Another Candidate Declares for Teamster President : Labor: Little-known San Jose official’s move illustrates leadership fragmentation. The union will hold its first national rank-and-file election next year.
The little-known head of a small San Jose local of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has thrown his hat into the ring for the presidency of the troubled 1.6-million-member union.
The candidacy of Lou Riga, 53, the secretary-treasurer of a United Parcel Service drivers local, further illustrates the fragmentation of leadership within the Teamsters.
Last week, the current international president, William J. McCarthy, who is 71 and has had a minor stroke and open-heart surgery, announced at a union board meeting in Florida that he will not run for reelection in next year’s government-supervised elections.
The Teamsters will hold the first national rank-and-file election in the union’s history next year as part of a 1989 settlement of a racketeering lawsuit filed by the Justice Department.
The agreement established a thick booklet of rules for campaigning, electing delegates, convening a convention and finally--in December, 1991--conducting the election for president and other executive board positions. Previous Teamster presidents and executive board members have won their titles at conventions of handpicked delegates.
The best-organized candidate so far is Ron Carey, the head of another UPS local in Long Island, who has spent the past year building a network of supporters. He is a strident critic of the current union leadership and its history of relationships with organized crime.
In the wake of McCarthy’s statement that he would not run again, the majority of the Teamster executive board endorsed as its presidential candidate R. V. Duram of North Carolina. Duram is now a national vice president who, as freight director of the union, oversees contracts covering union truckers.
In a press conference Monday in Los Angeles, Riga said he is running despite his relative obscurity because he simply believes the union is in danger of collapsing without better leadership.
He said he would cut salaries of Teamster executives and immediately add 1,000 organizers to the union’s payroll in an effort to double the U.S. and Canadian membership within five years.
“You need a Jimmy Hoffa type,†he said, referring to the former Teamster president who presided over the union for 14 years before his still-unexplained disappearance in 1975. Although Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, his aggressive style of leadership is strongly valued in some quarters of the union--so much so that Hoffa’s son, Detroit labor lawyer James P. Hoffa, is mulling the idea of running for the Teamster presidency.
Riga, the son of Italian immigrants who gave him the same middle name as then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is a native of Oakland who won his first union election in 1966 and has run the 1,400-member Teamster Local 576 in San Jose for 14 years.
He said he had decided to run for Teamster president under the government-supervised election procedure months before McCarthy made his decision not to run. He said he raised $7,000 from friends and supporters at a cocktail party in June, added about $4,000 of his own savings, took two weeks of vacation and began flying into media centers from New York to Boston to St. Louis to announce his candidacy. After his Monday morning press conference here he headed for Seattle.
Riga’s candidacy could evaporate as quickly as his limited finances. At the same time, it could propel him from obscurity onto the election slate of a more powerful candidate looking for allies. The rules under which the Teamster election is being staged are without precedent for a labor union, making the political dynamics impossible to predict.
The president of a Carson Teamster local, Jack Cox, who is also a member of the union’s executive board, said last week he may run for the presidency.
Earlier this year, Cox wrote a letter to McCarthy calling on the Teamster president to step down. He told reporters last week that he withheld his endorsement of Duram as the Teamster leadership’s choice to succeed McCarthy.
In addition, Daniel Ligurotis, Chicago’s top Teamster, who according to news reports called McCarthy a liar in front of a meeting of several hundred Teamsters earlier this year, is reportedly considering a campaign for president separate from the leadership’s slate.
