Federal government eases oversight of union with dark history

The United States Department of Justice will end 25 years of supervision of the Teamsters, a labor union once infamous for its alleged mafia ties. On Wednesday, Preet Bharara, the U.S. district attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked a federal court to begin rolling back the legal settlement requiring such federal oversight.

Federal administrators have been keeping tabs on the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters since the union agreed to settle in the face of a federal racketeering case. In 1989, union leadership signed a consent decree allowing the government to review internal management decisions and alter the process for electing union leadership. Hundreds of Teamsters with alleged ties to the mob were suspended or expelled from the union.

The district attorney’s request to wind down the terms of the consent decree amounts to an admission that “corrupt elements have been driven from the Teamsters,” union president James P. Hoffa said in a Wednesday statement.

“By agreeing to end the lawsuit, the government acknowledges that there has been significant success in eliminating corruption from within the Teamsters,” said Hoffa.

The Teamsters union has a long and storied history of corruption, stretching all the way back to when its predecessor, the Team Driver’s International, was formed in 1899, according to Penn State Harrisburg historian David Witwer.

“The union leaders ended up forming combinations with the employers in exchange for union contracts,” Witwer, the author of Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union, told Al Jazeera. “What you get is a system where, unlike lots of other unions, the Teamsters are not dependent on the members for organizing. They’re dependent on the employer."

By the 1930s, organized crime had seized control of leadership in many of the union locals. With the election of Jimmy Hoffa, who allegedly had close ties to the mafia, to lead the Teamsters in 1958, the mob suddenly had influence over the national leadership.

“He used their support to become the national president of the Teamsters and then essentially gave the mafia access to the Teamsters’ pension funds,” said Witwer. “And then they could use that access to finance particular ventures like the ownership of Las Vegas casinos."

In 1988, U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani brought a lawsuit against the Teamsters under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, alleging that union leadership had been party to extortion, misuse of funds and even shootings. It is that lawsuit which resulted in the consent decree a year later.

In the intervening years, a handful of other current and former leaders in various Teamsters locals have been convicted on racketeering charges. A government-mandated change in union rules took the process of choosing a national president out of the hands of local union heads and turned it over to all Teamsters in a nationwide popular vote.

In the aftermath of that rules change, James P. Hoffa — Jimmy Hoffa’s son —ascended to the presidency. But the new voting rules also strengthened the power base of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), an internal opposition group founded in part as a response to internal corruption.

Assuming a federal judge agrees to the joint request of the Teamsters and the U.S. attorney to lift the consent decree, it will be another five years before it is totally phased out. The new leadership of the Teamsters has vowed to continue strict internal oversight even without the supervision of the federal government.

“[W]e will remain ever vigilant in protecting our members and our union from anyone who would try and corrupt our union or do harm to our members,” said Hoffa in his Wednesday statement.