A Labor Leader Who Doesn't Care About Labor Rights
The Trump camp is being honest with working Americans: We will make your daily life considerably worse. This, for many workers, doesn’t register.
It was nice to get some confirmation this week that no one – not even labor union leaders – cares about the economy in good faith.
It’s a take I wrote about during the summer and it’s one I mean wholeheartedly: Voters don’t give a single shit about the state of the economy as long as their guy is in charge. This cuts across political allegiances, I think, but is most pronounced on the right, where working class folks will talk themselves into backing candidates who promise to make like utterly miserable for anyone who trades their labor for a little money.
Become a BFT subscriber and join our discord channel, where we talk about the 2024 election and other less-serious stuff
Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced Wednesday that the union would not endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race after backing Democrats running for the White House since Bill Clinton in 1996. This, of course, was widely seen as a win for Donald Trump, the single most anti-union candidate in the history of western democracy who has drawn unusually high labor union support because – in so many words – he pledges to uphold white supremacy if re-installed as president.
It’s not a complicated matter. About 60 percent of Teamster union members wanted the union to endorse Trump, according to internal polling. This polling data came about two weeks after Trump yucked it up with Elon Musk, the union-crushing richest man on earth, about illegally firing striking workers. Destroying the livelihoods of honest, hard-working people is joke fodder for these men, who – like every wealthy person – were born on third and mistakenly believe they hit a triple. The chuckling among Musk and Trump about capital crushing labor did not in any way bother the Teamster members who pushed O’Brien to back the Trump-Vance ticket. Not even O’Brien calling the Trump-Musk exchange “economic terrorism” swayed their allegiance to the fascist candidate. Because, you see, white supremacy trumps everything, including economic prospects.
Without the continued political and cultural dominance of the white race, these workers believe they have nothing. They’re wrong, of course, but that doesn’t matter.
How am I so confident this is about the bone-rattling fear of white folks who see 2024 as their last stand against the woke mind virus? Because several prominent factions of the Teamsters union have been publicly enraged by O’Brien’s waffling and have endorsed Kamala Harris. That includes, not so shockingly, the Teamsters National Black Caucus. Other Teamster factions representing hundreds of thousands of workers in swing states have enthusiastically embraced Harris over the past month, pointing to her support of reproductive rights as a key to the economic prospects of working people. And if you don’t think of abortion rights as an economic issue, ask working class women in Texas how much it strains them financially to take off work and travel to another state to receive care.
“When people show you who they are, believe them and Trump showed us for 40 years who he really is: someone who is not for us,” James Curbeam, president of the caucus, said in a statement. “Endorsing a candidate with his history would be a betrayal of the values that we have fought to uphold.”
Probably O’Brien’s refusal to endorse Harris won’t have an outsized impact on the race. Steve Rosenthal, a strategist for labor unions, told The Washington Post this week that the Teamsters’ non-endorsement “likely means the difference between their members voting 50 percent for Harris vs. close to 60 percent.” Certainly it’s not nothing. I would question whether the 60 percent of Teamster union members who wanted to back the Trump campaign would buckle under the weight of their union’s endorsement and vote for Harris if O’Brien had done the right thing for his working class members. Like the so-called independent voters who shape coverage for The New York Times every election cycle, I somehow doubt a voter with so many misgivings about the Democratic candidate would mull it over and vote for her or him (it’s painfully clear that every “undecided voter” interviewed by major media outlets are nothing more than Republicans who want to be on TV or in the newspaper).
O’Brien explained the union’s refusal to back either candidate by claiming neither Harris nor Trump “committed to the core issues that we need to get accomplished on behalf of our members.” I don’t know what he means, exactly, and I think O’Brien – who fawned over Trump at the Republican National Convention in July – has intentionally used vague language in explaining why the majority of the Teamsters desperately want to endorse a union-hating billionaire – a candidate that has seen overwhelming support from the billionaire class this year.
Dealignment Will Continue Until Morale Improves or Society Crumbles
Trump’s inexplicable inroads with labor unions is part of what’s known as class dealignment, a hallmark of pre-fascist eras in which a fascist movement makes grand promises to the glorious workers of the fatherland – we will return workers of color to their homelands, we will take from the over-educated middle-class libs and give to you – with no intention on delivering on said promises. Class dealignment is perhaps the most consequential part of the right’s use of bad faith. As I wrote back in February 2023:
Class dealignment is not a lose-lose situation. There is no breaking even here. It’s a massive loss for the American left and a long-term boon for the country’s right wing. It’s why J.D. Vance, a wealthy Ivy League elite who has never met an anti-worker policy he hasn’t wholeheartedly endorsed, can run for Senate as an avatar for the common worker. It’s why Trump can net endorsements from labor unions. It’s why New York Times columnists can write with a straight face that the GOP is slowly morphing into a workers' party when the Republican Party remains the planet’s fiercest and most dependable defender of capital, with the Democratic Party a close second. Because Bill Gates and Lebron James and Madonna support Democratic presidential candidates, Vance gets to cosplay as a working class hero and Trump gets to fake solidarity with a disgruntled worker making minimum wage. It’s all so disgusting, and somehow makes perfect sense in our fractured culture.
For working class folks who rightfully feel abandoned by the political class in our late-capitalist horror show society, for folks who want nothing more than a candidate who will visit pain – economic and otherwise – on those they resent, it doesn’t matter at all that Trump’s Project 2025 calls for the end of collective bargaining, restrictions to overtime pay, shredding nearly ever workplace safety rule enforced by the federal government, repealing child labor laws that have stood for nearly a century – as state-level Republicans have done with absolute glee over the past couple years – and eliminating public sector unions – and shielding corporations from basic labor violations, including their undermining of labor union drives that have proliferated among workers at major chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks.
The Trump camp, via Project 2025, is being open and honest with working Americans: We will make your daily life considerably worse. This, for many workers, doesn’t register. They’d rather trigger the libs.
It calls to mind the scramble to pass the New Deal through a Congress largely controlled by Southern Democrats who frothed at the mouth over the legislation’s integration mandates. A group of Southern Democratic senators came to Franklin Roosevelt one day during the fraught New Deal negotiations and told him they would not support what amounted to a single-payer healthcare system run by the federal government if it meant black folks could be treated in white hospitals. They said their constituents would much rather die than to share a hospital room with a black person. Ninety years later, we have the world’s shittiest healthcare system because white people would have rather died than to share their resources with those they hated.
It’s developments like these – one of the nation’s most prominent labor unions refusing to endorse the only pro-union candidate in the presidential race – that should remind people on the left that laying out a straightforward vision for how a candidate can help your family economically is a road to nowhere. Kitchen table issues don’t matter. Voters are emotional creatures; they’re not robots programmed to support the candidate who selects all the right inputs for how they might make your life materially better. We have to stop saying shit like “they’re voting against their own interests” every time there’s an uptick in working folks voting for a Republican candidate. This presupposes that we know what’s best for this worker – a decidedly paternal stance – and that the person sees economic well-being as the most important piece of their political calculation.
It might shock you to learn there are millions of Americans who would happily go broke if it meant stripping women of their bodily autonomy and stripping LGBTQ folks of their most basic rights. That some billionaire somewhere gets a tax cut equivalent to the GDP of Canada doesn’t mean shit to them. Suffering is the goal. Revenge is the goal. Domination is the goal. How the left can break through among working class voters with such mindsets is beyond me. But as we saw with the Teamsters' decision to forgo backing Harris, it is the reality of 21st century politics.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.
Comments ()