LABOR MARCHES LEFT, AND TRIPS

Is a similar fate in store for organized labor? Until last week, when a federal monitor barred Ron Carey from seeking reelection as president of the Teamsters, the revival of the trade-union movement was regarded as the most exciting development on the liberal-left in years. The new labor movement was younger, less white and male, more militant, and eager for audacious experiments. Furthermore, labor’s rebirth was ascribed to the movement’s openness to the energy and creative thinking of the political Left. Under the leadership of AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney, labor had shed its previous churlishness towards the advocates of radical causes. Marxists, the proponents of identity politics, third-party champions, environmentalists, the veterans of pro-Sandinista campaigns — all were kept at bay by Sweeney’s predecessors, George Meany and Lane Kirkland. But in the new configuration, the Left has achieved a position of influence it hasn’t enjoyed since the Popular Front era, when Communists controlled a number of unions and were a formidable presence in many others.

The Teamsters scandal has now placed the image of a reborn trade unionism in jeopardy. To the public, the case, with its revelations of money laundering and fraud, may suggest that the new labor movement is not much different from the old one. Carey’s misdeeds, however, are of a different character from the bribery, jury tampering, and racketeering that plagued the pre-reform Teamsters. His problems reflect the theme — all too familiar in recent Washington history — that if a crime was committed, it was for the good of humanity.

Carey was elected Teamsters president in 1991, after waging an aggressive reform campaign. His ascendancy was to have widespread repercussions. First, the Teamsters began to play a more active role in the AFL-CIO, from which the union had been expelled in 1957. (It was readmitted in 1988.) Second, the Republican party was deprived of its only significant labor beachhead. Where the Teamsters had often supported GOP candidates under Jimmy Hoffa, Roy Williams, and Jackie Presser, Carey guided the union towards endorsements of Democratic candidates, and he gave money and volunteers to the Clinton campaign and Democratic efforts to regain control of Congress.

Last, and most important, Carey was instrumental in ensuring Sweeney’s election as AFL-CIO president in 1995. In that contest, Sweeney was evenly matched with the federation’s secretary-treasurer, Thomas R. Donahue. The Teamsters were one of the last unions to throw their weight behind the Sweeney insurgency; a Carey endorsement of Donahue might have changed the result and the subsequent direction of the labor movement.

In the two years since Sweeney’s election, the new leadership’s signal achievement has been the transformation of labor’s public image. On more substantive matters, however, the record is mixed. Despite a ballyhooed, and quite expensive, campaign to organize the unorganized, labor still suffers from the pre-Sweeney pattern of membership decline in the private sector and only modest gains among public employees. At the same time, labor has stepped up the use of unorthodox tactics to win concessions from employers. Notable here is the corporate campaign, which entails a public-relations offensive to embarrass an employer, its directors, or large institutional investors.

On the political front, labor failed in 1996 to attain its major objective, the return of the House to Democratic control, despite massive spending and targeted attack ads against vulnerable GOP incumbents. Yet in the wake of the defeat of fast-track trade authority, labor’s clout with congressional Democrats has seldom been higher. Indeed, labor has instilled a measure of fear in Democratic politicians by aggressively attacking incumbents who break ranks on critical issues, trade measures in particular.

Despite his popularity with the AFL-CIO leadership, Carey was unable to consolidate control of his own union. In 1996, he was challenged for the presidency by James P. Hoffa, the son of the late, legendary leader and a much more imposing figure than other potential challengers among the Teamster old guard. Federal monitoring of Teamster affairs had turned the union into a paragon of internal democracy, and as the election date approached, Carey received soundings from the field indicating that victory was by no means assured. Desperate for funds, the Carey campaign made the fateful decision to look outside the union’s ranks.

While not always illegal, the involvement of nonmembers in union elections is regarded as a breach of one of trade unionism’s core unwritten rules. For an official of one union to involve himself in the election of another union is tantamount to a country’s interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign state. Public knowledge of the intervention can fatally compromise a union official who benefits from the outside help.

In Carey’s case, outside intervention entailed a scheme to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to his election coffers. Those involved range from top labor officials to the upper echelons of the Democratic party to the powerbrokers of the political Left.

According to the report of Kenneth Conboy, the federal monitor who issued the judgment against Carey, an elaborate plan was concocted in which funds from various sources were to be funneled to the Carey campaign through circuitous, and in some cases illegal, channels. During a two-week period in the fall of 1996, according to the report, nearly $ 900,000 in political contributions went from the Teamsters’ general fund to various cause organizations, all as part of the Carey campaign’s money-swap scheme. From the point of view of trade-union tradition and federal law, this is the most serious allegation: the transfer of Teamster funds — union-dues money, in other words — to Carey’s campaign. To camouflage the money’s ultimate destination, the plan in one instance apparently called for Teamster funds to be contributed to Citizen Action, a left-wing group, which would in turn make a contribution to the Carey campaign, in part by working through yet another channel, a telemarketing firm owned by Michael Ansara, a former Students for a Democratic Society leader. Here, then, was a classic, if maladroit, money- laundering operation.

A second pillar of the funding operation involved non-Teamster labor sources. According to the Conboy report, Carey determined that, having already given $ 475,000 to Citizen Action, he could not justify an additional $ 150,000 contribution. The money, therefore, was given to the AFL-CIO, which in turn made the donation to Citizen Action. Eventually, $ 100,000 of the money found its way back to Carey, while the rest remained in the bank accounts of Citizen Action and Ansara’s telemarketing firm.

In addition, officials from other unions raised money for Carey. Old-line unionists like Meany and Kirkland would never have involved themselves in another union’s internal affairs, no matter how seriously they regarded the outcome. But the new generation of labor leadership has fewer scruples in this area: Leaders of two of the AFL-CIO’s largest affiliates, Gerald McEntee of the State, County, and Municipal Employees and Andy Stern of the Service Employees, were both named as having raised money for Carey.

Finally, there was an abortive attempt to raise money for Carey through the Democratic party. Carey reportedly agreed to make a large contribution from the Teamster treasury to the Democratic National Committee and the 1996 Clinton campaign, in return for a contribution to his own election campaign. Party officials reportedly tried hard to accommodate this arrangement. They went so far as to ask a wealthy Filipino woman, whose contributions to the Clinton campaign were disallowed because of her status as a non-citizen, to give the money to Carey instead. She did so, but this money, too, was returned, reportedly because the woman was an employer, and employer contributions to union elections are illegal.

Most of the information about this scandal has come from the guilty pleas of three consultants to Carey who are said to have masterminded the money- transfer scheme: Jere Nash, Martin Davis, and Michael Artsara. The three are prominent members of the progressive political network: Nash founded Common Cause in Mississippi, while Davis has been involved in numerous liberal-left causes through his direct-mail operation.

Ansara’s pedigree is the most intriguing of the three. He was one of the best-known radicals at Harvard during the late 1960s and gained notoriety as the organizer of the action in which student radicals cornered and thoroughly menaced Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In fact, Ansara was regarded as a “moderate” within SDS. He never went underground or advocated the mindless violence favored by the Weathermen. Instead, he aligned himself with a faction known as Revolutionary Youth Movement II, a group that, among other things, advocated a biracial alliance of white radicals and the Black Panthers. Ansara also worked for Ramparts magazine, where his major project was a massive and ineptly argued study of the CIA, never published.

Ansara was something of an anomaly within the New Left in that he not only talked about the importance of “winning over the masses” to the antiwar cause, but actually made a try at recruiting the working class to a left perspective through grass-roots organizing campaigns. His first vehicle was an organization called People First, which he ran out of Dorchester, a working-class community to which he moved after Harvard. People First later metastasized into Massachusetts Fair Share, a grass-roots operation that concentrated on issues like utility rates and rent control.

In these early projects, Artsara was often joined by another former student radical, Ira Arlook. Arlook’s name has figured prominently in the Teamster scandals because of his role as director of Citizen Action, the organization at the center of the money-laundering operation. Until it suffered the taint of the Teamsters case, Citizen Action boasted an impressive record as the organizational center for progressive causes. The group is said to have spent $ 7 million towards the defeat of congressional Republicans last year, a huge sum for a relatively unknown organization. Arlook, Ansara, and other leftists whose names have surfaced in the course of the Teamster investigation can no longer be said to occupy the political margins. They have matured into skilled political technicians who are adept in the use of the latest developments in telemarketing, vote targeting, polling, advertising, and other modern electioneering techniques. They are also effective at mobilizing human beings — one useful talent learned in their radical youth.

New Leftists like Ansara and Arlook once regarded the labor movement as a retrograde institution, a rest home for incompetent white men, a bulwark of the Cold War. The feeling was mutual: Labor leaders like Meany and Kirkland regarded the New Left as an enemy and worked assiduously to keep leftists out of the labor movement and to reduce their influence within the Democratic party.

Labor’s suspiciousness continued through the 1980s, even as the AFL-CIO moved somewhat to the left, promoting tax-and-spend legislation and government regulation at a time when the Democratic party was moving to the center on domestic issues. The great dividing line continued to be foreign policy. Although fissures had developed within labor over Central America, labor continued to support an anti-Soviet policy and a robust defense. Within the Democratic party, labor was the sole organized voice for a hawkish foreign policy. The end of the Cold War thus removed an important obstacle from the Left’s path. Today, unionism’s foreign-policy objectives center on trade protectionism and the restriction of multinational corporations, not on the trials of unions in Poland or Latin America.

The Left has also benefited from the disintegration of the sectarian organizations that once dominated progressive politics. To be sure, John Sweeney made a public point about the direction of new labor by joining Democratic Socialists of America, founded by the late Michael Harrington, a splinter of the old Socialist party. Generally, however, today’s labor progressives spurn identification with various left-wingery. They operate not so much as a movement as a network. The progressives who increasingly dominate labor staff positions are linked by friendship, marriage, and past causes to other progressives in the labor movement, in activist groups like Citizen Action, in the Democratic party, and in the Clinton administration itself. To take just one example, Karen Nussbaum, head of the newly created Women’s Department of the AFL-CIO, is married to Ira Arlook.

One interesting member of the network is Barbara Zack Quindel, the woman who served as the first federal monitor in the Teamster election. Quindel, it turns out, was active in leftist causes in Massachusetts at the same time Ansara and Arlook were involved in their community-organizing projects, and she was later active in insurgent union politics in Detroit. Quindel is today a member of the New Party, a labor-oriented, somewhat radical organization that has had electoral success in several communities. Among New Party officeholders is Barbara Quindel’s husband, Roger, a county supervisor in Milwaukee. A number of unions have given contributions to the New Party, including, it is reported, the Teamsters.

Understandably enough, Quindel’s history did not inspire confidence in the fairness of the federal election-monitoring process. Hoffa’s people claimed that Quindel and her monitor staff drawn, for the most part, from leftist circles — consistently favored Carey, who won only narrowly in 1996. They were especially furious that Quindel postponed her decision to void Carey’s victory until after the Teamsters had won the UPS strike. Quindel removed herself from the Teamsters case this past September, after her ties to the New Party were revealed, and she was replaced by Kenneth Conboy, who issued last week’s report disqualifying Carey.

As the story of the Carey funding scheme has unfolded, some on the left have made semi-hysterical predictions that the affair will lead to the collapse of the project of recasting labor along more openly progressive lines. Clearly, there will be casualties before the case is finished. Already, Citizen Action has closed its national headquarters because of a fund shortage that resulted directly from the Teamsters scandal. Ron Carey faces the possibility of indictment. Another figure facing the prospect of criminal prosecution is Rich Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer and the Left’s favorite union leader, who has been linked to the money-laundering operation by the consultants. Trumka was elected to the labor federation’s number-two position after serving as a reform president of the Mineworkers, where he established a reputation for militancy and for his tough, smart, and very left-wing staff. Trumka’s mineworker team eventually gravitated to other labor entities, including the AFL-CIO and, especially, the Teamsters. Indeed, former mineworker staffers filled many of the Teamsters’ top administrative positions, a source of resentment among longtime Teamster officials.

But it is unlikely that the current troubles will divert labor from its present course. Although the direction taken by labor since Sweeney’s election has its detractors, most trade unionists seem willing to continue in it, especially with labor now the single most influential force within the Democratic party. Sweeney himself is guarded, even sphinx-like, in his pronouncements. In his years as president of the Service Employees, he hired many leftists to work as organizers and political operatives, but kept the union squarely within the labor mainstream on issues of institutional importance. He may follow a similar course as AFL-CIO chief. On the other hand, the loss of the Teamsters, coupled with a possible change of leadership in the Laborers’ Union, where President Arthur Cola, a Sweeney supporter, is under federal pressure to step down, could affect the balance of power in any future internal struggle. Indeed, a test could come rather soon if Trumka is forced to resign as AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer. (Trumka has pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which until recently was cause for automatic expulsion from the federation.)

There is also the question of what, precisely, constitutes the Left’s agenda today. The collapse of communism has removed the albatross of anti- Americanism from the Left’s shoulders. There is no identifiable leftist program for the remaking of the American system beyond a generalized support for an increased role for the state and limits on the power and mobility of capital. If the Left has an overarching objective, it would seem to be at the level of political strategy, where it is working to forge an organic link between the unions, the activist community, and the liberal wing of the Democratic party, forestalling the party’s complete Clintonization. With a more-or-less unified labor movement providing the money and manning the phone banks, this coalition could put real muscle behind the presidential campaign of Dick Gephardt. Or if Gephardt failed to catch fire, a more radical alternative, such as Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone.

But if the past is any guide, serious problems are certain to emerge in the labor-left alliance over the long haul. In his guilty plea, Jere Nash asserted that, until his involvement in the Carey campaign, he had followed a code of political ethics in which the concept that the ends justify the means played no part. While this may be true of Nash, it is certainly not true of the Left generally. Whether of the old or the new variety, the Left has treated the institutions of bourgeois society with disdain, including the traditions of organized labor. It is to the cause, not the institution, that the Left attaches its loyalties. Many of labor’s bright new staffers could just as easily pursue their goal of rearranging the American social order through Greenpeace, People for the American Way, or NOW. The history of labor’s relations with the Left follows a distinct pattern, in which radicals bring vitality and creative energy in the short term, but inevitably demand that labor adopt an adversarial stance towards the American system. There is no reason to doubt that the pattern will repeat itself.

Arch Puddington works for Freedom House in New York. He was executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy.