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SEAN O’BRIEN’S TANTRUM AGAINST THE DEMOCRATS  
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Steven Greenhouse
October 15, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ He appears to be hoping for a Trump victory, which would be a
disaster for the Teamsters, but just maybe good for him. _

Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters, speaks during the Republican National Convention, July 15,
2024, in Milwaukee., Matt Rourke/AP Photo

 

One labor leader after another has called Joe Biden the most pro-union
president of their lifetime. Sean O’Brien, the president of the
Teamsters union, evidently disagrees.

Last week, O’Brien told a conservative commentator
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honest with you, I’m a Democrat but they have f*cked us over for the
last 40 years”—and that of course includes the last four years
under President Biden. Not only did O’Brien, to the GOP’s delight,
engineer the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse anyone in the
presidential campaign (after the union had endorsed every Democratic
presidential nominee since 2000), but in comments like those above,
O’Brien seems eager to sabotage Kamala Harris and help Donald Trump.

It’s not at all clear what game O’Brien is playing, but one thing
is perfectly clear: If O’Brien helps deliver victory to Trump—who
recently praised the idea of firing union members who are on
strike—that would be very bad for the nation’s 1.3 million
Teamsters, indeed very bad for all of the nation’s nearly 15 million
union members.

Perhaps O’Brien is suffering from a serious case of amnesia. He has
evidently forgotten things, including many things that the Democrats
have done for the Teamsters over the last 40 years. O’Brien
evidently forgets that the Democrats delivered the very important $86
billion Butch Lewis bill, long the Teamsters’ number one legislative
priority. It rescued the pensions of more than 400,000 Teamsters.
O’Brien also forgets that Harris at one point cast the deciding vote
in the Senate to keep that bill from failing.

O’Brien also forgets that the Biden-Harris administration won
enactment of three important pieces of legislation that labor unions
enthusiastically supported: the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and
the bills to spur green energy and computer chip manufacturing in the
U.S. Those laws will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying,
blue-collar union jobs, many of them Teamster jobs.

O’Brien somehow forgets something very recent: Biden weighed in
heavily on labor’s side during this month’s longshoremen’s
strike, which the Teamsters union strongly supported
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In an unusual move for a president, Biden urged the port operators
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to up their wage offer, and that pressure helped get them to offer a
61.5 percent raise over six years and end the strike.

O’Brien also seems to forget, as the _Prospect_’s Harold Meyerson
wrote
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two weeks ago, that the Biden-Harris National Labor Relations Board
has immensely helped the Teamsters’ efforts to unionize hundreds of
thousands of Amazon drivers, who nominally work for outside
contractors even though they wear Amazon uniforms and drive trucks
emblazoned with Amazon’s logo. Regional NLRB officials have
determined that Amazon and delivery contractors are joint employers, a
finding that will make it far easier to unionize those drivers.

O’Brien evidently forgets that the Democrats delivered the very
important $86 billion Butch Lewis bill, long the Teamsters’ number
one legislative priority.

O’Brien forgets much else: that Biden and Harris have both walked on
union picket lines, that Biden and Harris strongly support the
Protecting the Right to Organize Act (which Trump opposes), that
Biden, with Harris backing him, expanded overtime pay to millions more
workers. Meanwhile, billionaire Trump whined that he hates overtime
pay. “I hated to give overtime. I hated it,” he said
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in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other
people in. I wouldn’t pay.”

The one thing O’Brien seems to remember is that Bill Clinton, a
Democratic president, persuaded Congress to ratify NAFTA, which, many
people forget, was negotiated by a Republican president, George H.W.
Bush. By speeding the exodus of jobs to Mexico, NAFTA hurt many
blue-collar workers, including many Teamsters. NAFTA was ratified a
long time ago—31 years ago—but O’Brien, through some
hard-to-understand mental processes, seems to hold Kamala Harris
partly responsible for NAFTA.

Whoops—I forgot to mention one other thing that O’Brien seems to
have forgotten. The Teamsters union under its previous president
praised Kamala Harris
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as “a strong ally for this union,” adding that she was “a
well-known champion of California Teamster members” and
“aggressively prosecuted wage theft by companies who
misclassified” truck drivers and other workers as independent
contractors.

Perhaps there’s another reason O’Brien asserted that the Democrats
have “f*cked” us over. Perhaps he was having a temper tantrum
because his ego was hurt when the Democrats didn’t indulge him and
invite him to speak at the Democratic convention. The Democrats were
understandably wary of giving O’Brien a big platform after he’d
spoken at the Republican convention, where he kissed up to Trump and
let Republicans turn him into a show horse
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to make their not very believable case that they are pro-worker and
pro-union.

It’s just plain—if you’ll allow me to use the word—“weird”
for O’Brien to accuse the Democrats of “f*cking” over unions
when Trump, as president, repeatedly “f*cked” over unions by
opposing the PRO Act, viciously attacking several labor leaders,
rolling back safety and overtime regulations, failing to enact his
long-promised infrastructure bill, and stacking the NLRB with
pro-business appointees who were intent on weakening labor unions. Not
only that, Trump has said he’d support a National Right to Work bill
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and once said that unionized automakers in the Midwest should move
plants to the South
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to save on labor costs. What’s more, many union members felt tricked
by Trump after he made the wonderful-sounding promise that he’d
bring back all of Ohio’s lost factory jobs
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and that didn’t come close to happening.

Perhaps there’s one other reason O’Brien said he feels
“f*cked” by the Democrats. He feels a need to sabotage the
Democrats and help Trump win in order to pursue what some say is his
unspoken goal of positioning himself as “Trump’s labor
guy”—the grand pooh-bah of union leaders—if Trump wins on
November 5. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan and
that puts him over the top, he’ll certainly owe a huge debt of
gratitude to O’Brien, both for not endorsing Harris and for his
words stabbing the Democrats in the back. O’Brien would love to be
seen as a kingmaker, which would thrust him into the spotlight.

If Trump wins, it might be great for O’Brien and his ego, but it
will be bad news for O’Brien’s 1.3 million Teamsters—and all the
nation’s union members—because there’s little reason to think
that Trump won’t be just as anti-worker and anti-union in a second
term as he was in his first term.

And with the viciously anti-union Elon Musk playing a huge role in any
Trump victory, Trump might become even more anti-union than before.

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Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, was a
New York Times reporter for 31 years. He is the author of the book
‘Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American
Labor.’

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* Election 2024; Teamsters; Democrats;
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