Teamster activist makes presidential ballot

IT'S OFFICIAL--Sandy Pope will be on the ballot for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Pope, who is running with the support of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the union's opposition movement, was nominated at the Teamsters' July convention in Las Vegas.

This may seem like the normal democratic process, but not in the Teamsters. Pope submitted petitions signed by more than 50,000 members just to be able to have her name placed in nomination.

She had to win the votes of 5 percent of the delegates to gain her place on the October ballot. This would have been easy except that most of the delegates were local officers, many of them indebted to the incumbent administration. Others just felt threatened by any reform candidate.

When she accepted the nomination, Sandy Pope began by telling the delegates:

Our union is at a turning point. We can meet the challenges ahead. But we need stronger leadership. That's why I'm running for general president. Wall Street has driven the economy over a cliff. Corporations and corporate politicians want to make unions a scapegoat. They know that the union movement is the only thing standing in the way of unchallenged corporate control.

She closed with a stirring call to action: "The fight for our future starts now. We're going to win this election the same way we're going to rebuild our union--by organizing Teamster to Teamster. The future is ours to win--let's build it together."

TEAMSTER RANK-and-file leaders across the country know that Sandy Pope is a serious candidate. But the mainstream media is stuck on the same clichéd story--a woman running for president of the supposedly ultra-macho Teamsters. They are more interested in her black belt in Tae Kwan Do than the crisis in the union that left James R. Hoffa, the hereditary Teamster president, in serious trouble.

The Teamsters used to have virtually every company that delivers freight in the U.S. under contract in one giant Master Freight Agreement. Today, there are almost no union freight companies left in the country. There is only one large employer remaining in the Master Freight Agreement.

UPS is the country's largest employer of Teamsters. The company is on pace to make record profits this year, but as Pope told the convention, "UPS Teamsters are getting hammered." Production harassment is rampant, full-time jobs are being eliminated in favor of cheaper part-timers, and UPS is subcontracting work to non-union employers.

Pope says that Hoffa "didn't come up through the ranks, he rode to office on his father's last name." She compares her 33 years in the Teamsters to Hoffa's history as a labor lawyer who never worked a Teamster job or was even elected as a local officer.

As Pope told The Nation"I started as a selector in a food warehouse. I hauled steel. I hauled sand. I hauled freight. I drove across country. I drove city. I've loaded trucks." Pope says that when she was a freight driver, "My handle was 'Troublemaker,' and I earned it." She likes to joke about challenging Hoffa to a truck-driving competition.

Steve Early, author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old? who has been writing about Teamster reformers since 1977, said in an interview that Pope has a realistic chance to win.

Hoffa is running for re-election, but there is another candidate for general president besides Pope: Fred Gegare, a member of the Teamster executive board who was, until recently, a Hoffa ally. Gegare is expected to split the Hoffa vote.

Early believes Pope can win by building on the 35 percent of the vote that TDU candidates have won in the past. He says she will also need support from some disillusioned local officers to help her tap into the strong anti-Hoffa sentiment among members.

If Sandy Pope is their next general president, Teamster members can begin a long, hard fight to rebuild Teamster power. Rank-and-file members of other unions will gain hope that they, too, can reclaim their union. It would be one of the best days U.S. labor has seen in a long time.