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Sandy Pope, insurgent candidate for Teamster president
Submitted by mnadmin on Sun, 02/13/2011 - 23:15
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By filing nominating petitions signed by over 50,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Sandy Pope won recognition as an accredited candidate for general president in opposition to incumbent James Hoffa. In November, her candidacy was endorsed by cheering delegates at the convention of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (www.tdu.org). Teamsters elect international officers by direct membership vote. Submitting nominating petitions gives Pope the right to post campaign statements in the union magazine but does not guarantee that members will actually be able to vote for her. To become a real candidate listed on the ballot, she must be nominated by at least 5% of the delegates at the pre-election union convention. With direct access to the rank and file, especially with the backing of TDU, Pope was able to gather all those signatures and demonstrate wide support among the membership. But it is far more difficult to break through the hostile political machines in the locals and elect sympathetic convention delegates. Pope is president of Local 805 in New York. In an e-mail report on the TDU convention in CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/), Steve Early writes about Sandy Pope. Brief excerpts follow:
By Steve Early
....the grueling job of running against Hoffa this time has fallen to Tom [Leedham]'s running-mate last time, who received 100,000 votes in her 2006 bid to become Teamster secretary-treasurer. Alexandra (Sandy) Pope is a most unusual IBT presidential candidate in any election year. She grew up in a Boston suburb and became a labor activist in the mid-1970s after dropping out of Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. She got involved with AFSCME while working at a state mental hospital in Northampton. But soon Ohio -- one epi-center of TDU activity within freight, steel, and car-hauling companies -- lured her away from the public sector. In 1978, she moved to Cleveland, learned to drive a tractor-trailer, worked as a driver and dock worker, and helped organize a successful month-long strike by her fellow steel-haulers. In 1985, she became a full-time Teamster organizer for Local 407 in Cleveland, a TDU-friendly affiliate whose president later ran on Carey's slate.
During the Carey years, Pope served as a Teamster national staffer in the union's warehouse division. She worked with Tom Leedham and other reformers to build aggressive contract campaigns like the membership mobilization effort that culminated in the 1997 strike by 200,000 Teamsters at UPS. In 1999, she went to work for Local 805 in Queens, N.Y. and is now the president of that 1,200-member local. She's made headlines in recent years for leading Local 805s on-going effort to assist hundreds of immigrant workers exploited by Fresh Direct, a grocery provider that fills on-line orders from the Big Apple's many millionaire celebrity shoppers.
In TDU circles, Pope has her own hard-earned celebrity that her backers hope will translate into broader voter appeal among 300,000 female Teamsters. (How could the union's distaff side not embrace a union sister whose campaign bio reports that she is a proud mom with two kids, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, whose interests include kick boxing, running, and teaching labor studies?) Women have virtually no representation in the top ranks of the Teamsters today. Even at last weekend's [TDU] meeting of reformers, they were relatively few in number. When TDU's 54-year old, 5-foot-6 candidate took the stage to rally a roomful of much huskier male supporters, she received a rapturous reception and several standing ovations...
Pope didnt soft-soap the many serious problems facing the union, at the national or local level. Corporate America smells blood, she warned. They are moving in for the kill. Pensions, full-time jobs, affordable health care, and decent working conditions are all at risk. The backward steps Teamster negotiators have taken lately, on all these issues, are just making it harder to rebuild union strength, Pope charged. If we have all these members out there who are dissatisfied, how can we organize the unorganized? How can we mobilize members for the next contract if the one they have now is not being enforced by the union?....
Fred Gegare, third candidate for IBT president
In December, Fred Gegare filed petition signatures to qualify him as an accredited candidate for IBT president. His website did not report the total number submitted, but he would have needed a minimum of 34,000. He failed to qualify as an accredited candidate entitled to space in the unions magazine because the election officer invalidated several thousand of his nominating petitions. Nevertheless he remains a self-announced candidate and can gain a place on the ballot if nominated by 5% of the delegates to the coming union convention. With his entry, the contest becomes a three-way battle among Hoffa, the incumbent; Pope, endorsed by TDU; and Gegare, an incumbent vice-president who now breaks with the Hoffa administration. Hoffa runs with a full slate and Pope is on her own.
Gegare is proud of his Midwestern values acquired by a lifetime in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and of his service as a U. S. Marine. His campaign declarations, spelled out on his website, seem almost a mirror image of what has been promulgated by TDU and endorsed by Sandy Pope. He excoriates Hoffa as an ineffective leader who burdens the union with concessionary contracts, who is unable to stand up to employers or fight for our members, who treats public employees as second-class Teamsters, who breaks "all the rules of a fair and democratic election, who is out of touch with the members, who shifted power from members. And more of the same.
But Teamster activists on both sides know that there is a difference between the two, an important difference which explains why the two sides have not united in what would appear to be a common anti-Hoffa cause. For years, Sandy Pope and TDU have been outspoken on all these issues and in all that time have been organizing and campaigning in the ranks for change. Gegare has been part of the Hoffa administration and, at best, silent; so that his belated coming out obviously could be ephemeral campaign rhetoric.
One example: Gegare now faults Hoffa for effectively forcing out Ed Stier who tried to implement an anti-corruption program in the union. But whenever Stier needed active backing in the Teamsters international executive board against those who would undermine his program, Gegare was...silent.
Some of what Gegare writes may seem forthright but remains ambiguous. It is not always clear whether he is calling for reform or protesting against it! He writes that Hoffa endangers all the constitutional rights of Teamsters and the autonomy of local unions. What, precisely, does that accusation mean?
Is it an implied attack on Hoffa for not standing up militantly against the Teamsters Independent Review Board? The IRB has forced agents of organized crime out of the union. Gegare, it seems clear, is glad to see them go. But the IRB has done much more: it has expelled IBT leaders who it charged with simple, unorganized, conventional corruption and imposed trusteeships over locals dominated by ordinarily corrupt officials. Most of them were part of the IBT establishment; they were part of the combination which lifted Hoffa, Jr. out of obscurity and propelled him to the presidency. But when they see Hoffa standing by as they are cut down by the IRB, they feel betrayed by the man they put in power. When Robert Hogan's local was trusteed and he, himself, expelled from the IBT, he wrote, "...you never really stood up to the IRB when it was clear this power-hungry overreaching organization consistently exceeded its authority, trampled on due process, curbed free speech and overturned union democracy... If you persist in this course, other union members will also find their voice and undertake the effort to take back their union..."
Gegare faults Hoffa for surrounding himself with an army of high-priced lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants, a criticism which echoes charges by TDU and by Ed Stier in his parting message to the union. Gegare adds that Hoffa pushed aside Teamster members to hire castoffs from other unions and out-of-work college kids as organizers.
This theme, high-priced consultants, repeated over and again provides some insight into the array of competing forces in this election. Hoffa, realizing that he was chosen by the old Teamster establishment who assumed he would remain their malleable instrument, seems to seek time to cut free and create his own base of support. Hence all those consultants. Gegare's critique will appeal to all those who feel that Hoffa betrayed them to the IRB. He promises to replace the personal assistants and high-priced consultants with people like him[self], Teamsters who have worked their way up and want to serve their union. Sandy Pope and TDU pledge to arouse the rank and file and reform the union. As the campaign proceeds, these differences could fade or become clearer.
Rank-and-file group, reform group, slate or campaign
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