It's election time in Teamsterland. This month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) will hold its fourth nationwide vote in ten years, sending mail ballots to nearly 1.4 million workers so they can directly elect top leaders of their union. Most other AFL-CIO affiliates removed this decision-making power from the rank and file decades ago, placing it instead in the hands of more easily controlled convention delegates. Thanks to twenty-five years of hard work by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and court-imposed changes finally ratified at the IBT convention in June, the labor organization long regarded as America's most undemocratic is once again giving its members the final say.

That's the good news. The bad news is that incumbent president James Hoffa, no friend of real Teamsters reform, may win the balloting that begins October 9. If his performance so far is any guide, Hoffa's re-election will propel his own union--and others--further down the path of accommodation with the Bush Administration, while leading to rank-and-file demobilization at firms like United Parcel Service (UPS), whose national contract with the Teamsters expires next summer.

Standing in Hoffa's way, as usual, is TDU, the Detroit-based network of Teamsters dissidents and its candidate, Tom Leedham, a feisty local officer from Portland, Oregon, who won 39 percent of the vote in a three-way race in 1998. The first Hoffa-Leedham contest was held in the wake of a union election fundraising scandal that derailed the Teamsters presidency of Ron Carey, who defeated Hoffa in 1996. Carey was removed from office and later indicted for perjury in a case that went to trial in New York City in August. Depending on the verdict, "Teamsters donorgate"--for which Hoffa tries to blame TDU and Leedham as well as Carey--could figure prominently in the first-ever debate between the candidates, scheduled for September 21 in Washington, DC.

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