Teamsters president Sean O’Brien headlined the RNC’s opening night and praised two of the party’s leading snake-oil salesmen: vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance and Missouri senator Josh Hawley. The party of billionaires couldn’t be happier.
Teamsters president Sean O'Brien speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15, 2024. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
JACOBIN
07.22.2024
Watching International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) president Sean O’Brien headline the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) last week raised a lot of questions. Delegates of the party, whose platform is devoted to union busting and redistributing wealth upward, were noticeably quiet during much of the union leader’s speech. The White House, which passed a $36 billion bailout to save the pensions of some 350,000 Teamster members following a party-line vote — meaning that not a single Republican voted in favor of the bill — is reportedly fuming. Talking heads sounded downright baffled in their on-air analysis.
They’re not the only ones. Some union leaders have taken issue with O’Brien’s presence at the gathering of anti-union true believers. Even as the GOP platform consists of a laundry list of union-busting policies — Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page wish list should Donald Trump retake the White House, aspires to eliminate overtime pay laws, public-sector unions, health and safety protections, and proscriptions on child labor — the party is trying to rebrand itself in a populist light, hoping to gain workers’ votes. Much of the labor movement has been united in denying the GOP the chance to use them as props toward that end, but O’Brien’s presence at the RNC, even without offering an official endorsement, gave the party precisely the type of photo op it had been looking for.
“It’s disappointing to see a national labor leader speak like that at the GOP convention,” Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, told the Washington Post. As AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler put it, “Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are on the bosses’ side.”
But if the politicos aren’t happy with O’Brien, what of the rank-and-file members who elected him? Some are undoubtedly thrilled: the IBT’s internal polling suggests that around one-third of members are Trump supporters. O’Brien’s engagement with the former president, whom he first met with in January, is not only motivated by a belief that Trump may win and that access to the president matters — a questionable perspective, to say the least; just look at what good endorsing Ronald Reagan did for the union — but an attempt to shore up support among these members for his own reelection campaign in 2026.
Yet while the Teamsters have always forged their own path, endorsing Republican presidential nominees in the past — they backed Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan in both bids, and George H. W. Bush — every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton has received their backing. For members who understand the threat the GOP poses to their union, long-simmering discontent with O’Brien has now boiled over.
It’s not just about O’Brien’s speech at the RNC. The members I spoke with agreed with the union leader’s assertion, delivered at the convention, that elected officials should have to earn their endorsement. But they view a number of his recent actions as unambiguous endorsements of the Republican Party rather than an assertion of independence.
Members elected O’Brien as a rebuke to James P. Hoffa’s regime, which oversaw decades of concessionary contracts. They did so in the hopes that O’Brien might change the union, reforming it in a more democratic, inclusive direction. It’s hard to square that vision with O’Brien’s behavior as of late.The party of billionaires is hoping to build a base among working-class people. It’s a strategy of convincing workers to pick up the shovel to dig their own grave.
Those members point to a host of examples: O’Brien’s positive comments about Senator J. D. Vance, who has a 0 percent rating from the AFL-CIO and has cosponsored Senator Marco Rubio’s bill that would legalize company unions, giving employers a new means of fending off democratic representation in the workplace by letting them set up phony unions controlled by management; his praise for and donation, through the union’s political action committee, to Senator Josh Hawley, a fierce opponent of the union’s members in his home state of Missouri who is being challenged by a Democratic candidate endorsed by much of the state’s labor movement; and the union’s $45,000 donation to the RNC, the first major such donation since 2004. These members worry what message O’Brien’s praise for a party pushing for not only weakening unions but for mass deportations and extreme abortion bans sends to immigrant and women workers — both fellow members as well as other workers around the world.
Taken together, a growing number of members believe their president is offering a straightforward, if not always explicit, endorsement of a political party that wants to destroy them.
By and for Billionaires
Donald Trump’s GOP is as pro-corporate as ever, which is fitting for a man whose catchphrase is “You’re fired.” But even as the party plots to outlaw unions and lower workers’ standards of living, the party is making a play for working-class voters, taking advantage of the Democratic Party’s failure to prioritize that constituency, either unaware or unconcerned that Republicans are determined to peel off those votes.
The GOP ticket has the support of a vast array of billionaires: last month, Trump met with more than seventy CEOs to assure them that he plans to lower the corporate tax rate even further than he did in his first term. The former president described the meeting as a “lovefest.” But even as they continue to receive support among the ultrarich, the beneficiaries of their policies, the party of billionaires is hoping to build a base among working-class people. It’s a strategy of convincing workers to pick up the shovel to dig their own grave.
For Teamsters members who understand it as such, many of whom devoted countless hours to helping O’Brien win the union’s presidency over James P. Hoffa’s chosen successor, watching their elected president assist in such a project is excruciating.
“I am for us voting for our endorsements and I am for us not just giving an easy endorsement to the Democrats or any politician,” a part-time worker at UPS who requested anonymity to speak freely told me after watching O’Brien headline the RNC’s opening night. “But I truly do not understand how you compliment right-wing politicians on a national stage without at least getting them to agree to something we are supposedly demanding. For example, I was told we are attacking right-to-work politicians, but here we are donating to Josh Hawley and praising J. D. Vance? And for what exactly?”
“Sean has the right instinct that we shouldn’t have blind allegiance to the Democrats, but without a strong set of politics, he ends up making bad calculations,” another member, who likewise requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said. “Instead of denouncing the two-party system and demanding that workers start exercising their own political power, Sean’s perspective is, ‘Well, Democrats aren’t great, so I should also talk to Republicans.’”
There’s no doubt that unions’ knee-jerk deference to the Democratic Party has played a role in their decades-long decline, even as the GOP has led the charge to stamp out unionism and immiserate workers. Rather than conditioning union support on elected officials reforming labor laws, reining in corporate power, and protecting members from employer attacks, organized labor has often surrendered its leverage in advance, a junior partner in the Democratic coalition whose unflagging support for the party is rarely rewarded by the Democrats in kind.
But while O’Brien spoke of making elected officials of either party earn the union’s endorsement, certain absences in his speech fueled workers’ concerns. The union leader did not mention that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who saved his members’ pensions, nor did he note the GOP’s united refusal to support the PRO Act or the vastly improved playing field Joe Biden’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has offered workers over the pro-business judges Trump appointed.
Working-class independence is indeed the only way workers will wrest power and resources from employers and the many elected officials who do their bidding. Flattering the GOP, however, is anything but that.
“You Ought to Be a Leader”
The matter is particularly bothersome to those who fought for more than a decade to save their pensions. Wesley Epperson, a retiree who has been a Teamsters member for more than forty years, spent seven years meeting monthly with fellow retirees in Local 41 in Kansas City to fight for the pension he had earned.
In 2019, as Epperson and his fellow members were still trying to wrangle enough political pressure to get their pensions bailed out, the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck General Motors, and Biden came to the nearby Fairfax GM plant to speak with the autoworkers. Epperson attended the rally. Afterward, he shook Biden’s hand and delivered a message.
I said, “Vice President Biden, thank you for coming to Kansas City. I’m not a UAW member. I’m a Teamster. And I stand to lose half of my pension — our pensions are in trouble.” He looked right at me and said, “I know all about your pension, and I know all about the Teamsters, and I want to tell you this: when I win the election, the first thing I’m going to do is fix your pension.”
The way Epperson sees it, Biden followed through on his promise, and O’Brien’s comments equating the parties is not just a failure to follow through on his end of the bargain but an abdication of union leaders’ responsibility to educate their members about politicians’ records. That many of his fellow Teamsters support Trump does not negate that duty; if anything, it makes it more important.‘You ought to be warning the membership about Trump the same way Shawn Fain is. They’re not splitting hairs; they’re telling the truth: this guy’s a real threat.’
“Other union leaders haven’t shirked their duty to educate their members, and even though a lot of their members are going to vote against themselves, at least their union presidents aren’t failing to inform them that they’re making a mistake,” Epperson explained. “We all know that if Trump gets elected, the labor movement will suffer, especially now that the Supreme Court has overturned the Chevron deference. What’s going to happen to the NLRB and all the other departments that are not going to have any power to defend the American people?”
When I asked Epperson for an example of the type of leadership he had in mind, he mentioned Ron Carey, the former IBT president who led a truckers’ strike in 1993 and then a nationwide UPS strike in 1997, with the latter winning much-needed gains in the union’s largest contract. Carey won the IBT presidency in 1991 and pushed for the union to break from endorsing Republican presidential candidates, instead backing Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. But once in office, Clinton supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a policy the Teamsters vociferously opposed.
So the union, led by Carey, declined to endorse anyone in the 1996 campaign, believing that neither party had earned their support.
“That’s the big difference between a real Teamster leader, a guy who looks at what’s good for his membership and their families and the working people in this country,” said Epperson.
You take a stand, you don’t play the patsy. Getting the two parties together sounds good, but it doesn’t work. You ought to be a leader. You ought to be warning the membership about Trump the same way Shawn Fain is, along with a bunch of other labor leaders. They’re not splitting hairs.; they’re telling the truth: this guy’s a real threat. He’s a threat to America and he’s a threat to the labor movement.
Not Your Friend
O’Brien says that he told both the RNC and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that he would speak at their conventions, and the latter’s reported failure to jump at that offer is an example of Democrats’ inability to grapple with the predicament that they’re in. But the Democrats’ shortcomings don’t mean the GOP isn’t still committed to destroying union members’ livelihoods. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
“As a negotiator, I know no window or door should ever be permanently shut,” O’Brien said on the RNC stage by way of explaining his presence. But the RNC is not a bargaining table; his attendance there was a photo op for a party desperate to use workers as props in its rebranding campaign. There is a clear reason he was given prime-time billing, and there’s a reason Trump and Vance were beaming as he spoke. They realized they had just pulled off a huge coup solely by the fact that O’Brien was there; it didn’t really matter what he said.
O’Brien may think he’s using the GOP to spread his message — his comments included accurate criticism of the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and corporations like Amazon, a critical Teamsters target given the existential threat it poses to the membership. But speaking at the RNC is not like appearing on Fox News. As Alexandra Bradbury put it in Labor Notes, “The convention is not a forum where policy is debated. It’s a coronation pageant.” O’Brien is not using the GOP; they’re using him.
For evidence of how eager the Republican Party is to use union members as props, think back to the UAW strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers last fall. The new reform leadership of the UAW, led by international president Shawn Fain, has refused to throw a bone to Trump, who wants union votes in swing states like Michigan while offering nothing to earn them. As Fain often puts it, Trump is a “scab,” having crossed workers’ picket lines and stiffed them as an employer. So when the union struck, and Biden became the first sitting president to walk a picket line, the Trump campaign was in a panic.O’Brien is not using the GOP; they’re using him.
The former president responded with a political stunt for the ages. Trump’s campaign has no ties to the UAW, and members refused to help him. So he traveled to Michigan at the invitation of a nonunion auto-parts employer, who had been put up to hosting the rally by his fellow automakers. There Trump spoke to a room of people as if they were striking autoworkers, even though none of them were.
No one would’ve known that all this was a stunt had members of the area’s labor movement not been willing to state it on the record. Many still do not know, because the mainstream media — from the New York Times to CNN — credulously repeated the Trump campaign’s version of events without bothering to investigate it. O’Brien handed over precisely the type of photo op the GOP had failed to get in Michigan.
Josh Hawley Puts Lipstick on a Pig
There’s also the matter of Josh Hawley. O’Brien has lavished praise on the radically conservative Republican (Hawley supports extreme abortion restrictions, among other things); as the union leader reminded everyone from the RNC stage, Hawley recently claimed that he no longer supports right-to-work legislation, after Missouri voters rejected it.
“He has shown that he’s not willing to accept the pillaging of working people’s pocketbooks,” O’Brien said of Hawley on the RNC stage. The next day, he shared a column by Hawley on “pro-labor conservatism,” tweeting that he is “100% on point.”
Hawley argues that corporate executives are using the profits they raked in from outsourcing jobs “to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag.” While correctly noting that “many Republican politicians . . . have broken the backs of unions at every opportunity,” the senator marshals his apparent newfound respect for the working man to push an “America First” agenda whose first priority, per his column, is to oppose electric vehicle mandates and, in doing so, go to war with the UAW.
“Reagan was right? Corporations took factories overseas so they could finance DEI and trans rights?” one member texted me about Hawley’s op-ed. “The biggest problem for autoworkers is EVs? This is all insane.”
Even the union’s Twitter account went rogue.
“Unions gain nothing from endorsing the racist, misogynistic, and anti-trans politics of the far right, no matter how much people like Sen. Hawley attempt to tether such bigotry to a cynical pro-labor message,” the Teamsters account wrote above a screenshot of O’Brien’s tweet. “The message this sends to Teamsters of color, Teamster women, and LGBTQ Teamsters is that they are not welcome in the union unless they surrender their identity to a new kind of anti-woke unionism.”
“If anyone knows who did this, I’d like to buy them a drink,” Ryan Haney, a freight trucker and Teamster activist, wrote in a Facebook post about the rogue tweet.
“I spent years of my life and thousands of dollars to help elect a Teamster General President who would fight for all Teamsters, who would wield working class solidarity as a weapon against the white collar criminals and political entities that want to divide us by race, gender, sexuality, and religion,” wrote Haney. He continued:
Because of that commitment, which I do not regret, I also feel a responsibility to say that the politics of crypto-fascists like Josh Hawley do not represent our movement or our union. I urge my Teamster brothers and sisters to find the strength (or in Teamster parlance, “grow a set”) to hold our leaders accountable to the mission they set out on five years ago, and not continue to drift into this dead end of collaboration with the enemies of solidarity.
“As an openly queer and proud member of ALU-IBT local 1, this is heartbreaking,” said David-Desyrée Sherwood, a member of the Amazon Labor Union, which recently voted to affiliate with the Teamsters. “Our international union president should not speak fondly of politicians that have trampled on labor rights and queer rights alike.”
What do O’Brien’s members in Hawley’s home state think of the Republican senator? One published an op-ed in the Kansas City Star in March, headlined “Anti-union Josh Hawley’s picket line pandering is shameless, phony political theater.”
“In my five decades as a Teamster, former trustee of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and president of the Missouri-Kansas-Nebraska Conference of Teamsters, I thought I’d seen every kind of shamelessness there is from a politician in an election year,” wrote member Jim Kabell. “Then I saw Sen. Josh Hawley campaigning at a picket line with Teamsters — just months after he said 200,000 of their Teamster brothers and sisters who provide vital government services are ‘hostage’ takers.”
Kabell lays out Hawley’s shameful record on labor, noting that the longtime right-to-work supporter also “single-handedly cut overtime pay protections for 237,000 workers and said a $12 minimum wage was ‘out of the mainstream.’” But times have changed, and Hawley, long the butt of jokes for trading in his expensive suits for what Kabell calls “normal person” clothes on his visits back to his home state, is “on a mission to rebrand” as a “pro-union champion of the working class.”
“Can you guess if Hawley has the new record to back it up?” writes Kabell.
He voted to remove prevailing wage protections in the first major Davis-Bacon vote in more than a decade. He voted against bipartisan legislation to create union jobs in Missouri. Against raising the minimum wage. Against workplace protections for pregnant workers.
And while he meekly pretends to accept the will of Missouri voters on right-to-work, he refuses to prove it by co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize or PRO Act, inexplicably claiming it would “hurt workers more than it helps.”
Of course, Hawley is just carrying out his party’s platform; only three Republican representatives have cosponsored the PRO Act. He is currently being challenged by Democrat Lucas Kunce, a working-class Missourian who has been endorsed by many of the state’s unions. In other words, rather than either keeping quiet or backing the pro-union candidate, O’Brien is boosting and, through the union’s political action committee, donating to an elite-educated union-buster rejected by much of Missouri’s labor movement.
“We wholeheartedly reject O’Brien using his influence and platform to laud an elected representative who — contrary to the Teamsters’ President’s remarks — has weaponized his power to weaken workers’ rights and divide Americans on the basis of race, immigration status, gender identity, and sexual orientation,” the Missouri Workers Center said in a statement, noting that Hawley declined to support the Warehouse Workers Protection Act, a measure to curb Amazon’s exploitation of its warehouse workers, and, like Vance, had a 0 percent rating from the AFL-CIO last year.The UAW’s refusal to give the time of day to a billionaire scab is a major obstacle to the GOP’s grand faux-populist rebrand.
In his op-ed, Kabell goes on to note that Hawley, unable to run away from his own record, has taken to showing up at picket lines to secure photo ops for his campaign. Yet even as he does so, explains Kabell, the senator has bashed public-sector workers (many of whom are Teamsters) and voted against the aforementioned pension rescue.
“I don’t care how many picket lines he shows up to in a pair of cowboy boots and Levi’s,” Epperson, the Local 41 member, told me. “There’s nothing redeeming about Josh Hawley, so why is Sean O’Brien giving money and lip service to him?”
If Hawley is a charlatan, Trump is just that on a far grander scale. Trump surely sees in O’Brien a rough-and-tumble tough guy that he admires but which, as a child of wealth with a renowned aversion to getting his hands dirty, he could never be. O’Brien returned this flattery on the RNC stage, saying Trump “has proven to be one tough SOB.”
But O’Brien, a union man through and through, should know that being the boss’s favorite is nothing to brag about.
“We weren’t promised a perfect president or even a left president in Sean O’Brien, but we were promised a militant one done with concessions,” one member said over text following the speech. “I am just not seeing how cozying up to people who are dying to make organized labor illegal or worse is following that promise.”
Trump the Scab
During his speech on the final night of the RNC, Trump brought up another union leader: UAW president Fain, blaming him for automakers’ decades-long shift to building auto plants in other countries.
“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen, and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every single autoworker, union and nonunion, should be voting for Donald Trump, because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing and we’re going to bring it back fast,” Trump said.
It’s far from the first time the former president has railed against Fain. The union leader is a mainstay in Trump’s speeches, sometimes coming up several times. It’s no secret why that is: as the UAW said following Trump’s speech, Trump “is a scab and a billionaire and that’s who he represents. We know which side we’re on. Not his.” It’s not only that the union supports the country’s shift to electric vehicles, a development the GOP resolutely opposes; the UAW’s refusal to give the time of day to a billionaire scab is a major obstacle to the GOP’s grand faux-populist rebrand. The UAW endorsed Biden in January; as of this writing, they have not endorsed Kamala Harris.
Why is Fain handling things so differently from O’Brien? After all, as is true of the Teamsters, plenty of UAW members are Trump voters.
Part of the explanation lies in their respective paths to power. If Fain’s ascension was a revolution, O’Brien’s was a palace coup. Fain is a member of a rank-and-file caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy, and embedded in a network of reformers. O’Brien, in contrast, was a loyal Hoffa lieutenant until breaking with him in 2018 over UPS contract negotiations. He struck an alliance with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the Teamsters’ long-standing reform group, who were determined to defeat the Hoffa regime once and for all; he has never been a TDU member. It’s an organizing problem — union leaders aren’t saviors; usually they’re the product of the state of organizing inside a union. Members who object to the direction Teamster leadership is taking the union have only one solution: organizing to change it.
O’Brien needed TDU and they needed him. When he won the presidency, it was thanks to his ability to bring both a slice of the old guard and reformers like TDU with him. That alliance may explain why TDU has been noticeably silent about O’Brien’s antics.
Meanwhile, O’Brien’s people have been marshaling a defense, encouraging members to post support for their leader on social media and insisting the union is demonstrating his independence from both parties, not sucking up to one of them. Several members showed me their Facebook feeds, which were a wall of notably similar pro-O’Brien posts from fellow Teamsters. The union is also text-banking some members, sending an MSNBC clip about O’Brien’s speech that emphasizes his claim to political independence.
“Last night, Donald Trump once again attacked our union on a national stage,” Fain said in a statement following Trump’s RNC speech. “As we’ve said for many months, he stands for everything we stand against. Trump claims to be attacking us in the name of protecting American autoworkers. So tell us why, when [the auto manufacturing plant in] Lordstown, [Ohio], closed in 2019, when Trump was President, and our members were on strike for 40 days, he said nothing and did nothing.” He continued:
Tell us why Trump blamed the 2008 auto crisis on the autoworkers. We’ll tell you why. Because Donald Trump always has and always will side with the billionaire class against the working class. . . . He wants to pad the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy auto executives. He wants to cut the corporate tax rates of his golfing buddies, and keep the stock buybacks and Wall Street manipulation going. He wants autoworkers to shut up and take scraps, not stand up and fight for more. He talks about the electric vehicle transition as the reason our industry is under threat.
“Corporate greed and the billionaires’ hero, mascot, and lapdog, Donald Trump, are the problem,” the UAW leader concluded. “Don’t get played by this scab billionaire. Stand up and fight for more.”
Union density in the United States is teetering on the single digits, not one Amazon worker has a union contract, and employers, aided by conservative judges, are well on their way to having the NLRB declared unconstitutional. As O’Brien put it on the RNC stage, union leaders cannot keep pursuing the same strategies as their predecessors; their members cannot allow them to do so. O’Brien and Fain are offering two versions of what “different” entails. One is a path to greater working-class independence. The other? To greater working-class humiliation.
CONTRIBUTOR
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
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