In the Teamsters Union: What’s the dollar cost of cruel beatings?

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The Teamsters Independent Review Board has been doing a scrupulous job of policing the union for corruption and expelling characters with organized crime connections. But some Teamster reformers feel that the Board has been slow in dealing with the kind of offenses against union democracy that resist evaluation in dollars, like intimidation, election fraud, and blacklisting. Which makes reports of the Board's investigation into events in Local 82 (in TDU's Convoy-Dispatch) of special interest.

Local 82 union representatives, according to C-D, stand accused of vicious beatings of members who protested against the destruction of the local's contract defenses of job seniority.

Local 82 represents trade show employees in Boston. There seems to be something about the trade show industry, perhaps its intermittent seasonal employment system, that lends itself to manipulation and corruption. (Similar problems in New York and Chicago.) The union's trade show contracts offer a measure of job security to members by providing a fair system of job referrals based on seniority. But the errant officials, says C-D, want to get rid of those seniority guarantees so that they can hand out the best jobs to their most dependable cronies. When a meeting was scheduled to vote on ratifying a proposed contract with a major employer, two union enforcers and a police officer allowed only members loyal to the administration to enter the hall. The contract was ratified, minus the seniority language.

Local 82 member Jimmy Lee charged that the day after he had filed a seniority grievance, he was assaulted by John Perry, the IBT Trade Show Director. In June, Perry faced hearings on the charges in state court. The assault charge against Perry was not an isolated incident, according to C-D, but part of a pattern. To bolster his regime, Perry had recruited one Joseph Burhoe into the local; his "extensive rap sheet," reports C-D, "includes a conviction for armed robbery." Burhoe now faces new criminal charges, accused of beating Eddie Flaherty, a critic of Perry, so badly that he was left unconscious and hospitalized; he left the industry in fear.

Commenting on reports that many workers with a criminal past had been employed at the Boston Convention Center, Perry asked, "We got a lot of guys in trouble. What's wrong with us trying to provide them with jobs? To which David Levin, of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, replied, "Nothing... The trouble is not anyone's past criminal record but the criminal behavior that is happening right now."

According to TDU, the IRB is investigating. "If the Hoffa administration is serious about acting against corruption and protecting Teamster contracts," comments C-D, "they will not wait on the IRB to take action."

At the Teamsters IRB

When IRB investigators charged that Peter Innaurato of Philadelphia Local 107 was associating with a member of the La Cosa Nostra family, the review board referred the case to President Hoffa, but he turned it back to the board for trial. His decision not to process the charge in the union does not necessarily display any deference to organized crime figures but does demonstrate his inability to act in such cases. In most likelihood, the evidence against Innaurato is gathered by FBI and/or other law enforcement authorities who would not appear before a union committee but who are free to testify before the IRB, an agency appointed by a Federal judge.