PORTLAND, Ore. (AFX) - From a remote Oregon base, Tom Leedham is trying again to unseat the heir to the best-known name in American labor, James Hoffa, for the leadership of the 1.4-million-member Teamsters' Union.
Academics, labor lawyers and other specialists say that while there are issues to discuss, it might take a major scandal to rile up enough of the membership to trounce Hoffa, and that hasn't happened.
Leedham, who got 35 percent of the vote against Hoffa five years ago, disagrees.
'Everything is different now because Hoffa has a record to run on and it is a record of very weak contracts, the first pension cuts in the history of our union and the biggest dues increase in the history of our union that happened without a membership vote,' he said at Oregon's Labor Day picnic, a brief respite from his nationwide campaign.
When Hoffa took over in 1998 he said the union was bordering on bankruptcy with only about $3 million in assets and virtually no strike fund. He put through a 25 percent dues increase which Hoffa said revived the fund and put the union on a sound footing.
Leedham said it violated campaign promises.
Pension accrual issues have cut benefits or extended retirement ages for tens of thousands of Teamster drivers, mostly in the central region extending from Nebraska though Pennsylvania, to make up for diminished pension funds.
Leedham, 55, is a low-key man who doesn't fit the usual image of a Teamster official.
A top officer of Oregon's statewide Local 206 since 1984, Leedham started as a warehouse worker after one year of college. He wound up running the union's 400,000-member warehouse division under Ron Carey, who defeated Hoffa for the union presidency in 1996 and was kicked out of the union for using $800,000 in union funds for his own campaign.
Leedham has the support of the feisty, dissident Detroit-based Teamsters Democratic Union.
Whether he is tilting at a well-entrenched windmill or can actually oust Hoffa will be known in November. Ballots go out in early October.
'The Teamsters are ready for a change.... Hoffa had an advantage because people thought his name would mean a stronger union but it has not won contracts,' he said.
Hoffa spokesman Rich Leebove said their campaign takes all challenges seriously but sees Leedham's effort as 'more of a vanity campaign.'
'He has no record to run on so he is attacking the Hoffa administration,' he said in a telephone interview. He said Hoffa was campaigning and was not available for interviews.
Leedham, Leebove charged, 'is just part of the old guard trying to come back in a new guise.'
Hoffa is the son of the famously absent Jimmy Hoffa who ran the union from 1957-1971, served prison time for jury tampering and pension fund irregularities and was presumed murdered by the mob in 1975. He was declared dead in 1982 but his body was never found.
Under the incumbent Hoffa the Teamsters paid millions of dollars for an investigation led by former federal prosecutor Edwin Stier into any remaining links of the union to organized crime.
Stier and his team all quit the same day in April of 2004, with Stier claiming Hoffa was blocking investigation efforts 'under pressure from a few self-interested individuals.' Hoffa called the charge 'reckless and false.'
But overall, the younger Hoffa has a pretty good record, said Prof. Gary Chaison, who teaches labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
'Many of the problems the Teamsters face are being faced by all unions, such as globalization and outsourcing,' he said.
Robert Bruno, associate professor at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois in Chicago, said there are issues Leedham can run on but wondered if they will mobilize a union with often-low voter turnouts.
'There was a lot of suspicion and confusion' about the way some pension accrual rates were negotiated, he said, adding that conditions were changed later when concerns arose over pension fund levels.
Leedham could make a case that the leadership knew funds were low and kept it a secret, Bruno said.
'Leedham can put these issues in play. He is no longer unknown,' said Bruno. 'But he has to make up a lot of ground to overcome the cachet of the Hoffa name. To do that you need an issue.'
There's also discussion about declining membership following the Teamsters' split with the AFL-CIO last year. Jerry Hunter, former chief council for the National Labor Relations Board, noted Leedham has attacked Hoffa, saying there have been no major organizing victories on his watch. However, the basis for the split was so the Teamsters could devote more funds to organizing than the AFL-CIO allows, he said.
Bruno said signs are that union members are becoming more defensive, concentrating on protecting what they have and worrying less about union growth. Most recent Teamster growth has come from taking in other unions, not from expanding the ranks of truck drivers, he said.
Leedham says private sector union membership is down to 7 percent and said unions need to come back together. 'It does not make sense to divide our forces at such a critical time,' he said.
'The leaders make it look like a high point,' he said. 'The view from the penthouse may be good. But from down on the ground it isn't so good.'
He said Teamsters he has talked to would like union leaders to live more like the membership.
In the 1990s, he said, there was a clean-up of 'multiple salary' arrangements which gave union officers with various jobs multiple salaries. But he said such arrangements have since risen from 16 to 163.
Defeating any incumbent union leader, said Chaison, is difficult. 'He has the patronage, he's the one who shakes the hands.'
Hunter said he has seen nothing that would improve Leedham's chances. Hoffa has run a pretty corruption-free union, he said.
'It's an uphill battle for Leedham for this one,' said Hunter, now a law partner with Bryan Cave LLP, which represents management.
Both Hoffa and Leedham are well-spoken, charismatic men who can talk with appeal to the common man, said Richard Menghello, a Portland, Ore. labor lawyer.
'It seems like guys out West have a history of this, going after the incumbent ... without a lot of success,' he said.
Hoffa sent a stand-in for a debate with Leedham last month in Washington, D.C. Leedham said he has agreed to another debate in Atlanta but has not heard from the Hoffa campaign.
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