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New Driver for the Teamsters
By Steve Early, July 2011 issue

Most contenders for top union office are eager to relocate to our nation’s capital, where many labor organizations still maintain large buildings whose impressive appearance belies the steady decline in union membership and influence. Life inside the Beltway still provides a feast of opportunity for upwardly mobile working class leaders. Among the perks are invitations to the White House (when the occupant is a Democrat), and a dazzling array of social events and fundraisers for labor’s many friends on “The Hill.”

Sandy Pope, a reform candidate for president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, foresees a different future for herself, if she is elected this fall. Pope plans to skip the political partying and rent out the “Marble Palace,” the Teamsters’ huge mausoleum-like headquarters on Louisiana Avenue, just a stone’s throw from the Capitol. Pope would keep a small legislative office in Washington but move the rest of the union’s operations to a lower-cost hub of trucking and warehousing in the Midwest.

“We should be where the members are, in the heart of the Teamsters, not inside the Beltway, surrounded by lobbyists and consultants,” Pope says. “We can tell the politicians, ‘Come see us—in Chicago!’ ”

Read the complete article at:
http://www.progressi...arlyjuly11.html




Sandy Pope



Jimmy Philip Hoffa

And what are those things on Hoffa's face?

Sisters In The Union Brotherhood: Still Struggling For Recognition
June 1, 2011
By Steve Early

Women in top union leadership positions generally don’t get much publicity—in part because there aren’t that many to publicize, except in a few unions with large white-collar membership. Randy Weingarten in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Mary Kay Henry of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) do garner media attention based on the size and geographical scope of their respective organizations, plus, in the case of Weingarten, teachers being under fire everywhere.

Elsewhere, the glass ceiling for female trade unionists (and accompanying media invisibility) can be as formidable as ever. Mergers with a larger labor organization and/or union election defeat have lowered the political profile of female leaders of unionized flight attendants and journalists. Recent magazine profiles have noted how it rare it is to find women like New York Taxi Workers Alliance founder Bhairavi Desai or Teamster activist Sandy Pope rising to prominence in the blue-collar worlds of cab driving or trucking.

Throughout the U.S. and Canada, only 16 Teamster local unions are headed by women. One of them is Pope, a longtime union reform activist from IBT Local 805 in Queens, who is challenging James Hoffa for the Teamster presidency this year.

At the rank-and-file level, women who haven’t yet made it into the ranks of labor’s full-time officialdom still face many of the same hurdles that Pope overcame when she gradually won acceptance on the job and respect within the union three decades ago.

Read the complete article at:
http://inthesetimes....or_recognition/