Funds. No labor official on full-time union pay may also receive fees for services as a union fund administrator or have "ties to his own personal advantage" with insurance brokers or other outside agencies doing business with the welfare plan. Moreover, all such funds must be tightly safeguarded by complete records and proper audits.

Corrupt Practices. There is "no room" in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. for any officer "commonly known" to be "a crook, a racketeer, a Communist or a fascist." Says the code: "A union need not wait upon a criminal conviction" to fire such officials.

Conflict of Interest. Like any public servant, the union official may invest his personal funds as he pleases--as long as he is "scrupulously careful to avoid any actual or potential conflict of interest," e.g., by owning a "substantial business interest in any business with which his union bargains collectively," by accepting "kickbacks."

At week's end Beck abruptly quit the convention to go home to Seattle. Behind him he left signs that the Teamsters were not going to take the code lying down. Detroit's Jimmy Hoffa, Beck's chief rival and heir presumptive, blandly announced a drastic (from 400,000 to 25,000) cut in Teamster representation in the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Industrial Union Department, with a resulting $90.000 cut in dues payments. And Hoffa Ally John J. O'Rourke, president-elect of the Teamsters' New York Joint Council, made an announcement even more ominous to labor unity. New York's 125,000 truckers, he declared, would feel free to cross picket lines thrown by union leaders "objectionable" to the Teamsters, thus making it tougher if not impossible for the Teamsters' enemies to win their strikes.

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