N.Y. Union Leader Seeks to Take Helm as Teamsters President in 2016 Election
This story appears in the March 30 print edition of Transport Topics.
New York-area union leader Tim Sylvester announced his bid to claim Teamsters leadership far in advance of next year’s election, mirroring a strategy of U.S. presidential candidates.
Sylvester’s campaign, called Teamsters United, kicked off this month with a dozen stump visits around the country.
“If I can get to enough members and talk plain common sense about what we need to be doing, I’m going to win,” Sylvester, 57, told Transport Topics.
He has hit the campaign trail before the 73-year-old incumbent, General President James Hoffa, has even announced whether he will run again or throw his support to a colleague.
Hoffa won re-election in 2011, beating Sandy Pope of New York and Wisconsin’s Fred Gregare, who together split 41% of the vote.
This time, Sylvester has support from Fred Zuckerman, a former Gregare supporter, who told TT he plans to run for another union office.
“It occurred to us that we did a lot of things wrong last time,” said Zuckerman, president of Local 89, which represents workers at UPS Inc.’s global air hub in Louisville, Kentucky. “One is we entered the race too late; that’s why we got started very early this time. Two, we were divided. What we need to do is form a coalition, which we’ve done, and run as one slate,” he said.
Sylvester is president of Local 804 in New York and previously backed Pope, a former official at the same local. Sylvester, who has spent his 35-year working career at UPS Inc., said his goal was to come up with a coalition approach.
Zuckerman said Sylvester “runs a very good local union, knows UPS and has done a lot of good things for his members. I think he’ll be a good candidate.”
“There’s a lot of opposition to Hoffa that’s growing,” added Ken Paff, spokesman for Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, which also is supporting Sylvester’s challenge. “There’s a lot of Hoffa fatigue.”
Teamsters spokesman Galen Munroe, in Washington, said he could not comment on the election.
The election process “is a matter of self-declaration,” said Richard Mark, an attorney who will be the independent election supervisor, as he was for the last election cycle.
There will be more activity late this year and early next year, heading toward a June 2016 convention, at which candidates will need to get 5% of the vote to get on the fall ballot, Mark said.
“The only people I am aware of who have taken that position are Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Sylvester,” he said. “I don’t have any comparable thing from Mr. Hoffa.”
When Sylvester became president of his local five years ago, his first mission was to get its finances in shape because it had been borrowing from its health-care fund to pay pensions.
“We were in horrible shape. We were on the verge of going bankrupt,” he said, adding that his first act was to double his members’ insurance co-pays, which didn’t sit well with many members.
“I had people going nuts . . . [but now] it’s five years later, and I have $53 million in my health fund, which is rock-solid,” he said.
“I’ve watched over the past 25 years and had a minor epiphany that, if we spent as much time fighting corporations as we spent fighting ourselves internally, we could get a lot more accomplished,” he said.
Sylvester worked as an organizer in Washington for three years, including on the union’s Overnite Corp. campaign more than a decade ago, before returning to New York and becoming active in his local.
The Teamsters tried, but failed, to organize less-than-truckload carrier Overnite before it was purchased by UPS in 2005. Overnite became UPS Freight, and those workers have been Teamsters since 2006.
“I’m a big believer in member-to-member mobilization,” Sylvester said. “I have a saying in my local: ‘You may not like what I tell you, but what I tell you is the truth.’ ”
