Weldon Mathis

Weldon Lamar Mathis (April 2, 1926 – October 20, 2001) was an American labor leader.

Weldon Mathis was born in Sylvester, Georgia in 1926.

He served in the United States Army in World War II.

Mathis joined the Teamsters in 1946.

Mathis' Teamster career began when he was elected business agent for Local 728 in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1950.

He was elected the local's secretary-treasurer in 1953 and its president in 1956.

In 1957 he was hired by the Teamsters' Southern Conference to be an organizer.

He left that post in 1967 when he was hired as an organizer for the international union.

In 1967, president Frank Fitzsimmons appointed Mathis as his executive assistant.

Mathis was appointed a vice president of the international union in 1972 to fill an empty seat.

He remained the local's president, even though he held additional national offices as well, until 1976.

He was elected 1976 and re-elected in 1981.

In 1978, Fitzsimmons appointed him director of the union's Building Material and Construction Department.

Initially, possible challengers included Joseph W. Morgan (who had sought to become interim president after Roy Lee Williams' resignation in 1983, Walter Shea (director of the Eastern Conference of Teamsters in Washington, D.C.), Donald Peters (a Teamster leader in Chicago), and Arnie Weinmeister (a Teamster official in Washington state and protégé of former interim president George Mock).

He was secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters from 1985 to 1991.

In 1985, Mathis was elected secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters.

In 1986, Presser won an amendment to the Teamsters' constitution so that the secretary-treasurer rather than the First Vice President would become interim president.

Presser secretly consulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation about Mathis before making him secretary-treasurer.

The FBI said he was not involved with organized crime.

Ten days after he was named interim president, Mathis resigned as president of Local 728.

The United States Department of Labor was investigating him at the time due to allegations of vote fraud in his last re-election bid.

Trerotola was deeply angered by the 1986 constitutional amendment which allowed Mathis to assume the presidency, and he began building a coalition to oust him.

When Mathis called a meeting in Arizona (where Presser was being treated), Trerotola refused to attend.

After Teamsters president Jackie Presser took a leave of absence for health reasons, Mathis was interim president from May 5, 1988 - July 18, 1988.

He was defeated for the presidency in an executive council vote, and served out the rest of his term as secretary-treasurer before retiring.

When Teamster president Jackie Presser was diagnosed with cancer and took a four-month leave of absence on May 5, 1988, Mathis was named interim president.

Presser was subsequently diagnosed with brain cancer, setting off a power struggle within the union.

The members of the union's freight and warehouse and its air freight divisions voted overwhelmingly against their respective three-year national contracts after Mathis took over.

But Mathis declared each contract "ratified" because the "no" vote fell short of the two-thirds needed to reject a contract and authorize a strike.

The contract votes weakened Mathis' support on the union's executive board because Mathis was the highest-ranking official involved in the talks.

Mathis's support among the union's leadership was never strong.

Mathis was considered much more liberal Presser or the rest of the Teamsters' leadership at the time, and he was much more in favor of participating fully in AFL-CIO.

Mathis was challenged by a faction of conservative Teamsters led by Joseph Trerotola, the union's First Vice President.

Mathis suffered another blow to his candidacy on June 28, 1988, when federal officials filed suit in federal court to impose a trusteeship on the Teamsters union..

Presser died on July 9, 1988, triggering an election for a new president.

But at an executive board meeting on July 18, 1988, Mathis was unseated as president in favor of William J. McCarthy, president of the New England Conference of Teamsters.

McCarthy, a protégé of Jimmy Hoffa, emerged as a candidate days before the vote.

He was seen as a much more aggressive leader than Mathis.

McCarthy—who led the opposition to the freight and warehouse contract—promised to fight the government's trusteeship suit, adopt a more confrontational collective bargaining posture, end the union's thaw toward the rest of the AFL-CIO, and endorse a George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election.

Peters, Shea and Weinmeister pulled out of the running, throwing their support behind McCarthy.