Camarata soughtto reform Teamsters

Published 12:00 am Sunday, February 16, 2014

In 1976, Frank Fitzsimmons, president of the Teamsters, struck a defiant note in a speech at the union’s convention in Las Vegas. “To those who say it is time to reform this organization, and it’s time officers stopped selling out the members,” he said, “I say to them, ‘Go to hell.’”

The next day, Pete Camarata, a rank-and-file Teamster dedicated to reform, rose to say he opposed Fitzsimmons’ re-election, as well as a pay raise for him. He said Fitzsimmons and his lieutenants had stifled democracy in the union and ignored workers’ concerns. He called for a rule that would automatically expel any Teamster officer who accepted a bribe from an employer.

Boos and catcalls drowned out his remarks.

Afterward, Camarata — who died last Sunday in Chicago at 67 — attended a cocktail party in the hotel ballroom, but felt unwelcome and excused himself. Several beefy sergeants-at-arms offered to escort him outside. (Camarata himself was a hefty man, at one point weighing 400 pounds.) Suddenly, one of them punched him. Others kicked him in the head with their pointed cowboy boots. His face was left purple and swollen, his right eye closed.

The police were sympathetic, until they conferred with Teamster officials. According to Lester Velie’s 1977 book about the Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, “Desperate Bargain: Why Jimmy Hoffa Had to Die,” one officer then said, “Get out of town, buddy, and get out fast.”

Camarata left Las Vegas, but he did not abandon his fight to reform the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 1981, as head of a dissident group, he ran for president of the union, the first outsider to challenge its leadership. He lost badly.

The campaign was one of many fights his group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, picked with a union that the federal government regarded as corrupt. Some were successful. In 1989, the Teamsters leadership accepted the group’s proposals for electoral reform. By agreeing to the direct election of international officers, the union avoided a federal trial on racketeering charges, but was subjected to government supervision.

The dissident group grew to more than 8,000 members, and though it comprised just a tiny fraction of the union’s total membership of 2 million, it was a major force in the election of Ron Carey as a reform candidate for Teamsters president in 1991.

Camarata retired from the workforce in 1995 but continued to fight for union reforms until his death of renal cancer, his wife, Robin Potter, said.