NEWS FEATURE: Priest teaches ethics to Teamsters

c. 1997 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ It is sometime in the late 1980s. Big Jackie Presser, sixth-grade dropout, head of the Teamsters union, is squeezed into a seat aboard a Teamsters jet next to the Rev. David Boileau, a Roman Catholic priest-philosopher, whose 6-foot-7-inch frame is similarly stuffed into position. They are going […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ It is sometime in the late 1980s. Big Jackie Presser, sixth-grade dropout, head of the Teamsters union, is squeezed into a seat aboard a Teamsters jet next to the Rev. David Boileau, a Roman Catholic priest-philosopher, whose 6-foot-7-inch frame is similarly stuffed into position. They are going to a luncheon meeting where Presser is to deliver a speech.

The priest is talking about Aristotle.


“I’d say, `Here’s what Aristotle says about being a citizen,”’ Boileau said. “And I’d spell it out to him. And he’d say, `Say that two or three different ways.’ And two hours later, you wouldn’t believe your ears. I’ve had a lot of students, but he was absolutely the best I ever had.”

Teamsters? Aristotle?

Hold it. Start over.

New scene: A recent late afternoon in Boileau’s office in the rectory of Mater Dolorosa Church in New Orleans. At 67, Boileau looks 10 years younger. He is still huge, long legs under a massive torso, and he sits in a chair like an artillery shell.

This fall he returns to his classroom as an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University. His latest book is atop the desk: an examination of the thought of Desire Mercier, a turn-of-the-century Belgian intellectual and cardinal-archbishop.

“He was a philosopher, an ecumenist, a patriot. So ahead of his time,” Boileau said.

That would be more like it for a priest-scholar with an advanced degree from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, studying the work of a saintly and obscure European churchman.

But the talk quickly turns to the Teamsters, and to Boileau’s enthusiasm for James P. Hoffa, son of the legendary boss who became synonymous with union corruption.

Unlike Ron Carey, the current president and a former parcel deliveryman, Hoffa is closer to the hearts of the long-haul truckers who make up the diversified Teamsters’ beating heart, Boileau said.

“My brothers,” he calls them.

Boileau believes this because he knows the Teamsters. Beginning with an invitation from Presser, for nearly 30 years he has been a union ethicist.


For years he has taught ethics to Teamsters.

Oh, the jokes, the rolled eyes. Teaching ethics to Teamsters. An oxymoron,like “media ethics.” As a matter of fact, media ethics is what Boileau teaches at Loyola.

Big, gregarious, with an easy bonhomie, Boileau is in some ways an old-fashioned Catholic labor priest.

In a Southern, ’90s culture that prizes private property, individualism and social class, Boileau is a friend to youths in dead-end jobs, a believer in collective bargaining, a teacher for the weak who would confront power.

“But the thing is, this power can only be justified if this is used to bring about equity in the workplace,” he said. “I tell them, if you’re going to be agents of justice, you have to be more just than the just.

“I educate them about this organization they’re in. What its theoretical underpinnings are. I tell them, the only thing you know at the moment is what your lawyer is telling you, and that’s not good enough in the ethical world.

“I tell them not so much what they can’t do, but what sort of person do you have to be to do this thing correctly.”


Working with unions in one way or another has constituted much of Boileau’s career since 1970, the year he came to New Orleans to teach philosophy at Notre Dame seminary. At the same time, Loyola hired him to run its new Institute for Human Relations, a social justice center offering assistance to underdogs spread from Central America to local union halls.

That same year, Boileau gave a talk to some Teamsters in Florida about the ethical obligations between employer and employee.

“This guy comes up to me and says that’s the best damn talk I ever heard,” Boileau said. It was Presser, then a rising vice president; the two developed a deep friendship.

When Presser became union president in 1985, he invited Boileau to join the Teamsters full time and travel to local shops to lecture, observe and occasionally diagnose and remove corrupt local officials.

“I said, `What do I do?’

“He said, `Tell us what we ought to be doing.”’

For three years, Boileau was on the Teamster payroll, founder and head of a human service department.

“I’d go around to the locals and I’d call a guy in and ask him, `What’s your job description?’


“He’d say, `I don’t have a job description.’ I’d say, `Uh-uh, can’t do that. You got to have a specific job.’ I mean, there was stupid stuff.”

By that time, the legendary Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa was nearly 10 years gone, presumably murdered after his disappearance outside a Michigan restaurant.

A presidential commission had pronounced the Teamsters thoroughly mobbed-up. And Presser himself was headed toward an indictment (he would die before trial), making him the fourth of Carey’s six predecessors to be indicted.

By 1989, about the time Boileau was purged from his headquarters job by Presser’s old-guard successor, the union signed a consent degree under a federal racketeering statute mandating a government-supervised cleanup.

But Boileau does not believe he was Presser’s window dressing, like a Bible on the brothel shelf.

“They were very conscious of the fact that they had a problem. They knew there is tremendous ill will against them, that they’re under tremendous pressure.


(OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE.)

After the purge, Boileau returned to New Orleans. He still spends a good deal of time working with members of Local 270, prepping some of those with poor reading skills to pass the state commercial drivers’ license exam and he still talks to Teamster officials on the ethics of labor relations.

Recent events, he believes, may have cut the Teamsters a break.

Nearly a decade of federally supervised cleanup has purged the union of almost 350 corrupt officials, by one estimate. A federal overseer has invalidated Carey’s recent election because of campaign finance irregularities.

“What has to be done is we have to get this election straightened out,” Boileau said.

“Then we’ve got to address ourselves to the problems: Say these are the mistakes we made, this is why, this is how we don’t make them in the future. We could get Madison Avenue down here, have them make the country conscious of the fact that you got a squeaky-clean organization here now.

“I mean, this is a golden opportunity.”

MJP END NOLAN

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