A subpoena by the board that monitors the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters charges that an employee of the union’s Washington headquarters submitted falsified receipts for personal expenses, mainly Uber rides, to the union’s official credit card.
The Teamsters are one of the many unions seeking to unionize the ride-sharing service.
The filing was made on Jan. 16 at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Daniel Healy, assistant counsel to the chief investigator for the Teamsters’ Independent Review Board. The board has monitored the union for the Justice Department since 1992 under a court-ordered consent decree.
The court filing reveals that the investigator started a probe into a Teamsters official for apparently spending union funds on personal items and not properly documenting them.
“Among other things, she frequently used the [Teamsters credit] card to pay for Uber rides. However, the receipts she submitted to the [Teamsters] do not match the format of Uber receipts issued to other Uber riders in the Washington, D.C., area and other cities,” the subpoena stated. The subpoena was first reported by Politico. A Teamsters representative could not be reached for comment.
The Teamsters have fought to unionize the ride-sharing service, which competes with more traditional taxi services that are often unionized. Most of the District’s taxi drivers are Teamsters members. Uber’s drivers are usually classified as independent contractors, though, making traditional organizing impossible. The Teamsters and other unions have been pushing local governments to pass ordinances that would make unionizing the drivers easier.
They union also has mounted PR campaigns against the service. However, as the subpoena shows, even union officials have often found the company to be more convenient than traditional taxis. The Washington Examiner observed an official with the Communications Workers of America call Uber following its December endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
The subpoena is directed to Uber, not the Teamsters, and calls on it to produce “specified records” to determine whether the receipts the official submitted were genuine.
The card user is not identified in the court filing, but an attachment to the filing requests Uber provide records relating to charges and rides by a person named Nicole Brener-Schmitz. A search of the Teamsters website indicates that she is with the union’s department of field and political action.
