Jordan Quinn is a worker at Amazon’s Northern Kentucky KCVG Air Hub.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has been busy currying favor with Trump and his “broligarch” administration. Why is he doing this?
O’Brien is an opportunist who follows whichever direction the political winds blow strongest. After a one hour interview with then-candidate Trump last year, O’Brien disagreed with Trump on immigration and said, “The Teamsters union supports immigrant workers because we all come from people that came from different countries.”
Since Trump’s election O’Brien has changed his tune, telling Republican Senator Josh Hawley on his podcast Better Bad Ideas that protecting undocumented workers is a “tough pill to swallow.” Cozying up to racist, anti-worker politicians like Trump or Hawley who only pretend to be pro-worker to get votes will not rebuild a fighting labor movement. O’Brien undermines his own goal of unionizing Amazon by supporting these politicians who are attacking the NLRB while sidelining the issues of immigrant Amazon workers. We need a plan that unites workers and wins real victories against the bosses.
Like AFL president Samuel Gompers over 100 years before him, O’Brien subscribes to the idea that workers and bosses have the same interests. This leads them to a dead-end strategy of “rewarding our friends, punishing our foes,” forgetting that both political parties are corporate. And over the last century this view has been tested and failed time and time again.
Today’s conservative labor leadership have learned little from the failures of Gompers’ AFL or Reagan crushing PATCO, despite their endorsement of him. Gompers’ AFL of the 1920s saw massive declines in union membership because they refused to oppose the two parties’ attacks on labor rights, refused to invest in mass organizing drives, and maintained segregation in the unions. This left the labor movement unprepared for the Great Depression, and it was up to socialists to lead major struggles in the 1930s to build the industrial unions we have today like the Teamsters, the UAW, and the ILWU. Under Reagan, the AFL-CIO’s refusal to mobilize all unions to defend PATCO left the door open for further attacks that gutted the unions in the neoliberal era.
Trump’s attacks on labor have primarily focused on public sector unions through DOGE cuts. The response (or lack thereof) by the rest of the labor movement will determine when and how Trump will come after the private sector unions. Trump can’t tolerate unions cutting into his profits and those of his billionaire buddies. If left unchallenged his administration will be emboldened to go for labor’s throats. Defending DOGE cuts to federal jobs as “trimming a lot of fat,” or saying right-to-work legislation should be left to state governments to decide, like Sean O’Brien recently claimed on a Fox News segment, is a betrayal of working people.
While Sean O’Brien is making a mistake by parroting Trump, other labor leaders supporting the do-nothing Democrats is also a dead end. The Democratic Party is a corporate party that is funded by billionaires and attacks unions too.
Our unions must break from both capitalist parties and build an independent, anti-war workers’ party. Such a party, rooted in workplaces, schools, and oppressed communities would win real victories against the billionaires by building movements and running independent candidates that fight unapologetically for the needs of the whole working class. While a new workers’ party may not be explicitly socialist from the outset, it would be a major step forward for the working class as a whole and we would fight for a socialist program within it.
We need to build rank-and-file opposition to opportunists like Sean O’Brien. For example, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) member and writer Hank Kennedy wrote a good article taking O’Brien to task for his anti-immigrant (and therefore anti-worker) remarks. However, a massive caucus like TDU could organize to change the approach of a powerful union like the Teamsters away from tailing Trump and towards pointing the way forward for the working class.
Even workers who are not yet members of unions, like unionizing Amazon workers, can organize to show what’s necessary. Despite O’Brien’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, ALU-IBT Local 1 in Staten Island and Amazon Teamsters at KCVG in Northern Kentucky are organizing to defend our immigrant co-workers against ICE and fighting religious discrimination against Muslim coworkers. Unionizing Amazon and other workplaces with large immigrant populations will require uniting immigrant and US-born workers around common demands.
Socialists in the labor movement must play an active role in this. Build a Fighting NALC (BFN), a new reform group in the letter carriers union, won open bargaining and led the first successful “Vote No” campaign on a sellout contract in 50 years! A Socialist Alternative member and trans BFN member organized to defend the right to use the bathroom at work and won! This is an excellent example that other union militants can follow rather than the divisive, bad ideas of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien.