Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo
Sean O'Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, speaks during the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee.
Yesterday’s headline, of course, was that the Teamsters had decided to make no endorsement in this year’s presidential race. That depended, however, on which Teamsters you’re talking about, and whether or not they were still in a meeting chaired by union president Sean O’Brien.
To be sure, the international’s general board voted by a 13-to-3 margin to affirm O’Brien’s clear preference for a position that would require the union to avoid having to campaign for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. O’Brien had previously given Trump a boost by delivering the prime-time address on the first night of the Republican National Convention.
But almost as soon as the general board adjourned, some of those 13, including New York’s Gregory Floyd and the West Coast region’s Chris Griswold made clear that their own regional bodies were endorsing Harris. Indeed, within 24 hours of the union proclaiming its neutrality, regions and locals representing more than 500,000 of the Teamsters’ 1.3 million members (of whom a little more than 100,000 are in Canada) announced that they were backing Harris.
Before yesterday’s meeting, the Teamsters General Board had met with Harris, Trump, and Robert Kennedy Jr. Commendably, a group of eight Teamster rank-and-filers also were allowed to attend all of those meetings, and asked questions of the candidates. After the last of those meetings, which was with Harris, those eight unanimously stated that they favored her. Their judgment, apparently, didn’t filter up to the General Board members (at least when convened as the General Board, though it was clearly in accord with a number of those members once they’d left the meeting).
In fairness, none of those eight rank-and-filers nor any General Board members save O’Brien attended his one-on-one meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year.
What could have prompted the rank-and-filers and so many regional Teamster leaders to support Harris? Herewith, a few plausible reasons.
First, of course, is the general record of the Biden-Harris administration, which has been the most pro-union in American history. Both Biden and Harris have walked picket lines with striking union workers.
Second, Harris voted in favor of the PRO Act, which almost no Republican member of Congress, nor Trump himself, supported. The act would levy actual penalties on employers who illegally violate the National Labor Relations Act by routinely firing workers seeking to organize their workplace. It would also require a mediator to impose a first contract at companies where the workers have won union recognition but the employer refuses to come to terms on a contract—a very frequent occurrence, says John Palmer, one of the three General Board members who voted to endorse Harris rather than join the room’s no-endorsement majority, and has declared that he’ll run against O’Brien in the Teamsters’ next presidential election.
Third, last year, the Biden appointees on the National Labor Relations Board reinstated the “joint employer” rule, under which the major companies that employ contractors to do their core work are liable for those contractors’ labor law violations. Trump’s appointees on the NLRB had struck that rule down in 2020. Just last month, following the reinstated ruling of the Biden NLRB, an administrative judge ruled that Amazon was responsible for inflicting a host of illegal labor practices on its delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, even though those drivers (who were required to wear Amazon uniforms and drive Amazon trucks) were nominally employed by a company that had contracted with Amazon to deliver its goods. Such contractors, called Delivery Service Partners (DSPs), employ 280,000 Amazon drivers, according to a Teamster press release that hailed the administrative judge’s ruling. The release went on to note that the ruling would encourage other such drivers to vote to join the Teamsters, as the Palmdale drivers had.
And in the several weeks since then, hundreds of drivers in the New York area have done just that. Had the Trump appointees to the NLRB still constituted the majority on the Board (i.e., had Trump been re-elected), Amazon would be immune to such pressures. As O’Brien has repeatedly stated, Amazon is the union’s primary target of organizing, which might suggest that having a majority of NLRB members appointed by Harris rather than by Trump would be a matter of considerable concern to Teamsters who wanted their union and workers in their industry to thrive.
Perhaps surprisingly, one group that has not been heard from since the no-endorsement decision is Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a generally progressive group that has been around for nearly half a century. TDU first arose in opposition to the union’s then-mobbed-up leaders and has been a voice for a more democratic union since then. Well over a year before O’Brien ran and won an insurgent campaign for the Teamster presidency in 2022, he secured TDU’s endorsement, even though he had frequently attacked the group in previous years.
Since he took office, however, a number of TDU former leaders, including Tom Leedham, who was TDU’s candidate for the Teamster presidency in 1998, 2001, and 2006, and Dan La Botz, who was one of TDU’s founders in 1976, have expressed concern that TDU has become an O’Brien cheering section in return for having been given staff and secondary leadership positions. As Leedham and La Botz wrote in CounterPunch, they are “disturbed and concerned to see TDU’s recent change over the last few years as it has subordinated itself to Sean O’Brien’s administration.”
“Beyond that,” they added, “O’Brien’s gestures of support for Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans, suggest a turning away from the democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive values that inspired TDU.”
In fairness, the current leaders of TDU have never claimed that their primary mission requires them to be Teamsters for a (small-d) democratic America.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this story said that no Republican in Congress supported the PRO Act. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) was a co-sponsor. We regret the error.
