The Teamsters Have a MAGA Problem. Here’s Why.
“I can hire half of the working class to shoot the other half,” the 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould bragged. That’s exactly what the billionaire boss Donald Trump is doing today, and what Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has enthusiastically signed on to.
O’Brien, who during the first Trump administration denounced the president as “our enemy” and the Teamsters old guard for “be[ing] silent and giv[ing] Trump and anti-labor politicians a pass as they dismantle what it has taken a generation for labor to build,” has become a willing partner in a political project built on xenophobia, state repression, and dismantling organized labor.
The U.S. labor movement is at a crossroads between multiracial democracy and authoritarian nationalism: Are unions going to stand for multiracial class solidarity? Or will they be defensive institutions, standing only for the narrowest understanding of the interests of their members?
Going Full MAGA
In 2024, O’Brien addressed the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee where delegates waved signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now.” Today the union is in the midst of a possible realignment, donating substantial sums to Republicans in battleground states in Congressional races for the upcoming midterms, though it is still giving more to Democrats.
What O’Brien presents as a “we can work with either party” approach looks more and more like political allegiance. He does favors for the Trump administration, and trashes its opponents.
During the government shutdown he appeared outside the White House beside Vice President JD Vance and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, urging Democrats to “put politics aside” and stop holding out for their demands to defend health care for the American people.
He has gone on the offensive against labor allies like Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—in a recent episode of his podcast, he and two New York Teamster leaders rehashed every right-wing, disinformation talking point to play up fears of Mamdani as an extremist who would drive up crime by defunding the police and drive away employers by taxing the rich. O’Brien said Mamdani “swung for the fences” on taxing the rich, and celebrated that New York Governor Kathy Hochul would shut that down.
O’Brien and the two New York Teamsters—between them, two lifelong Democrats and a lifelong Republican—presented themselves as the moderates left behind by two parties increasingly dominated by extremists. But O’Brien hasn’t been left behind. He’s on the main stage serving as a convenient prop for the far-right wing that is trying to brand itself as pro-labor, led by the think tank American Compass and Trump administration figures like Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ak.), claiming to build a “working-class nationalism.”
In January, O’Brien had Sen. Hawley as a guest on his podcast, and told him, “I think the biggest problem is people are trying to protect illegal aliens that come over here and commit crimes, and that’s unacceptable.” As the New York Times has reported, the majority of people swept up by ICE have no criminal records. But they do meet the criteria to be racially profiled based on the sector they work in, their language, perceived race and ethnicity.
“When I took office, I directed the Teamsters union legislative department to confront their own partisan bias,” O’Brien testified before Congress in October, following an introduction by Sen. Hawley. “There is a realignment around labor taking place within the Republican Party. The Teamsters union wants to encourage that movement by offering multiple paths to support our members and not a single litmus test.”
In O’Brien’s eyes, his shape-shifting opportunism has paid off. He has boasted about his “access” to Trump. He takes credit for Trump’s appointment of Republican Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary. But so what? Her appointment as labor secretary has brought no relief to the one million federal workers who have seen their collective bargaining agreements shredded, nor private-sector workers whose labor rights have been systematically rolled back under a hamstrung National Labor Relations Board, which issued 150 decisions in labor disputes in 2024, compared to 6 over the past 11 months under Trump.
Militancy Without Solidarity
O’Brien touts hundreds of strikes over the past three years. His administration has been bolstering Teamster militancy, for instance by boosting strike pay to $1,000 a week and granting it to any local that asks.
In June, 100 predominantly Latino workers at the Chicago plant of the manufacturer Mauser Packaging Solutions struck against unfair labor practices, for better pay, and for contract language to protect them from ICE raids.
O’Brien was nowhere to be seen. The International provided strike pay, but remained silent on the ICE raids, even as local community groups organized patrols to defend workers and their families.
Teamsters Local 705 adorned an empty parking lot next door with a sign to prevent ICE from using it as a staging ground for raids: “Federal agents do not have consent to enter this property unless they have a valid judicial warrant: Private Property-No Trespassing.” Months later, Mauser announced it would close the plant before Thanksgiving.
Around the same time, O’Brien posed for a photograph with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the dog-killing promulgator of ICE’s most sadistic practices. (DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment to confirm the meeting and what was discussed).
My YouTube language settings are for Spanish, and I get ads featuring Noem telling immigrants like me: “We will hunt you down.”
“I think by the end of this administration, if she stays the whole time, she’s likely to become the warden of the police state,” a former DHS official told New York magazine.
On December 16, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and a dozen federal immigration agents showed up at the Mauser picket line in Chicago and “interrogated and laughed at our members,” according to Teamsters Local 705. The agents asked striking workers about their immigration status and some workers offered proof of their U.S. citizenship.
“It was very clearly protected concerted activity, and [agents] took it upon themselves to start asking [the workers] and interrogating them about their status,” Nicolas Coronado, an attorney for the union, told Dave Jamieson of HuffPost.
“Debunked already, calm down. I congratulated these gentlemen and wished them luck,” Bovino replied to me on the social media app X. “Very amicable and friendly between us. You do realize the US Border Patrol has a large union?”
As for the large Teamsters union, O’Brien was silent. The International didn’t even put up a social media post.
Voices of Dissent
In November, at the 50th annual Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention, Chicago UPS driver John Zuraw urged fellow Teamsters to “renegotiate the terms of the coalition with O’Brien.” “It’s about signaling to O’Brien that his connection with MAGA is a problem,” Zuraw said.
There was a small protest outside, and many Teamsters have objected to O’Brien’s partnership with Trump, which included the formation of Teamsters Against Trump during the 2024 presidential election. But from TDU’s perspective, the benefits of staying in the Teamsters United coalition outweighed the costs of being isolated if they didn’t.
TDU’s tactical approach is part of a gambit of playing for time, growing its membership base and winning more elections in locals to one day– presumably when O’Brien has moved on–run a reform candidate for the top spot once they’ve amassed the strength. A longer term horizon means staying quiet about O’Brien’s defection to the nationalist far-right in the short-term to mitigate against a rift that invites repression or fractures the coalition. From TDU’s pragmatic outlook, survival of the reform institution, and the coalition, becomes paramount when buffeted by the heavy political storms of today. Given O’Brien’s support for organizing around union and workplace issues, TDU vowed to continue “to participate in the Teamsters United coalition as an allied, but independent organization that charts its own course and has its own campaigns.”
“If you have a strike, we’re going to send resources,” O’Brien pledged at the TDU convention. “If you have an organizing drive, you’re going to get resources. If you have any need in your local union, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with us, you’re going to get resources.” After some debate, rank-and-file members voted on a resolution to endorse the O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate for the next election for top officers in 2026.
Without the institutional power cemented across model locals to challenge O’Brien’s hold on the union, what is to be gained by engaging in the intramural sports of shadow-boxing criticisms for an audience of one while lacking the organized power to win? Under these circumstances, a pragmatic calculus means taking the good with the bad. But it’s become impossible to ignore the divisions and demagoguery from Trump and his pal O’Brien. And TDU has taken pains to lift up solidarity in workplace fights without incurring the wrath of O’Brien by directly challenging him.
In these moments, TDU goes back to its power analysis. “When we started we didn’t know how to run anything but our mouths,” said Ken Paff, former TDU national director, at the convention. “Today our members run locals and strikes and organizing drives and contract campaigns.”
Fit to Rule
They are becoming fit to one day rule by trial and error. TDU says its members and allies lead locals representing 100,000 workers. But if Teamsters become reform leaders by doing trade union work, what gives that work its political coherence as it doesn’t arise spontaneously from the experience of leading strikes and negotiating contracts?
Into that political vacuum O’Brien has stepped in. Even if TDU’s tactical armistice gives it freedom to organize locals, the political terrain is shifting faster than they can possibly organize while authoritarianism is ascendant. While the romance of denunciation can be strategic folly, a narrowly defined pragmatic outlook is no worthwhile alternative because the existential stakes of the moment demand political leadership now.
Between these false choices of loud denunciations and muted criticisms, there’s a grounded strategy. It can include a robust political education program geared towards developing the political consciousness of militant workers for a shifting terrain. That’s crucial because the demands labor partisans must exact from our opponents will not be solely confined to the economic realm. There will need to be political demands. No one benefits from pretending otherwise. And TDU can play an important role in showing how it can be done.
A Generational Defining Moment
That’s no easy task: translating economic militancy into political consciousness. But labor partisans have to try again and again until we can retake the ground we’ve lost over generations of union retreat and defeat. “Each generational defeat of the American labor movement disarmed it in some vital respect before the challenges and battles of the following period,” Mike Davis argued in the 1980s. We are today facing an epochal test between labor, capital, and political authoritarianism.
The Teamsters put out polling data last year that showed significant support among members for Trump. The uneven participation numbers across union locals makes it hard to confirm that, but even if accurate, a snapshot poll ignores the role of internal communication and information. Because members are evenly split for and against Trump, the polarization has created a convenient alibi to blame a divided membership and absolve O’Brien of his active role in creating conditions for members to accept Trump’s false pro-worker appeals and attacks on immigrant workers.
Nativism in the Driver’s Seat
O’Brien’s alliance with Trump has helped amplify nativist tropes used to justify state repression against immigrant workers. In Senate testimony in July, he endorsed the Trump administration’s push to require English-proficiency standards for commercial drivers’ licenses (CDL). His written testimony was mainly about rebutting claims of a driver shortage, but he also repeated debunked claims about immigrant truckers in response to a question, calling it “extremely frightening” that commercial drivers “don’t know this language” and are “not from this country,” and Fox News seized on those comments. (There is a reasonable case to be made against trucking companies that rely on workers with B-1 visas, or against other employers pushing for the expansion of guest worker programs, instead of hiring workers here with higher wages and better benefits.)
Since then, immigrant truckers have become scapegoats in a sweeping crackdown. Harjinder Singh, a Sikh driver involved in a crash in Florida while making an illegal U-turn in an 18-wheeler, was turned in to the face of the immigrant trucker backlash. As for horrible accidents, they should be condemned when drivers don’t follow the rules or are drunk. In 1981, Greg Bovino’s father did time in prison for killing a woman while driving very drunk in the wrong lane. But today’s backlash isn’t about enforcing the rules of the road. It’s about targeting immigrants.
In October, 200,000 immigrant truckers were effectively fired through a new rule requiring non-domiciled CDL holders to renew their licenses in person every year. An April executive order requiring English proficiency for all CDL applicants further weaponized the licensing process against all immigrants; Singh, for example, had legal status to work in the U.S. As a Punjabi owner of a trucking company told NPR: “Sikhs are easy to spot because they wear turbans and long beards.”
Inside the Machinery of Repression
Meanwhile, ICE raids, detentions, and deportations have surged during Trump’s second term. DHS received a staggering $170 billion infusion to expand a network of privately owned immigrant prisons. ICE this year has arrested as many as 75,000 people who have no criminal records. Others have been disappeared into foreign prisons without due process. Sheet-metal worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison, has claimed he was severely beaten and psychologically tortured.
ICE jailers are putting immigrants in 2x2 foot confinement boxes in Florida, a torture technique used in post-9/11 black sites. “Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects,” according to a December report from the human-rights group Amnesty International. No one should be tortured. And these immigrants if they’ve even committed a crime, it’s a civil offense.
After two National Guard soldiers were shot in D.C. on November 26, Trump seized on the isolated incident to inflame his base. He vowed to remove people from the country who were “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and stop migration from “all Third World Countries” to enable “the U.S. system to fully recover.”
Siren Song of Economic Nationalism
O’Brien’s embrace of MAGA politics cannot be chalked up to personality alone, or authoritarian impulses barely suppressed exploding into the open in the most flagrant of ways. There is a broader crisis that underlies his capitulation. As decades of industrialization, job losses, declining profit rates, and stagnant growth have eroded the economic security of union workers in once-thriving logistics and manufacturing industries, many workers experience the world as a zero-sum contest for a shrinking share of the pie.
MAGA politics offers the false promise of economic nationalism backed by a compelling story: the nation is failing because undeserving foreigners are taking what rightfully belongs to “real Americans.” In a 2023 paper, titled “Trump’s Kryptonite: How Progressives Can Win Back the Working Class,” the Center for Working Class Politics found that “securing the border” was the most popular policy among working-class voters, while decriminalizing immigration scored the worst.
Now nearly 80 percent of Americans think immigration is good for the country, according to the latest Gallup polls. But the material conditions of economic decline that breed the zero-sum politics of right-wing nativism and erode broad class solidarity remain. One key divide is between workers who have the credentials of a college degree and those who don’t. “In the absence of a class alternative,” write the scholars Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, “an obvious strategy” for the non-credentialed is “to organize as a native working class against non-native workers, or a male working class against a female one.”
Class Fragmentation: Teamsters Vs. Everybody
O’Brien’s alignment with Trump flows not just from an authoritarian personality but from a broader political fragmentation of the working class and nativism as a strategy to get ahead in a world of diminished possibilities. From the zero-sum perspective of Teamsters vs. Everybody, it makes sense. But it’s a strategy that destroys the very foundation of working-class power.
“We have always had unions that tried to win power by exclusion (keeping out women, immigrants, Black workers, the “unskilled”), and sometimes it works by dividing workers for the employer,” says labor scholar Stephanie Luce. “But employers always find a way to undermine that power (mechanization, guest workers, offshoring). Power by exclusion won’t last.”
Former Teamsters President Daniel Tobin, who came from the same local as O’Brien in Boston, infamously characterized unskilled industrial workers in the 1930s as “rubbish.” While his remark has often been cited as an example of nativist chauvinism, the historian David Witwer interprets it as an example of accusing immigrant workers as being unfit trade unionists for their lack of disciplined militancy, comparable to the Wobblies’ rebellions from below. “We don’t wanna to charter the riff-raff or good-for-nothings, or those for whom we cannot make wages or conditions…the International Union does not want the men today if they are going on strike tomorrow or the next day.”
Today the problem isn’t O’Brien rejecting industrial militancy he can’t control. The problem is his alliance with the governing power of a far-right coalition that uses the levers of administrative agencies of the state, the judiciary, the military, and the media to declare all-out war on one segment of the working class.
As Teamsters seek to organize Amazon’s diverse immigrant workforce, the question of supporting all workers becomes a practical matter, because nativism would be a failed strategy for any new organizing at the logistics giant.
Contradictions in the Teamsters
Rank-and-file Teamsters and local officers continue to organize militant strikes, including Mauser, the Indiana Casino workers who struck for recognition and won, as well as service workers at the University of Minnesota, whose strike brought diverse workers together across divides of language, ethnicity, and race, even going up against their own leadership and running to replace them (and lost).
In Cincinnati, 200 Teamsters ratified a six-year contract at Zenith Logistics, a third-party operator for Kroger. The members, who are overwhelmingly Latino and Black, won a $5 wage boost in the first year, three added personal days, and fully paid union health care coverage, and created new porter positions previously held by subcontractors.
The workers coordinated with other Zenith Teamsters locals, Indiana Local 135 and Louisville Local 89, and each bargaining victory built leverage for the next round. The impetus for the contract fight came out of a February Black History gathering, where the social networking event allowed them to sow the seeds for a coordinated contract fight. They gathered surveys in English and Spanish, refused off-the-clock work, and organized T-shirt days. The shirts read: “One Team, One Dream. Un Equipo, Un Sueño.” These struggles reveal what is possible when workers organize from the bottom up with TDU’s backing, and they show how critical solidarity can be to militancy.
Class culture
But striking is not automatically translated into support for progressive politics, even if multiracial democracy in the labor movement can be an antidote to political authoritarianism.
That’s why workplace fights can potentially tap into broader themes of social equality, because random people are thrown together under the heel of a common boss and have to overcome these divisions to win. Class solidarity is a culture built by the daily habits and actions that mark what is acceptable and unacceptable. That’s how a union goes from being an isolated defensive organization in a given workplace to part of a labor movement with shared, cohesive values and class-wide demands. But there’s no guarantee because we arrive in the workplace with a lifetime of influences that shape our political views. These political worldviews are then mobilized by what is happening in society at large.
“The impact of strikes on society — and their political meaning — are determined by the socioeconomic and political context: the state of the economy, the influence of left and progressive movements and organizations, public sympathy, levels of backlash or repression,” wrote Bob Masters, former political and legislative director of the Communications Workers of America.
Breaking the Mould
We have historical examples that further support that sociological point. The Communist Party of the United States of America organized to build unity between Black and white workers in the labor movement to breach the Southern citadel of racism and break new ground by fusing class solidarity and the militancy of the Black liberation struggle. By contrast, the South African Communist Party opted for caving in to racial apartheid, supporting a miners’ strike in 1922 with the slogan: “Workers of the World, Fight and Unite for a White South Africa.”
The South African Communists would later learn their lessons about the supposedly “transient consciousness” they ascribed to defenders of white supremacy, when outbreaks of racial violence exploded later and circumstances forced them to begin advocating for interracial class unity. They later went on to form a coalition with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and African National Congress to bring down the apartheid dictatorship.
In the U.S., during the Second World War, as Black workers entered unionized workplaces or came up for promotions, white workers fought workplace racial integration by organizing “hate strikes” or using hiring policies as “strike insurance” by stoking racial divisions to defeat unionization efforts.
“Unlike the 1933-37 strike wave, which produced a profoundly unifying dynamic within the factory working class, the 1943-45 strikes vented frustration and anger without socializing the new workers in a common ‘culture of struggle’ or assimilating their racial and sexual divisions,” wrote Mike Davis in Prisoners of the American Dream. “The racism of the white industrial working class would remain…the Achilles heel of the CIO’s efforts to transform national politics.”
When a leader of United Auto Workers campaigned for the mayoralty of Detroit in 1945, the CIO’s endorsement of the Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee doomed his campaign by defections of white auto workers protesting integration in the defense industry and government jobs. In spite of his many faults, UAW President Walter Reuther would go on to support and fight alongside the Civil Rights movement in the face of member resistance. After Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down, UAW rank-and-file members in Tennessee protested their plant’s decision to lower the flag to half-mast, according Nelson Lichtenstein’s Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. But Reuther also faced resistance from Black workers, and he organized against them, breaking their picket lines and labeling them “extremists.”
“It is hard to change institutions,” Reuther said to the UAW’s executive board in 1968. “That is why there are revolutions in the world.” The labor movement “has to have the youth. It has to have the student movement…the kind of forces that motivated guys to go to Mississippi to start the Civil Rights movement.” Of course, students contributed to the Civil Rights movement, but they didn’t start it. Reuther’s point was rather about linking the galvanizing political mobilizations of the day with collective bargaining. For labor partisans of Reuther’s generation, they had been forged in the crucible of labor struggles and politics.
Cadre Are Forged with Struggle and in Politics
What the idea of equal citizenship in the ideology of republicanism had offered the working-class movement in the 19th-century now New Deal liberalism would furnish for immigrant workers from Eastern and Southern Europe in the 20th-century in the politics of industrial democracy and mass organizing of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt would legitimate working-class politics through the American Revolution, denouncing the business class as “economic royalists.” The UAW would print Roosevelt’s remarks— “If I were a factory worker, I would join a union” —turning his words into a “mandate to organize,” per UAW President Homer Martin.
Drawing on Nick Salvatorie’s biography of Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, which linked that 19th century sense of republican equality to the socialism Debs would profess in the 20th century, Lichtenstein wrote about that earlier “communal citizenship:” “The fight was waged on many fronts: in the factories and mines, but also in municipal politics, public education, the construction of parks and playgrounds, even in shifting the character of a city’s patriotic rituals.” Reuther’s father would organize against steelmaker Andrew Carnegie’s efforts to build a public library in Wheeling, West Virginia, according to Lichtenstein. Unionists, led by immigrant radicals and socialists, denounced the gift from the “greatest of oppressors” because the violent suppression of the Homestead strike of 1892 was still fresh on their minds.
Decades later, as the strikes of the 1930s reordered American society, the limits of militancy became apparent. “Virtually every strike in the industry signaled the destruction of the organization that had called it,” wrote Lichtenstein. “To build an industrial union in the automobile industry would therefore require not just ‘militancy’ but a cadre of organizers who could deploy the new language of industrial democracy to link shop-floor problems with the union promise and New Deal politics in a persistent, systematic effort that seized a fleeting moment of social turmoil and legal advantage.”
In the wake of the 1937 auto strikes, the CIO ran a labor slate in council elections in Detroit in November. The UAW played a key role. The people who had organized militant strikes now led the charge for the labor campaign. One theme that emerged was political demands around police violence against sit-down strikers and the removal of the police chief.
According to Lichtenstein, “Reuther, who pounded away at this theme since the Yale and Towne strike in April, declared that labor would make ‘it’s best picket captain’ the new city police commissioner; the labor slate itself demanded the ‘removal from office of the present military-minded, dictatorial commissioner of police,’ who has ‘shown a great concern in crushing strikes than in battling increased crime and protecting the lives and sanctity of our womenfolk.’”
Ultimately, they lost as the CIO still hadn’t reached large sections of the industrial working class, including African Americans and leaders of key institutions who remained “skeptical of the CIO and still oriented toward Ford and the other paternalistic white elites.”
The labor movement today doesn’t have the balance of forces or the institutions that produced that brief fusion of workplace militancy and labor politics, with unions in the vanguard of pushing for municipal socialism. But militancy combined with politics is a critical piece of transforming the labor movement. And it should be a guiding principle even if we can’t simply copy-and-paste the lessons from the 1930s onto a different set of circumstances and historical contingencies.
“Programmatically, the labor slate pushed the outer limits of New Deal reformism,” wrote Lichtenstein, “calling for public ownership and operation of the utilities that supplied gas and electricity to the city; for development of a city-owned milk-distribution plant; and for a city-owned radio station and low-cost public housing.” Militancy without politics runs the risk of capture by the right. But derailed by racial and gender exclusions and thereby failing to build a unified working-class movement, the democratic revolution was aborted.
“I used to tell my classes that a revolution was possible in the 1930s, but not that modeled on the Bolsheviks,” Lichtenstein told me. “Rather, it was the one first projected by the French in 1789, validating the ‘Rights of Man and Citizen.’ But in the 1930s it would require the organizing of an ethnically heterogeneous working class to fulfill even the promise of the French Revolution. The civil rights movement of the two decades later still had a difficult road to follow to even partially achieve that.”
In the absence of social reconstruction and a world marked by economic stagnation we’ve witnessed a lurch to the right globally.
A Cautionary Story: Polarizing Unions to the Right
One of greatest cautionary tales about the limits of militancy comes from Poland, where in 1980 a strike by skilled workers broke out when they sat down at a shipyard in the port city of Gdansk demanding independent trade unions and the right to strike. Soon after, the strike would spread to factories and institutions throughout the country, seizing the world’s attention. The government folded and recognized Solidarity as an independent trade union, which would grow to ten million members. Later, leading trade unionists would be arrested, pushing the organization underground.
Today’s Solidarity is a coalitional partner with the authoritarian Law and Justice (PiS) government. Starting in the early 1990s, the union began defining itself as a “right-wing” movement fighting for “traditional Catholic” values, after previously marginalized conservatives became the dominant leading cadre in the union, according to political scientist David Ost. Besides the collapse of a state socialism that preached social equality and made egalitarianism the norm in public life, there was also a retreat from class. Instead of a left-wing class orientation, according to Ost, right-wing perspectives became dominant with culture and identity offering an explanation for social stratification.
Meanwhile, PiS has instituted economic policies as part of a state paternalism model in which unions aren’t independent class institutions but recipients of a corporatist pact. According to Ost, the government has mandated secure labor contracts, lowered the retirement age, limited Sunday work, and issued cash transfers for parents. Among the main beneficiaries of these pro-worker policies are government-aligned Solidarity members. “Where authoritarianism promises to defend workers,” workers “might reasonably seek inclusion within the system rather than risk their symbolic centrality to fight for political democracy,” wrote Ost.
The European labor unions emerged out of political parties, which is different from the U.S. context of economic struggles. That’s important to guard against neatly transposing lessons from Poland to the U.S. context, but the realignment efforts by the Compass Group and what O’Brien is attempting, even if it’s unclear whether he’ll succeed, points to a conscious effort at political polarization to the right within the labor movement.
Political Leadership in the Unions
Unions represent 14 million workers, making them the largest and most diverse working-class organizations in the U.S. People of color now make up the majority of union members. O’Brien’s embrace of Trump reflects a wider struggle over what the labor movement should be: a defensive organization bargaining solely for sectional interests, or a transformative force for the entire working class. His joining a right-wing nationalist political movement grounded in racial hierarchy undermines the most basic principle of trade unionism: An injury to one is an injury to all. When union leaders like O’Brien signal that immigrant workers are expendable, it erodes the power of the entire working class and the possibility that unions can be a unified and diverse movement.
It also gives employers power to rule over us through division. That is why O’Brien’s alignment with MAGA matters not only to Teamsters, but to anyone who calls themselves a trade unionist, worker, or a decent human being. Will organized labor defend all workers or be a conglomeration of sectional groups jockeying for scraps under a right-wing nationalist regime?
First, They Came for…
On the lower frequencies of eastern Long Island, a postal worker is now facing federal charges after she tried to help a man detained by ICE flee his captors in early November. “Why are you doing this to your people?” she asked the agents detaining her.
One afternoon, while picking up my kids from school in Queens, I saw a man wearing a federal-agent vest, holding a child by the hand. I scanned the playground for my kids, wondering whether other agents were nearby. Only later did I realize he was another parent at the school. Schools, and teachers unions, are key battlegrounds to defend students.
The fear was real. So was the anger. This is the country we now live in: a landscape of escalating repression where immigrant workers are hunted, constantly called criminals by DHS Secretary Noem and regime mouthpieces, and disappeared–and where a leading union president chooses to stand beside the hunters.
To update German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous quote: First, they came for the immigrants, and then they came for everyone else. In September, the Trump administration issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, authorizing law enforcement agencies to round up Americans based on their political and ideological beliefs, targeting people who he calls the “enemy within.” In a leaked Justice Department memo, the journalist Ken Klippenstein found that Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” based on their views about gender, U.S. policy, and immigration.
The enemies include people who are engaged in ICE defense, targeted for expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders;” those who adhere to “radical gender ideology,” and those deemed anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christianity.
As Klippenstein wryly observes, “so here we are, with a new War on Terrorism, only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”
We can advance together and build a better world. Unions must be at the center of any social reconstruction of a world where nothing is too good for the working class, a world of democracy in the workplace and society. Whatever residual commitment to broad class solidarity remains in the labor movement, it must be refurbished and renewed by acting like a class in unified struggle with politics in command. The Teamsters are supporting Starbucks workers on strike and have a history of honoring other unions’ picket lines. It’s time to draw a political picket line on Trump’s hateful politics of class division. The realignment of American politics we sorely need is one where working people go from being in crisis to generating crises for our billionaire opponents to break their stranglehold over society. Call it workers over billionaires.