Stefan Jeremiah/AP Photo
Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien speaks to a union member outside the Staten Island Amazon facility JFK8, June 19, 2024, in New York.
Yesterday, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this attention-arresting headline:
“RNC Statement on Failed Biden’s Anti-Union, Pro-China Policies”
Here, in its entirety, was the statement:
Joe Biden is not pro-union, he is pro-CCP—forcing EV mandates to please Communist China while making gas prices soar and killing auto industry jobs. If Biden really cared about working class Americans, he would stop caving to China, unleash our energy, and make life affordable again for working families. President Trump put hard-working Americans first once, and he will do it again when he’s back in the White House.
You may note that the statement doesn’t address the Republicans’ enduring and ongoing opposition to unions, or the officials whom Trump appointed when president (Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb, et al.) who devoted themselves to crippling unions in every way they could. It ignores the assessments of dispassionate historians that Biden is either the most pro-union president since FDR or the most pro-union president ever.
But the email was intended as something of a tease, laying a bit of groundwork for the opening night of the Republican convention next Monday, when the prime-time 10 p.m. speaking slot has been awarded to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters. Despite the misgivings and stunned disbelief of numerous Teamster officials, O’Brien has been playing footsie with Trump for a number of months, donating $45,000 of the members’ money to help fund the Republican convention (he gave an equal amount to the Democrats), inviting Trump in to speak to his executive board, and now, effectively kicking off the televised portion of the Republican convention.
O’Brien’s openness (a deliberately euphemistic word choice) to Trump overlooks a Biden record that includes bailing out the union’s multi-employer pension fund, and jump-starting a manufacturing and infrastructure renaissance with hiring stipulations favoring union workers, Teamsters very much included. For which reason, among many others, a number of Teamster officers have taken issue with O’Brien’s Trumpian tilt. As Jonathan Weisman has reported today in The New York Times, the Teamsters national office has come down hard on those critics, including filing suit against a member discussion website for using the word “Teamster” in its title.
Now, it’s always possible that O’Brien may use his allotted speaking time to ask the Republicans to adopt the pro-union initiatives that Democrats support and that Republican members of Congress have to a person opposed, like the PRO Act, which would enable workers to unionize without fear of being fired, or raising the national minimum wage from its current $7.25. He might ask them to endorse the recent ruling from Biden’s OSHA that requires employers to provide heat breaks to workers in weather like that which the nation is currently experiencing. He might ask that Republicans on the NLRB not continue to work to destroy unions, or that Republicans, should Trump win, not scuttle the antitrust suit that Biden’s FTC has brought against Amazon, which the union is seeking to organize.
If O’Brien really wants to do the nation a service, he might speak forcefully against Trump’s commitment to deporting undocumented immigrants. In my years covering labor, I’ve met a number of Teamsters who are themselves undocumented—the very workers and their families whom Trump has continually vowed to arrest, lock up, and deport. It’s atop Trump’s to-do list. It’s hard to see how this would be good for the Teamsters.
Then again, O’Brien may just sing Donald Trump’s praises.
O’Brien is certainly aware that a number of rank-and-file Teamster members would have his back if he did so sing. A breakdown of the 2020 presidential election exit poll showed that working-class (i.e., with no college degree) union members actually favored Trump over Biden by six percentage points (those with college degrees favored Biden over Trump by 48 percentage points). Trump’s rants at enemies, real and imagined, can stir some of the same fuck-’em-all sensibilities that the legendary Jimmy Hoffa’s rants once stirred, though Hoffa put his rants in the service of building a powerful union that genuinely bettered members’ lives, while Trump puts his rants in the service of solely benefiting Donald Trump.
The dog that hasn’t barked in the night in this story is Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a long-standing and staunch defender of union democracy in a union that long needed their good work. In 2022, O’Brien became only the second president to win the union’s top spot with TDU support, and in my occasional reporting on that election, it was clear to me that the TDU had backed the right candidate. O’Brien’s early tenure in office engendered few doubts on my part; he built such nearly universal support for a strike of Teamster members at United Parcel Service that the company agreed to a historically good contract, even as he was also appearing at rallies with Bernie Sanders and other social democrats to decry corporate greed.
But O’Brien’s Trumpian tilt has been evident for a number of months now, and I’ve heard not a peep about it from TDU. I continue to believe that the Teamsters for a Democratic Union also believes in a small-d democratic America, but it would be nice if they provided some confirmation of that.
