Takeover at the Teamsters.

Sean O'Brien New Teamster President Source

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

3-29-22

Read a follow up to this post here.

 

On March 22^nd 2022, the New leadership team of the Teamsters was sworn in after winning the national election last October. Sean O’Brien, a former Hoffa ally and the head of the opposition “OZ” slate will be the new president of the 1.2 million member union. James Hoffa Jr and his, “Teamster Power” regime led the union for the past 23 years.

There was considerable anger among United Parcel Services (UPS) rank and file after they voted down a poor contract in 2018, but Hoffa was able to impose the contract using a clause in the Teamster constitution requiring a two thirds majority to reject a contract if the voter turnout is below 50%. This contributed to the O’Brien victory along with two decades of concessions.

 

As is usually the case, there is elation among some in the labor movement, particularly sections of the so-called left, whenever there is even the slightest hint of a leftward shift in the ranks of the stifling bureaucracy that sits atop organized labor. Sean O’Brien, a long-time insider is now head of a reform slate apparently.

 

This scenario has played out so many times before it’s hard to get too excited. John Sweeney and his “reform slate” that took the helm at the AFL-CIO in the late 1990’s in the first contested election in a century, threatened to emulate Martin Luther King and block bridges in the defense of his members. He quickly shifted course to building them, not with organized labor’s rank and file but with the bosses. He orchestrated a campaign of fear and coercion that dragged Kaiser workers, mostly SEIU members, with the help of the SEIU leadership, in to the labor/management Team Concept trap, against their gut instincts.  

 

We have had numerous saviors in the labor movement that the big business press gives a lot air time to, describing them as Firebrands, Young Turks and other fancy titles. Sara Nelson of the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO is the most recent. They generally fade from the limelight as quickly as the capitalist press shone it on them.

 

Sean O’Brien sounds very similar telling CNN in an interview that, “Fighting for workers is a full contact sport. We call on every Teamster to put your helmet on and buckle your chinstraps because the fight begins today.". 

The UPS contract is coming up in 2023 and O’ Brien intends to “….make UPS an example,". A strike at the company in 2023 would be the first national strike by the Teamsters in 25 years after the UPS strike in 1997 and of national importance.  UPS is the largest trucking company in the country and today employs about 327,000 workers compared to 180,000 in 1997 according to CNN.

Some Teamster History. A Good Read

Anyone that has experienced the internal struggles within organized labor is very familiar with the brutal atmosphere and vicious personal battles that take place between forces competing for power. Opposition slates are often demonized, and in the Teamsters have been threatened with violence. Personally, barring one time when an intoxicated International VP called me at home and threatened me, I never experienced threats all the years I was active in AFSCME as a socialist publishing an opposition newsletter, the AFSCME Activist. There is more information on the AFSCME Activist and why it folded here.

 

Every major union has a huge army of full-time staff whose job it is to enforce the leadership’s concessionary contracts on the membership and ensure no movement from below threatens the hierarchy that employs them. Not being controlled from below, full-time staff are more often than not exploited and at the mercy of the leadership that hires them; they have to watch their mouths. As I have said many times, it is impossible to change the concessionary course of organized labor by taking a job as a full-time staffer.  Under these conditions, any of the staff under Hoffa would not have fared too well supporting the opposition slate.

 

According to information sent to this blog, the same day the O’Brien team were sworn in, 80 staff, including 25 IBT organizers were let go without notice, any kind of severance or early retirement option. As one staffer put it, “The OZ Slate decision seems to be motivated by politics and would be considered an egregious action if done by any employer and it’s not a good start from this union worker’s perspective.  This is not the way to create a strong union.  This act is fractious and was done to send a message to those who didn’t support or vote for the new slate of leaders.”

 

This is not unusual in unions. My own former union AFSCME International, imposed, or attempted to impose a two-tier wage system on its staff.

 

The truth is that Teamster rank and file members have lost confidence that very little, if anything will change. A weakness of the OZ slate victory is shown by the fact that the overall turnout for the vote was only 14%, demonstrating skepticism among members that O’Brien can deliver. The drop in turnout and collapse of support in Hoffa strongholds shows that while the failed strategies of the business unionists have lost significant support, many rank and file Teamsters do not see a clear alternative to the previous leadership other than to swap one set of labor bureaucrats for another. See the IBT elections results here.

 

In the leadup to the elections, both sides pointed to the need to organize workers at Amazon. O’Brien promised a return to a more aggressive approach that has been a strength of Teamster organizing in earlier decades, but militancy alone is not enough to take on a goliath of capitalism like Amazon. The failure of organizing drives at Amazon so far have not come from a lack of enthusiasm from organizers or a lack of desire to unionize by Amazon workers, but from labor leaders relying on a failed strategy of business unionism (that organizers must carry out) and their failure to openly reject and campaign against the Team Concept, the ideology behind the concessionary strategy that claims bosses and workers have the same interests. The natural result of this philosophy is that when capitalism goes in to crisis the immediate response from the union hierarchy is to bail it out which means attacking their own members.

 

There is no indication that Sean O’Brien and the OZ slate have abandoned this disastrous worldview. In addition, O’Brien is closely linked with the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration, in other words, the Team Concept in the political sphere. The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions has donated billions of dollars to this party of Wall Street over the years with nothing substantial to show for it.

 

It would be one thing if O’Brien arose as a reform figure in the midst of a major rank and file upsurge, and internal struggles within organized labor and the Teamsters union in particular; a scenario similar to the conditions that led John L Lewis, the United Mineworkers’ president and a former hack of Samuel Gompers, to play a progressive role for a period. But despite there being an upsurge in activity inside and outside of organized labor in the US in the past period, it is not (yet) a repeat of the huge upsurge in the 1930’s that led to the formation of the CIO. One missing link is the presence of significant left and socialist forces within the working class at the time, among the unorganized and organized workers. The reader can view the debate between the candidates from September 2021 below.

We live in extremely volatile times and there are without doubt rumblings within the ranks of organized labor and the unorganized workers in the aftermath of the pandemic, including at Amazon, Starbucks and other workplaces. It is impossible to say when and where a major uprising of the US working class will arise and what issue will be the spark, other than to say that it will.

 

It will be interesting to see what happens next.