WIN ONE, LOSE ONE

By Bruce van Voorst/Washington

Teamsters Union president Ron Carey won a huge battle for organized labor last week when he arm wrestled UPS into settling a strike. But he will have to refight the bitter war for the presidency of his union. A court overseer has found that Carey's campaign consultants tainted his election win over James P. Hoffa Jr. last year. Election overseer Barbara Zack Quindel, who establishes fact on behalf of the court, found that $221,000 in improper contributions to the Teamsters for a Corruption Free Union had been funneled to Carey's campaign. "The members cannot have confidence in their union or its leaders," said Quindel, "if their choice of officers has been manipulated by outsiders."

The ruling took some spring out of labor's step in making the UPS strike a springboard for organizing efforts, even as the Teamsters were staging Action Day for Good Jobs rallies across the nation. "We will use the energy of the UPS defeat to renew the fight for good jobs," vowed AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.

Carey was elected as a reformer in 1991. He was supposed to wipe away the Teamsters' history of corruption, particularly under Jimmy Hoffa, who was jailed as a result of it. Carey's UPS victory may yet help him hold off Hoffa Jr., son of the former Teamsters chief. But depending on his culpability in the fund-raising abuses, Carey's platform as Mr. Clean may not survive. The Teamsters stressed that Quindel found no wrongdoing by Carey. But Hoffa's supporters charged that the Democratic National Committee was mixed up in the scandal, and federal investigators were exploring the possibility.

After two decades in which union membership in the private sector dropped from 21% of the work force to 10%, leaders were encouraged by the support of a high percentage--55%--of the public in the UPS strike. But UPS may be a special case. The ubiquitous brown-uniformed drivers are almost part of the American family. People readily sympathized with the strikers, who charged that UPS was greedy in paying ever growing numbers of part-timers less than full-time employees. On the other hand, labor suffered a setback this month when a group of Wal-Mart stores workers in Wisconsin rejected the United Steelworkers of America.

The unions aim to find out where they stand. The next showdown is likely to involve the 2,000 pilots of the Independent Pilots Association who fly UPS aircraft. I.P.A. president Robert Miller, echoing the Teamsters, declares that his pilots are no longer prepared to accept salaries below the industry average. Elsewhere, a slew of collective-bargaining confrontations is upcoming, but none with the public impact of UPS. President Clinton averted a potential strike by Amtrak workers last week. The United Food and Commercial Workers, representing 44,000 supermarket workers in Northern California, has a contract expiring in February. "UPS was important," says David Smith, public-policy director for the AFL-CIO, "but it doesn't make any of these negotiations a walk in the park."

The unions see plenty of opportunities to reach disaffected working stiffs. For almost 20 years, wages have stagnated, held down by unending rounds of layoffs and job migration, as the global economy continued to exert its pull. Even in a booming U.S. economy with record low unemployment, labor has only recently been able to reverse this trend slightly.

The AFL-CIO has upped its funding for membership drives from 4% to 30% of its budget. The Teamsters are taking on nonunion Federal Express and Overnite Transportation, the largest group of unorganized truckers in the nation. Labor watchers say that for the unions to thrive, they need to shift their recruitment focus to the new information economy and away from the old manual one. But the union's targets still stress the less skilled end of the workers' spectrum--apple pickers in Washington state, hotel workers in Las Vegas. Whether these workers can provide a replacement for the iron and steel backbone of the old unions is uncertain. "If they can't crack the service industries--banking, computing, health, finance, insurance--they're dead," says George Washington University labor-law professor Charles Craver.

Carey will have to stow the champagne and start having some beers with the members while he explains to them that he's not dirty. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist of history, Hoffa can play the white knight.