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In 2000, Bill Clinton spoke at a LRA event.
Front pg. photo in the NYT had a smiling Clinton and Hoffa, Jr.
Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 1:50
PM
Subject: [PEN-L:15004] Teamsters, Hoffa
Jr. and Rank Opportunism On The Left
I know that this e-mail
will create some controversy, but I think that it is
a political issue
that needs a full airing.
In the last few weeks on LBO-Talk, someone
made a comment, in passing, that
suggested that Hoffa had not been such a
bad leader of the Teamsters. I
disagreed, but it didn't seem like it was
more than a general impression on
the part of the person or an issue of
enough importance to pursue. In the
last few days, however, another poster
has sent to a number of left listservs
a "report" on the Teamsters' recent
Convention, which purports to demonstrate
that the Teamsters under Hoffa
are the most democratic and most successful of
all American unions. Before
this "report" becomes a basis for the
verification of vague impressions,
it is necessary to take a deeper look at
what is going on here.
The report forwarded on the Teamsters was written by Greg Tarpinian of
the
Labor Research Association, a group which has been a primary front
group of
the Communist Party with regard to its labor movement work. It
continues a
pro-Hoffa perspective that the LRA and the CPUSA has held
since prior to the
election of Hoffa.
Why would the CPUSA take a
position so contrary to the rank-and-file movement
in the Teamsters Union?
The answer is appallingly simple. The founders and
leaders of Teamsters
for a Democratic Union are, for the most part,
Trotskyists, affiliated
with the journal _Labor Notes_ and the organization
Solidarity. Their
Trotskyist roots go back decades to the original
International Socialists
group in the US. The CPUSA would rather team up with
Hoffa Jr. then with a
rank-and-file group led by Trotskyists.
Now, I do want to make it
clear that there are criticisms one can make of how
TDU has conducted the
struggle within the Teamsters, and on other occasions,
I have made them
here on LBO-Talk. But it is one thing to criticize from a
position of
solidarity with the efforts to democratize and cleanup the
Teamsters; an
entirely different thing to join with those who oppose
democratization and
clean unionism.
There is no question but that Hoffa Jr. has been
forced to make some major
concessions on issues of union democracy, as the
considerably more accurate
report by David Moberg in _In These Times_
indicates.
[http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2518/moberg2518.html] No doubt,
too, TDU
rhetoric about the imminent collapse of the Teamsters under Hoffa
Jr. is
hyperbolic. But there also is no question that every corrupt
Teamsters'
official and every organized crime element within the union
supported Hoffa
Jr. in the last election, and will do so again. There is
no question that,
whatever their faults, the future of union democracy and
clean unionism in
the Teamsters lies, for the immediately foreseeable
future, with the TDU. It
is rank opportunism of the worst sort that LRA
and the CPUSA has teamed up
with Hoffa Jr.
Leo Casey
United
Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York
10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no
progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation
are men who
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without
thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
waters.
-- Frederick Douglass
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