Will the monitorship strengthen or weaken the union?
It’s understandable that longshore workers are wary of government intervention in their union. The Bush administration, after all, has proven itself to be no friend to workers and even less so to unions. But the same was true in the late 1980s when Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney in New York, brought a RICO suit against the Teamsters. The union reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that allowed court-appointed monitors into the union. In the union’s first election of international officers by direct membership vote, the right to a fair election was guaranteed by a federal judge and organized crime suffered its first major defeat in the labor movement. The Teamsters monitorship, now 15 years old, has not transformed the union into a beacon of hope for the labor movement. But the union and its members are far better off than when they were under the thumb of powerful mob bosses. Benefit funds are not pilfered; hundreds of corrupt officials have been removed for stealin
