BOSTON—Is Sean O’Brien, elected as an insurgent as Teamsters president almost four years ago, the favorite union leader of Republican President Donald Trump these days? The question becomes increasingly relevant as more and more of Labor takes a leading role in the fight against the MAGA movement.
The extent to which O’Brien’s union is behind him on his closeness with Trump is, of course, open to question. His speech at the Trump-run Republican convention last year has already drawn one potential challenger for the union presidency. His frequent ties with Trump dismay progressive elements in the union..
“And O’Brien’s alliance with Trump hinges on only a small section of the union’s membership, the movie industry,” comments a veteran progressive Teamster activist in Iowa. “A large section of Teamsters members reside in [the] trucking, warehouse, and service sector,” he adds. Teamsters in the movie industry are happy with Trump’s placement of high tariffs on and attempts to end the bringing in of foreign films.
The question of O’Brien’s allegiance, and that of the nation’s 1.2 million Teamsters, is important both within the union movement and in the broader political arena. The Teamsters have swung inordinate political clout for years, and O’Brien’s predecessor in the leader’s chair, Jim Hoffa, used it. He liked to say labor had no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.
Gone their own way
And the Teamsters have often gone their own way within organized labor. That includes co-leading the Change To Win unions’ walkout from the AFL-CIO 20 years ago. Change To Win has since fizzled. But there’s other evidence of the Teamsters’ marching to a different drummer. Consider:
- O’Brien enthusiastically endorsed former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., as Trump’s Labor Secretary. She’s the daughter of a Teamster and enjoyed relatively good relations—for a Republican—with Oregon unions during her time in Congress.
Her “moderate” voting record there, her willingness to work across the aisle, and her co-sponsorship of labor’s top legislative priority, the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, also enhanced her prospects with Trump. That’s even though she didn’t back it until after a Senate Republican filibuster threat had effectively killed it.
- The Teamsters were one of the few unions, and certainly the largest, to stay neutral in last year’s presidential race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. The board vote was 13-3.
O’Brien and the union’s board took that stance, but three major bodies, including the entire West Coast region and the union’s biggest local, in New York City, immediately declared afterwards they endorsed Harris. The regions and locals, not the international union, provide the people power that the Teamsters—or any union—depend upon during election drives.
Besides, a Teamsters pre-endorsement decision survey of more than 100,000 members showed 59% support for Trump.
- O’Brien initiated the relationship with Trump before last year’s national conventions. He wrote to both presidential nominees soliciting a speaking slot. Trump agreed and put him on during prime TV time on the GOP convention’s first night. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, later sat down for a long interview with O’Brien and the union board after the Democratic Party convention. But Harris invited AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler to address delegates.
O’Brien used his convention address to point out he was the first union leader to speak to the GOP. Then he lambasted the party, however, for its reflexive anti-unionism and for its catering to the corporate class while writing off workers. The delegates didn’t listen, and Trump didn’t care what O’Brien said.
After all, O’Brien fits Trump’s stereotype of a union leader: A middle-aged white guy with a Boston accent and not a college graduate. O’Brien’s visual presence on the GOP convention stage helped validate Trump with the older white men, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, whom the Republican cultivated. Trump, remember, is locked in on TV and video appearances.
O’Brien explained the speech in an interview with the Boston Herald in April. He stated the Democrats “lost the working class” and just “sit on the sidelines and throw rocks.” The “lost the working class” quote often comes from labor’s longest supporter in Congress, however, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt.
- While other union leaders were skeptical about Trump’s across-the-board large tariffs, especially against the U.S.’s biggest trading partners, Mexico, Canada and China, O’Brien gave full-throated support to Trump’s tariffs on foreign-made films using U.S. talent. SAG-AFTRA and the Theatrical and Stage Employees agree with him, because filming abroad robs their members of jobs here at home.
“The Teamsters applaud any elected official—Republican, Democrat, Independent—who’s willing to fight for American workers,” O’Brien and his union’s Motion Picture Division President, Lindsay Dougherty of Local 399, said in a joint statement after Trump’s tariff announcement.
“We look forward to continuing to work with the administration to build a trade agenda that benefits our members and workers throughout the American motion picture and TV industry.”
Added IATSE President Matthew Loeb in a statement after a joint entertainment union letter to Trump:
“American film and television workers have faced unprecedented job losses due to aggressive overseas incentives and economic uncertainty. The federal government must provide a balanced, comprehensive response to level the international playing field and support American jobs. These measures will help bring work back home, strengthen local communities, and maintain our global leadership in entertainment production.”
Voiced the more common view
By contrast, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler recently voiced the more common union view of Trump’s tariffs. Shuler, too, is more symbolic of today’s union movement: half women and with rising shares of workers of color and young workers.
“Unions have always seen tariffs as one of the tools in our trade policy toolbox,” Shuler told a recent D.C. symposium. “We should not see trade as a binary of free trade versus protectionism, but rather we should ask: ‘What is trade in service to? To whom is trade in service?’
“A tariff alone cannot grow jobs long-term without investments. Currently, this [Trump] administration has not said anything about making investments in critical industries like steel and auto…Creating these tariffs without making the right investments and choices here at home is like putting the car in neutral, then stepping on the gas.”
O’Brien told the Herald he’s been on the phone with Trump several times a month.
All this has drawn flak—and a potential foe in the next Teamsters presidential election.
“In speaking with fellow rank & file members, I can tell you that the members I speak with are very concerned about the ‘cozy’ relationship that O’Brien has with Trump. Fighting for good jobs and the right to organize is what Teamsters are wanting their union to fight for, not hanging out with Trump,” said the veteran Teamster activist in Iowa. His efforts to reform the union date back to the work he did in Ron Carey’s campaigns late in the last century.
John Palmer, a Teamsters vice president at-large, plans to challenge O’Brien. He laid out his reasons after O’Brien’s Republican convention speech. For Palmer, it was the last straw.
“This has all culminated in his presence at the anti-union, anti-worker Republican national convention, kissing the ring of a man”—Trump, again—”that scabbed a picket line, fails to pay workers, discriminated against people of color as a landlord, falsely accused five Black men in New York of murder, orchestrated an insurrection against the United States, dodged the draft, and appointed union busters from the Jones Day law firm to create the most anti-union Labor Board in history,” Palmer wrote.
One union-buster was a National Labor Relations Board member during Trump’s first term. He hailed from an anti-worker law firm that calls itself the nation’s leading “union avoidance advisor.”
O’Brien’s also met with another top anti-worker right-wing politician, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, to lobby for state tax credits for movie filming in Texas, the Herald reported.
All this leaves one not-so-wild card: Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the decades-long insurgent movement that eventually brought first Ron Carey and—almost three decades later—O’Brien and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman to the union’s top two jobs.
In one-Teamster-one-vote union presidential races, Zuckerman had narrowly lost the Teamsters presidential race to Hoffa four years before their joint ticket clobbered Hoffa’s picked successors.
Despite O’Brien’s budding alliance with the GOP, Teamsters for a Democratic Union announced in April that it’s endorsing the duo for re-election next year. Nominations for top jobs, including union board members, will occur at the Teamsters convention in Chicago on November 7-9, with the election in the weeks to follow.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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