WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Washington Post reported that more than two dozen officials of the Washington-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters earned more than $200,000 last year, and 225 earned more than $100,000, according to a report by a union dissident group. Some officials received multiple salaries from different locals, the group said.
Teamsters President James P. Hoffa was paid $236,725 in salary and $272,096 in total compensation, said Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Frank Wsol, head of Local 710 in Chicago, received $298,005 in total compensation.
More than 100 Teamster bosses got multiple salaries by simultaneously holding posts in different parts of the organization. Eleven received four separate salaries, while 53 received three or more.
“This is a union, not Enron or General Motors,” said Ken Paff, national organizer for TDU, which is based in Detroit. “It’s a movement of working people. This shouldn’t be a road to the upper classes, or even to the country clubs. We should pay our officers well, but not like CEOs. This distorts our values and resources.”
Many of the individual salaries reported by the TDU are lower than the group found in past surveys. In the mid-1980s, for example, then-president Jackie Presser raked in $500,000 annually by serving in multiple posts, the dissident group said.
Top officials’ salaries dropped after the Justice Department cracked down on the union for its ties to organized crime, Paff said, but recently they have begun rising again. He said the union has never before had so many people earning such high salaries at any one time.
Bret Caldwell, a spokesman for the Teamsters, did not dispute the facts in the report. But he defended the pay packages, saying Teamster officials’ salary levels are set by the members. He said some officials do extra jobs to earn the extra salaries. He said the pay levels are not out of line with salaries earned by other top executives.
“The members authorize the salaries,” Caldwell said, noting that many rank-and-file members earn more than $100,000 a year, thanks to contracts negotiated on their behalf by the union. “It’s not like Tyco,” he said.
The Teamsters, the largest private-sector union in the United States, represent 1.4 million members. Its 525 locals across the country represent airline workers, truck drivers, beverage workers, warehouse workers, dockworkers, mechanics, white-collar office workers, entertainers, nursing home aides and members of many other professions.
Caldwell said the dissident group produces this annual report to discredit and “bring harm” to the union. He added that some officials at other unions make more than Hoffa.
There have been other reports of lavish pay packages, perks and insider dealing within the labor movement in the past year. At a hearing on Tuesday, witnesses before a House subcommittee testified that some directors of Ullico, a District-based, union-owned insurance company, profited through stock investments using inside knowledge about Global Crossing, the telecommunications giant that failed earlier this year.
Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) accused Ullico officials of engaging in “Martha Stewart maneuvers,” adding that the alleged “illegal actions . . . profit a privileged few at the expense of the workers.”
Under federal law, union salary and expense data must be available for public inspection. In the past, the information was housed only at union offices and at regional offices of the U.S. Labor Department. The Labor Department recently began placing these filings on the Internet.