Yes, a Union Leader Spoke at the RNC. Yes, the GOP Still Hates Labor.

I didn’t look in on the Republican National Convention until late Monday night, preferring instead to watch the 1935 John Ford comedy The Whole Town’s Talking, wherein Edward G. Robinson plays both a vicious gangster and a nebbishy office worker who gets mistaken for the gangster; a moderate quantity of hilarity ensues. With that done, I figured, all right, I don’t feel like it, but a national magazine pays me to do this. So I logged on to the convention—and saw Teamsters President Sean O’Brien excoriating corporate America. For a moment I thought perhaps I’d clicked onto the wrong website. A big-time labor leader speaking at a Republican convention? Was I looking at a Democratic ally, or some Republican doppelgänger? Which was exactly how the convention planners wanted me to react. I quickly came to my senses.

Let’s be clear. The Republican Party despises labor unions. Until recently it made little effort to hide this. The GOP’s 2016 GOP platform stated that Republicans’ commitment to economic growth “compels us to challenge the anachronistic labor laws that limit workers’ freedom and lock them into the workplace rules of their great-grandfathers.” Republicans today (with significant loudmouthed exceptions like Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Labor and the Workforce Committee) are quieter about being anti-labor, in the interest of holding on to their working-class majority. The spectacular failure of then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2016 presidential bid, which was pretty much all about vanquishing organized labor, may have also influenced this cosmetic change. In the 2024 Republican platform approved Monday night, the words “labor” and “union” are nowhere to be seen.

But the party is still viciously anti-union. Republican presidents, including Donald Trump, install reliably anti-union majorities on the National Labor Relations Board. Only three congressional Republicans (Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Christopher Smith, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer) have signed on as co-sponsors to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to organize a workplace. Not a single Republican senator has signed on—not even vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, whom The New York Times calls “pro-labor” solely on the basis of Vance being anti-immigrant.

It makes historic sense that when Republicans gave a prime-time slot to a labor leader, it was a Teamsters president. The GOP has a soft spot for the Teamsters. That’s because during the 1950s and 1960s the Democrats, led by Senate Racketeering Committee counsel and later Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (père) relentlessly investigated the Teamsters’ Mob connections and those of their president, Jimmy Hoffa. Eventually Hoffa went to prison, but President Richard Nixon, sensing a political opportunity, commuted Hoffa’s sentence in 1971, and the Teamsters returned the favor by endorsing Nixon in 1972. (Three years later the Mob painted Hoffa’s house, but that’s a tale for another day.) The Teamsters in effect became the GOP’s pet union, endorsing every Republican presidential candidate except Gerald Ford until 1992, when they endorsed Bill Clinton.

The love affair between Republicans and the Teamsters ended because, in 1988, Rudolph Giuliani pulled a Bobby Kennedy. Giuliani, at that time a Mob-busting U.S. attorney in Manhattan (this was his finest hour) brought racketeering charges against the Teamsters, to the great consternation of congressional Republicans, who pressured President George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department either to fire Giuliani or remove him from the case. Giuliani stood fast, securing a consent decree that put the union under tight federal supervision until 2015, by which time the Teamsters had been scrubbed clean of Mob ties.

The Teamsters went on to endorse Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, in 2020, President Joe Biden, but according to Reuters, they are tentatively planning not to endorse either Biden or Trump in 2024. The reasons, Reuters says, include doubts about Biden’s feasibility as a candidate, but also may reflect irritation that O’Brien was refused a White House meeting to discuss a possible bailout for Yellow Corp, a large trucking company that declared bankruptcy last year. If the latter is true, O’Brien is overlooking that it wasn’t until Biden became president that the Teamsters were able to secure a long-sought $36 billion bailout of the Central States Pension Fund, a casualty of the Mob interference, Rust Belt decline, and mismanagement under federal receivership. Biden was vocally supportive of the generous contract O’Brien negotiated last year with UPS, securing wage increases of $7.50 per hour, heat safety protections, and an end to wage tiers and mandatory overtime.

According to Reuters, Republicans accepted O’Brien’s request to speak at their convention but Democrats have not. If true, that’s the kind of foolish inattention that I warned against in my April article, “Yes, Joe Biden Can Win the Working Class Vote.” In his Monday night speech, O’Brien said he was the first Teamsters president in history to address a Republican National Convention.

“I … want to thank President Donald Trump,” O’Brien said, “for opening the RNC’s doors to the Teamsters union, and inviting me to speak before you tonight.” O’Brien then articulated a series of Trumpian generalities about how working people receive little respect from the corporate elite. “We all know how Washington is run,” he said. “Working people have no chance of winning this fight. That’s why I’m here today—because I refuse to keep doing the same things my predecessors did.” That was a slap to James Hoffa, Jr., Teamsters president from 1998 to 2022 and an extremely partisan Democrat who, at a Detroit Labor Day rally with President Barack Obama in 2011, declared his union to be at war with the Tea Party and said, “Let’s take these sons-of-bitches out.” On Monday night, O’Brien said, “We are not beholden to anyone, or any party.” Indeed, the Teamsters raised eyebrows in February when it was reported that the union’s PAC gave the Republican National Committee $45,000. (The union also gave $150,000 to the Democratic National Committee.)

O’Brien said he started talking to Senator Josh Hawley in 2022 after Hawley (along with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and five other Republicans) publicly opposed a contract that the Biden administration was imposing on railroad workers. Their declared reason was that the contract didn’t include sick leave; Biden subsequently secured it. But they knew the contract would win congressional approval; the Republican dissidents were just looking to undermine Biden’s labor support. Judging from O’Brien’s speech, it worked. “We started talking,” O’Brien said. “Senator Hawley changed his position on national right to work.” He also got Hawley to walk a couple of Teamsters picket lines. O’Brien praised Vance, Senator Roger Marshall, and Representatives Fitzpatrick, Nicole Malliotakis, and Mike Lawler, saying they “truly care about working people.”

O’Brien congratulated himself in the speech for presenting hard truths to the GOP, but his speech took its time getting to policy specifics. He called for “trade policies that put American workers first” and for the government to make it “easier for companies to remain in America,” two positions Trump has already embraced. Eventually O’Brien mentioned “legal protections that make it safer for workers to get a contract.” That was an oblique reference to the PRO Act. It elicited no response whatsoever from the crowd. O’Brien called for bankruptcy reform and mentioned Yellow Corp., an esoteric topic that wouldn’t have drawn much response even at a Democratic convention.

Finally O’Brien grasped the nettle. “Labor law must be reformed,” he said.

Americans vote for a union but can never get a union contract. Companies fire workers who try to join unions and hide behind toothless laws that are meant to protect working people but are manipulated to benefit corporations. This is economic terrorism at its best, and individuals cannot withstand such an assault. A fired worker cannot afford corporate delays, and these greedy employers know it. There are no consequences for the company, only the worker.

This passage articulated the heart and soul of organized labor’s political agenda. There was some scattered applause for the “economic terrorism” line, mainly I think to ratify that angry turn of phrase. Otherwise, though—crickets. These were Republicans, after all.