Can Teamsters unionists in the US beat the Trump vote?
Joe Allen is a former Teamster and the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. In this article, he discusses the iconic Teamsters union, the largest transport union in the United States. The union’s image lately has been tarnished by President Sean O’Brien’s association with the far right. O’Brien’s courting of Donald Trump and his appearance at the Republican National Convention have provoked a backlash among rank-and-file union members and a debate about how the Teamsters should orient in the lead-up to the presidential election next month.
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The Teamsters’ backhanded endorsement of Donald Trump for president has caused an uproar in the US trade union movement. Teamster General President Sean O’Brien, who just a year and a half ago was being touted as a new militant leader of the union, hosted at Labor Notes conferences, toured the country with Bernie Sanders and Sarah Nelson, and received enthusiastic coverage in the left media, is now considered toxic.
His open courting of the far right began last autumn, followed by a private meeting with Trump, donations to the Republican National Committee (RNC), his speech at the Republican convention all culminated in the vote by a majority of the union’s General Executive Board (GEB) not to endorse any candidate for president, while releasing dubious polling that the majority of Teamsters supported Trump. This was a shock to many observers of the US labour movement, but this side of O’Brien has been hiding in plain sight for a long time.
The polls for the presidential election are either balanced on a knife’s edge or show a Trump lead, especially in the upper Midwest. Teamster votes could make the difference in the outcome of the race. So, it’s understandable that anger and bewilderment at O’Brien and the Teamsters is widespread. A backlash against O’Brien’s embrace of the far right has been building, however. The Teamsters National Black Caucus first broke ranks, along with Teamster Vice-President at-large John Palmer, and endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket.
At the same time, in a confusing political summersault, those members of the Teamsters’ GEB who voted not to endorse any candidate nor to go record against Trump, or who skipped the meeting entirely, returned to their local unions and Joint Councils and quickly issued statements—representing as many 1 million out of total Teamster membership of 1.3 million—that endorsed Harris and Walz. Even members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the former reform organisation, which is now comfortably part of the leadership of the Teamsters, have played a central role in launching Teamsters against Trump to mobilise Teamster votes for the Democrats.
It appears that a majority of the Teamsters GEB and the leadership of TDU, though, are desperately trying to avoid a clash with the white nationalist sympathiser leading their union, who they have invested heavily in for several years now. For many trade unionists, Trump represents an existential threat to trade unions and broader democratic rights in this country. Yet he also receives significant support among union and non-union workers across, despite his long anti-union record and plans to dismantle many of the legal rights of trade unions.
Can partisan Democrats on the Teamsters’ Joint Councils across the country and Teamsters against Trump beat the MAGA vote in the union? If it can or can’t, what does that say about the state of rank-and-file politics in the Teamsters, and what comes after?
Joint Councils to the rescue?
John Nichols of the Nation magazine enthused about the Teamsters’ Joint Councils’ endorsement of Harris across the country, which appeared to have check-mated the Teamster leadership’s non-endorsement. He enthused:
“The Harris campaign may not have won over the national leadership of the Teamsters in Washington, it has ended up with something more important: a bonanza of endorsements from Teamsters units in the battleground states that will decide the presidential race.
“In fact, Harris received so many endorsements from Teamsters joint councils and union locals in states across the country that her campaign is now touting endorsements of the Democrat from units representing more than 1 million of the labor organization’s 1.3 million members. And they’ve gotten a boost from James P. Hoffa, who led the union for decades as its general president. Hoffa ripped into the current leadership, calling the failure to back the Democratic ticket this year ‘a critical error and, frankly, a failure of leadership by O’Brien’.”
Reading Nichols, I was struck by several things about his take on developments in the Teamsters. I find his embrace of the former general president of the union James P. Hoffa, Jr. bewildering. Nichols ignores Hoffa’s two-decade-long, disastrous leadership of the Teamsters, including endorsing every Democratic Party presidential candidate from Al Gore in 2000 to Joe Biden in 2020. While O’Brien was the first Teamster leader to address the RNC, Hoffa was lavishly courted by the GOP in 2000. According to the Chicago Tribune:
“For the first time in 20 years, the Republican National Committee threw a bash for a Teamsters chief. The glad-handing assembled included Republican senators like Michigan’s Spencer Abraham and Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, who face tough re-election races in union-heavy states, and old-guard stalwarts like Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Ted Stevens (Alaska).
“Hoffa, a delegate to this month’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles, obviously was thrilled. ‘I didn’t know I had so many Republican friends,’ he said.”
One of those Republican friends was fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan, whom Hoffa leaned on to ramp up anti-Chinese xenophobia. Hoffa was close to Trump during his one term in office. In late 2019, I wrote:
“Despite having endorsed Hilary Clinton in 2016, Hoffa who earned a reputation as one of President Donald Trump’s most reliable union supporters on trade and infrastructure projects, including the environmentally disastrous Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines and the ongoing trade war with China.
“Hoffa admitted in an October interview that many Teamsters voted for Trump in 2016. Hoffa also predicted that many ‘Teamsters are likely to vote for Trump again in 2020, regardless of who the Democratic nominee turns out to be’.”
Hoping that Hoffa can push back the MAGA vote is an act of political folly. “But, pretty much the same can be said about the Joint Councils across the country, also.” Joint Councils are important administrative bodies in the Teamsters but are obscure at best to the broad membership. They have also been derided for decades by union reformers as undemocratic, stuffed with patronage employees, and an easy way for local union principal officers to gain another paycheck for little work. Earlier this year, I reviewed the role of Chicago’s Joint Council 25 in local elections:
“Despite some changes, the JC 25 remains pretty wedded to the old ways of doing things in their own unions and in city and county politics. For example, last year the largely immigrant, non-English speaking members of Tom Stiede’s Local had to overcome the retaliatory behavior of their employer, the Anthony Marano Company, a major produce distributor in the Chicago area, and the hostility of their union over wage and working conditions documented by Labor Notes’ Luis Feliz Leon, here. With this kind of record, how is someone elected to a leadership position in the Chicago Teamsters?”
In August, West Coast Teamster and UPS driver Edgar Esquivel took a deep dive into the backstabbing, racist world of Los Angeles area Joint Council 42:
“In the aftermath of Sean O’Brien’s embarrassing homage to the most reactionary and xenophobic Republican party in generations at their party’s National Convention last month, the largest Teamsters joint council (JC) in the union, JC 42, had prematurely voted in mid-July to endorse the reelection of Democratic party xenophobe Kevin de Leon for Los Angeles city council’s 14th district—only to withdraw it two weeks later. The city councilman gained national notoriety when he compared a colleague’s adopted black son to luxury handbags almost two years ago. De Leon’s remarks triggered protests in the second largest city in the US and calls for his resignation.”
Chicago’s Joint Council 25 and Los Angeles’ Joint Council 42 are two of the largest in the Teamsters. How anyone can think that these people can fight the MAGA vote is beyond me. But, it does reveal, I think, that many of the professional, middle-class liberal and social democratic observers of the Teamsters actually know very little about how the union operates and interacts with its members.
Teamsters against Trump
Teamsters against Trump (TAT) is different from the Joint Councils that have endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket, if only by a few degrees. It’s a pretty bare-bones operation initiated by members of TDU and held its first online meeting for volunteers on 28 September. It also leans heavily on a few staff members of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, Kentucky, the home local of Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman. Zuckerman ran with O’Brien on the same Teamsters United slate that won a landslide election in 2021.
Listening in on the discussion, it struck me that TAT acts largely as a campaign vehicle for marshalling votes for the Harris-Walz ticket. It made no demands on the Teamsters union or the Harris-Walz slate, and this was largely reflected in the discussion, which emphasised getting our side out to vote in key battleground states and, most importantly, not to engage Trump supporters in the union. So far, it has put out one video. With only a few weeks to go in the election, this may strike people as very practical, but it is also short-sighted. Far-right politics, particularly around anti-China and anti-Mexican xenophobia, has been stoked for decades in the Teamsters. It’s hard to see how one defeats the MAGA vote without taking it on.
The other major problem for TAT is that it has to carry the burdens of the Biden-Harris administration. The American Rescue Plan saved Teamster pensions across the country, which didn’t get one Republican vote, and is reason alone that many Teamsters in the upper Midwest will vote for the Harris-Walz ticket. (Their broader appeal on this issue could be undermined by a recent report that Governor Tim Walz cooked the books on the Minnesota state teachers’ pension.) Trade unions, however, only represent 10 percent of the US workforce and a minuscule 6 percent of the private sector. Issues like labour law, important to unions, don’t necessarily resonate with the broader working class, whose lives are very precarious, from housing to food costs.
A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer captured this well:
“Jim Kohn voted for Democrats much of life — that is, until Trump came along in 2016. Kohn, a retired truck driver who lives in South Philly and for years voted along with the Teamsters union, is still a registered Democrat. But he’s planning to vote for Trump for the third time, and he believes more of his neighbors frustrated with inflation and the high cost of goods will, too. ‘When Trump was president, everything was cheaper,’ he said. ‘Now, everything is so sky high.’”
Another Philadelphia resident told the Inquirer:
“They’re saying Kamala is going to save our democracy. That means very little for people who can’t keep the lights on.”
TAT also has to carry the burdens of Teamsters and TDU into the election. One of the battlegrounds that they are planning on intervening in is Michigan, with its large Arab and Muslim population. The Teamsters are one of the few major unions to have not called for a ceasefire in Gaza. This will work against their credibility, but TDU also tabled a motion for a ceasefire at its last convention. That the wider war initiated by Israel in the Middle East is tied so intimately with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies will be a huge barrier in their campaigning. With less than a month to go in the presidential election, anti-Trump Teamster campaigners being so closely tied to the Democratic party may, once again, prove to be a false road taken.
First published at CounterPunch.
