On Wednesday, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien appeared once again on Fox News to talk about his support for Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Donald Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary. Her nomination has been widely seen as a gift to O’Brien and the Teamsters in exchange for their refusal to endorse Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 election, a move that helped solidify Trump’s increased support among working-class voters. However, Chavez-DeRemer is anything but a champion of working people, and her appointment is a cynical attempt by Trump to divide the working class and to capture and develop a sector of right-wing labor – a project that O’Brien has so far been happy to support. 

The fact that the president of an organization that represents hundreds of thousands of some of the most precarious and exploited workers in the country, including thousands of immigrants, would even agree to appear on the reactionary, hate-spewing anti-immigrant Fox network was bad enough. In fact, O’Brien has appeared on the channel several times in the last year. But it was his pathetic attempts to use his appearance to curry favor with the Trump administration and his ongoing shift to the right that was most disturbing. Not only did O’Brien refuse to condemn Trump’s and Elon Musk’s attacks on federal workers, arguing that ultimately that was for the courts to decide, he also provided working-class cover for Trump’s cuts, saying that there is “a lot of fat in the government that he is trimming and I don’t think people are opposed to that.” O’Brien then added that we should wait to pass judgment on Trump’s presidency until day 101, effectively giving the president a free pass to carry out his racist and anti-worker reactionary agenda for several more months before drawing any conclusions.

But worst of all was O’Brien’s statement that he and the Teamsters were “going to the mat” to  support Trump’s nominee for Labor Secretary, even after her shameful performance in front of the Senate that same day. When asked by Senator Rand Paul whether or not she still supported aspects of the PRO Act that would have potentially challenged the national legal standing of right to work, Chavez-DeRemer not only said she did not, but said explicitly that she will “fully and fairly support states that want to protect their right to work.” In other words, the very same Labor Secretary that is being championed by O’Brien and the Teamsters has openly declared her support for laws that have, as much as any legislation, been responsible for the massive decline in labor density since the 1980s. When asked about these statements O’Brien declared that the Teamsters were opposed to right to work, but that he was nonetheless eager to work with senators, including MAGA Republican and Christian Nationalist Josh Hawley, to draft a new version of the PRO Act that would remove those provisions. 

These kinds of bizarre contradictions, where we have labor leaders advocating for and cooperating with explicitly anti-worker and anti-labor politicians and political appointees, is sadly nothing new. In fact, O’Brien is not alone in adopting an attitude of preemptive capitulation and an opportunistic wait and see approach toward the Trump regime. In a remarkable about-face, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain, who had been a fierce critic of Trump, penned an op-ed in The Washington Post just a day before Trump’s inauguration saying that the union was ready to work with the new administration. Fain effectively embraced Trump’s “America first” economic policy, openly supporting his proposed tariffs on China and Mexico. What Left Voice writers Emma Lee and M. Carlstad said about Fain then is equally applicable to O’Brien now:

By promising to “work together” with the Trump administration, he [Fain] is sowing illusions in imperialism to concede slightly better conditions for the working class — illusions that are increasingly idealistic as the political situation veers to the right and there is less political pressure to give even lip service to the rights of oppressed groups.

And there’s the rub: such cooperation with bourgeois politicians, whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, liberals or right-wing authoritarians like Trump, only weakens the power of unions and the working class in the long run. Rather than address the real enemy  — the bosses, the capitalist ruling class, and the state that represents their interests — chauvinist “solutions” like tariffs or deportations of immigrant workers merely redistribute levels of generalized exploitation, unemployment, and suffering of working people globally, moving it from one region or state to another, undermining solidarity and collective action, and breeding nationalist illusions. This only further feeds the popularity of right-wing monsters like Trump and Musk. 

It should be clear by now to every Teamsters member and every working person across the country, that bureaucrats like Sean O’Brien are an embarrassment to the working class and that they do not and cannot represent their interests. The Teamsters should take immediate action to remove O’Brien as the leader of their union; but replacing one bureaucrat with another will not solve labor’s problems. Rebuilding a fighting labor movement in the United States requires real union democracy and the independent self organization of rank-and-file union members alongside all working people across the country and around the world. Developing such a united front of workers and the oppressed (native and immigrant, unionized and nonunionized) is also the only way to defeat Trump’s reactionary agenda and build the kinds of independent working class organization needed to put an end to capitalist exploitation.