Remember Who the Teamsters Are

By Dominic Pino

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

 

Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien gave the closing speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention on Monday. It’s unusual for a major union president to address the RNC. His vilification of business sounded like it could have come from his political ally Bernie Sanders and left the GOP audience cold, with several attempted applause lines receiving little to no clapping.

 

There’s a good reason the Teamsters usually stay away from the RNC. Conservatives have sided with the American public against unions for decades. They have succeeded in weakening unions’ grip over the American economy and freeing workers from their abuses. The GOP must not trick itself into believing the nonsense that union bosses spout. The Teamsters are a good example of how unions harm workers through corruption and take their money for left-wing activism.

 

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was founded in 1903. In 1905, its actions spurred one of the deadliest race riots in American history. Clothing workers went on strike against Montgomery Ward in Chicago. The Montgomery Ward workers were not Teamsters members, but Teamsters national president Cornelius Shea, from Boston, ordered Teamsters drivers who served Montgomery Ward to strike in solidarity with the clothing workers.

 

It’s unclear exactly why Shea did that, and there’s reason to believe he might have been bribed by Sears, Montgomery Ward’s major competitor at the time, as recorded in the book Solidarity for Sale by Robert Fitch. Regardless, Chicago employers responded by locking out all Teamsters members citywide. Chicago Teamsters at that time were mostly Irish Americans. Employers looked for people who weren’t union members and were willing to work at a pay rate that undercut the union rate. Nearly all of them were African Americans.

 

The work stoppage lasted 105 days and resulted in 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries as the armed strikebreakers and the Teamsters members battled. Irish mobs supporting the Teamsters lynched some of the black men. Most of the Teamsters members were never rehired after the stoppage ended, and the unrest set back the cause of unionization for years afterward, as most people, including President Theodore Roosevelt, were disgusted by the Teamsters’ actions.

 

Incidents like this are why the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 over Harry Truman’s veto after a Republican wave in the 1946 midterms, banned solidarity strikes. Unions in the U.S. may strike only against the employer they bargain with, and they must explain why they are doing so. Backlash against unions was so strong after World War II that it broke Democrats’ winning streak in congressional elections, and the Taft-Hartley Act continues to save Americans from economy-crippling labor actions and bring order to labor relations.

 

The Taft-Hartley Act also allows states to pass right-to-work laws, which are now in force in 26 states. Right-to-work laws say that nobody can be required to join a union or pay dues as a condition of employment. They ensure that union membership and financial support is voluntary, not coerced.

 

Americans hate being forced to join and pay unions, but unions love to get government on their side to expand their membership, so they oppose right-to-work laws. Opposition to right-to-work has been Sean O’Brien’s main condition for supporting politicians, and he bragged in his speech about how he got Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) to flip-flop on the issue.

 

Hawley signed the National Right to Work Committee’s candidate pledge in 2018 but reversed his position last year and received a $5,000 campaign contribution from the Teamsters in response. He also joined picket lines with the United Auto Workers and Teamsters to show his union bona fides. Nearly every major union in Missouri, including the UAW and Teamsters locals, has endorsed Lucas Kunce, his Democratic opponent, anyway. Even the Missouri firefighters’ union, one of the few to endorse Republicans in the past, endorsed Kunce this year.

 

The Teamsters consistently support Democrats with their political activity. Since 1990, 94 percent of Teamsters campaign contributions have been to Democrats. The Teamsters also spend millions more dollars on activism, voter-turnout efforts, research organizations, and media outlets. Virtually none of that spending is for right-wing or even bipartisan groups.

 

The Democrats reward this support when they are in power. The most recent example was the $36 billion in taxpayer money to bail out the Central States Pension Fund, which mostly serves retired Teamsters members. The fund was founded by Jimmy Hoffa and was already known in 1980 as “the most abused, misused pension fund in America.” The bailout was part of the American Rescue Plan Act, supposedly for Covid relief, that Democrats passed without a single Republican vote. The money came with no requirements to reform the fund, and subsequent investigation has found that $127 million of the bailout went to 3,479 recipients who are deceased.

 

Aside from their political activities and history of violent labor actions, the Teamsters are also known for criminality among their leadership. This is also typical for American labor unions and one of the reasons most American workers want no part of them. Union leaders often get away with their misbehavior for years before being caught, if they are ever caught.

 

Teamsters member John Pavlak distributed leaflets critical of a leader in a Teamsters local in the Chicago area. He received an envelope in the mail that contained a copy of one of his leaflets with “YOU ARE DEAD” written on it and a .45-caliber bullet. That sounds like the sort of thing that might have happened in the 1920s when Al Capone ran the Chicago Outfit — but it happened in 2001.

 

The man Pavlak was criticizing, Dominic Romanazzi, is still president of Teamsters Local 330 in Elgin, Ill., today. This incident became public knowledge as the result of an internal Teamsters probe that was supposed to prove that the union had stamped out organized crime in its ranks. Instead, it uncovered that it still existed. The probe was subsequently canceled. Romanazzi defended himself by telling the Chicago Tribune in 2004, “The people who called me were nephews or sons of mobsters. They were not mobsters.” Pavlak was fired from his union job, and the origins of the envelope were never definitively established.

 

The entire trucking industry suffered from organized-crime influence for decades. That was much easier to do when the industry was heavily regulated by the federal government, with a few major firms dominating the market, and many drivers were forced to be Teamsters members. After major congressional investigations into Teamsters corruption, led by then–Senate staffer Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 with near-unanimous support. That act remains in effect today, requiring greater transparency in union operations and protecting workers from union tribulation.

 

Even after that law, though, Teamsters corruption continued. After a federal racketeering investigation, the union entered into a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 1989 that gave the federal government strict oversight of its internal operations. That oversight continued for the next 25 years. When it was ended in 2015, prosecutors said direct organized-crime ties to national Teamsters leadership had been expunged, but corrupt practices still existed in the union. The United Auto Workers has also operated under a consent decree since 2020, after the conclusion of a DOJ investigation that sent over a dozen top UAW officials to prison.

 

More recent examples of Teamsters criminality:

 

·        In 2018, Scott Alexander and his wife, Nancy, the former president and office administrator, respectively, of Teamsters Local 50 in Illinois, were sentenced to a year in prison each for embezzlement and wire fraud.

 

·        In 2020, John Ulrich, former vice president of Teamsters Local 812 in New York, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for soliciting tens of thousands of dollars in bribes.

 

·        In 2022, John Coli Sr., the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 727 in Illinois from 2000 to 2017, was sentenced to 19 months in prison for receiving $325,000 in kickbacks from a local business over several years.

 

Since the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, it now has thousands more small fleets than it did in the Teamsters-dominated days, including many owner-operators. Since owner-operators are not employees, they are not eligible for unionization, much to the Teamsters’ chagrin. Without government barriers to entry, U.S. trucking capacity has expanded greatly, leading to better service at lower prices.

 

The Teamsters lost one of their last legacy outposts in the long-haul trucking industry when Yellow went out of business last year. Yellow had been in financial trouble for a long time, but the Teamsters contributed to the company’s demise by opposing a corporate reorganization plan. O’Brien sought to undo concessions made by the previous Teamsters president to keep the company afloat. The Teamsters posted a picture of a tombstone on social media that said, “Yellow 1924-2023.” Most of Yellow’s competitors are non-union and don’t have to deal with such obstructionism. O’Brien sacrificed 22,000 Teamsters jobs at Yellow.

 

Despite constant media hype, the union-membership rate continues to decline in the U.S., following a decades-long trend as workers gain the freedom to leave and realize they aren’t getting anything worth their dues. Unions remain strongest in the public sector, and half of all U.S. union members work for government. In the private sector, the unionization rate is only 6 percent, a record low. Teamsters membership peaked at around 2.2 million in the mid 1970s. Today, it is 1.27 million, about the same level as in 1950.

 

The Teamsters union is not a friend of blue-collar workers. It skims their paychecks and sends the proceeds to Democrats while filling its own coffers. O’Brien’s total compensation was $419,222 last year. Its “marble palace” headquarters building in Washington, D.C., is right next to the Capitol, easy walking distance for its lobbyists to ask Democrats for their next favor.

 

This is an organization that Republicans have, rightly, been fighting to free workers from for three-quarters of a century. They should be happy to let Democrats try to sell unions’ crap sandwich.