A woman running the Teamsters? What is the world coming to?

Steven Greenhouse has an article in The New York Times about the Teamsters:

Sandy Pope acknowledges straightaway that she faces an uphill battle; she is the first woman to run for the presidency of the Teamsters union, and she is running against a three-term incumbent, James P. Hoffa, who has the most famous last name in American labor. But Ms. Pope, president of the Teamsters Local 805 in Queens since 2005, insists that she can pull off an upset. She argues that the rank and file are tired of Mr. Hoffa and fed up with contracts packed with concessions. “The anger among the membership is at an all-time high,” said Ms. Pope, who ran unsuccessfully for the union’s number two spot, secretary-treasurer, in 2006 as part of a dissident slate that lost by a ratio of nearly two to one. “The members are much more willing to look for change than five years ago.”
Although the mob influence that once pervaded the Teamsters has been largely rooted out, thanks to two decades of federal supervision and scores of indictments and expulsions, the union and its 1.4 million members face other problems. Membership has steadily declined, as nonunion trucking companies have taken over much of the market, and the economic downturn has made it hard to negotiate sizable wage increases or in some cases, to avoid contract concessions.
Ms. Pope’s campaign will move into a higher gear when she expects to be officially nominated as a candidate for the presidency at the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas. A third candidate, Fred Gegare, a former supporter of Mr. Hoffa and leader of a Teamsters local in Wisconsin, is also expected to be nominated. The members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are scheduled to vote this fall.
Like many political candidates, Ms. Pope hopes to capitalize on an anti-incumbent fever that has been fueled by the weak economy, and she says she thinks the three-person race will give her an edge as the person least identified with the old guard and a problem-plagued status quo.
But David L. Gregory, a professor of labor law at St. John’s University, questioned Ms. Pope’s chances. “I would suspect Hoffa has a lock on the presidency,” he said. “He seems to have solidified his base.”
Ms. Pope, who is affiliated with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a powerful faction that has long opposed Mr. Hoffa, said she wanted to make the Teamsters a more dynamic, more combative union that energizes its rank and file far more. But even if she loses, she said, she is confident that her campaign will improve the union by propagating her vision and prodding Mr. Hoffa to adopt some of it. She said she would have the locals do far more organizing, and would move money from headquarters to the locals to pay for it. She also intends to push locals to cooperate more to increase their clout when negotiating with regional employers. Ms. Pope said that Mr. Hoffa had not been nearly aggressive or tough enough in bargaining or organizing. She criticized several contracts negotiated in recent years, especially the one with YRC Worldwide, the biggest unionized long-haul trucking company, which included a fifteen percent pay cut, and exempted the company from making pension contributions for nearly two years. Union leaders justified that as an effort to keep the company out of bankruptcy and save more than 25,000 jobs, and the union received some equity in YRC in exchange.
Ms. Pope, 54, is far from the traditional image of a burly male Teamsters president. She is five-foot-six, weighs 135 pounds, and has blond-streaked sandy brown hair that falls past her shoulders. A member of the union since 1978, she drove trucks in the Midwest for years, hauling steel and delivering auto parts, and obtained a black belt in tae kwan do to help protect herself.
Supporters say she is a smart, savvy operator and a charismatic speaker. And she is plenty tough, having faced sexual harassment as a driver and a lot of boos when she ran for secretary-treasurer. “I’ve had to take a lot of guff,” Ms. Pope said. “Driving a truck is a hard job. It’s hard to drive in snow and ice in Cleveland and Buffalo, going to places you don’t know and making deliveries in the middle of the night.” She recalled arriving, covered in grease, to truck stops that had only men’s showers, often asking a waitress to stand guard while she washed up.
Still, Mr. Hoffa’s forces say that they are hardly worried about Ms. Pope. “She can wish upon a prayer of a rainbow,” said John Murphy, a Teamsters vice president for the Eastern Region who is a member of Mr. Hoffa’s slate. “She’s very critical, but she doesn’t offer any solutions. She doesn’t have a rationale to justify her campaign. She’s a vanity candidate.” Mr. Murphy said Mr. Hoffa, who has led the union since 1999, after Ron Carey was forced out from the presidency in a campaign-finance scandal, had done an excellent job. “By any measure, what Jim Hoffa has achieved over the past dozen years has been quite remarkable,” said Mr. Murphy, whom the Hoffa campaign put forward as its spokesman. “He’s unified the organization. He’s restructured the finances. He’s built up a solid strike fund, and he’s stepped up our organizing efforts.”
Under Mr. Hoffa, the union has organized 30,000 private school bus drivers, monitors, and mechanics, and 7,500 ramp workers at Continental Airlines.
Mr. Murphy said Mr. Hoffa was negotiating the best contracts he could in tough times and pointed to the flexibility shown in the rescue of YRC and the jobs there. “It’s in times like these that the value of your union shows through,” Mr. Hoffa and Ken Hall, his running mate and a candidate for secretary-treasurer, say in their campaign literature. “Your Teamsters union leadership is working tirelessly, at every level possible, to protect Teamster jobs and benefits and to balance the scales that have tipped so far toward Wall Street and away from Main Street.”
The Hoffa campaign, in a Web site called truthaboutsandypope.com, accuses Ms. Pope of running down the assets from her local to less than half of the $1.75 million it had in 2005, saying she has spent extravagantly going to Teamster meetings around the country.
Ms. Pope calls the Hoffa criticisms hypocritical, saying she goes to the same meetings that most Teamster local presidents do. She said the main reason that her local’s assets have dropped is that she has spent so much trying to organize nonunion workers, especially 900 at FreshDirect, the grocery delivery company. In an unusual strategy, Ms. Pope is not fielding a full slate of two dozen candidates for national and regional positions, but is instead running alone. She said many union officials backed her or wanted to work with her, but they were reluctant to join a slate because they worried that Mr. Hoffa and his allies would retaliate, a fear that Mr. Hoffa’s supporters say is unjustified. Ms. Pope said she hoped to again see the Teamsters become the nation’s most powerful union, as it was in the 1950s under Mr. Hoffa’s father, Jimmy Hoffa. He was hugely popular among drivers, but was convicted of jury tampering and fraud, serving time in federal prison before disappearing in 1975.
Michael H. Belzer, an associate professor of industrial relations at Wayne State University, said it would not be easy for Ms. Pope or anyone else to reverse the union’s decline. He noted that the Teamsters once represented eighty percent of the nation’s long-haul truck drivers, but it now represents around only eight percent, as many unionized firms have been pushed out of business by industry deregulation and lower-wage nonunion competitors. “It was an enormous challenge to turn things around twenty years ago,” Professor Belzer said. “It’s going to be much more enormous now.”
Mr. Gegare, a union member since 1972, often echoes Ms. Pope, also criticizing Mr. Hoffa for his “top down approach”, and for relying on many unelected consultants and lawyers as his top advisers. Mr. Gegare asserts that Mr. Hoffa runs the Teamsters “like a family fiefdom. It’s time for members to be the first priority and for local unions to get back their autonomy,” he said.
Ms. Pope acknowledges that the Hoffa campaign will have a much larger war chest than she or Mr. Gegare. As before, many well-paid officials in the union’s hierarchy are expected to contribute generously to Mr. Hoffa’s campaign. “I’m counting on grass-roots organizing and the Internet, Facebook, texting, and free conference calls to counter that,” she said. “I have regular conference calls with dozens of drivers during the middle of the night. They ask me questions and I respond. I think of winning the way the Obama campaign won: with ground action.”

Rico says that whirring noise is Jimmy Hoffa, spinning in his grave, wherever that is...