At an important moment for the future of the labor movement, The Call is publishing different perspectives on debates in the unions. The following article is an opinion piece written by Brian Denning, a Teamster in Portland, Oregon, on his assessment of the situation in his union. We will publish more opinion pieces on these debates in the future.
It’s a strange time to be a DSA member in the Teamsters. With a grounding in labor organizing, it is painful to see my union working to convince members their primary role is loyalty to union position holders — and definitely not membership organizing. Since August of 2023, my Local, Joint Council, and International have had extremely low interest in any concerns from the shop floor, and the chill is palpable. It’s jarring to go from organizing labor rallies in support of Gaza and Palestine, to the deafening silence from my union. And it is hard in the wake of United Auto Workers (UAW) and Shawn Fain’s clear class struggle unionism to watch Teamsters and Sean O’Brien make surface moves in that direction while internally dampening engagement of rank and file members.
In place of a bold vision, the public-facing optics show Teamster photos with Trump in the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (IBT) headquarters, donations to bigoted anti-worker and anti-union Senator Josh Hawley, and Sean O’Brien as a speaker at the Republican convention. These moves are polarizing rather than engaging Teamsters membership, even before the Republican National Convention speech.
Hoping that political donations curry favor with politicians whose lot is long cast with capital overlooks the failure of this defensive strategy to do little more than slow the bleeding out of organized labor. Calculating that Trump has a good chance of being in power in 2028 when the UPS contract comes up is understandable; calculating that Teamsters can bank on Trump’s good will tomorrow — let alone four years from now — is fantasy.
It’s difficult to discuss Sean O’Brien’s presidency and the Teamsters in this time period without comparing them to Shawn Fain and the UAW; in particular their approach to member political education and presidential politics. With 400,000 working members, UAW is roughly one third of the size of the Teamsters. Yet not only was UAW the first union to get a sitting U.S. president on a strike line to show support, Shawn Fain also clearly articulates an inspiring vision that politically educates membership in the deep organizing tradition of Jane McAlevey. And Fain was very clear when he said publicly that, “Trump doesn’t give a damn about working-class people.”
In contrast, O’Brien came to Trump and the RNC and bolstered their power — not the power of the Teamsters. This was the tame union man bending the knee, more than a labor champion speaking truth to power. Alexandra Bradbury at Labor Notes offered a pointed critique of O’Brien’s RNC speech, showing how his pandering and nationalist rhetoric undermines the interests of an international union, and the interests of workers broadly. The framing of Republicans as champions of the working class by O’Brien, despite a voting record indicating quite the opposite, was dissonant to many — even those ready to acknowledge the limitations of both parties required under capitalism to manage working-class decline. O’Brien’s public support for Senator Hawley during and after the RNC speech also resulted in backlash within the membership. After some public-facing and internal push-back on his blanket praise of Hawley, O’Brien issued an official statement that Teamsters do in fact stand with their LGBTQ+ membership who have been demonized and targeted by Hawley — and most of the Republicans O’Brien went out of his way to paint as friends of Teamsters.
Shawn Fain of UAW is known for championing the working class as well as his union siblings. Fain speaks to class issues, and presses for more labor solidarity — lining up contract expirations for May Day, the four-day, 32-hour work week — these are bold ideas that engage membership and the working class. UAW shifted from their important contract wins to highly visible and exciting organizing campaigns that highlighted conditions of workers and engaged members. IBT’s visibility has been much more limited.
Sean O’Brien is known for being pugnacious, with fighting rhetoric; but the unifying vision, the bold ideas are not currently on display. Compare O’Brien with Ron Carey, who as president of the IBT in 1997 led the historic UPS strike. The motto for that campaign was, “Part-time America doesn’t work!” The center of the campaign was the need for full time work with good wages and benefits for working families — a unifying, rank-and-file inspiring, public-supported campaign.
O’Brien’s overtures to Republicans are not particularly surprising; many IBT members are conservative, and Trump remains popular with a vocal minority. Union worker demographics show that union membership is seeing recent growth led by Black and Latina women, and a long trend line of a higher representation of peoples of color in union membership than non-union populations. Simultaneously, union membership is shifting more Republican this year, and generally trending older, with much higher numbers of union members represented in the over age 45 demographic.
Some have suggested that O’Brien went to the RNC to show the Democrats that there are consequences for their inaction on workers’ issues. They say O’Brien is disciplining the Democrats, because the Democratic Party-controlled White House did not support Teamster railway workers; Democrats refused Sean O’Brien’s request for assistance with the bankruptcy of the national shipping line Yellow, impacting 30,000 Teamsters; and because Biden declined the invitation to visit the IBT headquarters. The issue with this calculation is while a mobilized and organized working class could and can leverage concessions from political parties including the Democrats, attempting to pressure that party from the right does not then yield movement leftwards. The last six election cycles at a minimum show that Democrats simply shift further to the right, and do not pause when confronted with losing union votes or support.
More likely is Sean O’Brien signaling to a heavily Republican base of older, higher dues-paying, vested-in-pensions Teamsters who will be voting in 2026 when O’Brien is up for reelection. O’Brien is also showing those to his left within the Teamsters that he doesn’t need them to win reelection; they can either “dance with the one who brung them,” or be further marginalized.
The youngest Baby Boomers turn 60 this year. As this dominant demographic wave retires, a younger membership will have different views on major issues, from Gaza to climate change and what it means to be in a union as working conditions continue to decline for most Americans. Since 2016, Millennials are the largest generation in the workforce, while Boomers are rapidly declining. A union planning to engage and win the hard fights ahead should work to not alienate the future leaders and inheritors of an organization.
UAW’s Shawn Fain publicly called for a ceasefire in Gaza in December of 2023, and showed solidarity with and support for protesting students on U.S. campuses this year. In contrast, Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters are an outlier among unions in the United States when it comes to Palestine and Israel’s ongoing genocide. Unions representing the majority of unionized workers in the US have passed resolutions or made statements pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza — including within some conservative unions. But not the Teamsters, whose history includes heavy investment in Israel. The Teamsters as an organization clearly decided that their strategy is to simply not address in any way the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the U.S. government cosigns and supports. Position holders within the Teamsters appear unwilling to politically educate membership in a way that would lay a foundation where members can work through politically fraught ideas and minimize tendencies toward polarization.
Within the reform wing of the Teamsters, there are a range of views on what is to be done. Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), by far the largest and best-known caucus within IBT, probably isn’t going to bring up any political issues like Gaza and Palestine, as it has long claimed to be nonpartisan and only focused on member education and organizing. Their position now is especially complicated after having supported O’Brien’s candidacy on the “Teamsters United” leadership slate in 2021.
So what role is TDU currently fulfilling within the membership and the IBT? TDU expresses no differences with the IBT on any subject including Gaza and Trump, because they are the minor partner in their “coalition” with O’Brien and see it as all-important to maintain that coalition because they experience more openings for organizing when the top leaders don’t denounce them. TDU leaders have decided they do not have power to leverage within the coalition, in the same way AOC and Bernie lined up behind Biden, believing that any show of independence would bring retribution and marginalize them. Thus TDU has shifted from a reforming pressure outside the power structure to a subsumed player within the power structure.
Another group in the mix is Teamsters Mobilize — an upstart reform movement of rank-and-file Teamsters started in 2022, and the forum T-unionlink.org, built to connect Teamsters and provide a site for Teamster and labor history, education, and debate. Teamsters Mobilize tapped into a real frustration of some Teamsters that saw IBT and TDU unwilling to fight for a base pay of $25 an hour for part-time UPSers in the contract fight last year, as well as other contract concerns. TDU initially began a campaign for $25 but dropped it at O’Brien’s insistence. The IBT has sent T-unionlink.org a cease-and-desist letter to force them to stop using the Teamsters name, which has a chilling effect on internal dissent. The action appears retaliatory for a group breaking news and sharing dissenting voices of current and retired Teamsters that the IBT finds threatening to their narratives of responsive leadership and grateful members unified behind O’Brien. This is a serious issue within the Teamsters where critique, disagreement, or conflict is perceived as disloyalty by union position holders.
Defining good members by “loyalty” to position holders fails to center the rank-and-file in the union, and it undermines solidarity. It also signals that the administration lacks confidence and vision. Infighting and an inability to organize are directly related to the lack of a unifying and engaging vision for Teamsters.
Teamster members seeking a voice towards reform and greater democratic engagement may struggle to find that in TDU, when the reform caucus is constrained from making any independent critique, and when the caucus appears to represent in actual numbers less than 1 percent of the 1.2 million Teamster members.
Teamsters are coming out from under decades of James Hoffa Jr. and service-model unionism that rejected rank and file engagement. To expect Teamsters to suddenly or fully embrace class struggle unionism is unrealistic; this is a fight on a longer timeline than a few years. But as a labor organizer and a socialist, I know increasing expectations and engagement on the shop floor is the only path forward that is not simply managed decline.
The conditions that gave labor a great opportunity for organizing in the last few years are a clear threat to capital, which has responded accordingly. The highest U.S. courts are rapidly eroding the right to strike, and aiming at neutralizing the National Labor Relations Act. Organized labor has huge challenges ahead. Challenges that demand vision, and leadership, right now.
DSA as an organization is wisely careful not to alienate labor unions broadly and reform caucuses especially, so there is an understandable hesitation to dive into assessing Teamsters and TDU. Yet as labor organizers and socialists we cannot allow ourselves to accept demands of loyalty over solidarity with the working class.
TDU and the IBT can choose to engage rank and file members of the Teamsters as well as position holders in the Joint Councils and the Locals; building support and buy-in — but not without moving now. It’s time to show leadership and create with members a real vision of a fighting union, and a future for labor in the U.S. The labor movement knows the potential of the Teamsters — it is time for building the member-led structures capable of navigating the road ahead.
