What the Teamsters President Didn't Say in His RNC Speech
Teamsters' Sean O’Brien took aim at anti-union politicians “on both sides of the aisle.” History shows one side is clearly more supportive of strong labor protections.
by PJ Evans, More Perfect Union
However you feel about International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s controversial decision to speak at the Republican National Convention, his speech earlier this week forced an important conversation – one that the media all too often ignores.
“Never forget American workers own this nation,” O’Brien told a crowd that included some of the fiercest proponents of anti-worker laws in America. “We are not renters, we are not tenants, but the corporate elite treat us like squatters. And that is a crime.”
Turning his ire to politicians, O’Brien condemned both Democrats and Republicans for not paying enough attention to the needs of labor unions over the past three decades. “There are far too many people on both sides of the aisle still caught up in knee-jerk reactions to unions who subscribe to the same tired claptrap that unions destroy American companies,” O’Brien said.
“If you have a D, R, or an I next to your name, we wanna know one thing,” O’Brien said. “What are you doing to help American workers?”
But in his remarks, O’Brien didn’t dwell on all the details of President Biden’s and Donald Trump’s records on labor, so we wanted to dig in. Here’s everything you should know.
Comparing the record
O’Brien’s criticisms are true to some extent. Democrats in past administrations have largely failed to pass laws that would have helped workers organize and assert their rights at work, while Republicans have been aggressively hostile to unions.
And one of the most aggressively anti-union presidents in recent memory was former President Donald Trump.
During his first term in office, Trump nominated a union-busting lawyer to run the Department of Labor, after initially nominating a fast food CEO whose company was investigated hundreds of times for wage and safety violations. His administration defended anti-union “right to work” laws, proposed a rule that would have allowed restaurant owners to pocket employees’ tips, and denied overtime pay to millions of workers.
When President Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he laid out his agenda during a Teamsters event, before the union endorsed him that year.
First, he promised to ban non-compete agreements, which companies use to prevent employees from finding new jobs with “competitors” under the guise of trade secrets. These agreements can, and often do, restrict workers in even the lowest-paying industries. “If you work for Jimmy John’s you have to sign a noncompete agreement,” Biden said. “You won’t walk across town and work for McDonald’s and get three cents to five cents more.”
Biden’s Federal Trade Commission banned noncompetes this year. FTC Chair Lina Khan, whom Biden nominated and was confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate, said in a statement that the rule will “ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”
Biden also promised to expand overtime protections to millions of workers, telling the Teamsters that in 2019, “$1.2 billion in overtime was denied for hourly workers who are not unionized.” Biden’s Department of Labor recently finalized a rule raising the overtime salary threshold to $58,656 per year, making 4.3 million workers eligible for overtime pay.
During that same event, Biden promised to protect the pensions of millions of workers by signing the Butch Lewis Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to prevent dramatic pension cuts and shoring up retirement benefits for workers.
”The fact is, these multiemployer pensions are the only way it works for the significant number of labor unions—particularly you all,” Biden told the crowd. “Particularly Teamsters.”
As president, one of Biden’s first acts in office was to sign the bill into law, ensuring 2 to 3 million workers’ pension plans remain solvent for decades to come.
‘Toothless laws’
O’Brien also took aim at existing labor protections in the U.S.
“Companies fire workers who try to join unions and hide behind toothless laws that are meant to protect working people, but are manipulated to benefit corporations,” the Teamsters president said.
Under Trump, those laws were rendered even more toothless. Trump appointed anti-union lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency monitoring violations of labor laws and administering union elections. Those appointees then weakened the Board’s ability to hold employers accountable for violating workers’ right to organize.
Biden, by contrast, has strengthened the NLRB by appointing some of the most aggressive regulators in the administration to the board. The Biden NLRB has issued a series of rulings and regulations intended to curb abuses of workers’ right to unionize, prevent illegal filings, and make it easier to unionize.
As a result, workers are creating new unions at a rate we haven’t seen in a long time. And big corporations are spending more time with lawyers in courtrooms having to defend their illegal union-busting conduct.
Another key point raised by O’Brien in his RNC speech was the hurdle labor unions face after winning an election. “Labor law must be reformed,” he said. “Americans vote for a union but can never get a union contract.”
It takes more than a year for the average union to reach a first contract with their employer, in large part thanks to vicious union-busting.
We’ve covered this extensively across so many organizing campaigns. There’s only so much the NLRB can do, because labor law has been weakened over the years by Congress.
But under President Biden, the NLRB has ordered employers to bargain in good faith with workers. It helped the Starbucks union force their bosses into serious negotiations, and an NLRB willing to back workers provided a nice backdrop for the Teamsters to negotiate a new contract with UPS last year.
And Democrats have also pushed to strengthen labor law and protections for workers by pushing to pass the PRO Act – landmark legislation that would finally provide real teeth to labor law to protect workers’ right to organize, strike, and get a good contract.
There are 48 Democrats in the Senate listed as co-sponsors of the bill, while not a single Republican voted for it in 2021. And when the Senate HELP Committee brought the bill up for another vote last year, it passed along party lines. Every Republican once again opposed it.
And speaking of the U.S. Senate, here’s what O’Brien said in his speech about a certain Republican Senator:
“I wanna recognize Senator [Josh] Hawley for his direct, relentless, and pointed questioning of corporate talking heads, lawyers, CEOs, and apologists,” O’Brien said. “He has shown he is not willing to accept their pillaging of work.”
Hawley, who is up for reelection in Missouri this year, did show up on a picket line last year. And he recently blasted the CEO of Boeing for taking a massive raise while gutting the company.
But when it comes to their voting record, he and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), whom Trump picked as his running mate this week, both received a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO. Hawley voted against the PRO Act and the Butch-Lewis Act in 2021, which rescued the pensions of a million Teamsters and was championed by President Biden.
And, as Missouri Attorney General, he sued to block former President Barack Obama’s order to expand the nation’s overtime rules to cover about 4 million more workers.
Corporate welfare
O’Brien also addressed the corporate welfare handed out to America’s largest corporations:
“Massive companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Walmart take zero responsibilities for the workers they employ,” O’Brien said. “These companies offer no real health insurance, no retirement benefits, no paid leave.”
We’ve spent a lot of time reporting on Amazon, Uber, and Lyft workers’ efforts to organize for better benefits and fair pay. The law doesn’t make it easy, but this is one area where Biden’s and Trump’s records could not be more divergent.
Biden’s NLRB issued what’s called a Joint Employer rule in 2023, which would provide a huge boost to gig workers. The rule ensures that workers at franchises and subcontractors count as employees of the big corporations that control much of their day-to-day work. The rule will be key to the Teamsters’ effort to unionize Amazon — if it can survive after being blocked by a Trump-nominated judge.
And what the current NLRB has proposed is a complete reversal of the Trump administration’s policy; Trump’s NLRB sided with big corporations like McDonald’s and Amazon, issuing a rule that made it easier for corporations to evade responsibility if their contractors violated labor law.
Project 2025, the policy agenda Republicans will use if they win in November, will only make things more difficult. The document, created by the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, calls for making all labor protections negotiable, even the minimum wage, as well as loosening child labor regulations so that teens can work hazardous jobs.
The Trump alumni who wrote the manual also called for a reduction in overtime pay and the elimination of fair pay standards for blue-collar government contractors. Each would represent reversals from the current administration, which just implemented the first of two major expansions of who qualifies for overtime pay.
Let’s look at one final piece of O’Brien’s speech:
“We need trade policies that put American workers first,” O’Brien said. ”We must stop corporations from abandoning local communities to inflate their bottom line.”
After so many years of perverse incentives and bad trade deals, this is a long-term project. The signature achievements of the Biden administration – laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – promote the rebuilding of America’s manufacturing base and infrastructure, and as a result, are creating millions of new, well-paying union jobs.
Project labor agreements are forcing companies to pay good wages and employ union labor. Buy American rules instituted by the Biden administration, requiring that any goods purchased with taxpayer money contain 75 percent U.S.-made content, ensuring that we build things in America, not China. And closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on the rich will help put workers first.
Within 24 hours of O’Brien’s speech to the RNC, Trump suggested he would be interested in lowering corporate taxes even further than he did in 2017. When the president of the Teamsters said that he saw “workers being sold out to big banks, big tech, corporations, and the elite,” this is Trump’s record on labor and taxes during his four years in office.
As for Biden, O’Brien said in an interview with CNN one day after delivering his RNC speech: “He is definitely the most pro-union president we have ever had.”