A mong the speakers at the GOP convention this year will be International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. He will be the only major labor leader to speak at the event, which has typically been avoided by union representatives.
The news that O’Brien would speak prompted rumors that the Teamsters might endorse Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House. That probably won’t happen. O’Brien has requested a speaking slot at the Democratic convention as well, and it’s unlikely he’d speak at both if he were going to pick a side. Expect him to instead talk up unions to the Republicans, making the case on Trump-like nationalistic, made-in-America grounds.
O’Brien’s decision to speak to the GOP in part reflects the fact that a good portion of his union’s members are Republicans. Teamsters represent a wide variety of professions, including long-haul freight drivers, police and corrections officers, and construction workers, among many others. While the endorsement of the Teamsters is unlikely, the votes of their rank and file are potentially up for grabs.
Other union leaders like the late AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka have said that Trump gets more union support than past GOP candidates. Exactly how much is hard to say. Presidential exit polls ask if voters are from union households. It’s a curious way to frame the question since it doesn’t specify whether the voters themselves are union members. They might live with a union member, but who says they agree on politics? In any event, Trump won 42 percent of those voters in 2016 and 40 percent in 2020. Other pollsters don’t bother to ask at all. The AFL-CIO does its own polling but never releases the full data.
The temptation for Republicans would be to think that that they could gain even greater union support by leaning left on union issues. That probably wouldn’t make much of a difference (and isn’t worth trying). Trump’s appeal to union members is likely just an extension of his appeal to working-class voters generally. In short, it’s cultural, not ideological.
Trump’s administration leaned right in its labor policies, rolling back several Obama-era policies, and that doesn’t seem to have blunted his appeal. It’s likely that many of the rank and file aren’t even that big on their unions. Many employees are at workplaces organized years before they were hired, and the workers were obligated to back the union if they wanted to keep their jobs.
For Trump, giving the Teamsters a speaking spot is a no-brainer. It gives him another way to demonstrate his appeal to blue-collar Americans. For O’Brien, it’s an attempt build a working relationship with what may very well be the next presidential administration.
It’s difficult to imagine any other major union being so bold. But the Teamsters, who claim 1.3 million members, have long had a reputation for being the most right-leaning of major unions, law enforcement unions excepted. The Teamsters are not members of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation and a staunchly liberal organization. A perennial complaint within the movement is that the Teamsters grow their numbers by raiding other unions, i.e., using various tactics to get workers out of their existing unions and signed up with the IBT.
The Teamsters endorsed Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan twice, and George H. W. Bush in 1988, and they have flirted, politically speaking, with Trump for years. The union surprised many when it announced in October 2015 that, unlike other unions, it was putting off any presidential endorsement. The reason was reportedly due to a lack of internal consensus because so many members backed Trump.
The Teamsters wouldn’t make an official endorsement until late August 2016, backing Hillary Clinton just two months before the election. The lateness of the endorsement almost certainly blunted any positive effect it had for the Clinton campaign. By contrast, the Service Employees International Union, a labor group comparable in size to the Teamsters, endorsed Clinton in November 2015, a full year before the election. The Teamsters endorsed Joe Biden in August 2020, following a similarly long internal deliberation process.
As a real-estate developer, Trump often negotiated with construction and trade unions and has often spoken of them positively. He told Newsweek in a 2015 interview that he had “great relationships with unions.” In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, he wrote, “Is Trump a union man? Let me tell you this: Unions still have a place in American society. In fact, with the globalization craze in full heat, unions are about the only force reminding us to remember the American family.”
Trump was even a card-carrying union member himself for many years, having joined the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists due to numerous appearances in television and in movies. Trump quit SAG-AFTRA in 2021 when the leadership publicly mulled expelling him following the January 6 riots. That same year the union passed a resolution barring him for life.
In short, Trump understands unions better than any U.S. president since Ronald Reagan, who, during his Hollywood years, served as SAG president. O’Brien no doubt hopes that speaking at the GOP convention will give him access should Trump win reelection. It’s a savvy move on O’Brien’s part, and allowing him to speak is likewise a good political move by Trump. It makes him look magnanimous. But amid this friendliness, Trump should remember that he has achieved political success with unions without full-fledged pandering toward them.