Ronald Robert Carey (March 22, 1936 – December 11, 2008) was an American labor leader who served as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1991 to 1997. He was the first Teamster General President elected by a direct vote of the membership. He ran for re-election in 1996 and won, but in 1997 federal investigators discovered that the Carey campaign had engaged in an illegal donation kickback scheme to raise more than $700,000 for the 1996 re-election effort. His re-election was overturned, Carey was disqualified from running for Teamsters president again, and he was subsequently expelled from the union for life. Although a federal jury ultimately cleared him of all wrongdoing in the scandal, the lifetime ban remained in place until his death.
Early life.
Carey, the second of six children (all of them boys), was born in Long Island City in March 1936 to Joseph and Loretta Carey. His father was a driver for United Parcel Service (UPS). Carey's father had to work Sundays and Christmas Day (often without pay), which taught Ron about workplace injustice, but his father also took him to union meetings where Ron learned about workplace change and how to run a democratic union. Raised in Astoria and Long Island City, he graduated from Haaren High School in Manhattan and was offered entry into St. John's University on a swimming scholarship. But he turned down college, enlisting in the Marines in 1953 and serving until 1955. At the age of 18, he married Barbara Murphy, a girl who lived in the apartment above him. The Careys remained married until Ron's death; they had five children.
Carey became a UPS driver and joined the Teamsters in 1956. He and his father pooled their money and bought a home for both families in Kew Gardens, Queens. He ran for and was elected shop steward of the 7,000-member Local 804 in 1958 because he felt members weren't getting the services their dues paid for. He was elected secretary of the local in 1965. After several unsuccessful campaigns, Carey was elected Local 804 president in November 1967. He earned a reputation as a hard bargainer (by 1977, he had negotiated salary increases which doubled his members' 1968 hourly wages) and for being free from graft and the influence of organized crime. Under his leadership, in November 1967 Local 804 became one of the first Teamster locals whose members qualified for a pension after 25 years of employment regardless of age. He also led long but successful strikes in 1968, 1971, 1974, and 1982. He was re-elected eight times, winning each campaign by landslide margins. Although Local 804 had always negotiated its own contract with UPS, the national union forced the local to participate in the national master contract in 1979. Carey was named a negotiator for the national master contract, but was not included in the Teamsters' national bargaining team. In 1987, Carey sued to overturn a provision of the union's constitution which permitted rejection of a proposed contract only by a two-thirds majority. The union changed the provision to permit a majority to reject a proposed contract.
During his tenure as Local 804 president, Carey took two years of correspondence courses at home, two years of courses at the Xavier Institute for Labor Management Relations (a highly influential Catholic labor school), and six months of labor management courses at Cornell University.
Steven Brill devoted an entire chapter to Carey in his 1978 book, "The Teamsters," which drew attention to the local leader and launched his national career within the Teamsters.
The Road to the Teamster General Presidency.
Election campaign.
In 1989, Carey announced that he would run for president of the Teamsters union. Carey was highly critical of the UPS contract that the Teamsters, led by interim General President William J. McCarthy, had negotiated in 1990. Carey's local represented more than 6,600 members at UPS, making it largest Teamsters local within the company, and Carey's criticism of the contract carried great weight within the international union. Carey also criticized McCarthy for refusing to call for a strike vote prior to ratification, for not adequately communicating the "concessionary" nature of the contract to Teamster members, and for helping oversee the loss of nearly 800,000 Teamsters members in the past decade. In mid-October 1990, McCarthy, suffering from health problems and losing support within the union for his handling of various contract negotiations, announced he would not seek a full term as Teamsters president. Endorsed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a member-led reform caucus, Carey ran for General President on a pledge to eliminate corruption and organized crime's influence in the union. Utilizing TDU's national mailing list, he raised $200,000 in mostly small contributions from Teamsters members and criss-crossed the country by car to meet with the union's membership.
The December 1991 election was the first in which Teamsters members elected the General President by direct secret ballot rather than through delegates hand-picked by local leaders. Other candidates in the election included: R.V. Durham, leader of the Teamsters in North Carolina and generally considered the front-runner in the campaign (he had the backing of a majority of the union's executive board); Walter Shea, a veteran union staffer from Washington, D.C.; and Carey. Although James P. Hoffa, son of disappeared Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and a long-time Teamsters union attorney, tried to enter the race for president, a federal official ruled that he did not qualify under the union's eligibility rules. Carey and his slate (which included a candidate for secretary-treasurer and 13 vice presidencies) swept the election. Carey won with 48.5 percent of the vote to Durham's 33.2 percent and Shea's 18.3 percent. But turnout was low: Less than half the membership voted, and only 16 percent of the union's total membership voted for Carey. Carey vowed to reduce the general president's salary, end the practice of permitting union officers to draw multiple salaries, no longer endorse Republicans for president, and seek federal legislation mandating universal health care.
First term.
Changes and challenges came quickly during Carey's first term. Within days of his inauguration as union president, he replaced a large number of top staff at the union's headquarters, and within a few weeks sold the union's two airplanes and started charging staff for lunches in the union cafeteria. He twice ordered his own salary cut, from $225,000 in 1991 to $175,000 in 1994. In his first few months in office, Carey defeated a disaffiliation attempt by flight attendants working for Northwest Airlines (and later refused to agree to a contract in which the Teamsters would win a 30 percent ownership stake in Northwest in return for $886 million in contract concessions), renegotiated a contract for truck drivers (carhaulers) who ferried automobiles from ports and factories to dealers, and defeated an attempt by the Safeway grocery store chain to contract out its trucking operations. Carey was also active politically. He was the first Teamsters president to testify widely in front of Congress. He vigorously opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and pledged political retaliation against members of Congress who did.
Despite Carey's pledge to eliminate corruption and the influence of organized crime in the Teamsters, there were many who claimed that he did little in his first term to tackle the problem. Federal investigators accused Carey of engaging in "halfhearted" reforms, permitting a Teamster with known organized crime links to oversee a corrupt local, hindering court-appointed trustees reforming locals, and setting up an ethical practices committee which did nothing to stop corruption. One organized crime figure, Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco, former acting boss of the Lucchese crime family, even said he had had a relationship with Carey in the 1960s and 1970s—statements Carey vigorously denied. U.S. Department of Justice officials began an investigation into the accusations in June 1994. There were also claims that Carey had improperly intervened in a jurisdictional dispute between two Teamster locals. Carey was also accused of a conflict of interest for not disclosing that he had received UPS stock from his deceased father's estate. Joseph Carey bought eight shares of stock in 1935 for $320, which over the years (including stock splits) grew to 112,000 shares worth $1.9 million. The stock was sold back to the company by the estate in August 1992, and Carey was cleared of the charges. In May 1994, Carey was accused of corruption regarding a number of real estate deals. The Independent Review Board (IRB), a three-member panel created under a Federal court order in 1989 designed to help supervise the union's elections and rid it of corruption, began an investigation into how Carey was able to finance hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate investments and into who may have forged Carey's estranged wife's signature on several documents. Carey later admitted he had forged his wife's signature but claimed he did so with her permission. Carey said he financed all the investments though savings, loans from relatives, and his $1.9 million inheritance. Carey was cleared by the IRB of all charges in July 1994. The IRB said no fraudulent activity had occurred in the financing of the deals. Although Carey did forge his wife's signature and asked a union employee to lie about it, the IRB concluded that Carey's wife had given him permission to sign her name and that the forgeries were unrelated to union activities.
Carey did take extensive measures to clean up the union, however. In September 1992, he trusteed 18,000-member Local 237 in New York City for corruption, which led to an extensive battle for control of the local. In January 1994, he trusteed Local 732 to remove it from the influence of the Lucchese crime family, and trusteed Local 851 (which represented workers at John F. Kennedy International Airport) for being under the influence of organized crime as well. He investigated the Local 819 health plan for selling policies to non-members and denying reimbursement to members to fund the scheme; trusteed the local representing workers at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for corruption and nepotism; trusteed Local 97 in Union, New Jersey, for being under the control of the Genovese crime family; trusteed Local 875 after federal investigators found that more than $8 million had vanished from the union's pension fund; and trusteed Local 1205 after finding that the union put non-members into its health plan, engaged in nepotism, and had violated federal pension regulations. By mid-August 1995, Carey had trusteed 51 of the union's 651 local unions (mostly on the recommendations of the Independent Review Board). The number had risen to 67 by July 1996. The changes did not come without a backlash. Carey received a number of death threats during his first term, and hired bodyguards to protect himself and his family.
Carey also significantly restructured the union's finances. He undertook two initiatives in this area. The first was to close the international union's four regional headquarters in the U.S. Carey depicted the regional headquarters as little more than a mechanism for union officers to engage in corruption and receive multiple salaries, but his opponents claimed that the move was retaliation against Carey's political opponents (who were officers in and drew income from the regional headquarters). The fight to close the offices was a bitter one, and Carey eventually sought a federal preliminary injunction to enforce his right to physically enter and take charge of the offices. The Teamsters' executive board gave him permission to close the offices by a vote of 14 to 3, and the regional headquarters were shuttered in June 1994—saving the international union $15 million in salaries and expenses. His second major initiative was to seek a 25 percent dues increase. Carey proposed the dues hike in February 1994. The union's executive board had voted to raise strike benefits from $55 a week to $200, but made no provision for funding the higher benefits. A dues hike was essential, Carey said, because the strike fund anticipated running out of money in mid-1994 (and did just that during the national trucking strike in June 1994). Carey also said that the union's budget was significantly out of balance. The union had lost 500,000 members since 1979 and assets had fallen to $45 million from almost $200 million in 1990. But Teamsters members turned down the dues hike proposal by a 3-to-1 majority in March 1994,