Ron Carey: Visionary Labor Leader Dies at 72 First Democratically Elected Teamster President Remembered As A Corruption Fighter And Vindicated Reformer http://www.tdu.org/newsroom [This item will appear at the above URL shortly]

Ron Carey, a former UPS driver and Teamster president who set the standard for American union leaders for courage and honesty and transformed the leadership of both the Teamsters Union and the AFL-CIO died yesterday at age 72 in New York.

Carey toppled mob rule in the Teamsters, became the International Union’s first democratically elected General President and used his influence to change the leadership and direction of the AFL-CIO. In 1997, he led a 15-day strike against United Parcel Service—winning the labor movement’s biggest victory in a generation. Carey resigned from office in November 1997 to fight allegations that he was involved in an improper scheme to use union funds to finance his reelection campaign. Carey was vindicated of this charge by a jury in federal court in 2001 which found that Carey had no knowledge of, or role in, the scheme.

“Ron Carey was the nation’s most charismatic and successful labor leader as the Twentieth Century was coming to an end. He will be remembered as a major figure in American labor history on the basis of just two of his accomplishments: In 1991—running as a reformer with the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, he was elected general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 1997, he led the successful 15-day strike against the giant United Parcel Service, the biggest victory organized labor had experienced in at least three decades,” said Ken Crowe, the author of Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters and The Vindication of Ron Carey.

As a labor journalist at Newsday, Crowe covered Carey for more than 20 years from 1976 when he was president of Queens-based Teamsters Local 804.

**************************************** Stuart Basefsky Director, IWS News Bureau Institute for Workplace Studies Cornell/ILR School 16 E. 34th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10016

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