Last month, the union “reform” group Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) issued a short, tersely worded statement announcing the Teamsters United slate for next year’s Teamsters national leadership election. TDU participates in the TU faction, headed by General President Sean O’Brien.
While the endorsement of the slate will have to be confirmed at the TDU convention in November, the statement amounts to an endorsement of the fascist policies of O’Brien and the Teamsters leadership. O’Brien spoke last year at the Republican National Convention, where he gave a right-wing populist speech, and since then has explicitly endorsed Trump’s attacks on immigrants and his trade war measures.
O’Brien is even attempting to break into the right-wing podcast circuit with his own channel, where he interviews people such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a major figure in the January 6 coup attempt, who also plays a central role in the Trump administration’s overtures to the union bureaucracy.
O’Brien was one of the earliest union bureaucrats to line up behind Trump. Since then, other figures, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain, have followed suit. Their embrace of the would-be dictator and führer is the sharpest expression of the social chasm separating rank-and-file workers from the union bureaucracy, which is joined at the hip with management and the political establishment.
The record of O’Brien and other “reform” bureaucrats
The support for Trump is a development upon a long list of sellouts, including the 2023 UPS contract, which has led to tens of thousands of job cuts, and on the railroads in 2022, where the Teamsters and other rail unions stalled for time as workers pressed for a national strike, giving Congress the space to ban a strike and impose a deal workers had already rejected.
Biden, who billed himself as the most “pro-labor president in American history,” cultivated close ties with the bureaucrats in the Teamsters, the UAW and other major unions, which the White House used to suppress strikes in critical industries and prepare the “home front” for war as it poured resources into Ukraine and Israel. Last summer, Biden summed up this approach when he called the AFL-CIO his “domestic NATO.”
After the collapse of the Biden campaign and the election of Trump, many top bureaucrats jumped ship to the Republicans, seeking to carve out spaces for themselves within Trump’s planned dictatorship. While workers are being thrust into struggle against the Trump government, which rules on behalf of the corporate oligarchy that rules society, the bureaucrats are lining up on the other side of the barricades.
This means that the fight by the working class in defense of their democratic rights and working conditions requires a rebellion against the union bureaucracy and its replacement with new structures: rank-and-file committees democratically controlled by workers.
The bankruptcy of bureaucratic self-reform
TDU’s continued support for O’Brien follows the class logic and function of the organization, which is to prevent the emergence of a movement that escapes the straitjacket of the bureaucracy. For decades, they have promoted illusions in the idea of bureaucratic self-reform, rejecting a fight against capitalism and the fight for the political independence of the working class.
Their endorsement of O’Brien in the 2021 union election was the product of their thoroughly unprincipled strategy of ingratiating themselves with this or that faction within the top officialdom, allowing them to use TDU to whitewash their own record and prepare for a move up the totem pole, with leading TDU members swimming in their wake to take up positions as top bureaucrats themselves.
O’Brien, infamous among Teamsters members in New England as a thug, was even disciplined for threatening violence against TDU candidates more than a decade ago. But after burying the hatchet, TDU came to play the central role not only in his election campaign but in the dishonest maneuvering at UPS in 2023. TDU served as the organizers and PR people for a bogus “strike ready” campaign.
The Teamsters bureaucracy never had any intention of calling a strike, and the campaign was designed as cover for the contract the bureaucracy had already worked out with management. The deal, which the TDU claimed was one of the greatest in the history of the union, has paved the way for mass layoffs.
This is not the first time TDU has played such a role. In the 1990s, they first entered the union administration of Ron Carey. Carey was elected following a massive corruption scandal and direct federal intervention under the RICO Act. He then sold out the 1997 UPS strike with a deal with below-average wages, which was followed immediately by mass layoffs.
Carey was no less corrupt than his predecessors, and was removed from office after he was caught using union funds for his reelection campaign, with the money fenced through the Democratic National Committee. To this day, TDU falsely claims the UPS strike was a milestone victory and that Carey was innocent.
The TDU’s announcement of next year’s slate comes as its sister organization in the UAW, Unite All Workers for Democracy, has collapsed after the UAW and its president, Shawn Fain, embraced Trump’s trade war policies.
Now, the UAW is covering up the circumstances behind the death of Ronald Adams, a skilled trades worker at the Stellantis Dundee Engine plant. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, meanwhile, has launched an investigation, which has won support from around the world.
UAWD explicitly rejected the campaign of Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and a socialist, who ran against Fain for union president on a platform abolishing the bureaucracy. They also opposed his lawsuit against the massive vote suppression in the election, where more ballots were marked “undeliverable” than actually cast.
Now, the remnants of the group play the role of Fain’s highly paid top advisers, while thousands of autoworkers have lost their jobs and the union doubles down on toxic “America first” nationalism through its alliance with Trump.
In 2021, TDU hailed O’Brien’s victory as the beginning of a nationwide reform movement sweeping the unions. In reality, it was a maneuver by factions of the bureaucracy designed to bolster their own credibility to prepare for the next round of sellouts.
The election itself was marked by ultra-low turnout, just 12.9 percent, expressing the deep alienation felt by workers towards the bureaucracy. This was the second-lowest turnout of any national union election behind the UAW election the next year, which brought Fain to power.
O’Brien’s election was also financially lucrative for TDU members who entered into top union posts. This includes Matt Taibi and Willie Ford, who each made around $250,000 last year. Both are up for reelection on next year’s Teamsters United slate.
Four years later, with next year’s election looming, TDU has apparently decided the less said about it, the better, so as not to attract unwanted attention from workers who feel only hatred for the union apparatus.
The role of the pseudo-left
TDU is part of a broader collection of pseudo-left organizations whose function is to prevent a genuinely independent movement of the working class against capitalism. The faction was founded in collaboration with Labor Notes, a magazine and political tendency founded in the 1970s, and also enjoys close support from the Democratic Socialists of America, which devotes all of its efforts to covering the Democratic Party’s left flank.
In 2022, Labor Notes, flush with success from the Teamsters election, held its biggest conference ever, with O’Brien headlining the opening session alongside “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders and others.
But no amount of empty phrases about “democratic unionism” can cover up the gulf separating the interests of the bureaucrats and the pseudo-left from the workers. History is catching up with them. Only two years later, the 2024 Labor Notes conference almost broke apart on its first day when police moved against anti-genocide protesters outside the venue, while Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, an ex-Chicago Teachers Union official hated for his role in suppressing demonstrations, spoke inside.
Shawn Fain ended the conference with a warmongering speech calling for a new “Arsenal of Democracy”—in plain language, preparing the working class and American industry for World War III. Sean O’Brien was also present but did not speak, and literally fled the scene when a UPS worker attempted to ask him basic questions about the contract.
What is being exposed is the entire conception upon which TDU, Labor Notes and others are based. Arguing that workers should avoid “politics” in favor of a narrow focus on the organizational machinery within the unions, this has always meant in practice a rejection of socialist politics and an embrace of the dominant, capitalist politics.
Connected to this is their narrow nationalist approach, rejecting a strategy of an international movement of the working class against capitalism in favor of appealing to capitalists within the United States for piecemeal reforms.
Now that the ruling class is moving towards open forms of dictatorship, such groups are acting openly to defend and to justify the bureaucracy’s embrace of fascism, demonstrating their essentially right-wing character and hostility to a mass movement in the working class.
The trajectory of TDU is fresh confirmation that workers cannot “reform” the apparatus. Workers must overthrow and replace the bureaucracy with organizations that they control, and provide them with independence from both management and the capitalist parties.
Above all, what the working class needs is not to chase after non-existent reformers but their own socialist politics, aimed at establishing a workers government and abolishing the power of the corporate oligarchy and the drive towards dictatorship.