The Teamsters President Is Out of His Depth

“We are not beholden to anyone, or any party,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said two months ago at the Republican National Convention. Perhaps he meant it, because on Wednesday the Teamsters announced that, for the first time in 28 years, the union would not endorse any candidate for president. Still, this non-decision doesn’t smell to me like a declaration of independence. It smells like capitulation to the GOP.

According to the Teamsters announcement, the union could extract “few commitments on top Teamsters issues from either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.” Oh, really? Not a dime’s worth of difference, huh? That’s surprising. It’s my understanding that Republicans oppose labor’s policy agenda across the board, whereas Democrats (although sometimes lacking sufficient enthusiasm) nearly always support labor.

What are these top Teamsters issues? Let’s review.

The biggest, by far, is support for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would remove various obstacles to labor organizing, many of them dating to the anti-labor Taft-Hartley law, which a Republican Congress passed over President Harry Truman’s veto in 1947. According to the Teamsters announcement, Harris told the Teamsters she supports the PRO Act. Indeed, when she was a senator, Harris cosponsored it.

Does Trump support the PRO Act? Strangely, the announcement doesn’t answer this question. Let’s be generous and conclude that Trump was politely evasive. Still, I can answer for him: Trump doesn’t support the PRO Act. His running mate J.D. Vance, explicitly opposes it—in part, Vance explained last March to Politico’s Ian Ward, because “I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.” (Vance has acquired an adorable habit of saying the quiet part out loud.)

Another top Teamsters issue would be state right to work laws that bar unions from charging non-members fees to cover their portion of collective-bargaining costs. This creates a free-rider problem that drains union treasuries. In his convention speech, O’Brien suggested that he had successfully persuaded Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to change his mind on right-to-work laws. According to Hawley, it was actually Missouri voters who changed his mind by voting in 2018 to repeal it, but never mind. Has O’Brien changed Trump’s mind on right-to-work laws? Not yet! According to the Teamsters announcement, Trump would not agree to veto any bill that imposes right-to-work nationally.

This should not come as a surprise. During the 2016 campaign Trump said, “I like right to work,” and “my position on right to work is 100 percent.” That’s not particularly ambiguous. Later, when Trump was president, his Justice department submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in support of subjecting public employee unions to right to work laws, a position the high court affirmed in its 2017 Janus decision.

The Teamsters non-endorsement statement doesn’t answer whether Harris would commit to veto a bill imposing right-to-work nationally. Maybe they forgot to ask? Anyway, her answer would be no. It did note that Harris “criticized dangerous ‘right to work’ laws.” And anyway, the PRO Act would eliminate right to work nationwide.

If there’s an official Teamsters document listing its top legislative priorities for the current Congress, I can’t locate it. But there’s one for 2021-2023 session, and at the top is a bailout for multi-employer pensions, of which the most prominent is the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund. The Biden-Harris administration delivered that bailout in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Act, which passed without a single vote from O’Brien’s new best friends, the Republicans. Harris, as president of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote on the parliamentary motion to proceed with the bill. Looking down the rest of that 2021-2023 list, I can’t find anything that Harris would oppose or that Trump would support.

One must ask: Where did Harris fail? What resistance on her part made the Teamsters deem her commitments “few”? According to the non-endorsement, Harris let railroad workers down.

“Tens of thousands of railroad Teamsters,” the Teamsters statement says, “were forced to accept a new contract implemented by Congress without member support in 2022.” Yes, that was a blunder. Fearful of a national rail freight strike, Congress and President Joe Biden invoked their powers under the 1926 Railway Labor Act to impose a contract that didn’t include sick leave. But a few months later, the Biden administration undid most of the damage by quietly negotiating an agreement with the rail companies on sick leave.

O’Brien won’t let this go. According to the non-endorsement, “neither candidate promised not to intervene to force similar RLA contracts.” Just to be clear: There is no major-party presidential candidate who ever would make such a promise.

The 14-member Teamsters board could not bring itself to endorse either candidate. But Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect reports that eight rank-and-filers who were invited to attend the board’s meetings with Harris, Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., felt differently. They all said they were for Harris. The text of the non-endorsement makes proud reference to these rank-and-filers’ participation, referring to the union’s interrogations as “rank-and-file roundtable interviews” and “rank-and-file presidential roundtables.” But no word is mentioned that these emissaries from the real world told the board to endorse Harris, and that the board ignored them. The fix was in.

What did the broad membership want? The Teamsters conducted a few internal polls that produced contradictory results. The first was a series of straw polls conducted by 300 union locals from April 9 to July 3, before Biden quit the race. These polls had Biden leading Trump, 44 to 36 percent. After Biden withdrew, the Teamsters commissioned a second membership poll from July 24 to September 13, overseen by an un-named “independent third party.” Union members were invited to participate through a QR code on the back of the Teamsters’ quarterly magazine. In that poll, the results flipped: Trump led Harris, 60-34 percent, leaving some Harris supporters scratching their heads. Was Trump’s lead legit?

Finally, the Teamsters hired Celinda Lake, a respected pollster, to survey members. That poll also ended September 15. Lake’s poll more or less reaffirmed the previous one, with Trump leading Harris 58-31 percent. Trump’s lead was legit after all.

But Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the AFL-CIO who now runs a voter project called In Union, points out that other unions aren’t passive with their members about elections. They perform outreach to educate them about each candidate’s positions. “It’s the union’s job to communicate with members about these candidates,” Rosenthal told me, “particularly when they don’t know these candidates.”

Arguably Harris’s abrupt entry left the Teamsters no time to introduce members to Kamala Harris. But if that’s the case, why attach any significance to a poll that puts Trump ahead?

The Teamsters have never been especially pro-Democratic. Robert Kennedy drove the union into the arms of Republicans in the 1960s with his prosecution of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. Then Rudolph Giuliani drove them back into the Democrats’ arms in the 1980s by putting the union into federal receivership. (Details here.) According to O’Brien, about half the union’s members are Republican. That’s probably true. In general, about one-third of union members are Republican, so while Democrats typically win union households, they don’t win them by large margins.

Still, O’Brien’s doing Trump an unreasonably large favor by withholding a Harris endorsement. “The real damage,” Rosenthal told me, “is that Trump—the way he lies about everything—will lie about this.” He’ll pretend to be a friend to labor, when he’s anything but. “That makes our job tougher in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, which have strong union membership.” Thanks for nothing, Sean.