Objects to UDR on Carey

The writer of the following letter is a workers' rights attorney in Massachusetts who has been a staunch supporter of the union democracy cause:
Dear editor: If you told me even a year ago that I would be reading repeated articles in our organization's publication doing anything other than chastising a union leader for using funds of the organization to promote his own re-election to union office, I would have told you that no such thing is possible. Yet in issue after issue I find what appears to me to be AUD and its most active members and contributors in one way or another doing just that.
While I have generally admired and long been part of the work of AUD and TDU, applauded the struggle of Carey's team in the UPS strike, supported Carey's candidacy and oppose Hoffa's, and believe the members should not have been selectively deprived of a chance to choose whom they want to elect, I still deem it among the worst of all offenses for a union leader to use the union's (i.e. the members') funds to promote his own candidacy for office and can neither condone nor excuse it because the candidate who did that was the one I preferred.
  In solidarity, Mark D. Stern
P.S. While it has no influence whatsoever on the views I expressed above, I voluntarily disclose that Barbara Zack Quindel was my law partner 20 years ago and remains a friend to this day.
Editor's comment: Mark Stern's denunciation of the Carey campaign tactics are well taken; but, I believe he misreads the intention of our accounts which is not to excuse those misdeeds but precisely to emphasize what he, himself, mentions and is so critical a fact: that "the members should not have been selectively deprived of a chance to choose whom they want to elect." Now that Carey is eliminated, even expelled from the union, the way has been smoothed for the old guard to return to

APWU: from page 12

invites manipulation and abuse by the incumbent union officers."
According to the DOJ brief, none of the candidates was informed before or during the nominating meeting that the union election committee required the submission of social security numbers and addresses. The seven candidates were assisted in their appeal to the Department of Labor by AUD staff and cooperating attorney Louie Nikolaidis.

Convention Report

Peter Raska, one of the plaintiffs and a delegate to the APWU in July, distributed hundreds of copies of the DOL brief to convention delegates. David Yao, a delegate from Seattle and a long-time friend of AUD, reports that con

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