‘It’s the Most Horrible & Despicable Thing I’ve Ever Seen in the Labor Movement’
Teamsters President Sean O'Brien's "tacit endorsement" of Donald Trump has "infuriated a lot of members."
By Steve Wishnia
With the Teamsters the only large U.S. union that has not endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, many members are seething at General President Sean O’Brien for speaking at the Republican national convention in July.
“Just his mere presence there infuriated a lot of members,” says Richard Hooker, secretary-treasurer and principal officer of Local 623 in Philadelphia, calling O’Brien’s appearance a “tacit endorsement” of Donald Trump.
“I understand what he was trying to do,” Hooker told Work-Bites, “but Donald Trump is not a friend of workers, never was, and never will be.”
“Sean O’Brien thinks he can go negotiate a deal with the most rabidly anti-union people in the country. What was his thought process?” asks Chris Silvera, head of Local 808 in Queens. “It’s the most horrible and despicable thing I’ve ever seen in the labor movement.”
The union leader’s flirtation with Trump, he added, “is greater than just a speech.”
A spokesperson for the Teamsters national office said the union is still in its endorsement process, with Vice President Harris scheduled to meet with rank-and-file members on Monday, Sept. 16.
“You don’t hire someone unless you give them an interview,” O’Brien told the CBS News show Face the Nation on Sept. 1. “This is our opportunity to ask her about Teamster-specific issues and also labor issues.”
He said that speaking at the convention wasn’t an endorsement of Trump, but an opportunity “to highlight how important we are” and “to call out the people, the corporate elitists who forget who built this country, the American workers.”
“Half of our members are Republicans, half of our members are Democrats,” O’Brien said, “so we have to serve all of our membership equally.”
Several Locals Back Harris
But Trump’s supporters, “both inside and outside the Teamsters,” definitely took his convention appearance as an endorsement, Local 769 President Josh Zivalich wrote in a letter to O’Brien Aug. 14, announcing that the South Florida local was backing Harris. Like other anti-Trump Teamsters, he cited O’Brien’s praising Trump as “one tough SOB” in his convention speech and his “thumbs-up photo” with him after they met at Trump’s Florida mansion in January.
Several other Teamsters locals have also endorsed Harris, including Local 808, Local 623, Local 122 in Boston, and Locals 186, 572, and 848 in Southern California. The Teamsters National Black Caucus announced its endorsement on Aug. 13, and Joint Council 28, which comprises locals in Washington, Alaska, and part of Idaho, followed on Aug. 16.
“This election may be the most consequential for organized labor since FDR was elected President in 1932,” JC 28 President Rick Hicks wrote. Teamster members, he said, need to ask themselves “what life would really look like if we elected a President who openly yearns for a future where corporations have ultimate power and working people have none.”
The Teamsters’ executive board considered endorsing President Joe Biden before he withdrew from the race in July, says vice-president at-large John Palmer, from Local 657 in San Antonio, Texas. All but two of the 26 members favored backing Biden, he told Work-Bites, but the two who opposed the idea were the union’s two top officials—O’Brien and general secretary-treasurer Fred Zuckerman.
Palmer says he was the only vice-president who didn’t attend when Trump met with Teamsters leaders and members in January.
“I refused to be in the same building with that asshole,” he explains.
The Teamsters have endorsed Democrats in every presidential election since 1996, when they stayed neutral to protest President Bill Clinton’s pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement. They had endorsed Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s, after Nixon pardoned former leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1971.
Unions supporting Harris this year include the AFL-CIO; National Education Association; American Federation of Teachers; SEIU; United Auto Workers; United Food and Commercial Workers; Communications Workers of America; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Steelworkers; the Machinists; and the Carpenters, Laborers, and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The Fraternal Order of Police, which announced its decision Sept. 6, is the largest union backing Trump.
The Teamsters locals endorsing Harris say it was a no-contest choice. Trump’s labor record is abysmal, they note: appointing union-busting lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board; crossing an IATSE film crew’s picket line while filming an episode of The Apprentice in 2004; and, more recently. telling multibillionaire Elon Musk that he was “the greatest” for summarily firing strikers. (O’Brien called that “economic terrorism.”)
“Without the right to strike, we don’t have a labor movement,” says Palmer.
In contrast, they note, the Biden administration enacted the Butch Lewis Act, which prevented cuts in pension benefits for workers in financially troubled multiemployer plans, including more than 350,000 in the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, the largest plan affected. The measure, blocked in Congress under Trump, was added to the American Rescue Plan in 2021, and passed by the Senate despite unanimous Republican opposition after Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote.
“Joe Biden put the Butch Lewis bill into the American Rescue Plan. That doesn’t buy you something?” Silvera asks.
“I am assuming—even praying—that you will ultimately do the right thing and that the IBT will endorse Kamala Harris for President,” Local 769’s Zivalich wrote to O’Brien.
“Engaging Trump supporters is very important. They’re being sold a bill of goods,” Local 623 shop steward Ryan Boyd told Work-Bites. But there are better ways of reaching working-class conservatives, he adds. “You have to at least listen to their concerns.”
“I don’t condemn Sean O’Brien categorically. I want to work through this,” Boyd says. “I just think it was a very bad move.”
“I get the frustration,” says Local 623’s Hooker. But Democrats at least got the Protecting the Right to Organize Act through the House in 2021, while Senate Republicans killed it by threatening a filibuster.
Another worry is that even if the union endorses Harris, the delay will impair their member-education and get-out-the-vote efforts.
“At this time in 2008, we’d already had people in hotels for two weeks,” says Palmer.
Zivalich wrote that O’Brien’s “repeated dalliances with Trump” will make reaching right-leaning members “damn near impossible.”
Silvera says that unions trying to work with Trump is a losing game. When the Teamsters and the building-trades unions met with Trump during his first term, he says, “he got to pimp the fact that he met with you, and he gave you nothing.”
He believes a lot of pro-Trump union members “know damn well that Trump’s anti-union, but they’re racist, and that’s more important to them. He’s appealing to something that needs to be destroyed in the labor movement.
“The working class is all different kinds of people. If you can’t get with that, you become an enemy.”