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Why the Teamsters are courting Trump

The new populist right is far more amenable to workers and trade unions than the left wants to admit.

Zaid Jilani

Topics Politics USA

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In 2018, I covered a state legislative race in West Virginia, where a Republican state senator felt pretty confident. Robert Karnes opposed a local teachers strike and told a local newspaper that he wasn’t worried about any kind of backlash from teachers. ‘I can’t say that it will have zero effect, but I don’t think it’ll have any significant effect because, more often than not, they probably weren’t voting on the Republican side of the aisle anyways’, he said of West Virginia’s teachers. But the local teachers unions called his bluff. Organised labour spent around $10,000 backing his opponent in the GOP primary, and he went down in flames. ‘I think that teachers showed their political power in the primary’, a local high-school teacher told me at the time.

I’m reminded of that story now when I think about the rousing speech that Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, gave at the Republican National Convention (RNC) this week. Unlike many of the other speakers at the event, O’Brien did not endorse Donald Trump or the Republican Party at large. His union hasn’t decided which candidate to endorse this year, if any. His remarks were fiery and independent. ‘We are not beholden to anyone or any party’, he thundered.

O’Brien insisted that his union will work with anyone in a bipartisan fashion in order to pursue the interests of its workers. He denounced the corporate elites who have power over both parties in Washington, and he singled out a pair of populist Republican senators – Missouri’s Josh Hawley and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance of Ohio – for praise for their work on workers’ issues.

In the annals of political history, the speech was remarkable. It was the first time a Teamsters president had addressed a Republican presidential convention, and it is almost unheard of for speakers at the event to promote organised labour or denounce big business.

In today’s Washington, unions are largely in the Democratic camp, and that’s exactly how the Chamber of Commerce and other GOP-aligned business groups like it. O’Brien’s speech served as a sort of fig leaf: he was announcing that his union was open to working alongside Republicans – as it has with Hawley in recent months – provided that they are open to working with his members. Although he didn’t endorse Trump, he did flatter his ego a bit – calling him a ‘tough SOB’ (son of a bitch), following the assassination attempt.

If you’re familiar with how politics works, nothing O’Brien did was particularly foolhardy. He’s trying to build his influence in the Republican Party. If the polling is correct, a Republican trifecta is well within reach this year, meaning that if the Teamsters were aligned only with Democrats, they would effectively be shut out of federal policymaking for years to come.

Courting both parties is no different than what any number of other interest groups do – from Wall Street to Big Pharma to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to realtors. But the reaction to O’Brien’s speech from the left has been positively acerbic. White House staff were reportedly ‘furious’ at O’Brien for daring to appear at the RNC, pointing to a pension bailout that Biden had secured for the Teamsters. Other unions denounced O’Brien for giving the Republicans the time of day.

‘It’s disappointing to see a national labour leader speak like that at the GOP convention’, said Matthew Biggs, who serves as the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. ‘Make no mistake about it, [Republicans’] intent is to crush federal unions and have mass firings of federal employees and turn the government into an at-will employer where people are hired and fired based on their political leanings.’

Left-wing accounts on social media were even less diplomatic towards O’Brien. Apparently, a rogue staffer even posted a message on the Teamsters’ account denouncing him for endorsing an op-ed Hawley wrote promoting pro-labour conservatism. ‘Unions gain nothing from endorsing the racist, misogynistic and anti-trans politics of the far right’, it thundered, before being quickly deleted.

This sentiment is emblematic of how many on the activist left now approach politics: you’re either with us on every single issue under the rainbow, or you’re not even worth working with on anything.

But if O’Brien endorsed the same philosophy, he would only be weakening his union. Hawley has proved increasingly useful to the union movement over the past year. Last year, he dropped his support for so-called right-to-work laws that make it harder to organise a union; he supported the United Auto Workers during their strike against the big three automakers; he was the only Republican to join Democrats to try to block a Senate vote that would nullify the National Labor Relations Board’s ‘joint-employer’ rule, which helps workers more easily bargain with companies that might use contractors or staffing agencies to dilute worker power.

Leftists will be quick to point out that Hawley still hasn’t co-sponsored the Protecting the Right to Organise (PRO) Act, which would enhance worker protections and weaken ‘right-to-work’ across the country. But if you were to raise this fact with O’Brien, he would probably remind you that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were brand new political alliances.

Political parties in the United States are built out of massive coalitions filled with competing interests. For decades, big business and its allies have called the shots in the GOP, and the Republican base views unions with deep suspicion.

But if O’Brien’s path to changing the party is a long one, it’s also well worth travelling. Being shut out of political power by half the spectrum is no way for labour to rebuild itself in the United States. Just take the advice of Randi Weingarten, the powerful teachers-union leader and Democratic partisan, who praised O’Brien for his speech. ‘Education used to be a bipartisan issue’, she lamented, alluding to the fact that teachers unions now have marginal influence over the GOP. O’Brien wants to make sure his members don’t suffer the same fate.

Zaid Jilani is a journalist and communications consultant based in Atlanta. Follow him on X: @ZaidJilani.

Picture by: Getty.

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Topics Politics USA

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