Teamsters

see hoffa

---

AN 8 25

Politico reports Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien is hedging his bets and supporting Republicans after years of buttressing Democrats.

“Our members are working people whose interests cut across party lines,” said Teamsters spokesperson Kara Deniz. “And there’s no value in living in a bubble … where you only talk to certain people to the exclusion of others.”

After nearly two decades of mostly backing Democrats, Politico reports the GOP donations “signify a marked shift in the pivotal labor union’s strategy since 2024,” when Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien delivered a historic address at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and his union began more seriously supporting Republicans.

This will mark the second year in a row the labor union’s political arm donated to the Republicans’ House campaign arm, says Politico, which reports the union’s D.R.I.V.E (Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education) political action committee gave the National Republican Congressional Committee $5,000 in the second quarter. In addition to giving to the NRCC, Teamsters gave a combined $62,000 to nearly two-dozen GOP congressional candidates, including those running in significant battleground districts.

IFrame Content

The 23 Republicans Politico reports the union supported all went on to win their respective seats, suggesting the union donates to winners. This included Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) and Rep. Mike Lawler, (R-New York), among others.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Spokesperson Viet Shelton questioned union leaders’ loyalty to members.

“Congressional Republicans have betrayed America’s workers and union members by selling out our communities for the GOP’s billionaire backers,” said Shelton.

Twitter critics also complained of betrayal, pointing out that it was the Biden Admin that saved the pension fund Teamsters rely on “so their president showed his appreciation by supporting Republicans.”

“Not one damn Republican voted to save the hard-earned pensions of the Teamsters,” said At Our Table Show Host Jaime Harrison on Twitter. “Not one!”

“I helped canvas to defeat Right To Work, which [Sen.] Josh [Hawley (R-Mo.)] supported as AG and during his initial Senate campaign,” posted another commenter. “Now, with abortion on the line … the Teamsters are donating to him? Not gonna lie. This feels like a knife in the back.”

The group hasn’t forsaken Democrats, who still benefit from “far more contributions than Republicans,” reports Politico, but the shift does count as “a warning sign” for Democrats who continue to lose union support.

Read the full Politico report at this link

---}:

an 7 25

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters reportedly employed and promptly dismissed Peter Cvjetanovic (also spelled Cytanovic), the 28‑year‑old former white nationalist whose fiery image at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, made him a flashpoint of far‑right extremism.

Hired into an administrative role at the union’s D.C. headquarters earlier this year, he was fired during his probationary period once the union became aware of his past, HuffPost reported Thursday.

Teamsters executive board member John Palmer, who is challenging President Sean O’Brien in the union’s upcoming 2026 election, has publicly questioned how the hire bypassed the usual vetting process. He said senior-level hires are customarily subject to sign-off by “three or four people,” but said he was unaware of how Cytanovic was vetted, per the report.

A source familiar with the situation told HuffPost that Teamsters did not know of his involvement in the rally at the time of hiring. As a college student from Reno, Nevada, Cytanovic marched alongside neo‑Nazis on UVA grounds in 2017.

IFrame Content

A widely circulated Getty photo captured him screaming with his face illuminated by tiki torches — a striking symbol of the white supremacist demonstration.

According to the report, his brief tenure was outed by an anonymous Reddit post from a Teamsters HQ employee, who wrote that they discovered Cytanovic’s name linked to Charlottesville after googling him, reported it to management, and saw him terminated soon after.

The report further noted that Cytanovic has consistently argued since immediately after the Charlottesville rally that he is “not the angry racist [people] see in that photo.”

He claims that his primary motivation for attending the demonstration was to protect the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which he viewed as representative of white European heritage.

At the time, anti-racist groups were calling on Charlottesville officials to remove the Lee monument from a local park, per the report.

He told Nevada’s Channel 2 News, “I hope people acknowledge that being a party to the alternative right does not make me an evil Nazi, and that being pro‑white right now is dangerous, and being pro‑white doesn’t mean I’m anti‑anyone else”.

---

UAW rips 'billionaire scab' Trump following Teamsters RNC speech

---

'Moment of shame': Teamsters president ripped for GOP convention speech an 7 24

---

new rt jdv and hawley some pro union? but no PRO Acts?

---

Opinion

The GOP pretends it's pro-union

Robert Reich

The Republican Party began its national convention last night, with a bow to … (wait for it) … organized labor. You read that correctly.

A few days ago, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this remarkably ironic headline:

“RNC STATEMENT ON FAILED BIDEN’S ANTI-UNION, PRO-CHINA POLICIES”

This was followed by an even more absurd RNC statement:

Joe Biden is not pro-union, he is pro-CCP—forcing EV mandates to please Communist China while making gas prices soar and killing auto industry jobs. If Biden really cared about working class Americans, he would stop caving to China, unleash our energy, and make life affordable again for working families. President Trump put hard-working Americans first once, and he will do it again when he’s back in the White House.

As my friend Harold Meyerson, writing for The American Prospect, notes, the RNC statement didn’t address the Republicans’ enduring and ongoing opposition to unions, or the officials Trump appointed when president (Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb, et al.) who devoted themselves to crippling unions in every way they could.

It ignored the assessments of dispassionate historians that Biden is either the most pro-union president since FDR or the most pro-union president ever.

Harold went on to explain that the RNC email was intended as something of a tease, laying a bit of groundwork for the opening night of the Republican convention last night, when the prime-time 10 p.m. speaking slot was awarded to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters.

Despite the misgivings and stunned disbelief of numerous Teamster officials, O’Brien has been playing footsie with Trump for a number of months, donating $45,000 of the members’ money to help fund the Republican convention (he gave an equal amount to the Democrats), inviting Trump in to speak to his executive board, and now, effectively kicking off the televised portion of the Republican convention.

O’Brien’s openness to Trump overlooks a Biden record that includes bailing out the union’s multi-employer pension fund and jump-starting a manufacturing and infrastructure renaissance with hiring stipulations favoring union workers, Teamsters very much included. For which reason, among many others, a number of Teamster officers have taken issue with O’Brien’s Trumpian tilt.

As Jonathan Weisman has reported in The New York Times, the Teamsters national office has come down hard on those critics, including filing suit against a member discussion website for using the word “Teamster” in its title.

Why didn’t O’Brien use his allotted speaking time to ask the Republicans to adopt the pro-union initiatives that Democrats support and that Republican members of Congress have to a person opposed — like the PRO Act, which would enable workers to unionize without fear of being fired, or raising the national minimum wage from its current $7.25?

Why didn’t O’Brien ask them to endorse the recent ruling from Biden’s OSHA that requires employers to provide heat breaks to workers in weather like the kind the nation is currently experiencing?

Or ask that Republicans on the NLRB not continue to work to destroy unions, or that Republicans, should Trump win, not scuttle the antitrust suit that Biden’s FTC has brought against Amazon, which the union is seeking to organize?

If O’Brien really wanted to do the nation a service, he would have spoken forcefully against Trump’s commitment to deporting undocumented immigrants.

Harold notes, in his years covering labor, he’s met a number of Teamsters who are themselves undocumented — the very workers and their families whom Trump has continually vowed to arrest, lock up, and deport. It’s atop Trump’s to-do list. It’s hard to see how this would be good for the Teamsters.

***

A breakdown of the 2020 presidential election exit poll showed that working-class (i.e., with no college degree) union members actually favored Trump over Biden by 6 percentage points (those with college degrees favored Biden over Trump by 48 percentage points).

Trump’s rants at enemies, real and imagined, can stir some of the same fuck-’em-all sensibilities that the legendary Jimmy Hoffa’s rants once stirred, though Hoffa put his rants in the service of building a powerful union that genuinely bettered members’ lives, while Trump puts his rants in the service of solely benefiting Donald Trump.

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found athttps://robertreich.substack.com/

---

Labor reporter disputes Trump 'unity' push as GOP runs 'voter suppression campaign that dwarfs' 2020

Alex Henderson

'Moment of shame': Teamsters president ripped for GOP convention speech

recall fake union rally ~ UAW picket line (also jdv?) ~ Scranton Joe

'A corporate CEO’s dream': Labor unions blast Trump-Vance ticket

---

When we think of the Teamsters union, we often think of the mob and the figure of Jimmy Hoffa, memorialized by countless Hollywood films. Yet Ken Paff reminds us that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters should also conjure up in our minds rank and file militancy and enormous worker power in key sectors of the economy — as witnessed in the late 1990s with the UPS strike. Paff, one of the founders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, reflects upon the history and future of the IBT.

Resources:

Teamsters for a Democratic Union

Steve Early, “The Ghost of Jimmy Hoffa Won’t Go Away,” Jacobin October 12, 2019

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-december-2-2019/

---

,,.obody who has followed Donald Trump's career, dating back many years before he entered politics, should be surprised by these events. Nor should anyone be surprised that Trump would express "regret" over the fall of Manafort for his many crimes against the United States. As Craig Unger explains in his new book, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, the developer/casino magnate/reality TV star has cultivated connections with the underworld for decades. He built Trump Tower with illegal immigrant labor and concrete supplied by the Mafia — and gave an apartment there to the girlfriend of a mobbed-up Teamster boss. Millions of dollars have been poured into Trump properties from gangsters around the world in massive money-laundering operations.

He has always felt most comfortable with unsavory figures like Manafort, who should have been indicted and sent to prison for blatant influence peddling during the Housing and Urban Development scandal back in the Ronald Reagan era, and Cohen, who has long done business with crooks in the taxi and real estate sectors in New York City. His infamous attorney Roy Cohn was a mob lawyer indicted three times, who was lucky to escape imprisonment for tax evasion and many other alleged crimes.

The Trump outfit is going down in the time-honored style that marked the decline of La Cosa Nostra. A tough guy like Michael Cohen folds up and squeals exactly the same as Sammy the Bull. And a smart guy like Manafort, who has gotten away with everything and thought he always would, is put away exactly the same as Al Capone, convicted of tax evasion on the testimony of an accountant.

No doubt Trump and his choir will remind us that none of these charges touch on campaign collusion with the Russians, but that is a feeble rejoinder. Special counsel Robert Mueller has already filed preliminary indictments on that aspect of his investigation, of which there will be more to come. Meanwhile, the special counsel will present evidence concerning Trump's Nixonian attempts to obstruct his investigation.

But regardless of what Mueller eventually reveals about the president, the Cohen deal has placed Trump in grave jeopardy. In pleading guilty to felony violations of federal campaign finance statutes, Cohen has said that he paid off Stormy Daniels and another woman in a criminal conspiracy with Trump.

Remember, that plea deal was reached not with Mueller but with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, headed by Trump appointee Geoffrey Berman, and the Department of Justice, headed by Trump appointee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. While his aides whisper to Fox News that "the president cannot be indicted," Americans will soon realize that the man in the Oval Office is an unindicted co-conspirator — just like Nixon.

The question that faces every member of Congress, and for that matter, every voter, is what to do about it.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

---

~ ufw violence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Agricultural_Labor_Relations_Act_of_1975

The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA), also referred to as the Alatorre-Zenovich-Dunlap-Berman Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975,^[1] is a landmark^[2] statute in US labor law enacted by the state of California which became law on June 4, 1975,^[3] and which establishes collective bargaining for farmworkers in that state.^[4]

The goal of the Act is to "ensure peace in the agricultural fields by guaranteeing justice for all agricultural workers and stability in labor relations."^[5] The Act, part of the California Labor Code, explicitly encourages and protects "the right of agricultural employees to full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment, and to be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."^[6]

The Act established rules and authorized regulations similar to those of National Labor Relations Act, a federal law which formally protected the collective bargaining rights of most American workers except farm and domestic workers.^[7] The California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) administers the Act. The ALRB has two functions: To conduct, oversee, and certify representation elections, and to investigate unfair labor practice (ULP) charges and pursue remedies.^[4] Administrative law judges and agency staff adjudicate most cases, with the five-member Board serving as a final arbiter.^[4]

---

Labor's War at Home

by Lee Sustar

Internationalist Socialist Review, April 2003

While the war drive against Iraq has focused the world on the Bush Doctrine abroad, there is a domestic equivalent-a dramatic escalation of the 25-year employers' offensive. With the White House leading the way, Corporate America aims to deal a series of decisive defeats to organized labor and to consolidate a balance of class forces that overwhelmingly favors employers. With union membership in the private sector down to just 8.5 percent (and 13.2 percent overall),' business sees an opportunity to achieve virtual de-unionization.

Many, if not most, unions face their greatest struggle in decades-not just to hold on to some gains, but to even survive. In February, the leaders of five of the largest unions, seeking to push a more aggressive strategy for organizing staged what Business Week called a "palace coup" on the AFL-CIO Executive Council to create a smaller executive committee to drive policy.

Moreover, there is deep unease in the ranks of organized labor about George W. Bush's agenda, reflected in the passage of antiwar resolutions in union after union and the formation of U.S. Labor Against the War. Even the AFL-CIO Executive Council has voiced opposition to a unilateral U.S. war on Iraq-a major departure from top union officials' lockstep support for U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War. The controversy over the war could presage a wider debate among union members about how to reverse labor's decline.

The urgency of such a debate can't be overstated. Even in union strongholds, labor is in retreat in the face of employer demands for givebacks in wages and benefits. Unions have already agreed to billions of dollars in concessions over the last two years in steel, aerospace, airlines and telecommunications. Where unions hesitate to accept cuts, such as at United Airlines, Bush's Air Transportation Stability Board and bankruptcy judges are imposing them anyway. Meanwhile, in the public sector unions which represent 37.5 percent of those workers, the fiscal crises of states and cities have prompted government demands for cuts in jobs, pay and working conditions in the public sector as well. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatened to impose 12,000 layoffs if municipal unions refused to accept $600 million in concessions. In Portland, Oregon, the public school teachers' union agreed to a 5 percent pay cut and to work 10 days for free. Even "good" contracts, such as the Teamsters' agreements with UPS and freight companies, mask concessions by allowing the companies to grind down the number of good jobs and working conditions over the course of five-year deals.

Government intervention is playing a central role in this offensive. Since taking office, George Bush has banned strikes in the airlines, invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in the West Coast dock dispute; banned unions from key parts of the Department of Homeland Security; imposed new financial reporting requirements on unions and announced plans to privatize some 850,000 federal jobs, most of them unionized.

Bush's anti-union campaign is by far the most aggressive one from the White House since President Ronald Reagan fired nearly 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981. Just to make sure union leaders got the point, the White House dispatched Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to the annual AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Florida in February to add insult to the many injuries Bush has inflicted on labor. When asked by International Association of Machinists (IAM) President Thomas Buffenbarger about the new restrictive reporting requirements, she read out accounts of corruption involving IAM officials. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called Chao "insulting at times," adding that, "In all my years, I've never seen a secretary of labor so antilabor."

Chao's attack was a rebuff to conservative union leaders such as Teamsters President James Hoffa, who has sought to build an alliance with Bush on issues ranging from oil drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve to war on Iraq. Hoffa, along with Carpenters President Doug McCarron, who took his union out of the AFL-CIO in 2001, had attempted to consolidate a right-wing opposition to Sweeney. In late 2002, the Carpenters re-affiliated with the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), a violation of the AFL-CIO constitution and a test of Sweeney's resolve. The building trades are also at odds with Sweeney over their handling of the $335 million insider trading scandal that enriched the top labor officials who direct the union-run insurance company ULLICO, which handles $6 billion in pension funds for the building trades." Former BCTD chief Robert Georgine, who is CEO of ULLICO, has refused to make public an outside review of the scandal, which prompted resignations from the ULLICO board by Sweeney and two other top AFL-CIO officials.

The formation of the new, smaller executive committee can be seen at least in part as a countermove against the right by more liberal-left union leaders. While this isn't a division remotely on the scale of that which led to the split of the old CIO from the AFL in the 1930s, the tensions are real enough. Certainly, the politics of individual leaders matter in this dispute-the palace coup was engineered by the liberal leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).'3 The key factor, however, is the pressure from the employers and the U.S. state on one side and an increasingly bitter and angry union rank and file on the other.

In fact, the major union contract battles of 2002 highlighted the increasing pressure on labor officials from their restive memberships. Although labor officials bowed to employers' demands in every major battle, bitterness in the rank and file over concessions has forced leaders of a number of unions to sharpen their rhetoric against the employers and at least partially mobilize the membership for action.

If union leaders have been able to get away with making concessionary agreements, it's because the rank and file does not yet have the confidence and organization necessary to take the initiative in the struggle. Nevertheless, the growing support for antiwar resolutions in union bodies, as well as labor participation in antiwar protests, reflects a politicization of sections of organized labor.

This article isn't intended to be comprehensive account of labor struggles over the last year-recent articles in the International Socialist Review provide such an overview. The aim, rather, is to briefly summarize trends and provide an analysis. It will conclude with a discussion of the kind of politics and organization necessary to reverse organized labor's long decline.

The employers' offensive intensifies

While the employers' offensive has continued for more than two decades, the economic boom of the 1990s gave unions greater leverage to resist and sometimes make serious gains. After the long strikes and lockouts at A.E. Staley, Caterpillar, Bridgestone-Firestone and the Detroit newspapers in the mid-1990s, the 1997 Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service demonstrated that workers can take on powerful corporations and win. Reform Teamster President Ron Carey was ousted by government intervention in the aftermath of the strike on trumped-up corruption charges for which he was eventually cleared. Nevertheless, the UPS strike finally broke the automatic assumption that a strike equals defeat that had overshadowed the labor movement since the destruction of PATCO.

The next three years after the Teamsters' win at UPS saw strike victories for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) at Verizon (twice) and US West, for technical workers at Boeing and janitors in Los Angles and Chicago. This must be put in perspective, however. While the number of strikes and lockouts involving more than 1,000 workers jumped from 17 in 1999 to 39 in 2000, it fell to 29 in 2001 and just 19 in 2002. The number of person-hours lost due to strikes was the lowest since records were first kept in 1947. (Final figures for 2002 were not available at the time of publication). Even in 1986, in the heyday of Reaganism, there were 69 such work stoppages. In 1974, at the height of the rank-and-file rebellion, there were 424 strikes and lockouts.

The onset of recession in 2001 gave employers greater leverage to press their demands in both the private and public sectors. The 12-day Minnesota public sector strike at the same time as a New Jersey teachers' strike at the time signaled an attack on public sector unions at the federal, state and local levels that is intensifying today. (Those strikes also showed that even under the ideological pressure of patriotism after September 11, workers were willing to fight). Despite the recession, union membership held steady at 16.4 million in 2001, but dropped to 16.1 million in 2002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Virtually the entire decline came in the private sector, where unions represent the smallest proportion of workers in nearly a century. For the three "heavy metal" unions, the losses in recent years are staggering. Over the last five years, the United Auto Workers have lost 95,000 members; the Machinists, 33,000; the Steelworkers, 121,000. The losses would be greater except for mergers and new organizing pursued outside the unions' traditional jurisdictions. For many unions, the membership figures are much worse: The 15 biggest of the 66 affiliated unions in the AFL-CIO represent 10 million of 13 million of the federation's membership.

With the economy still limping along in 2002, union job losses continued to mount, especially in manufacturing. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, hiring is at its lowest level in 20 years, and the economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since the recession began in 2001. Employers used the opportunity to bring back "concessions bargaining"-the term for unions' agreement to surrender wages and working conditions that began in the late 1970s and accelerated following the PATCO defeat.

Twenty years ago, union leaders from former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland on down tried to justify concessions on the grounds that the U.S. economy had to be more competitive with Japan in order to prosper. The escalation of the Cold War in those years provided additional ideological justification for "national sacrifice."

This time, union leaders have taken a different approach. While they have claimed that it was necessary to take concessions in order to "save" companies like bankrupt United Airlines and US Airways, in many cases they have tried to resist them, however half-heartedly. This is not due to stiffer backbones in the union leadership, but to the increased working class consciousness after 25 years of sacrifice and expectations raised in the 1990s boom. In the early 1980s, the employers could claim that free-market policies were the cure for the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and workers were prepared to accept it. Today, in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and the recession, workers are bitter and suspicious.

As a result, union leaders have had to articulate the pressure from below and talk tough. In New York City, for example, Randi Weingareen, president of the 130,000-member United Federation of Teachers, last year organized an authorization vote for an illegal strike. While it was a symbolic gesture, he was able to secure a better-but still concessionary- deal than originally offered. Similarly, Roger Toussaine, the reformer who now heads New York's subway union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, also mobilized for an illegal strike before accepting an improved-but again, concession