By ERNIE GOTTA
Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, surprised many by being one of the guest speakers during the first night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. O’Brien’s speech was forceful at times, with condemnations of multinational corporations like Amazon and Yellow Freight.
But at the same time, the speech also generated illusions in the political system and even praised Trump—calling him “one tough S.O.B.,” which is an acronym that O’Brien uses for himself (@TeamsterSOB) on the social media platform X. O’Brien also applauded the VP candidate, J.D. Vance, as well as several other Republican senators, for listening to unions and alleged that they “truly care about working people.” In fact, some Republicans, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), do acknowledge the strategic significance of appearing to align themselves with labor unions. O’Brien’s speech referenced Hawley’s support for the Teamsters in a dispute with Amazon.
The audience initially gave O’Brien hearty rounds of applause, but as the speech continued with references to corporate “terrorism” against the working class, the enthusiasm diminished.
O’Brien is the only Teamster president in the union’s 124-year history to speak at the podium of the Republican National Convention, although James Hoffa Jr. attended the GOP convention in 2000 and publicly raised the possibility of supporting Bush over Gore in that year’s race. (The union threw its support to Al Gore at the last minute.)
It is not unusual for union leaders to support Republican politicians. For example, in 1940, John L. Lewis, president of the Mineworkers Union and the CIO, broke with FDR over war policies. At the time, with the labor movement surging, many workers thought that Lewis’s break would result in a call for building a labor party. Instead, in a radio address, he threw his support to Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. It is also true that Republican candidates going back to well before Wendell Willkie courted labor unions.
The Teamsters supported Republican nominees or professed “neutrality” between the parties for over two decades—backing the campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.—until the union gave support to Bill Clinton in 1992. Since then, despite its temporary wavering between Bush and Gore in 2000, the IBT has endorsed all of the Democratic presidential candidates—at least, until the present time. Now, O’Brien says that the Teamster leadership has not yet made a decision on endorsing a presidential candidate. The Teamsters donated $45,000 to both the Trump and the Biden campaigns.
In one way, this may reflect what is perceived as political division among rank-and-file Teamsters based on an internal union straw poll. Politico explains that the straw poll “showed 37 percent support for Trump, 46 percent for President Joe Biden and 5 percent for independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The rest were undecided, uncommitted or may not vote.”
O’Brien’s speech was a master class in bureaucratic maneuvering, even though it angered some. His maneuvers created divisions within the Teamsters’ bureaucracy; many did not want him to speak at the RNC. In New Politics, Teamsters Vice President John Palmer wrote, “The Teamsters conducted a poll of which the majority of members chose not to support Donald Trump. Members should demand that President O’Brien not participate in the Republican Convention, nor allow himself to disgrace this Union by creating the false impression that Teamsters members support Trump and all he stands for.”
O’Brien is really walking a tightrope between a divided rank-and-file base, a bureaucracy traditionally rooted in the Democratic Party, and politicians—both Republican and Democratic—who manage the capitalist, imperialist system of the United States.
What can union members gain from O’Brien’s maneuvering? Nothing. In reality, his speech would have been at home in both the Republican and Democratic Party conventions. The Teamsters president is playing a losing game with the union membership’s money. It’s clear that he means to conduct business as usual when he states that the Teamsters “aren’t beholden to anyone or any party. We will create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition.”
A bipartisan agenda? To what end? Both Trump and Biden and their political parties have terrible track records in giving support to unions and the working class. Trump has a long history of union busting in his hotels before becoming president. As president, Trump continued union busting, stacking the NLRB with anti-union representatives, pushing right-to-work legislation, opposing increases in the federal minimum wage, etc.
Biden was also terrible for the working class. Most notably, he forced a terrible contract on railroad workers that failed to meet some of their most needed and basic demands. Many of these workers are represented by the Teamsters, who downplayed Biden’s betrayal. The Biden administration failed to implement any real meaningful pro-union legislation. The Democratic Party has also failed to accept O’Brien’s offer to speak at their convention—a fact that O’Brien exploited early in his speech to the RNC, to thunderous applause.
Furthermore, O’Brien promoted the idea of American exceptionalism and played to the worst of patriotic clichés by tying his favorite slogan that he uses to describe the Teamsters, “bigger, faster, and stronger,” to his vision for the United States. Accomplishing this goal means that U.S. corporations must maintain their ability to exploit workers at home and abroad. O’Brien’s strategy seemingly wants to leverage the 1.3 million members of the Teamsters union to push the Democrats and Republicans to collaborate and, as former President Trump says, “Make America Great Again.”
The working class has nothing to gain and everything to lose from following this perspective. Working people in the U.S. have nothing in common with the capitalist class. We have nothing in common with politicians like Trump and Biden—who manage a corrupt, destructive, and greedy system. For the working class, bipartisanship of the Democrats and Republicans means more immigrant workers and their children in cages, increased funding for police, more funding for Israel’s colonial project and genocide of the Palestinian people, greater restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, more repression of the Queer community, more union busting, etc.
The Democrats and Republicans have dominated the political life of the working class for generations. But what can working people do to break this cycle? The only option is for working people to organize in their unions and communities around the demand for class independence. There are no shortcuts for this solution, just as there are no answers for workers in the capitalist system.
The only answer for working people is working-class independence. Our struggle for class independence takes place in the streets and also in building an independent labor party as a vehicle for the working class to wage an unrelenting struggle against capitalism. Why did the Teamsters’ straw poll mentioned above not have an option for a labor party? Why does the union limit itself to supporting one or another of the parties of the bosses?
What could an independent labor party in the U.S. accomplish? A definitive break with the Democratic Party—and the bureaucratic union leadership that supports it—would open an important space to fight for real solutions to environmental, economic, and other social crises. A real political party for the working class could raise demands to increase the minimum wage, organize the unorganized, and fight for universal health care. To accomplish this historical task, rank-and-file union members must put pressure on their leaders to demand a call for an emergency congress of labor that puts building a labor party at the head of its agenda.
