Defining Our Interests
Recent decisions by the Teamsters have highlighted a stark decision facing resurgent unions: whether to prioritize narrow self-interest, or the interests of the movement.
Over the weekend, news broke that the Teamsters had thrown in behind Senator Josh Hawley’s bid for reelection in Missouri, breaking from the overwhelming majority of Missouri unions – including the Missouri AFL-CIO – that are backing one of Hawley’s prospective challengers.
It’s the latest in a series of bizarre decisions by the international union and some of its locals. With President Sean O’Brien’s election to replace James R. Hoffa, Jr., the Teamsters seemed poised to become a success story for union reform, catapulting Teamsters for a Democratic Union into influence for the first time since Ron Carey’s administration.
Some of the public-facing results have been less encouraging, despite the successful strike threat and pre-strike settlement during negotiations for a UPS agreement. Since then, the Teamsters have engaged in a high-profile courtship with the Republican far right, including cultivating a relationship with Donald Trump and making a substantial contribution to the Republican National Committee for their convention fund shortly after O’Brien met personally with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Overtures are overtures, and a courtship can fizzle; a dialogue, while alarming, doesn’t necessarily indicate anything more. But backing Hawley cements the seriousness of the Teamsters’ overtures to Hawley, Trump, and J.D. Vance, tying the union to a one-time supporter of “Right-to-Work” engaged in a cynical pivot – rejected by most unions and even the retired President of the MO-KS-NE Conference of Teamsters – to reinvent himself as a pro-worker politician.
The bizarre decisions haven’t been strictly at the level of electoral politics. Recently, a Teamsters local union in Pennsylvania – Teamsters Local 211/205 – made headlines for cutting a secret deal with Block Communications, the family company that owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, taking severance packages and decertifying their bargaining unit while four other unions remain on strike. The move, negotiated in secret with management and deliberately withheld from other unions on strike, triggered condemnation from the local NewsGuild and CWA District 2-13; the Guild and CWA represent the majority of workers that remain on strike.
A local decision to sell out a strike and decisions to court reactionary politicians by an international union don’t bear an immediate similarity; in fact, Teamsters 211/205 is one of the locals that strongly favored candidate Steve Vairma over O’Brien. But in both instances, the motivating logic – both explicitly articulated and less explicitly implied – bears a sharp resemblance. That resemblance, which should be troubling for reformers, suggests a continuity between the “new” Teamsters, and the old.
Deals in Secret
Let’s start with the Post-Gazette.
Last week, news broke that Teamsters Local 211/205 had reached a settlement with Block Communications – the parent company for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – to end their strike after nearly a year and a half, taking severance agreements and agreeing to decertify their union. The settlement was immediately condemned by The NewsGuild and CWA District 2-13, with CWA International Vice President Mike Davis accusing the Teamsters of prioritizing “greed over solidarity” by “selling out in secret[.]” According to statements made to WESA by Teamsters 211/205 Business Agent Joe Barbano, the Teamsters kept negotiations with Block Communications secret from other unions for six months at management’s demand.
(Disclosure: I’m a member of TNG-CWA, and this newsletter is named after The NewsGuild’s founding President; consider my perspective accordingly.)
There’s a grim, self-serving logic to the Teamsters’ actions. By all reports, Block Communications threatened to drastically reduce or eliminate their jobs altogether; after a year and a half on strike and a narrowing range of exit strategies, fear can be a powerful motivator. For union leaders weary of losing time and money to a protracted strike, securing the “best-worst” for their members while cutting the problem loose looks attractive. The impact on other strikers represented by other unions becomes largely immaterial – they have no legal obligation to look after those workers, and at the moment the broader interest seems to conflict with their narrow interest, narrow interest easily wins.
That’s the logic.
But the deal they reached – transactional and driven by narrow self-interest – is in keeping with some of the worst tendencies in organized labor, and the worst tendencies of what’s often termed “business unionism.” There are both petty and substantive moments of inter-union conflict over competing priorities every single day; it’s part of what occasionally makes the “House of Labor” a family so dysfunctional that Game of Thrones dynasties look like the Brady Bunch in comparison.
Rarely, however, do these moments of conflict cross into such explicit moments of seeming betrayal. It’s the “got ours” mentality to its most tragic and absurd extreme: the willingness to sell out everyone else’s interests, provided that your own are met. Your union has provided the service that members pay for, after all: a negotiator that gets them the best deal possible. You answer to them, not anyone else; you can’t be blamed for that, can you?
That those still on strike face diminished prospects for fair settlements isn’t, after all, a problem for the Teamsters: their workers have been taken care of, those workers still on strike are the responsibility of other unions, and the Teamsters’ hands are washed of the whole dispute.
The damage of such an approach is immediately apparent. Transformative moments for organized labor, like the recent coordinated strikes in Minnesota and UAW’s call for mass strikes on May 1, 2028, rely on coordination and trust between unions. That coordination doesn’t require that those unions fully surrender their own freedom to bargain and advocate for their interests; it does, however, require that they work in coalition recognizing that their interests and broader interests are inextricably aligned. If unions prioritize narrow self-interest at the expense of the trust necessary to work in coalition and partnership with other unions and their communities, then our collective power as a movement is diminished.
Early twentieth century union leaders and radicals like James Connolly decried this as “sectionalism,” naming it one of the greatest internal threats to the labor movement. It’s intrinsically poisonous to movement and class politics, presenting a narrow philosophy by which segments of organized labor can find ready excuse to turn a blind eye to the struggles of other workers, under the rationale that it isn’t in their interest to intercede. The “collective” in “collective interest” is defined not as a broader group, let alone as a class; “collective” and “institutional” interest become one and the same.
There’s an easy rejoinder to all of this: that it was the right of those workers to decide their own fate. To an extent, that’s right; union and worker democracy means the right of workers to make choices, whether bad or good. What that argument side steps, however, is the decision to make common cause with the opposition – Block Communications – while deliberately agreeing to keep your allies in the dark, under the theory that damaging broader collective interests is immaterial compared to securing your own.
That’s the true tragedy – and the one that isn’t limited to a sole strike settlement.
Reward Your Friends, Punish Your Enemies
So how’s this connected to Josh Hawley and national political decisions?
Start here: Josh Hawley’s being rewarded.
(We’ll get to where they connect if you read on.)
It’s fairly straightforward: Hawley has made overtures and become an inroad into the Republican caucus for the Teamsters, and they’re reciprocating by lending him political backing for a reelection campaign in which he’s heavily favored.
Unions play this transactional realpolitik frequently, holding their nose to endorse candidates out of political chess. An endorsement in a race – or staying out of a race – can help secure movement for key legislation (or at least a fair hearing); in the case of Republicans that earn rare labor endorsements, the expectation is that they’ll be there on hard votes and provide an inroad into an overwhelmingly hostile caucus. It’s not new to the Teamsters; they played a similar game backing moderate Republican Governor Charlie Baker for re-election in Massachusetts in 2018, banking on maintaining incumbent relationships over burning bridges for a challenger.
There are lines, though, and unions are typically only willing to overlook so much – and in Hawley’s case, there’s a lot to overlook. Hawley has a lifetime score of 11% from the AFL-CIO, and a 0% score in 2023 – below the already-low caucus average of 3%. In four out of five years on record, Hawley was worse on labor votes than the Republican average; in the one outlying year, 2020, he matched the caucus average of 33%.
Those are just the pieces of legislation on which the AFL-CIO took positions – and as a federation of over 55 affiliates with competing priorities, the AFL-CIO positions itself conservatively. A far broader range of issues of interest to affiliates and working people received votes, and Hawley has consistently backed reaction, carving a niche as one of the most stalwart MAGA Republicans in the Senate. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board argued, his labor pivot doesn’t pass the smell test: judge him not by his rhetoric, but by his actions.
After all, if you ask Josh Hawley what he thinks of education and other public sector unions, his pro-union persona will quickly fall apart. But the Teamsters see a road for themselves, and they want to keep it open.
Why is the road there for them? Outreach to far right politicians has undoubtedly been aided by an apparent move away from so-called “culture” issues under O’Brien’s leadership. Aversion to “culture” issues isn’t particularly surprising at first blush; union leaders at all levels and in most sectors remain wary of the “divisiveness” of “culture war” issues, albeit wary to different extents. Risk-averse leaders often cautiously focus on narrow formulations of “bread-and-butter” issues while maintaining a delicate balancing act between taking a stand on social issues, and alienating segments of membership. When the chips are down, labor almost always falls on the right side – albeit often imperfectly, as in the case of the AFL-CIO’s late and carefully measured support for a ceasefire in Palestine.
In fairness, discerning such a move by the Teamsters is largely discernment through absence, but the absences are telling. The Teamsters were one of the few unions to remain silent on the Dobbs decision, even while the AFL-CIO and most international unions condemned it as an attack on reproductive care and healthcare rights. Likewise, the Teamsters have remained silent on the ongoing war in Palestine, even as most major international unions and the AFL-CIO have taken stances, with the UAW leading a ceasefire coalition joined by other international unions like NEA, APWU, UE, and others. The list goes on.
To an outside observer, it seems as though the Teamsters have rejected a balancing act in favor of narrowing their issues and interests: in practice, that includes lowering the already too-low bar for what makes a “friend” of labor. It’s easier to avoid hard stances or points of conflict if you pretend they’re not there.
Two Roads
There’s plenty of reason to suspect this may be a positive factor in building bridges with far right politicians; after all, Hawley and his wife, Erin Morrow Hawley, have both been key legal activists for the anti-abortion movement, and Hawley was involved in the infamous “Hobby Lobby” case in 2014.
But they’re rewarding someone who’s delivering for them. If Hawley continues to provide for the Teamsters, then why does it matter? After all, politicians of both parties – including Democrats – are rewarded, even praised, as they fail to uniformly advance labor’s interests.
Josh Hawley isn’t a typical Republican Senator. He first swept into office on the Trump wave in 2016 after a primary victory over the Republican establishment’s handpicked candidate for the Attorney General nomination, State Senator Kurt Schaefer, and after defeating Democrat Teresa Hensley in the general election. Hawley – like disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens, also elected in 2016 – ran on a clear anti-establishment message, portraying himself as clear of the “swamp” and independent of Republican establishment control.
It was a watershed year for Missouri as Democrats suffered a historic and largely self-inflicted defeat, losing all statewide offices on the ballot and breaking a long run of statewide representation even as the state’s politics turned from purple to red. Hawley didn’t spend long as Attorney General, declaring less than two years after taking office that he would challenge incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill in the 2018 election – a race he won.
Hawley’s most infamous moment came as he raised his fist to far-right insurrectionists on January 6, even as they stormed the capitol complex in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. His actions came under scrutiny for inflaming the insurrectionists; it was later revealed that he fled to safety immediately following the incident. Hawley expressed no regrets about his actions, and boasted about fundraising off of the incident. In 2021, the Teamsters, prior to O’Brien taking office, condemned the insurrection as an assault on democracy.
Hawley has been, and continues to be, one of the key proponents of chauvinist nationalism in Donald Trump’s Republican Party: the “MAGA” wing of Republican politics. He, along with Senator J.D. Vance, has carved out a right-wing populist niche, attempting to stitch together an “America First” alliance of working class and rural white voters, along with economic elites, under the proposition that racial “others,” foreign nations, and “wokeness” are to blame for economic precarity and difficulty. It’s not unfair to identify a distinct odor of far-right – even fascist – politics, which should be of deep concern for organized labor.
Reactionaries work to kettle worker politics and activism in moments of labor power or crisis; overtures now are no different than past overtures like Nixon’s. During moments in which worker militancy coalesces into expression of broader or even class interest, it’s useful to try to constrain exactly what that interest looks like into something more manageable and less threatening: something like a labor-nationalist chauvinism predicated on xenophobia and resentment. It’s not the bosses that are your enemies; they’re victims, too. It’s wokeness and foreigners that are the enemy, and it’s the left that’s doing their dirty work for them. Your union leaders don’t see that, but we do, and we know you do too.
It’s ludicrous. We can scoff at how farcical Republican posturing is, much like many did – guilty as charged – when Marco Rubio decided to take a stab at “supporting” unions in 2021. We do so at our own peril.
Because what they’re doing has an audience among conservative union members that often feel that their unions don’t represent their political values – the very members to which the Teamsters appear to be responding and appealing. Recent evidence worryingly suggests that union members may draw a distinction between “pro-worker” and “pro-union,” and are receptive to regarding anti-union politicians as “pro-worker” even if they don’t regard them as “pro-union.” The divergence between what’s “pro-worker” and what’s “pro-union” is a dangerous ideological wedge, and one that reactionaries are keen to hammer home.
That message isn’t one that can be readily co-opted for labor’s own ends. In making their case for a pro-worker politics, Republicans like Vance and Hawley have embraced anti-union rhetoric; both Vance and Hawley echoed Donald Trump’s attacks on UAW leadership during the Big Three strike, attempting to drive a wedge between UAW rank-and-file and President Shawn Fain even as they rushed to grab pictures on UAW picket lines. To the extent they’ve been “pro-union,” their conditional support cleaves narrowly to their view of the daylight between their view of what’s “pro-worker,” and union positions.
It presents us with two roads: one upon which we reject narrow political agendas and narrow self interest in favor of thinking bigger, and one upon which we accept the poisoned chalice and voluntarily constrain what we believe to be our collective interest, our role, and our political vision. The Teamsters appear to be charting a path down the latter.
Why they’re choosing to do so is unclear. There’s a clear realpolitik in courting Trump; labor-washing his candidacy, even without an endorsement, helps maintain his unearned image as a pro-worker politician, and could pay off with unique access to the White House should Trump win in November. Where the courtship leads is still unclear; the Teamsters promised a late decision on Presidential endorsement this summer. It also helps strike political independence, diffusing the oft-repeated – and not wholly baseless – criticism by conservative members that unions serve as an appendage of the Democratic Party.
Building bridges to reactionaries may be what they believe to be an authentic expression of rank-and-file sentiment; it may be something they feel is necessary to “appeal,” as Teamsters for a Democratic Union leader Ken Paff observed yesterday in Jacobin, to those members. It could even be portrayed as similar to Senator Bernie Sanders choosing to make oft-criticized appearances on Fox News, under the theory that he’d rather have a voice with their audience than let them listen solely to reactionaries.
It could be all of the above – or some mixture thereof.
There’s merit to figuring out how to deal with reactionary sentiment among union members; the conundrum is particularly familiar to unions within the Building Trades, which have struggled with pro-Trump rank-and-file sentiment. Simply ignoring it while promoting Democratic candidates and “voting your paycheck” isn’t working, and something different needs to be done. The most generous analysis of the Teamsters’ political decisions falls within this category: that engagement is for the purpose of change, bringing conservative members into closer involvement with their union, providing opportunity to change their politics through collective struggle.
But embracing reactionary political priors seems at cross-purposes with changing them; establishing much-needed political independence does not, as Shawn Fain and UAW made clear, require entertaining class enemies.
The choice of roads, the choice of how we define our interest and how we define our obligations resulting from that interest, is where a local decision to sell out a strike and a national decision to court the far right come together. In both cases, the Teamsters have seemingly embraced the naked transactionalism promoted by business unionism, prioritizing narrow self-interest and dealmaking over their own long-term interests, to say nothing of the broader interest of organized labor or the working class.
The cost is huge, both for the Teamsters and the broader movement. Although politicians on the far right may deliver for the Teamsters on immediate issues, supporting candidates that threaten the right of workers to exercise their power at the ballot box – to say nothing of candidates that threaten the broader civil and economic rights of those workers – trades for short-term wins at the cost of long-term defeat.
Where It Leads
The tragedy is that the victory TDU has worked decades to achieve appears to be under threat, and under threat in a manner that leaves them largely powerless to avoid it.
Ken Paff’s piece in Jacobin yesterday presented the first real response to the controversies. In it, he highlighted TDU’s accomplishments – many of them very real, and important – while stressing that they’re a junior partner in the governing coalition. Though not made explicit, the reality is nevertheless made clear: if they want to continue advancing their goals, they have to accept the bad with the good.
It’s a difficult and unenviable position, and one which inevitably faces junior partners in coalition governments. There’s every reason to believe that TDU activists and leaders take exception with recent decisions; undoubtedly, they’ve argued against some of them internally. It’s entirely reasonable to speculate that those decisions, absent TDU’s influence, could be far more numerous, and far worse, and that TDU maintaining a seat at the table serves as a moderating force.
But there’s a looming question as to whether and when the costs will outweigh the rewards, and when the coalition agreement will break. Although Paff deflects controversy as ginned up by social media – an all too familiar shield raised by those feeling pressure – that’s far too glib and hopeful a response. Aside from internal pressure reported by the media, the Teamsters face external pressure as well. Decisions, from secret strike settlements to questionable political choices, have set them at sharp odds with others in the movement, cozying up with bosses and politicians actively attacking other unions and broader working class interests. If there’s a belief that anger is restricted to the posting class, it’s a deeply mistaken one.
Even more troublingly, the shape of those decisions indicate that despite TDU’s hard-won reforms, they haven’t dislodged some of the worst legacies of O’Brien’s predecessors. Democratic reforms haven’t yet produced a clear change in political philosophy or direction; sectionalism is still ascendant, presenting a political rather than procedural challenge for reformers.
If reformers are indeed embracing a role of loyal dissent within the Teamsters leadership, it’s one that may not be tenable in the long term. After all, parliamentary coalition governments always have a shelf-life; there’s no reason to expect this would be different. An alliance of convenience with O’Brien only serves so long as it’s convenient, and it’s reasonable to expect a future moment in which that convenience will come into question for both parties. Should the alliance fracture, it could leave reformers on the outside looking in, alienated from both O’Brien and the Hoffa loyalists remaining throughout the union.
But regardless of the decades-long effort to reform the Teamsters, and regardless of what path the governing coalition takes, the immediate reality appears clear. For now, Teamsters, both at the international and local levels, are continuing down a road that prioritizes what’s good for the Teamsters now over what’s good for the movement. It’s the choice of business unionism over movement unionism, and the choice of sectional interests over movement or class interests. In making that choice, they’re choosing to continue some of the worst elements of the Hoffa dynasty’s legacy, despite the heroic decades-long effort of reformers to dislodge it.
It could be easy to disown them, or to let them choose isolation over the broader movement. It may even feel justified, given moments in which they’ve demonstrated no broader concern for broader union interests. Blaming someone, whether O’Brien or other actors, may feel righteous.
But succumbing to that temptation isn’t to their interest, or ours; it just entrenches a divide we can ill afford. Feelings of righteousness won’t lead to a unified front against the bosses and their political allies. Unionists, whether in the Teamsters or outside, have to continue building a broader interest, even with our siblings that seemingly betray it.
This doesn’t mean shirking from accountability for those betrayals. It does, however, require that we demand accountability with an eye toward building something better. Our goal is not to embrace the movement their actions create – one of internally warring camps – but to fight against it.
That means continuing solidarity with reformers inside the Teamsters, and anyone working with an eye toward that vision of our movement. For those inside the Teamsters, it’s their mission to realize it; we can only support and encourage them in doing so. Those of us on the outside can only hope they succeed before the labor movement is further divided and damaged by prioritizing self-interest over a movement coming into its moment.