Teamsters’ Reentry: A Moral Problem

Asked two years ago whether the Teamsters would rejoin the AFL-CIO, President Lane Kirkland said: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley.” Kirkland had good reason to be skeptical, for the AFL-CIO had expelled the Teamsters in 1957, claiming that the union was “dominated, controlled or substantially influenced in the conduct of its affairs by corrupt influences.” Thirty years later little has changed.

It is not that the Teamsters are corrupt fro...