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, “I’ll be 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. In an unusual move for a president, Biden urged the port operators 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 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 at a recent rally 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 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 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 and once said that unionized automakers in the Midwest should move plants to the South 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, 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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