BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND

THE WORKFORCE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, APRIL 29, 1999

Printed for the use of the Committee on Education

and the Workforce

THE INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS

RERUN ELECTION

Thursday, April 29, 1999

House of Representatives,

Subcommittee on Oversight

and Investigations,

Committee on Education and the Workforce,

Washington, D.C.

OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE PETE HOEKSTRA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS *

OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TIM ROEMER, RANKING MEMBER *

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL G. CHERKASKY, ELECTION OFFICER *

APPENDIX A -THE WRITTEN STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE PETE HOEKSTRA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS *

APPENDIX B- THE WRITTEN STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TIM ROEMER, RANKING MEMBER *

APPENDIX C- THE WRITTEN STATEMENT OF MICHAEL CHERKASKY, ELECTION OFFICER *

TABLE OF INDEXES *

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 1:15 p.m., in Room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Peter Hoekstra [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.

Present: Representatives Hoekstra, Norwood, Schaffer, Roemer and Scott.

Staff Present: Becky Campoverde, Professional Staff Member; John Loesch, Professional Staff Member; Patrick Lyden, Legislative Assistant; Michael Quickel, Staff Assistant; Michael Reynard, Media Assistant; Mark Rodgers, Workforce Policy Coordinator; Rob Sterner, Paralegal; August Stofferahn, Professional Staff Member; Matthew Tallmer, Professional Staff Member; Brian Compagnone, Minority Staff Assistant; Gregory Jefferson, Minority Counsel; Cassandra Lentchner, Minority Special Counsel; Patrick Dugan, Minority GAO detailee; and Darryl Chang, Minority GAO detailee.

Chairman Hoekstra. A quorum being present, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will come to order.

The subcommittee is meeting today to hear testimony regarding the rerun election of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Under rule 12(b) of the committee rules, any oral opening statements at hearings are limited to the Chairman and the Ranking Member. If other Members have statements, they can and will be included in the hearing record. Without objection, all Members' statements will be inserted into the record.

Let me just give my brief opening statement.

Mr. Cherkasky, welcome back.

Mr. Cherkasky. Thank you, sir.

Chairman Hoekstra. I think--well, actually this is the first Teamsters hearing for Mr. Roemer, so you missed all the interesting excitement, rather than the report that we issued this year.

Mr. Cherkasky is the individual appointed by Judge Edelstein to be the election officer for the rerun of the 1996 election of officers of the IBT. It is hard to believe that it is 1999 and you were appointed to oversee the 1996 election. As has been widely reported, the results of the original election were overturned and a rerun ordered because various money laundering schemes were carried on by Ron Carey's campaign.

Mr. Cherkasky is no stranger to this subcommittee. He testified twice last year about issues relating to his role as the election officer. Last April he testified about newly instituted rules aimed at preventing a repeat of the illegal activities that occurred in 1996. He also described his plans to proactively investigate campaign spending.

Mr. Cherkasky also appeared before us in September after the funding for the rerun election was determined. He described for us how he had adjusted his budget to account for an approximately $2 million shortfall from his original projected budget.

We will be very interested to hear how you actually did with your budget. Knowing the answer to that question already, congratulations.

He also provided an update on the new timetable for the rerun election.

The ballots for the rerun election were mailed out on November 2 of last year, and the vote count commenced on December 3. James Hoffa defeated Tom Leedham by a margin of 55 to 39 percent. Various postelection protests were filed by the Leedham campaign, which Mr. Cherkasky investigated and subsequently denied. Appeals by the Leedham campaign were also denied on March 19, 1999. The results of the election were officially certified with two exceptions involving Canada and the southern region. On March 22, James P. Hoffa was sworn in as the general president.

Since there were the exceptions in the southern region, Mr. Cherkasky is still employed by the court and is still conducting--in the process of conducting--what would this then be, the third election for the southern region?

Mr. Cherkasky. It is the third 1996 rerun. Second rerun for one seat.

Chairman Hoekstra. So I am not sure, this could be a strategy of lifetime employment. I would guess that not much longer you will be vested in our pension plan.

It was a long time coming, but after more than 2 years of a leadership elected through fraud, the Teamsters Union has duly elected leaders. I am confident that Mr. Cherkasky ran a fair and honest election. I personally visited the vote count site and was quite impressed by both the size and complexity of the operation as well as the professionalism with which the process was carried out.

Mike, it really was a good process, and I have enjoyed working or watching you work through the process. It was completed under budget and completed in a way that new officers could be sworn in to the Teamsters.

Now that the 1996 election has largely been completed, the subcommittee would like to take advantage of your experience as the election officer. We would like to find out what you have learned about American labor law and what we might need to take a look at legislatively to clean up this process not only for the Teamsters, but for other unions and other organizations. It is especially important that we gather as much information as we can from Mr. Cherkasky because the next IBT election will occur in 2001, and it will not be supervised by a court-appointed election officer. In accordance with the 1989 consent decree, the next election will be supervised by the Department of Labor, assuming that the Department of Justice exercises that option. It is hoped that the information we gather here today will help to ensure that subsequent elections at the IBT are conducted fairly and honestly, regardless of who is conducting them.

Welcome back. We look forward to your testimony.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Roemer?

Mr. Roemer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to be here, after all your kind and glowing words about Mr. Cherkasky, and participate in my very first hearing as the Ranking Member.

I join in welcoming Mr. Cherkasky back to the subcommittee today and note today marks the 1-year anniversary of when he had his first opportunity to provide this subcommittee with testimony regarding his efforts as appointed election officer to oversee the rerun of the 1996 election for general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

As the new Ranking Member of this subcommittee, I have not had the opportunity to hear Mr. Cherkasky's comments in person, but I have reviewed his past testimony and look forward to hearing him today.

It appears that Mr. Cherkasky has done well. Today Mr. James Hoffa is serving as the duly certified and democratically elected general president of the IBT. Mr. Cherkasky's office even completed its election supervision under budget by $700,000, due in large part to the fact that only 20 percent of the expected protests were filed. This, again, attests to transparency of this successful election. The rank and file membership, regardless of which candidate they supported, was served well by having the opportunity to participate in a free and fair election.

I am pleased that the IBT has a certified president, and I look forward to working with Mr. Hoffa on many issues in the future.

Again, I would like to welcome Mr. Cherkasky today, and I look forward to hearing his testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Hoekstra. Thank you.

Chairman Hoekstra. Maybe to everyone's surprise Mr. Cherkasky does have a real job. He not only oversees the election for the Teamsters, he is also president of Kroll Associates, and they make all kinds of different things, but as we were talking earlier today, they also provide the armor or the reinforcement or the security enhancements to Humvees, and recently somewhere in the Balkans one of them went over a 14-pound land mine, and our troops that were riding in the Humvee walked away from it. And so congratulations and good work on that other side of your life.

Mr. Roemer. Mr. Chairman, could I add into your superlative comments and just try to say to Mr. Cherkasky, I had no idea that you were associated with that program. The Humvee is made in my district in South Bend, Indiana, and the Chairman, who is not only informed on labor and education issues, but informed on defense issues, has cited a particular case that we think is not only a very good testimony for the great product that we make in South Bend, Indiana, but that it exceeds the qualifications and the specs that it is built to. The case that our Chairman cites, three marines walked away from that 14-pound antitank land mine. They survived it, and we are delighted with your contribution to that and your business. And as we have Armed Forces in Iraq and Bosnia and in Kosovo right here today, we are very appreciative of the contributions that a lot of these contractors make toward making a great product that tries to ensure the safety of our troops overseas. So they are doing a great job, and we appreciate that, and, Mr. Chairman, thank you for the comment for the defense interests of our country and for a great product made in South Bend, Indiana.

Chairman Hoekstra. Great. Can I get a deal on one? I probably couldn't afford to put the gas in it.

Mr. Roemer. They give a deal to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Have you been in any movies lately that you could promote it?

Mr. Cherkasky. I think you told me that you were in one of our Suburbans which was armored.

Chairman Hoekstra. That is right. I told you you were going to have a halfway decent day today. If you want to keep going and see where this leads, you are more than welcome to. We are looking forward to your statement.

Mr. Roemer. We could have a defense hearing if you want.

Mr. Cherkasky. I would like to throw a shareholders meeting.

Chairman Hoekstra. I think in all seriousness, it has been hard work over the last 18 months, and you have been at the front lines, and you got the job done, and we ought to recognize a job well done. So, I am glad that we can have this actually kind of lighthearted banter on a very serious issue. But you and Richard went and got the job done, and your team did an outstanding job, I think, in a very difficult situation.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Cherkasky.

Mr. Cherkasky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would ask that the remarks be included in the record.

Chairman Hoekstra and distinguished members of this House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, thank you for this invitation to testify concerning my work as the election officer responsible for supervising the 1998 rerun election for the top officers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

I appeared before this subcommittee 1 year ago and told you what I hoped to accomplish during my service as election officer. I am pleased to tell you now that my work as election officer is nearly completed, and I expect that the election office should end its operation this summer. As of today, I have certified 20 candidates as elected to the IBT's general executive board; 18 of those have been sworn into office. On March 31, 1999, I issued the decision proposing to certify the election of two Teamsters Canada vice presidents, and that decision is now under review with the election appeals master Kenneth Conboy.

I declined to certify the election of J.D. Potter, as southern region vice president, after an investigative audit conducted at my direction found that he had contributed $10,000 in personal funds, double the limit imposed by the election rules, to the Hoffa campaign. The facts found in my investigation, conducted jointly with the Independent Review Board, caused me to conclude that Mr. Potter had violated the campaign contribution rules and had then testified falsely to conceal that violation.

A rerun election with three candidates nominated for the southern region vice president position is now under way. Ballots are scheduled,to be mailed, to the southern region membership on May 7, 1999, and the ballot count is scheduled to start on June 10, 1999, at the election office in Washington, D.C.

From my vantage-point, having the rerun election for IBT officers supervised by an independent election officer served the consent decree's objective of fostering the membership's democratic participation in the affairs of the union. Approximately 356,000 ballots were counted, representing about one-fourth of the union's membership. Although the number counted was less than in the initial election, it shows solid interest and involvement in the process by hundreds of thousands of members. The totals suggests that the candidates worked hard to compete and turn out their votes. In the southern region the margin between the winning and losing candidate was 1,003 votes out of more than 28,000 counted. In the western region the margin was 5,241 out of more than 68,000 votes counted. And in Canada the margin of victory was 1,772 votes.

I believe that having the election supervised by an independent authority enhanced the credibility and the legitimacy of the results. Where there is independent supervision conducted with integrity, the members and the candidates know that the results were trustworthy and were not foreordained by the entrenched powers of the union or, as used to be by the case at the IBT, by organized crime. In the supervised environment members and candidates learned exactly what it means to campaign, compete and vote freely.

The election office staff and I have heard from many IBT members in the course of the supervision. Many of the members, in the course of asking questions about the process or in pressing a protest allegation, have praised the consent decree that gave them the right to vote for the international officers and thanked the government that brought it about. These comments tell me that the supervised elections in 1991, 1996, and the supervised rerun election in 1998 have built the members' trust in the democratic process.

The election office processed more than 400 protests during the rerun election. When I found a violation of the election rules and imposed a remedy, my objective was to keep the playing field level for the competing candidates and maintain an environment in which the voters could make their choice freely and without coercion. Protests filed covered a broad range of activity from alleged misuse of union resources to campaign finance violations to allegations of coercion. Plainly, members made use of that process to have their complaints aired about potential election violations.

When I was here last year, the question of funding had not been resolved. By September 1998, an agreement between the government and the IBT made $6.1 million available to run the supervised election. The election office had approximately $500,000 in funds remaining when the $6.1 million was made available. From that cash, the election office has spent approximately $5.4 million in the rerun election. That number is less than the 1998 draft budget for the rerun election which was projected. Much of the variance is accounted for by simple cost savings. The real estate markets favored us in the fall of 1998, and the site rented for the rerun election ballot count cost less than we had budgeted on the cost of the 1996 count site. While I did employ hundreds of temporary workers to count the ballots, the physical layout of the ballot count site allowed for a slightly smaller number than in 1996. These are some of the factors that generated a savings of almost $500,000 on the cost of the mechanics of counting the ballots.

Other savings arose because the rerun election generated fewer protests than had been anticipated from previous experience. Fewer protests meant that I had to draw less on my staff and on outside staff. The funds remaining in the election officer's account, slightly more than $1 million, should be enough to conduct and complete the supervision of the southern region rerun election and afterwards to wind up the business of the election office. I do not presently anticipate any need to draw on the contingency fund that IBT local unions created in the fall of 1998 to ensure that there would be enough money to do the job.

Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you and testify today. I would be happy to respond to questions from the Members.

Chairman Hoekstra. I think one of the interesting things for me would be for you to describe the election process. How does a member vote?

Mr. Cherkasky. A member first and foremost is a member who is eligible to vote. So what we have to do is we have to check on the eligibility of that member, make sure that they, in fact, have dues paid up. So we had a process of screening that member, making sure that we had a list of truly eligible members, and then rechecking that.

That member who was, in fact, eligible to vote was mailed an envelope with a secret ballot inside. Those were envelopes and ballots which were, in fact, coded so that you had an outside ballot which would go to the member. They would open up the ballot and inside that they would have a ballot and a secret ballot and a return, so that, in fact, what they would do is they would mark their ballot, they would put that in the ballot envelope and then put that envelope in the return.

From the return envelope we could, in fact, determine eligibility when it on got back to us. We would slit that ballot open and take out that anonymous ballot and then separate that out, cut that open, and then take the vote and process that electronically.

Chairman Hoekstra. In your statement, it says that roughly 25 to 30 percent of the Teamsters voted. I think that at least this statement indicates that that is a relatively good return. I mean, I would look at it and say--I won't go back to exactly your words, but I mean, I take a look at it and say 25, 30 percent, is there something that we ought to be concerned about ? That perhaps, 70 percent--did you take any look or do any follow-up as to why 70 percent didn't return ballots?

Mr. Cherkasky. We didn't. And it is a lower percentage, which the purpose of this, certainly in part, was to democratize this union and make sure that they understood that they had a vote.

I think that some of the process, there is--it is very clear that the process of voting, having an elected leader disqualified, and then going to revoting with all the haggling that went on discouraged some people, discouraged some people about the process so that there was not the same turnout. The percentages, though, were only slightly lower than the previous time, and it still does evidence--if you have 350,000 people voting, it is a lot of people who are voting or participating.

So, we would have liked to see more. I think that potentially with more time and more money, you could have disseminated the information a little bit better. But in light of some of the things that had happened and some of the discouragement, we are not surprised by that turnout. We were actually pleased that it reached that level. Always would like to see more.

Chairman Hoekstra. Could you have a list of who voted and who did not vote? Is that available information or not?

Mr. Cherkasky. We have the lists. It is certainly not something that we are disseminating about who voted and who didn't. But we do, in fact, have the ability to create that list.

Chairman Hoekstra. I mean, if there were an organization or if somebody said, hey, I mean, we struggle with that all the time when we have congressional elections or other elections and there is a turnout in the 40 percent, 45 percent. There would be an independent--there would be a way possibly for an independent organization or somebody to take a look and to survey individuals who didn't vote to perhaps get an understanding as to why they didn't vote in this last election?

Mr. Cherkasky. I think that certainly would be possible to do a survey and try to determine that, yes, sir.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Roemer.

Mr. Roemer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Again, Mr. Cherkasky, thank you again for your testimony and for your good work in the private sector. We appreciate both today.

You said in your 1998, April 29th, testimony that the 1989 consent decree was, quote, a spectacular success, unquote, and the money was, quote, absolutely wisely spent, unquote. Do you care to expand on those comments at all in light of your testimony today?

Mr. Cherkasky. What we have seen since 1989 is a transformation of a union, a transformation of a critical union that played a critical role in the United States economy and also played a pivotal role in organized crime and their economy, the underground economy.

The ability--what we saw then and what we see today is, in fact, a transformation of a union. The effect of that consent decree is to take back that union from organized crime. Is it completely back or not? I can't comment on that. I can tell you that enormous strides have been made such that we are confident that of the numerous prosecutions and numerous actions by the IRB, by the actions of the free elections, that this union is on the right road.

And it is from my own district in New York City the impact of taking back such a critical cog in the economy of the city has had terrific positive repercussions for our economy, for the construction industry, for the transportation industry so that this is something that has worked and has worked extraordinarily well.

Perfection? There is not perfection in life. Have we gotten all the way there? We probably haven't gotten all the way there.

Mr. Roemer. Well, we expect the perfection on the hummer, if not in this process.

Mr. Cherkasky. AMG and the Kroll-O'Gara Armoring Group have a great product.

Mr. Roemer. You have commented extensively and articulately on some of the ramifications of the consent decree on cleaning up corruption, on the economy and New York City and so forth. You say on page 3 of your testimony, and I quote, these comments tell me that the supervised elections in 1991, 1996, and the supervised rerun election in 1998 have built the members' trust in the democratic process, unquote.

Can you comment a little bit more on the internal ramifications of what has happened here? You have commented a little bit on some of the external ones.

Mr. Cherkasky. Well, we clearly have seen in the day to day of overseeing this elections process a vitality of dissent, a vitality of voicing opinions, of understanding that the government was their partner to the extent that both sides have, during the year and the 18 months that I have been involved in this, have turned to the election officer as the mediator and have looked to the consent decree as being the guideline for how to take back this union. And I think that the typical Teamster, and we viewed hundreds of them, if not thousands of them, came to believe that, in fact, this process was working.

Were they necessarily happy with where the union was going? No. But I think that they thought that they were having a voice in their union, and that was so important to them.

Mr. Roemer. You mentioned in your testimony that only 20 percent of the expected protests were filed is that further proof that there was transparency and success in this election, and is that just intuitive, or is there factual things that you can attach to that?

Mr. Cherkasky. I think I should stand corrected on that. I didn't mean to say it was 20 percent. It was approximately off 20 percent, so that literally 80 percent of what we expected were filed, so it was off 20 percent, so that instead of having 500, which we anticipated, we had 400.

Mr. Roemer. What can you draw from that?

Mr. Cherkasky. What we did draw from that is that the intelligence of the protests, the thought of the protests, the fact of the diversity of the protests, that, in fact, it was still a very hotly contested, competitive election which people cared about. And I think that also we hope that some clarity in rules and the use that they got, and the procedures, that they didn't have to raise every point. So if there was a dropout, it was because they started to understand the process better and the adherence to the rules. The protests that we had, by and large, were not of a major variety because by and large these candidates on all sides complied with the rules.

Mr. Roemer. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Scott?

Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Hoekstra. I told Charlie I was going to go to you anyway because all Charlie was going to talk about was how Mr. Cherkasky was going to give us back our $6 million, and I knew Mike didn't have an answer to that, so we just told Charlie to go home.

Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I might ask him, you speak about how much you spent. The consent decree required that the Federal Government pay for the rerun election. After all the coming, going and money swaps and here and there, did the Federal Government pay an amount equivalent, however it was labeled, for the election?

Mr. Cherkasky. There obviously was some hot debate about whether the Federal Government was going to be required or is required by the consent decree to, in fact, cover this latest rerun. There was an accommodation in which the Teamsters Union contributed $2 million toward the rerun of the 1996 election. The Federal Government, through a variety of different funding and accessing funds that I think were going to go to the IRB anyway, funded the rest. So that it was a split.

Mr. Scott. So that after all is said and done, the Teamsters paid $2 million the Federal Government was supposed to pay?

Mr. Cherkasky. The Teamsters paid $2 million, and the Federal Government paid the rest.

Mr. Scott. All right. How long do you expect to stay around?

Mr. Cherkasky. Well, we hope to be out--very honestly, and this has been a great assignment, but I personally would really like to do my other business. And, again, I thank you for the opportunity to be here and participate. It was something that I, as a kind of prosecutor, thought was so important, and really I am lucky to have had the opportunity. But I am really looking forward to when this is over. I think it will be over, knock on wood, by the end of the count in June and that we will be out of business by August 1st.

Mr. Scott. Now, the election is in June--I mean, the votes are cast in June. You have to count the ballots and certify and wait for protests. And all of that is going to be finished by August?

Mr. Cherkasky. Well, we are hoping it is going to be finished in August.

Mr. Scott. Okay. And that will end the election supervision?

Mr. Cherkasky. Yes, sir.

Mr. Scott. Do you have any recommendation about how long the IRB ought to stay around?

Mr. Cherkasky. I don't. I work for Judge Edelstein. Judge Edelstein is obviously the fulcrum of that litigation between the different parties, and as his court-appointed officer, I think it is my obligation not to, in fact, comment on something that my boss will ultimately be involved in deciding.

Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Cherkasky, as you take a look at the rules for the rerun, and recognizing that Mr. Scott and Mr. Roemer and myself may have an opportunity to go through at least parts of this again if we so decide to make it a focus of the subcommittee, I mean there is going to be an election again in 2001.

Mr. Roemer. Can we vote on that now?

Chairman Hoekstra. Let's vote on it now, and we will bring back proxy voting. But, I mean, if you take a look at the process, are there rules? I mean, what worked in your rules package? What didn't work? And what things--I mean, are you required to file a report to the IBT, to the IRB, or to Judge Edelstein, or the Justice Department or this subcommittee as to what worked and what did not work in this rerun election?

Mr. Cherkasky. We are not required to. We actually talked about this recently internally. There has been an enormous amount of work was done in 1991; very thoughtful work was done by Michael Holland to, in fact, prepare for future elections. It was something created called the "cookbook," what worked and what didn't. Ms. Quindel had obviously adopted a lot of that process and improved upon it. We think we have adopted the things that work. It was 99 percent laid out for us so that we just kind of went with that. So we have a cookbook of how to do this and what really does work.

I think that we are really debating about whether doing some more writing on that will be particularly helpful since it does exist. The next election--

Chairman Hoekstra. Let me just interrupt for a minute. It existed for Ms. Quindel, but the result didn't work. It existed, and you maybe learned something from what Ms. Quindel did. Not that I want to give you any more work, but I think it might be helpful to this subcommittee and it might be helpful to the Department of Labor and to the IBT if not a big formal report, but if you actually did step back and write some of the things and some of what we would call lessons learned.

Mr. Cherkasky. With consultation with my boss and with the concurrence of my boss, and I will consult with him about that, we certainly have no objection to doing that. And if you think that, in fact, it would be helpful, we will.

Chairman Hoekstra. I think it would be, and I don't know if Mr. Roemer has an opinion on that. No?

The next election may be supervised by the Labor Department or may not be.

Mr. Cherkasky. Yes, sir.

Chairman Hoekstra. And I would think that it would be helpful for them to take a look at your--at the cookbook to make sure that that election gets done once and not twice.

Mr. Cherkasky. Right.

Chairman Hoekstra. Have you taken a look at what is going to happen in 2001?

Mr. Cherkasky. Have we taken a look at what is going to happen?

Chairman Hoekstra. Yes.

Mr. Cherkasky. Because there is a decision to be made by the Department of Justice, it is a little premature to do that. And very honestly, the election office goes out of existence, so it will clearly be a different process. So I have not, no, sir. I haven't really looked at that. I obviously hope to be around personally in 2001, but not as election officer, I won't be. And whatever assistance we can give, we will.

Chairman Hoekstra. As you went through the process for this election and you put together your pattern, did you take a look at existing labor law that governs regular union elections as you developed your rules for the elections and determined whether there was an adequacy in current labor law or whether there needed to be modifications or adaptations or enhancements to existing statutes to address some of the problems that you might have seen in the 1996 election?

Mr. Cherkasky. Well, it was always in the context of the LMRDA and the consent decree that this was being done. It certainly wasn't done with an idea of creating legislation or prophylactically doing something for the year 2001. It was for the idea of pragmatically and practically doing things that the very twitches, the little shifts that needed to be made consistent with the new facts that we were, in fact, faced with because of what had happened in 1996, but it was always done in the context of the labor law because that is obviously an overarching policy and procedures and body of law that was extremely useful in consulting as we made our protest decisions and as we made our decisions as to how to structure the processes that we were going through.

Chairman Hoekstra. And you would think current labor law is adequate?

Mr. Cherkasky. It is--again, it was a reference work for us. I can't tell you that this is something that was a creation that was sui generis. It is a unique combination of labor law and a very specific consent decree, and it was attempting to kind of put those together and using what we had in labor law and other examples in the labor movement to try to do things that were consistent and had a background that, in fact, had a track record for working.

Do I think that there are some things that have been learned, some processes that can be used in other instances where there is corruption? We as a company, Kroll is doing other work with other labor unions, and certainly some of the stuff that we have learned here has applicability on the vulnerability of elections, the need for oversight, the need for oversight on the financial aspects of those. I think that those are things that are common threats not just for the Teamsters, but other unions throughout the United States because where there is, union leadership has great power, significant power, and it is crucial to have those people be elected under a rule of law, under regulations and process. And I think that that has come home to all of us in part through the Teamsters election process to the union movement.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Roemer?

Mr. Roemer. Mr. Chairman, I don't have any more questions. I want to thank Mr. Cherkasky for his three rounds of testimony, for his conscientious and diligent work, and wish him well in his "old" new job. And I don't have a second round of questions, and I thank you.

Chairman Hoekstra. Mr. Scott?

Mr. Scott. No further questions, Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Chairman Hoekstra. I have no further questions. Mr. Cherkasky, I don't know if you want to introduce Mr. Mark.

Mr. Cherkasky. To my left is Richard Mark. Richard has been counsel to the action office 18 months, and really I couldn't do it without him.

I do want to thank you in general, Mr. Chairman, and this committee. It has been a pleasure working with you, being part of this process. I think the stuff, the questions that you ask are good questions, and I appreciate the dialogue.

Chairman Hoekstra. Great.

Richard, thank you for being here. Thank you for your efforts over the last 18 months, and congratulations to the two of you for completing a project. And I think while we have had some disagreements on the subcommittee as we have gone through this process, I think everybody on the subcommittee has had the same objective in mind, which is getting the Teamsters back--helping to facilitate getting the Teamsters moving back in the right direction. And the work that you have done has enabled that to happen. Mr. Hoffa was sworn in a while back. We will have a public swearing in this week, Saturday. So there is progress, and hopefully it sets a foundation for the largest private labor union in America.

So thank you very much. No additional comments. The subcommittee will be adjourned. Thank you.

[Whereupon, at 1:54 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]