By Stephen Franklin,
Tribune Staff Writer.

January 24, 1999

It always struck Jim Michalik that the friends and relatives of the leaders of his local held a heap of cushy union jobs. So, too, he was irked that little information about contracts or the local's doings filtered down to lowly members like himself.

But last fall a court-appointed monitor issued a report on wrongdoing within the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union as well as its Local 1 in Chicago, and it deeply stirred him, along with a number of his co-workers. "To find out that your local is about $1 million in debt, it is overstaffed and that it has no job descriptions--when we read that, we just thought, `My God, this is too much,' " recalled Michalik, a bartender at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Chicago. Vowing to set things straight, Michalik is now running for presidency of the 13,400-member organization. And when the balloting takes place in May, it will mark the first contested election in the local's 16-year history.

Amid probes of major unions such as the Teamsters and Laborers, plus recent accusations of financial wrongdoing by officials with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union in New York City, organized labor faces an unwanted explosion of publicity about corruption and a ricochet effect within its own ranks. "You really can't say with any precision whether there is an increase, but there appears to be heavy occurrences of corruption," said Ken Boehm, head of the National Legal and Policy Center near Washington, D.C. The conservative-funded think tank, which publishes the Union Corruption Update, is hardly a friend of organized labor.

The muckraking by the government and union reformers appears to have inspired members like Michalik who might not have spoken up before. In the case of the hotel workers, the union's monitor especially lamented the lack of democracy and union officials' inclination to keep members in the dark. The impression of worsening corruption has set off a great deal of hand-wringing within union ranks. Union officials say they know that such publicity plays into the hands of non-union companies, and they are desperate to bury their troubles. Most experts doubt that unions are any more corrupt than before. Rather, they say, the image of growing corruption is the result of long-term government probes that have generated significant publicity. The only thing new, suggested Herman Benson, a veteran campaigner against union corruption, "is that something is being done about it."

And the clean-up effort has mostly been led by the government or rank-and-file union members, added Benson, who 30 years ago founded the Association for Union Democracy, a struggling watchdog group in New York. The government recently said, for example, that it will need another year for its 4-year-old monitoring of the 450,000-member Laborers, a union long led by Chicago officials, so it could "wipe out corruption."

Any day now, Peter Vaira, the union's hearing officer, is expected to rule whether Arthur Coia, the Laborers' president, should be expelled from the union because of alleged organized crime ties. The court-appointed election monitor for the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union is also expected to rule soon on whether James P. Hoffa can be sworn in as the union's new leader. The monitor is considering charges of campaign wrongdoing filed last month by Tom Leedham, one of Hoffa's opponents.

As for the 244,000-member hotel workers union, Kurt Muellenberg, the union's court-appointed monitor, said that he was impressed by the steps it has taken since he described it as a union plagued by unchecked spending and costly favoritism. "They are making all of the right moves," said Muellenberg, who also belongs to the union's three-person public review board. Union President John W. Wilhelm took over last year when Ed Hanley, a one-time Chicago bartender who had led the union for 25 years, was forced to step down as a result of the government's probe.

Chicago Local 46 of the Service Employees International Union has been similarly embroiled for the last two years in a controversy over money, and, in turn, democracy. Accusing local President Jarvis Williams, who is the union's vice president, of letting the local sink into financial distress without informing the 11,000 members about the situation, several members complained to the union's leadership in 1997. A union hearing officer last year said the local had failed to follow previous recommendations about improving its finances. She faulted the local for not making its financial records available and said it should publicly post its policy on members' freedom of speech rights. The union appeared to be at least $650,000 in debt.

Gary Daniels, a union member and worker at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center, says that members' complaints and requests for information are still being squelched by the local's leadership. "When we question things, they say, `Don't worry. It's being taken care of,' " Daniels said. He is a leader of a drive to take 325 detention center workers out of the union. The state Labor Relations Board recently cleared the way for the workers to decide if they want to shift to the Fraternal Order of Police. "If there were any credence in the complaints, I would have been gone by now," said local president Williams.

In the case of hotel workers union Local 1, its president, Terry Maloney, a veteran local official, doesn't deny that changes are needed. He took over last fall when the local's president, Tom Hanley, the son of the former union president, was barred from the union for one year in a deal with investigators amid allegations he put his father in a $31,000-a-year part-time job with the local, approved a no-show union position for another person and charged the union for non-union expenses.

One of the changes that Maloney said he has carried out is calling for the first accounting review of the local's finances. Asked about the local's debt, Maloney, who was the local's secretary for the last few years, was unsure. Later, however, he said it owed the parent union about $1.1 million. Convinced the local must communicate better with its workers, Maloney also started a newsletter last fall. Although the union monitor said that the local had been urged by consultants for several years to cut workers because it was overstaffed, Maloney said he had let only one go so far.

That was Ramon Mursuli.

An organizer with the union for the last five years, Mursuli was let go in November after he told officials that he also intended to run for the local's presidency. Before taking the union job, he had led an unsuccessful breakaway effort by members several years ago. "They didn't give me any reason for my firing," Mursuli said. The only reason he could see, he said, was to punish him for his candidacy.

But Maloney said Mursuli was fired because he had done "an ineffective" job. Maloney discounted his opponents' complaints about a lack of democracy, saying they only want his job. Whatever happens, Sigrid Alexandersen, a banquet worker at the Sheraton Hotel and candidate along with Michalik, sees a gain for Local 1. "Even if we lose," said Alexandersen, "the members will get used to competition, and the idea will not die."

Copyright 1998, The Tribune Company.