Teamsters: The ghost of Jackie Presser

Joe Allen reports on the recent Teamsters union congress in Las Vegas and considers the possibilities for a revival of the rank and file.

This article was first published on 29 June on the Medium website.

The big news coming out of the Teamsters recent convention in Las Vegas is that for the first time in 35 years there will be no rank and file democratic elections for the top officers of the union. The Fearless slate, led by Richard Hooker, failed to get the 5% of the delegates necessary to make it onto the ballot. The Incumbent Sean O’Brien‑Fred Zuckerman ‘Teamsters United Slate’ were elected to office by delegates to convention.

Popularly known as the ‘OZ’ slate, they secured 96% of the vote. They are the first leaders of Teamsters to be elected without a popular mandate since the 1989 voluntary consent decree between the union and the federal government. The court order mandated changes in the union’s highly undemocratic constitution to provide for one-member-one-vote for convention delegates and International officers. The last Teamster leader elected by convention delegates was Jackie Presser in 1986. He was notoriously corrupt, mobbed-up, and an FBI informant and led the union until his death in 1988. It looks like Teamsters have come full circle.

The Teamsters’ General President Sean O’Brien cast the OZ slate’s reelection as a victory for the union’s rank and file. 

This victory belongs to rank-and-file Teamsters. When we were sworn into office four years ago, our leadership team committed to building a bigger, faster, stronger union, and that’s exactly what we’ve done …

 O’Brien declared in an official union statement. Yet, convention delegates are disproportionately union officers, staff, and close allies — with bloated and multi-salaries­­­­ — where rank and file workers are few and far between.

Bloviating claims such as, ‘The Teamsters is now the most aggressive, effective, and respected labor union on Earth,’ according to O’Brien, are in sharp contrast to a union deep in crisis. It must be a great relief for O’Brien and Zuckerman to avoid campaigning, especially at UPS, which has been ravaged by tens of thousands of layoffs and building closures across the country. Adding insult to injury, the Teamsters’ approved buyout program for UPS drivers has been implemented so incompetently, that has infuriated many more people than those who took it in order to get out of the hell-hole of UPS.

Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA.), inadvertently captured the new reality of the Teamster ‘democracy,’  according to the New York Times:

He received a standing ovation in Las Vegas, and opened with a joke about Mr. O’Brien’s resounding victory. ‘Ninety percent! Those are Putin numbers!’ There was some halting laughter. In fact, Mr. O’Brien secured 96 percent of the vote.

The most important reason that the Fearless slate wasn’t able to reach the 5% of the delegates necessary was due to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s (TDU) dirty alliance with the O’Brien leadership. The Teamsters is the most pro-Trump of all of the major unions. TDU since its founding in 1978 heroically supported long shot candidates in the bleakest of times. This is especially true in the two decades following the federal government’s purge of Ron Carey, the first rank and file, democratically elected leader of the Teamsters. Carey led the Great UPS Strike of 1997.

TDU, for example, supported Tom Leedham’s three reform campaigns against the old guard candidate James Hoffa, Jr., the son of the infamous and long dead leader of the Teamsters. It supported Sandy Pope’s 2011 campaign, the first woman to run for the top spot in the union. She ran as a single candidate for General President in a three-way race. In 2016, TDU supported Fred Zuckerman and Tim Sylvester and the first ‘Teamsters United’ slate, it nearly defeated the incumbent Hoffa. In the 2021 elections, it flipped the other way, and made a deal with some of the worst elements of the old guard that split from Hoffa, and endorsed a slate led by Sean O’Brien.

O’Brien’s long record of threatening members and the racism and misogyny of his home Local 25 based in Boston were well documented. TDU claims they have a ‘coalition’ with O’Brien, but the effect has been that there is no independent organization of rank and file Teamsters to oppose the union’s alliance with the fascist-aligned Trump administration, along with long list of other vital issues. There was no open discussion or debate of this detrimental alliance between TDU, O’Brien, and Trump at the recent Labor Notes conference, which doesn’t reflect well on the state of the left and the trade unions.

The Fearless slate campaign always faced long odds in its challenge to O’Brien. The death of Fearless slate member, New York Teamster Chris Silvera, the former head of the Teamsters National Black Caucus (TNBC), on his way to the convention, threw a shadow over the convention for his slate. Promises made to the Fearless slate that local union delegates would vote for them didn’t materialise, whether by subtle or not-so-subtle methods. But, TDU’s unrelenting hostility to Fearless played an important role, acting as O’Brien’s whip on any dissent in the union membership.

I spoke to Richard Hooker, the Secretary-Treasurer of Teamster Local 623 based in Philadelphia, who challenged O’Brien for the top spot in the union, a week after the close of the convention. Richard is the first African-American candidate for the top spot in the Teamsters. He faced the jeers and boos of hostile convention delegates while accepting his nomination. I asked him how he was doing. ‘Boos don’t bother me. You have to go through it. It doesn’t bother me at all.’ Richard told me that the convention had ‘too many officers.’ I asked him what were the consequences of such an overwhelming victory for the incumbents, ‘Unfortunately, our members are going to face the hard truth with this administration.’

Other Teamster convention business, included providing speaking opportunities to far right and pro-Israel politicians. In sharp contrast to the UAW convention that voted to divest the union of Israeli Bonds, the Teamsters had two prominent supporters of the State of Israel speak at their convention: Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO.) and Cory Booker (D-NJ). Hawley is also a prominent far right politician. Sean O’Brien also announced that the union had reached a deal with the Trump administration to end the government oversight of the union, one of the last methods for rooting out corruption, despite its notorious role in ousting Carey from the union, who was later found not guilty in federal court.

Meanwhile, the disgraced former Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer attended the convention and appears to have become part of O’Brien’s entourage. Finally, and most bizarrely, the Teamsters passed a resolution recognizing February 14 as “James R. Hoffa Day” as a paid holiday, the man most responsible for bringing the Mafia into the highest levels of the union, further consolidating the cult-like internal life of the union.

The Long Counterrevolution

Back in 1996, Steve Greenhouse, the New York Times labor reporter, wrote an article called Teamster Counterrevolution: Why It Nearly Won Election. Ron Carey won the 1996 election with a majority of the vote against a well-funded campaign led by James P. Hoffa, Jr. Greenhouse saw a lot of the appeal of Hoffa, Jr. in his famous name, a nostalgia for the mythical Teamsters union. He also ran a sophisticated campaign that played on the shortcomings of Carey’s few years in office. Despite the horrid reputation of many of Hoffa’s key supporters, he didn’t promise a restoration of the old order, he promised to ‘Restore the Power.’

Ken Paff, the director of TDU in 1996 and still a leading figure today, told Greenhouse: 

Why is it that in countries that are new to democracy, dictators always try to make a comeback? The people in the counterrevolution don’t like someone trying to take away their power. They control armies; they control people and pensions. They mustered a lot of power and resources to defeat Carey.

The two decades of Hoffa Jr. chipped away at many of the reforms that Carey implemented, but he couldn’t do away with all of them. The Counterrevolution took a lot longer to triumph, but this time around it was with the vital support of the ex-reformers of TDU.

A full restoration, hopefully, is still not in the cards. While another rank and file election is not possible for another five years — and any efforts to abolish them is in all likelihood to fail — but, making it more difficult to run for office is not out of the question. It will certainly be more difficult to challenge the leadership over the next few years. The Teamsters are looking more like the old Teamsters. Jackie Presser would be pleased.