Sean O’Brien Walked Right Into It
8 min read
Very few individuals who attempt to use Donald Trump for their own interests end up walking away with their dignity intact. That’s something that Sean O’Brien, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, should have considered before he lent the union’s credibility to the Republican National Convention back in July.
“President Trump had the backbone to open the doors to this Republican convention, and that’s unprecedented. No other nominee in the race would have invited the Teamsters into this arena,” O’Brien said in his speech.
Myopia is part of the pattern: Trump somehow convinces his targets that they are special for having attracted his attention; then, in the end, they discover that he got what he wanted in exchange for nothing. This week, less than a month after the convention, Trump was chatting with the union-busting right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, and the two bonded over the joy of firing striking workers.
“You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone,’” Trump said to Musk, who laughed in response. Musk, who is an avid Trump supporter, was hosting the former president on his social-media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter). The next day, the United Auto Workers, which has endorsed the Democratic ticket, filed a federal complaint against the two men for trying to “threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes.” Additionally, making matters more complicated, the Black caucus of O’Brien’s own union, the Teamsters, announced its endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris that same day.
This all put O’Brien in a deeply awkward position, given that he had lent his personal credibility to a man who was now publicly endorsing strike-breaking and union-busting. He sent a statement to Politico saying that “firing workers for organizing, striking, and exercising their rights as Americans is economic terrorism.” There’s an old cliché about not negotiating with terrorists, but presumably you also don’t want to be a featured speaker at their big political convention.
Trump’s hostility to unions is neither new nor surprising. As president, he appointed judges and justices who were hostile to organized labor, made anti-labor appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, and altered regulations to make it easier for employers to stiff low-wage workers on pay and overtime. By contrast, the Biden administration has been one of the most pro-labor in history; just ask the Teamsters, whose pensions the administration rescued from insolvency.
There are a few policy areas, such as trade, where some unions align more closely with Trump’s positions than with Harris’s. But none of the prominent self-styled Republican “populists” whom O’Brien named in his RNC speech actually supports proposed legislation that would provide greater protections to those seeking to form or join a union. Instead, Republicans have persistently tried to blame the economic struggles of the white working class on a diversifying workforce. Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, wrote in a July op-ed that “the C-suite long ago sold out the United States, shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs, while using the profits to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag.”
To O’Brien’s credit, his speech at the RNC did not sound like this. O’Brien was right when he told the audience that, “against gigantic multinational corporations, an individual worker has zero power. It’s only when Americans band together in democratic unions that we win real improvements on wages, benefits, and working conditions.” But that’s precisely why his appearance at the convention was ill-conceived: The Republican Party is not interested in helping American workers form or join unions. It is interested in winning votes by whipping up hostility against workers who do not fit a narrow, racialized conception of the American working class. O’Brien made that narrative more credible with his presence.
So why did O’Brien speak at the convention in the first place? At the time, Biden had not yet stepped down as the Democratic nominee in favor of Harris. With Trump looking like a lock for the presidency, perhaps O’Brien felt as though he was earning the goodwill of the party most likely to be in power in January. In an ideal world for organized labor, both parties would seek the support of America’s unions and not just the support of business—the Democrats typically seek the support of both, with mixed results for organized labor. O’Brien implied as much to CNN in mid-July, saying, “The partisanship is not working. We need bipartisan support; we need bipartisan cooperation.”
So you can imagine how O’Brien might think that, by speaking at the RNC, he was acting in his members’ interests. Instead, all he did was lend labor’s credibility to a party whose economic and social agenda is to divide workers and hobble their political influence rather than support them. O’Brien has also offered to be one of the many union leaders speaking at the Democratic National Convention this week as well, but has reportedly not gotten a response. I think rejecting this offer would be a mistake; the Democratic Party should try to avoid alienating a prominent union leader notwithstanding his appearance at the rival party’s convention.
The American labor movement itself has not always been a model of tolerance—both historically and recently; the Teamsters settled a racial-discrimination lawsuit against O’Brien in January (the union denied wrongdoing). Nor is the white identity politics of Trumpists’ faux-laborist rhetoric entirely new. Throughout American history, financial elites have tempted white workers with the possibility of succeeding on the condition that they narrow the labor tent to exclude particular disfavored minorities. To the extent that the story of American labor is often more tragedy than triumph, it is because this Faustian bargain has been repeatedly struck without the lesson being learned that the end result is not a stronger labor movement but a weaker and more divided one.
The Founders preserved slavery, and thus a racial caste system that divided white laborers from Black, giving the former the status of persons and the latter the status of chattel. Racial division has remained the most effective tool for elites seeking to keep pay low, benefits minimal, and working conditions deplorable. Whenever financial elites successfully tempt white workers into allying with those who share their prejudices instead of their economic interests, those same white workers find themselves weakened and exploited. But when workers ally with one another across racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural lines, they can reshape society.
Two examples from the past illustrate this. During the 19th century, members of labor and agricultural organizations such as the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor realized that they had more in common with Black laborers than the southern financial elites who ran the Democratic Party to which many of them had traditionally belonged. The Populist Party that emerged from the labor ferment of the late 19th century sought reforms that would have benefited workers across racial and cultural lines, but was ultimately defeated by the same combination of race-baiting demagoguery and political terrorism that ended Reconstruction. Like the Republicans before them, the Populist leadership by and large surrendered to bigotry rather than fighting it, believing their ambitions would be better served by indulging prejudices rather than toiling against them.
The labor reforms they sought would have to wait until the mid-20th century, when labor groups such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations managed to bring workers together across social lines to advance both the social-democratic agenda of the New Deal and the racial equality sought by the civil-rights movement.
Both episodes were more complicated than these brief summaries can capture, but the moral of both stories remains: When labor movements fail to be tolerant, they fail. And when they appeal to the broadest possible coalition, they can achieve things no other force in politics has proved capable of achieving. The right-wing backlash to the New Deal and the Great Society shattered the coalition that brought them into being, but it has never been able to fully repeal its successes.
At least, not yet. Some conservatives are hoping that ongoing right-wing control of the Supreme Court and a second and perhaps indefinite Trump administration will allow them to do so. They remain committed to the long-standing Republican agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and lax regulation for corporations. That economic agenda is simply not possible in a world with a strong labor movement. So when Hawley blames the struggles of working-class white Americans on “diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag,” it is little more than an update of the rhetoric of 19th-century Democratic Party demagogues who fought Populist reforms by attacking them as a trojan horse for “Negro domination.”
Workers may not share the religious beliefs, ethnic backgrounds, gender, or sexual orientations of their colleagues, but they do share their economic interests. The corporate executives who want to manipulate their prejudices in order to pay them less money for more work under worse conditions do not. As long as their employees are raging against someone for having blue hair or specifying their pronouns, because they profess a different faith or speak a different first language, they are easier to exploit. Colleagues don’t need to love one another. They don’t even need to like one another. But they do need to understand that allying with those who share your prejudices is no substitute for solidarity with those whose fate and fortunes are intertwined with your own.
The intolerance that is the ideological and moral cornerstone of the Trump campaign is bad for the labor movement. American history illustrates as much. So does the record of the Trump administration itself, which was as anti-labor as they come. In both cases, these are histories that one would hope a union leader like O’Brien would be familiar with.
