The Teamsters’ RNC Speech Represents the GOP’s Past—and Its Future
The Teamsters’ RNC Speech Represents the GOP’s Past—and Its Future
The plight of American truckers is an opportunity for the new working-class Republican coalition.
After a weekend when the world was shaken by the attempted assassination of the former (and perhaps soon to be re-elected) President Donald Trump, yet another historical event took place at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday evening, where Trump—bandaged and having shown the world what kind of guts he has in the face of this attempt on his life—was himself a smiling witness.
For the first time ever, the leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, was invited to address the RNC. This has caused some consternation on the part of the commentariat, left and right, whom O’Brien himself invoked on stage as a reason to accept Trump’s invitation to speak.
Though we often associate organized labor with the Democrats, it wasn’t always thus. The Teamsters, at one time, were the most powerful labor union in America; at the height of their power, under the leadership of Jimmy Hoffa, they supported the Republican Party, at least all the way back to 1960 in the run between Richard Nixon and JFK. This is, perhaps, an explanation of why the Kennedy clan spent years dragging Hoffa into court, and also of Nixon’s pardon of Hoffa in 1971 after a five-year stretch in prison.
Hoffa, having grown up in a single-parent home after his father’s death and working full time from the age of 14, was an outsider in the labor movement; he was not an ideologue, and rejected the relationships with communism and socialism that leaders of other major unions were engaged in.
1960 and 2024, however, are many worlds apart, and O’Brien rules over a much smaller kingdom. The Teamsters only represent approximately 5 percent of truckers in America, and it has been 44 years since the party of labor, under Jimmy Carter, passed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, the consequences of which have devastated membership in the Teamsters and led to a severe reduction in truckers’ wages over the last four decades.
Trucking has a lot of problems, and O’Brien is to be commended for appearing in Milwaukee, and particularly for one of his comments: “I will always speak for America and the American Worker, both union, and non union.”
I have been a non-union trucker for 27 years of my adult life, across 4 different countries, including the United States, where I have put miles down in every one of the lower 48. I have some suggestions for the incoming administration—it is seems obvious now that the Dems are done—and hopefully O’Brien would agree with me about the import of the problems my suggestions seek to address.
O’Brien repeatedly invokes the “American Worker”; does Mr. O’Brien understand that immigrant groups are constantly abused in the trucking industry, often by their homeboys who are already here? Does he understand that Eastern European gangsters are actively operating in the freight brokerage market, and are now holding American companies at ransom to have their loads delivered? Should America’s trucking industry be used as an ATM for those in other countries to extract value, and thus reduce the share of the pie for American workers, while illegally holding loads of valuable product hostage?
O’Brien is a smart guy, and though he barely mentioned immigration or the influx of illegal migrants into the American labor market, surely he understands what is going on here.
I quote his speech once again: “Never forget, American workers own this nation. We are not renters. We are not tenants. But the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime we’ve got to fix.”
I couldn’t agree more, and I hope that O’Brien works closely with President Trump and Vice President Vance to put an end to the use of foreign indentured servants on the roads in America, who not only undercut Americans wages, but also put the rest of the motoring public at great risk.
The Teamsters, God bless ‘em, have, like myself, been at odds with corporate lobby groups like the American Trucking Association, who have for many decades now propagated a myth of a truck driver shortage, which has mostly been used to convince politicians that soaking the taxpayer for their truck driving schools is a solution to a retention problem that often sees large trucking firms go through nearly 100 percent of their employees annually.
The Republican Party, however, has a long history of listening to such groups as the ATA, rather than truckers themselves, and being more than happy to shovel taxpayer dollars at businesses who are unwilling to fix their own labor problems.
O’Brien again: “We need trade policies that put American Workers first. We need corporate welfare reform.”
Once again, O’Brien and I are simpatico, as corporate welfare has been the “solution” to a problem created by the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. This “solution” has itself created many more problems—from the imposition of the surveillance state onto truckers to “nuclear verdicts” which have forced the insurance industry into a corner and made it ever more difficult for trucking companies to insure themselves and to the above mentioned reliance on foreign indentured servants to move our freight. No wonder many truckers give up on the business and look for greener pastures.
The Republican Party is often associated with a pro-business platform, yet they often decry state assistance for private enterprise.
With the rise of pro-worker populism in the party, as evidenced by the actions of Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley and the addition of Vance to Trump’s ticket, perhaps the Republicans can have some circumspection on the policies they have supported for so long—policies that have seen the taxpayer finance the further erosion of the wage floor and job conditions for one of America’s archetypal blue collar jobs. Maybe the Republicans can even bring themselves to end a wage disparity that keeps truckers from being paid the overtime that nearly every other worker in America enjoys and help put more money in the pockets of millions of American families.
“Teamsters for Trump” is not without precedent in history, and perhaps the Teamsters, among other advocates for truckers like the Owner Operator/Independent Drivers Association, can work with the Trump administration to make a better future for all truckers in America, their families, and the nation.
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