EDITORIAL
Labor will recover from Rodrigues verdict
A pillar of Hawai'i's labor movement has been toppled with this week's conviction of United Public Workers leader Gary Rodrigues.
The labor movement is too strong to be shaken for long by one man's fall. Yet it's important for all union members to understand the magnitude of the damage he has done.
Rodrigues became one of the most powerful men in the state by dint of his intelligence and his dedication. He buttonholed governors and mayors and came to be known at the Legislature as "the 26th senator." When he was named to Gov. Ben Cayetano's Economic Revitalization Task Force in 1997, the state's captains of industry and business who worked with him came away impressed with his ability to see the whole state economic picture, not just the labor piece of the puzzle, and his willingness to compromise labor's position for the good of the whole polity.
But the same qualities that made him great at his calling made him too big for it, and contributed to his undoing.
"He's an intelligent, shrewd and aggressive representative for blue-collar workers throughout the state," Big Island labor lawyer Ted Hong said Tuesday. "Conversely, the other side of that is he is also arrogant, dismissive and obstructionist ... "
"My members understand me, and they know I will go to the mat for them," Rodrigues said in a 1997 interview. But what he didn't say is that he had also become entirely different from the blue-collar workers whose lives he undeniably improved. UPW members believed he was worth the $200,000 they paid him — a salary beyond their wildest individual dreams.
Yet, as a federal jury now has made painfully clear, that wasn't enough for Rodrigues. The verdict is underlined by the fact that the jury convicted — in less than 12 hours of deliberation — on all 101 highly complex criminal charges.
Rodrigues was convicted of engineering a scheme from 1996 to 2000 in which he accepted kickbacks from insurers who did business with the union. He also set up a consulting arrangement for his daughter, who was also convicted; she was supposedly hired to review the benefits programs of the union but actually did little or no work.
Some UPW members seem to be in denial over the guilty verdict and what it means. There is no anti-labor conspiracy at work here. There is merely individual hubris, venality and greed.
But this trial was about one criminal labor leader, and not about his union. "Gary Rod-rigues is not the UPW," labor observers emphasized.
The UPW must find its way without Rodrigues. In particular, it must strengthen its board of directors to prevent its executives from grabbing the kind of autonomy that wipes out their accountability.
Gary Rodrigues was truly one of Hawai'i's most effective labor leaders. That's saying a lot, because Hawai'i has seen a number of labor giants. The difference is the other ones didn't end up in prison.
