The Teamsters announced on September 18 that it “elected not to endorse any candidate for U.S. President.” The press release stated:
After reviewing six months of nationwide member polling and wrapping up nearly a year of rank-and-file roundtable interviews with all major candidates for the presidency, the union was left with few commitments on top Teamsters issues from either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris — and found no definitive support among members for either party’s nominee.
The union’s extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump.
Whether you believe the Teamsters should have endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris for president or not, the fact that the General Executive Board (GEB) could not issue a unified statement condemning the Trump campaign, and calling for major effort to curtail support for him in the membership, is a major victory for Trump and the far right in this country.
I’m sure the Trump campaign is celebrating this as a major victory. The largest logistics union in the United States, with 1.3 million members, represents workers at the largest private-sector, unionized employer—United Parcel Service—in the country. The union will not be supporting his opponent but strongly suggested—with dubious use of phone call polling—that a majority of its members support Trump.
Few people will buy that the union’s creative accounting is the reason for not expressing a clear opposition to Trump and his MAGA movement. For many years, a small minority of long-time Teamster reformers, including former candidates for the top positions in the union Tom Leedham and Tim Sylvester, have warned of the danger that Teamsters’ General President Sean O’Brien represented to the union and the broader labor movement.
Beginning last fall, O’Brien began openly courting far-right figures, notably Republican Senators Josh Hawley and JD Vance — currently Trump’s vice-presidential running mate — followed by a private dinner with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, then making campaign contributions to the Republican National Committee (RNC). After Sean O’Brien retaliated against the Teamsterlink online forum earlier this year, Leedham, Sylverster and Bill Zimmer posted on CounterPunch:
Old Teamster hands are really not surprised by any of this, we know who Sean O’Brien is. The forum creators have more than a combined 100 years of membership in the Teamsters, we’ve seen plenty. Now we see wholesale firings, crawling down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the Trump ring, lying about growth, hiring PR firms to “sell” contracts to members and now hiring union-busters to threaten and intimidate retirees and stifle free speech.
Trump, Vance, and the neo-fascist Tucker Carlson enthusiastically applauded Sean O’Brien’s performance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He was welcomed as a rising star of the far right. While O’Brien called his appearance at the RNC “historic” — implying it was a new day for the Teamsters’ influence and political independence in presidential politics, it was only historic in that a major union leader openly praised Trump and far right political forces that attempted a presidential coup on January 6th, 2021.
While Fred Zuckerman, the Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer, said in the union’s statement, “‘Right to work’ laws only exist to try to kill labor unions.” Fascism kills unions, too. A major barrier has fallen in the labor movement. When did coup-plotting and openly allying the union with neo-Fascists, like Hawley and Vance, become acceptable in the U.S. labor movement? Why couldn’t the Teamster leader put forward a unified statement against Trump and MAGA?
I would say that the reasons for their inaction runs much deeper. Teamster General President Sean O’Brien and a sizeable minority on the GEB — John Palmer is the lone public dissenter on the GEB — either see Trump and the far right as their natural political allies, not pariahs to be shunned by the labor movement. Or they are so terrified of the prospects of a Trump presidency, that they are running scared and hoping that by praising the potential “I be a dictator for day one,” they can survive the coming onslaught.
Yet, O’Brien and a majority of the Teamsters’ leadership have legitimized not only the far-right ideas that exist among many Teamsters — and other major industrial unions and the skilled trades — but it has also removed the union from any position it could have played fighting the far right in this country. This catastrophe, however, was avoidable. Unfortunately, the longstanding reform, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) has compromised itself out of publicly opposing O’Brien. Leedham, Sylvester, and Zimmerman wrote:
Teamsters for a Democratic Union for decades and until they endorsed Sean O’Brien for President was considered the conscience of the labor movement and the watchdog of the IBT. How things have changed. As one teamsterlink poster said “there has never been a time in my membership where there is less accountability to the membership of the union then right now.” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, once considered the watchdog is now the propaganda wing of the O’Brien IBT. Ignoring any controversies and apologizing for everything from O’Brien’s “mistake” in taking credit for 206,000 nonexistent new members to justifying the $2.9 million settlement of a racial discrimination case involving 13 fired organizers of color.
O’Brien’s coddling of Trump and the far right has produced a partisan Democratic Party backlash among the Teamster membership. Starting with the Teamsters National Black Caucus (TNBC), who endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket in opposition to O’Brien, they were followed by several large Teamster local unions. While this may be understandable faced with the Trump threat, it also represents the cul-de-sac that the U.S. working class and labor movement are trapped in. The Democrats cannot provide the answers to the economic and social crisis faced by the broad working class.
We live in dangerous times. While the traditional, mainstream parties that the working classes across the globe may still be able to pull off an election victory, they have continued to decline in the face of confident far right masquerading as “working class” parties. We need new parties to represent workers in this country, not the Hannibal Lecters of the Republican Party or the wine-cave dwellers of the Democratic Party, but first we need a change in the Teamsters.
Courtesy CounterPunch
Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a former Teamster and the author of Vietnam: The Last War the U.S. Lost, People Wasn’t Made to Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder, and Justice in Chicago, and The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service. He has written for Jacobin, Socialist Worker, Tempest and elsewhere.
