Even shrunken from its high point, the Teamsters union is a major force in the American labor movement--for both good and ill. On the plus side, building on its celebrated UPS strike of 1997, the union just negotiated respectable wage increases for full-time workers, though as BusinessWeek concluded, the agreement "doesn't deliver for part-timers." On the downside, Teamsters' failures to organize effectively hold back organized labor's drive to grow. In any case, much of the credit for the rise from its nadir under mob control goes to a 1989 consent decree with the Justice Department, which has removed hundreds of mob-influenced or otherwise corrupt leaders and given members the right to elect major officers directly. Now Teamsters president James Hoffa Jr. has made ending the consent decree and its institutions--like the Independent Review Board (IRB), which investigates and punishes corruption--his top priority.

That would be a bad move. It would risk undoing the good that pressure from federal oversight has wrought, including gains in formal democracy that surpass those at many other unions, such as last year's revision of the constitution to mandate direct elections by members. But neither the IRB nor internal union efforts at reform have yet succeeded in establishing "a culture of democracy within the union," which the judge overseeing the Teamsters identified as one of the two main goals of the consent decree. Hoffa's internal structure to investigate and punish corruption, RISE (Respect, Integrity, Strength and Ethics), so far has only codified rules and done historical research, and Hoffa plans to put it in action only after government oversight ends. Union democracy experts, like professors Clyde Summers of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Michael Goldberg of Widener Law School, as well as the Association for Union Democracy, argue that RISE is not sufficiently independent to do the job and that top Teamsters brass could easily override it. The Teamsters are certainly not the only union lacking a robust democratic culture, but the Teamsters' unique history makes it crucial that reforms are solidly secured.

The risks of backsliding are not just theoretical. In May the IRB permanently barred from the union two of Hoffa's closest associates, William Hogan Jr., president of Chicago's Joint Council 25, and Dane Passo, Hoffa's former Midwest campaign manager and special assistant. They were disciplined for trying for two years to force the Las Vegas local to permit a mob-linked labor broker (of which Hogan's brother was vice president) to provide low-wage, nonunion workers for convention setup work, thus threatening to undermine the Teamsters contract and displace union members.

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