Word: teamsters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...challenge is more inviting to Bill Clinton than a voting bloc on the verge of slipping away. Take the Teamsters: Clinton had broken the union's long-standing alliance with Republicans, but by early 1995 its enthusiasm had "died down," an Administration memo says. So Clinton's team went to work. Harold Ickes, then the deputy chief of staff, and Mickey Kantor, the U.S. Trade Representative, took pains to help Teamster president Ron Carey deal with a bitter California strike, according to interviews and documents obtained by TIME. While the White House overture failed to win concessions for the Teamsters...
...strike, at Diamond Walnut Growers in Stockton, Calif., was just such an issue. After 700 union members walked out in 1991, the firm hired replacement workers to process and package its 100,000 tons of nuts a year. The Teamsters demanded the jobs back, and the company refused, a standoff that persists today. But in 1995 the strike was seen by presidential aides as a chance, the memo said, to "rekindle" the Teamster bosses' affection for Clinton. Identifying the strike as one of Carey's "biggest problems," the memo urged Ickes to "assist in any way possible...
...assist he did. Teamster officials, with a fine understanding of political pressure points, asked Ickes to put Kantor on the case. Who better to jawbone the management of Diamond Walnut than the man charged with opening foreign markets for American nuts? "I remember calling Mickey and saying, 'This is something bothering the Teamsters,'" Ickes told TIME. Said a White House veteran familiar with the issue: "Implicit in such messages is, Bring pressure to bear...
...widening fund-raising investigation that threatens to topple current Teamster president Ron Carey has brought Hoffa closer than ever to reviving the family dynasty. Carey has spent time before a federal grand jury investigating an illegal scheme to divert union money to his campaign during his 1996 re-election bid, in which Hoffa was narrowly defeated. And it's far from certain that Carey will even be allowed to participate in the rerun election scheduled to begin in January. Hoffa, meanwhile, is out campaigning, raising money, plugging a reformist platform and decrying what he describes as the "biggest scandal...
There's a lot at stake. To the government, a Hoffa assumption of power would represent the failure of three decades of law enforcement to rid the union of ties to his father's corrupt regime. To the Democratic Party, it could mean the loss of Teamster donations and support. And to Carey and his staff, it would not only mean personal repudiation but also the failure of their promise to rid the union of its past...