UPW going back to basics under new administrator
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
With former leader Gary Rodrigues facing a prison sentence, one of Hawai'i's most powerful labor unions is digging in, the administrator in charge of the United Public Workers union says.
Advertiser library photo • Oct. 29, 2001
"There is absolutely a natural tendency for others to try to take advantage of what they may see as weakness," said labor lawyer Peter Liholiho Trask, who will run the union during a receivership which will last at least several months.
"My main interest is protecting the interests of the members and placing the union back in their hands," said Peter Trask,
"I am letting them know that what the union stood for before hasn't changed," he said.
"The basic things in this union's life won't change in terms of enforcement of the contracts 110 percent, and opposing privatization of our jobs."
Trask, 53, son of David Trask, longtime leader of the Hawai'i Government Employees Association, was named administrator of the UPW on Dec. 5 by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He was appointed after Rodrigues was found guilty on federal charges of mail fraud, money laundering and embezzlement in connection with taking kickbacks from companies that did business with the union. His sentencing is scheduled May 12.
Rodrigues had been head of the union for 21 years.
"My main purpose is protecting the interests of the members and placing the union back in their hands," Trask said.
It could take a while. A receivership of a New York public employees union — six times larger than the UPW — took 3 1/2 years.
Trask said Rodrigues' conviction could not have come at a worse time for the union.
Two contracts, covering most of the employees, expire this year. The UPW is facing a new legislative session and Linda Lingle, the state's first Republican governor since 1962, who has expressed an interest in cutting costs and privatizing some state work.
The union's Unit 1, with close to 10,000 blue-collar nonsupervisory workers, includes trash collectors.
Unit 10 has about 2,000 members in the public sector, including institutional and other healthcare employees and the adult corrections officers who work at state prisons.
Only after contracts are settled and the session is over, Trask said, can he deal with how members can take control of their local again.
There is a lot of pressure for change, he said. "When someone of Gary's stature disappears from the scene, everybody comes out of the woodwork and has an opinion."
But it would be distracting to appoint temporary officers and an executive board, let alone offer a new board for an election, he said.
He also is reviewing the union's books.
"From the cursory review of the finances I have done so far, the union seems to be in good financial shape," he said.
That fact, and the strength of the contracts, Trask said, is a credit to Rodrigues and his administration over the years.
Trask said he will rely on the 30-plus staff, "people who have been around a lot longer than I have."
Four staffers have left. "I want to get everybody to sail in the same direction. If people don't desire the same goals, they are asked to leave," he said.
Trask said he sometimes feels like he is "putting out fires all over the place, managing by crisis."
He has been working six and seven days a week, with some days of 16 hours, but says he is taking the job "one brick at a time."
The international usually picks somebody from out of state, but recognized here they needed someone familiar with the Hawai'i scene, someone "close enough to the union but not too close," Trask said.
"They tugged at the heartstrings, and it was one of those things where your heart says go do it and your brain says you are crazy.
"But I was born in the labor movement, and I am not about to turn my back on the labor principles that fed me and educated me," he said.
Trask was a UPW staff member from 1992 to 1997, and then outside counsel to the UPW and the HGEA.
He was an aide to U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye from 1979 to 1982, and had worked in Wally Fujiyama's law firm.
Born on O'ahu and raised on Maui, Trask graduated from Baldwin High School there and the University of Hawai'i and Hastings College of the Law at the University of California.
Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.
