Versione Italiana – Translation by Paul Rosenberg
For the first time in nearly three decades, the Teamsters will not endorse a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, a significant and potentially problematic shift for the Democratic Party. The move breaks a tradition that was last interrupted in 1996, when the union last chose not to make an endorsement. While in recent decades the Teamsters have consistently endorsed Democratic candidates, they have historically had close ties to Republicans, backing figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.
The decision came just two days after Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris held a private meeting with union leaders, during which Harris outlined the Biden administration’s successes on behalf of workers and sought to win their support. However, a majority of the 14-member Teamsters board of directors voted not to endorse any candidate, with just three votes for Harris and none for Donald Trump.
Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, explained the decision in harsh terms:
Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business.
This move not only signals a rift with the Democratic Party, but also reflects growing divisions within the union itself. In fact, recent polls of Teamsters members have revealed strong support for Donald Trump. In one poll, 59.6 percent of respondents favored Trump, while only 34 percent favored Harris. A separate telephone poll confirmed similar results.
Not everyone agrees with these numbers, however, and some union leaders have questioned the polling methodology. Additionally, several local Teamsters chapters, along with the Teamsters National Black Caucus, have openly criticized the national leadership, urging members to support Kamala Harris. Since then, three of the union’s regional councils, representing hundreds of thousands of members, as well as six local chapters have nevertheless decided to support Harris. Local chapters in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are actively campaigning for her, challenging the national council’s decision.
In parallel, a new progressive organization has emerged – Teamsters Against Trump – which has promised to campaign among tens of thousands of union members in swing states to support Harris.
The Teamsters represent more than a million workers in industries ranging from UPS drivers to construction workers to health care and utility workers. With a strong presence in the Midwest and swing states, their lack of support could have a significant impact on the 2024 election.
According to Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri interviewed by Vox,
Union endorsements are valuable because they usually come with access to resources, particularly volunteers to knock on doors and work phone banks.
Thus the lack of official support could possibly reduce voter support for Harris and the Democrats in these areas.
The union has also sought to strengthen its ties with the Republican Party. O’Brien made history this year by becoming the first union leader to address the Republican National Convention. He praised Trump during his prime-time address, calling him “a tough son of a bitch” while attacking “corporate greed”. Critics say O’Brien implicitly encouraged conservative members to support Trump, while his supporters saw it as an attempt to push Republicans toward a more pro-union stance.
O’Brien had also requested a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, but according to the union, he did not receive an invitation.
O’Brien has led the Teamsters since 2022, and his new strategy marks a significant shift from that of his predecessor, Jim Hoffa, who led the union for 24 years and is the son of Jimmy Hoffa, the union’s longtime and storied leader who disappeared mysteriously in 1975 and was declared dead in 1982. O’Brien has met with candidates from all political parties, including Biden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, signaling a greater strategic opening for the union in presidential politics.
On the financial front, the Teamsters largely continue to support Democrats, having donated more than $800,000 to Democratic PACs this election cycle. However, they also donated $45,000 to the Republican National Convention, their first significant contribution to Republicans in years.
According to many analysts, the Teamsters’ lack of support reflects dissatisfaction with the current president rather than a judgment on Kamala Harris, despite the policies of the Democratic administration.
Joe Biden has made relations with labor unions a central plank of his political agenda during his presidency. From the start, Biden sought to cement his status as “Union Joe” by implementing policies and measures to strengthen workers’ rights and union bargaining power. These efforts led many unions, including the United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO to declare their support for Biden and Harris well in advance of the election.
Since the beginning of his term, Biden has repeatedly said that he wants to go further on workers’ rights than any of his predecessors:
I want to be the most pro-union president who leads the most pro-union administration in American history.
he declared at a meeting at the White House in September 2021.
That same year, he encouraged workers at an Amazon facility in Alabama to vote to join a union. In an unprecedented video message, Biden declared that there should be
no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda
by employers towards employees.
In 2022, Biden then used an executive order — a specific tool available to the president — to improve working conditions on federal projects, including the use of union agreements for construction on federal projects, an agreement that required the hiring of unionized workers. The Biden administration then created new rules on equal pay for federal workers.
Biden has also generally expressed support for labor action, though he has not gotten directly involved. For example, as happened with the strike by screenwriters and actors demanding higher wages in the streaming era and protections against artificial intelligence, a strike that lasted from May to July 2023. At the start of the actors’ strike a Biden spokesperson said that the president “believes all workers — including actors — deserve fair pay and benefits.” Biden also directly called for a fair deal for writers in May. However, he remained relatively silent after that, even as work stoppages have continued for months. Vice President Kamala Harris, however, postponed an MTV appearance, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre canceled an appearance on “The View” in June because of the strike.
While the administration has worked to stick to its pro-union commitments, controversial decisions such as the move to end the railroad strike have created tensions. In 2022, the president used the Railway Labor Act of 1926 to block the railroad union from striking for better sick leave. Administration officials argued that the economy could not afford a disruption to rail transport, but political considerations related to inflation ahead of the midterm elections likely also influenced the government’s response. At the same time, the Biden administration has continued to work behind the scenes to pressure railroads to accept workers’ demands, and it has largely succeeded. Union leaders credit Biden with helping them secure this victory for workers.
Another point of tension with unions arose in 2023 with the possibility of a strike by members of the UPS Teamsters union, which could have created a bottleneck in supply chains. At the time, Sean O’Brien explicitly and unequivocally told Biden not to interfere:
In my neighborhood where I grew up in Boston, if two people had a disagreement and you had nothing to do with it, you just kept walking. We’ve said that in the White House on numerous occasions. We don’t need anyone to get in the way of this fight.
The Teamsters have cited these two episodes as some of the reasons the union has not supported a presidential candidate, despite the fact that one of the candidates in the race, Donald Trump, is not known for being a supporter of unions. Trump often clashed with unions as a businessman, probably more than any other president before his election, and tensions with the UAW leadership continue to this day.
Recently in his dialogue with Elon Musk on Twitter, the former president said:
You come in and say, ‘Do you want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘Okay, you’re all fired. You’re all fired. So, every single one of you is out’
While Trump was in office, the members he appointed to the National Labor Review Board — the NLRB, an independent federal agency that enforces labor laws on collective bargaining and unfair labor practices — made it harder for unions to get representation in non-union workplaces by lengthening the time between seeking representation and elections, thus giving management more time to campaign against the union. Under Biden the NLRB has repealed those rules.
In 2018, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court also issued a devastating ruling against public sector unions, which represent nearly as many members as private unions. With Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch casting a deciding vote, the Court made it easier for public employees to opt out of paying union dues, even in a unionized workplace.
So why have O’Brien and the Teamsters decided to lend their personal credibility to a man who publicly advocates weakening unions?
O’Brien comes from a long-time Teamsters family, with his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all members of the union in Boston and involved in freight transport, a career undertaken by the future president of the union himself, who hauled heavy materials to construction sites before becoming president of an important local chapter in his hometown in 2006. This begins a journey that leads him up the union hierarchy, though not without setbacks.
In 2013, he received a 14-day unpaid suspension for threatening members of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a progressive reform group, during a dispute with an ally in Rhode Island. “They will never be our friends,” he said of the protesters. “They need to be punished.”
After that storm blew over, Jim Hoffa appointed O’Brien as the union’s vice president in 2017, giving him responsibility for overseeing the union’s contract negotiations with UPS, where more than 300,000 Teamsters work. However, he was relieved of his duties a few months later by Hoffa, who was unhappy that O’Brien had tried to include people critical of him on the bargaining team, including the head of a Louisville chapter who had narrowly lost the Teamsters presidency to Hoffa in the previous election.
After being removed from office, O’Brien begins a journey that will lead him to challenge the union’s longtime leader. Two years later, O’Brien appeared at the convention of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the reformist and progressive group he had fought against in 2013 which he had said “will never be our friends”. At the convention he announced his support for many initiatives that had long been supported by the group, such as ending the rule that required a two-thirds vote to reject a contract when less than half of eligible members voted. The union had used this rule in 2018 to approve the contract with UPS, even though a majority of the members who voted had expressed their opposition.
O’Brien got the support of the TDU, staunch opponents of Trump, and then decided to run against the candidate supported by Hoffa, who in the meantime had decided not to run for another term. In the race for the head of the Teamsters the future president of the union chose as his vice Fred Zuckerman, the leader of the Louisville Teamsters, the man who had opposed Hoffa in 2016 and who had been the cause of O’Brien’s removal.
O’Brien won the election, the first person to do so without the support of the incumbent. He takes a significant leadership role in the union as head of the Teamsters, seeking to renew and strengthen the organization, focusing on a more aggressive approach to employers and advocating for a union that not only represents its members, but also defends workers’ rights in a changing economic environment.
Highly critical of large corporations like UPS and Amazon, he began to advocate for greater worker organization and union activism. However, his direct style and outspokenness led to controversy. In 2023, during a congressional hearing, he almost got into a physical fight with Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
O’Brien is therefore a seasoned politician, capable of maneuvering between the different currents of his union and politics, as well as adapting to the needs of a diverse union constituency. Some experts have argued that the Teamsters leader has adopted a more bipartisan approach precisely under pressure to consider the different political inclinations of the union’s members and ensure his re-election as head of the union.
Experts also say O’Brien is aware that many rank-and-file Teamsters are Trump supporters. Some polls show about 40 percent of auto workers supported Trump in the last election, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s ILR School in Buffalo.
According to Brian Pannebecker, president of Auto Workers for Trump, workers who support Donald Trump do so
[…] because they have traditional values. They own guns. They don’t want their gun rights taken away or restricted. They are overwhelmingly anti-abortion.
But some have raised concerns about the Teamsters’ choice. As Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu have argued, working-class white Americans have certainly supported Republican presidential candidates at higher rates in recent elections, but that process began long before 2016, and narratives that focus on Trump’s supposed appeal obscure this important long-term trend. This hasn’t stopped the Teamsters from supporting Democratic candidates.
Furthermore, according to Reuters’ Gram Slattery, Harris was losing to Trump by 25 points among whites without college degrees in late August polls and is losing to Trump among Teamsters by 27 points, in line with the general trend.
Which has prompted some to suggest that there are other reasons. Chris Towler, a political science professor at Sacramento State University, tweeted the results of an indicative poll that showed support for Biden before he dropped out and new support for Trump when Harris replaced Biden:
No surprise the first Democratic candidate in almost 40 years to not get their endorsement is also the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket…
he declared.
And miss me with the whole “her policies” shit, just a few months ago the Biden-Harris policy agenda had Teamsters’ support.
David Darmofal, a professor at the University of South Carolina, has also suggested that race was the only reason that made sense. Demographic data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Teamsters workforce was 73 percent male and 60 percent white.
James Williams — a former adviser to Democratic Senator Dick Durbin —suggested along the same lines there was a racial element at play. He complained that the fourth-largest union in the United States
will not support a black woman for the White House whose policies support the very right to organize against its opponent,
adding: “In the real world, this is just being a bunch of fanatics”.
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