NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5825

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Subject: NEWS:Former CIA/FBI Head to Lead Teamsters
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Via The NY Transfer News Service ^ All the News that Doesn't Fit


             Former CIA/FBI head to oversee Teamsters

                           By Sam Marcy

The Bush administration, even more than its predecessors, takes
great pains to advertise abroad its supposed virtue in handling
labor relations. This is especially true in Third World countries
where the governments may be under siege by militant and
revolutionary workers. With its vast network of embassies
employing hundreds of publicity agents, the U.S. government
promotes a self-flattering fiction on how a democratic capitalist
country deals with labor-management struggles.

According to this benign image, free labor in the U.S. negotiates
with free management over the terms and conditions of employment
in a peaceable, calm manner. When disputes arise that cannot be
resolved through bargaining, the government occasionally offers
its services and intervenes in a benevolent manner. The result is
of course beneficial for both parties and serves the public
interest.

This tripartite relationship of labor, management and government
is a model that can only serve the best interests of all sides
concerned.

How ideal! How incredibly idyllic is this picture of the class
struggle in the United States!

Now a news bombshell involving labor relations in the U.S. has
been dropped. We wonder if the Voice of America or the diplomatic
network of labor experts have communicated it to the world. The
media have certainly failed to convey it adequately at home.

Over the objection of the largest union in this country, the
government has imposed upon it the former head of not one but two
dreaded secret police agencies. On Aug. 5, Manhattan Federal Judge
David Edelstein appointed William Webster to supervise and control
the 1.5 million members of the Teamsters, the strongest union in
North America. Webster directed the Federal Bureau of
Investigation from 1978 to 1987 and then moved over to be director
of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Webster still part of "the Company"

Even to use the word "former" is to underestimate the situation.
Webster is as deep in police and espionage work as he possibly can
be. No CIA director can disengage from "the Company" after
supposed retirement. While some secrets may be unearthed under the
Freedom of Information Act, the CIA legally is not required to
reveal its relationship with former employees, from the directors
to clerks and janitors. Such is the character of the elaborate
U.S. espionage network.

This writer knows of no other country on the entire planet where
the government, be it so-called democratic, fascist or otherwise,
has had the temerity to actually impose the former chief of its
spy network on an unwilling union. Scan the whole world and you
will not find a parallel to this utterly incredible and gross
interference into the internal affairs of a union.

None of the pre-World War II fascist governments--Franco's Spain,
Mussolini's Italy or even Hitler's Germany--dared to do this. But
the democratic government now headed by former CIA director George
Bush has done it, and only a sprinkle of short news reports have
found their way into the capitalist press.

Taking advantage of a Consent Decree signed by the Teamsters and
the government in 1989, Judge Edelstein appointed Webster to be
the "independent member" of the three-person Independent Review
Board that was created presumably to protect the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters from alleged corruption.

Behind the `corruption' charges

For decades, the government has intervened in this powerful union,
presumably because of corruption, but really because the IBT is
the strongest union in the country. At this time, the Teamsters
union shows every indication of growing stronger and more
militant.  Teamster intervention in the strike at Pittsburgh Press
in July stopped management's attempt to use scabs to produce and
deliver the newspaper.

The government first imposed the Independent Review Board on the
previous union leadership, which was supposed to be corrupt. The
newly elected leaders have nothing to do with the old officials.
They have a right to dispense with this review board, to reject
the whole thing and be free to bargain collectively without
interference from the government.

As the new Teamster president, Ron Carey, argues in a July 29 news
release, "We had a democratic election. The former leaders who
were accused of ties to organized crime have been removed. Now
it's time for the government to let the members and their elected
leaders run this union."

Instead of honoring this request, the government set itself up as
the permanent supervisor without the consent of those to be
supervised and in fact over their strong objection.

The union release makes the point that the government went back on
its word in the Consent Decree. It promised to scale back
participation in the Independent Review Board following a
democratic election, but has not done so. It instead proposes the
IRB be allowed to send representatives to attend any meeting of
any Teamster local union or joint council, though these meetings
involve discussions of sensitive issues related to contract
negotiations and political and legislative campaigns.

This is unwarranted interference in union affairs.

The government also wants to give its board representative
unlimited authority to spend the union's money on staff and
expenses. Fees and expenses billed to the union by court-appointed
overseers so far total nearly $27 million. The Consent Decree has
cost the union more than $10 million in legal fees and related
costs.

The government's representative is paid at $385 per hour. This
amounts to extortion. It's a form of unarmed robbery, with the
money coming out of the hides of the workers.

Teamsters object to Webster

The union also objected strenuously to Judge Edelstein's
appointment of Webster. It argued that Webster was part and parcel
of the law enforcement agencies and had no credentials that would
in any way qualify him to monitor, let alone supervise, such a
vast organization which more than anything else needs to deal with
its own affairs and needs no interference from the government.

Nonetheless, the judge went on to appoint him. This could scarcely
be done without the knowledge of the Bush administration.

Of course, for many years the U.S. public has been saturated with
all types of stories about corruption in the Teamsters. One after
another of the heads of the union were removed through government
intervention, indicted and convicted. As part of the Consent
Decree, 58 officials charged with offenses related to organized
crime were removed from the union, and another 77 officials have
been removed, resigned, were suspended, or signed agreements
relating to other offenses.

Of course, there has been corruption of union leaders. This is an
inseparable aspect of their relations with the capitalist
government and the employers, who all these many years have been
anything but paragons of virtue.

Corruption in business

This appointment of the former CIA director comes precisely at a
time when the U.S. government has been forced to disclose
corruption in the giant conglomerate Sears Roebuck & Co., which
has advertised itself all over the country as the place where
America shops. For years Sears had been robbing the American
public through its auto service centers where it deliberately
overcharged customers, thereby milking the public of undisclosed
millions of dollars. The findings of an 18-month investigation
forced the government to charge that this habitual practice by a
giant corporation is "nothing but systematic looting of the
public."

And what is the government doing about it? Has it moved to appoint
a former CIA or FBI director to supervise this vast
multibillion-dollar corporation? Has it even denounced the board
of directors or other executive officers? The company has not
denied the practice of cheating the customers. Its best defense is
that these were honest mistakes. Yet there is not even a remote
possibility that the government will crack down on Sears as it did
on the Teamsters.

In over a century of the existence of the labor movement and the
capitalist monopolies that exploit the workers, no large company
has ever had its principal officers indicted or convicted because
of scabbing, strike breaking, or illegal anti-union practices. Yet
these are commonplace.

Even in cases where, during strike-breaking operations, workers
have been killed, wounded, openly beaten up, or savagely
brutalized, as has happened so many times, the government never
punishes corporate directors. Would it ever think of taking the
corporate entity over and supervise it so no illegalities could be
committed in the future?

Ever day executive officers, directors, partners, and owners of
companies are convicted of innumerable crimes. Does the government
ever take it upon itself to take over an entire corporate entity?
At most there is a slap on the wrist, a fine here and there which
adds up to the equivalent of a small gratuity.

Corruption in government

For a government to bring corruption charges against the
Teamsters, it is only proper legally if the government has clean
hands. Yet who was in charge when the union was being taking over
for corruption? Attorney General Ed Meese, who later had to resign
under a cloud of corruption charges.

The issue in the Teamsters union at the moment is whether the
union is actually free to negotiate with management, with its
exploiters, freely and on equal terms. How can there be equality
if bargaining is overseen by a judicial process and all the judges
are appointed for life by a capitalist government? The Bush
administration alone has appointed 115 federal judges.

Yet all this is supposed to be taking place in an atmosphere of
free labor negotiating with free management, where the government
brooks no interference and merely acts as a benevolent outsider
that is occasionally called in by both sides to aid and assist a
peaceable solution.

Time was when the labor movement in the United States looked to
the government to help rather than hinder union organization and
collective bargaining. But this has been turned around. Union
representation elections are now supervised by a government that
is all too eager to wreck the trade union movement. There is
virtually no use for recourse to the capitalist government in
labor relations.

The labor movement must finally come to the unavoidable conclusion
that it cannot reliably look upon the capitalist government to
befriend it or to act as an unbiased arbitrator. The process of
collective bargaining in this stage of the tremendous growth of
monopoly capital has meant the fusion of the monopolies with the
capitalist state. Rare intervals when the capitalist government
truly took on the role of arbitrator, as was attempted by the
Franklin Roosevelt administration, have faded away. The Nixon,
Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations have all shown this.

Labor's remedy lies within

Labor's remedy lies within itself. The process of collective
bargaining must take on a realistic aspect.

The habitual and long-established form for a contract between
union and company, in which it is written that the company and the
union will collaborate and have an identity of interest, is a
false conception.

Their interests are diametrically opposed. The union struggles for
higher wages, better conditions, pensions, health care, and all
the rest. It is diametrically opposed to the interests of the
employers.

In a broad historical sense, what is the meaning of collective
bargaining in Marxist terms? It is to bargain over the rate of
exploitation. As long as the struggle is limited to this, the
unions are dependent on the vicissitudes of the capitalist cycle
of development.

No matter how hard they fight, in good times and bad, the workers'
struggle is limited to curbing the intensity of exploitation. But
the exploitation of labor by capital, the appropriation of the
unpaid portion of labor by the capitalists, remains the one
undeviating aspect of the relationship.

The struggle to limit the intensity of exploitation, to decrease
its rate, must necessarily continue in both good and bad times,
so-called. But the working class as a whole--in and out of the
trade unions, skilled and unskilled, full and part-time, employed
and unemployed--must fight not merely to limit exploitation, which
is inevitable under capitalism, but to abolish exploitation.

It is in this respect that the labor movement must take on a
thoroughgoing review of its political orientation. Labor must not
be an instrument in the hands of this or that capitalist party
that is dedicated to maintain the exploitation of labor under the
mask of friendly, peaceable negotiation in which the government
poses as a benevolent neutral.

The absurdity of this mask is exposed by the appointment of the
former CIA director to supervise the Teamsters! What is next?

It is not some obscure Big Brother that is looking over the
shoulders of the population, but this old, familiar yet monstrous
behemoth, which seeks to control every facet of life. Webster's
appointment is a dangerous development.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St.,
New York, NY 10010; "[e-mail]".)

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