Truckin' Along

New boss for a defiant union

The presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters may well be the most powerful union post in the U.S., but it has its hazards. Two of the last three Teamster bosses, Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, were sent to prison on corruption charges. After his release, Hoffa vanished, presumably rubbed out by the Mob. Says Jackie Presser, a Teamster vice president: "That chair isn't a throne, it's an electric chair." His point:

the leader who fails to attack corruption fast enough gets indicted by the Government; the chief who moves too fast falls under the guns of the gangsters.

All of that has never kept an eager group of Teamster leaders from coveting the office. For one thing, the power, pay and perks are the best in the entire labor movement. And if the latest in a long series of congressional reports of the Teamsters is correct, the cash skimmed illegally off the tables of Las Vegas casinos can also sweeten a Teamster president's job.

Thus it seemed fitting that the Teamsters met last week in Las Vegas, where delegates elected Roy L. Williams, 66, a career union official from Kansas City, to a five-year term as their new president.

The union did so in a rousing voice vote of acclamation even though Williams, who has beaten prison despite three federal indictments, now faces a fourth. He is accused of attempting to bribe Nevada Senator Howard Cannon in 1979 to delay deregulation of the trucking industry.

Although the indictment cast a dark shadow over the convention and its 2,200 delegates, the issues were rarely confronted directly. Presiding as the interim president in place of the late Frank Fitzsimmons, whose subdued public leadership had offended neither the Justice Department nor the Mob, Williams scoffed at his accusers. He dismissed the latest indictment as "a damned lie" and the congressional report as "so wrong and so false" that he need not respond to it.

The convention's mood of defiance was reinforced by, of all people, Ronald Reagan. In a message videotaped at the White House after Williams was indicted, the President said to the delegates: "As a former union president, nothing makes me prouder than to work together with my union brothers toward a shared goal.

I hope to be in team with the Teamsters."

The union was the only major labor organization to support Reagan's bid for the presidency against Jimmy Carter.

Most of the Teamsters' 2 million constituents--the largest union membership in the nation--seem to worry little about corruption or links to organized crime.

Even if they did, the union's highly authoritarian procedures stifle dissent effectively. Still, some 30 reformist delegates, members of a group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union, braved unrelenting hostility from their fellow delegates. They nominated a candidate for president, Peter Camarata, a Detroit dockworker. They proposed the formation of an independent ethics committee, a limitation on the salaries of the top Teamster officials, and re-election of those officials by the entire membership, not merely convention delegates.

The reformers failed, of course, to secure passage of any of their proposals. Sometimes when they went to argue their case, a band of husky Teamsters from Ohio, in matching white T shirts, followed in a menacing way. Instead of limiting salaries, the delegates awarded Williams a $69,000 annual pay increase, bringing his salary to $225,000. That is more than twice the salary of Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO.

Kirkland, in one of his first moves as George Meany's successor, invited the Teamsters to rejoin the AFL-CIO, which had expelled the Teamsters in 1957 for corruption. Bringing the Teamsters back into the fold would yield the federation $380,000 a year in new dues and would ban the Teamsters from raiding other unions. But the Teamsters' executive board last week did not even ask the convention to consider the reunification overture.

As for the Teamsters' unsavory reputation, one AFL-CIO official summed up the situation accurately, if a bit cynically:

"I don't think Roy Williams worries about respectability one bit. If he can get the President of the United States to address his convention on videotape, he doesn't have to worry."

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