The conservative (d)evolution of Teamsters for a Democratic Union

At a recent press conference alongside far-right Republican leaders including Vice-President J.D. Vance and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Sean O’Brien aligned himself with Donald Trump by blaming Democrats for the government shutdown, demanding they drop their opposition to Republican-proposed cuts to social welfare programs. Despite the cynicism on both sides of the political aisle, this is just the latest in a series of events that have showcased how far O’Brien has moved the Teamsters away from the basic labor union commitment to working-class solidarity.

At the same time as O’Brien is showcasing his commitment to Trump and the far right’s agenda, the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) is preparing to host O’Brien as the keynote speaker at its 50th anniversary convention in Chicago on November 7. This event is designed, by most accounts, to secure the unchallenged endorsement of TDU for O’Brien’s second term as Teamster president. The TDU endorsement drive has been highlighted by its efforts to exclude internal critics, including long-standing Teamster and TDU activists and leaders. Some of these critics are planning on picketing O’Brien’s presence at the convention. David Levin, TDU’s paid staff director, has played a key role in denying entry to dissenting members. All of this stands in stark contrast to the public assurances of some TDU officials that “TDU is a democratic group” that embraces “a wide range of opinions.”

If debate and difference are truly welcome, why are critics being barred from participation? Once a reform movement and a caucus defined by its courage to punch up, TDU now appears content to punch down—suppressing internal dissent while genuflecting to power. This turn of events has many of us on the labor Left wondering, What happened to TDU?

TDU was once the most important rank-and-file reform group in the U.S. labor movement. It operated in one of the most powerful unions, was founded by socialists, and is still looked to by many as an important part of the Labor left. But the reality is that TDU has traveled a long way from its origins as a militant rank-and-file caucus.

How should we characterize an organization that has unswervingly put its support behind a reactionary MAGA-obeisant union president in Sean O’Brien, has integrated itself into the leadership of the Teamsters Union behind O’Brien, and suppresses opposition within its own ranks? The evolution of TDU from radical, rank-and-file reform group to junior partner in the Teamsters bureaucracy needs to be faced honestly.

The founding of TDU

TDU was founded in 1976 out of a merger between Teamsters for a Decent Contract (TDC) and Teamsters United Rank and File (TURF). It launched with 200 members from 44 locals across 15 states.

Both TDC and TURF had been formed and grew during the early 1970s wave of wildcat strikes and renewed labor militancy.

Reflecting these roots, at its founding, TDU was committed to democratic, rank-and-file control of the union, confrontation with both employers and sell-out union leaders (including the gangster elements that led the IBT.) They also actively opposed racism and sexual discrimination in the industry and in the union.

That year, it carried out its first big campaign, organizing the Teamster ranks to win a new national master freight agreement—at the time, a contract covering 450,000 workers.

To get a sense of the threat TDU militants posed to the business unionists who led the Teamsters at the time: Cleveland Teamsters leader (and future IBT president) Jackie Presser— who was congenitally averse to strike action—joined a picket line made up of crooked officials and their flunkies, protesting TDU’s founding at its 1976 convention at Kent State University!

In the late 1970s, TDU would grow through organizing fights—and through workplace organizing and member education. TDU supported strikes, led efforts at democratization, and developed core rank-and-file strength in key industrial jurisdictions such as steel hauling and car hauling.

By November 1979, TDU had upwards of 5,000 members and 35 active chapters. When it merged with the Professional Drivers Council (PROD), a safety advocacy group for truck drivers with ties to Ralph Nader, it doubled those numbers to 10,000. At least 20 chapters were publishing local newspapers, and TDU had its own national newspaper, Convoy-Dispatch.

The role of revolutionary socialists in TDU

One major catalyst bringing these Teamster activists together was the International Socialists (I.S.), whose members had deliberately gone to work as Teamsters to build rank-and-file capacity and class struggle unionism. I.S. members would end up playing an outsized role in TDU’s early leadership and political orientation. Ken Paff, a key founder and national organizer, came from this milieu.

From the outset, however, TDU leaders framed the organization primarily as a broad, pragmatic, rank-and-file reform group rather than a vehicle for socialist politics.

This pragmatic approach wasn’t without tensions among some of the socialists who had been instrumental to TDUs founding. The intention of some of its Marxist founders was for TDU to be something of a transitional organization that could be a potential bridge between rank-and-file organization and higher levels of class consciousness. The key here was to organize around the central issues and demands facing workers in their workplaces, but also introducing basic socialist ideas to the militant minority  of advanced workers at key moments.

By the late 1970s, internal disputes—over whether TDU should carry explicitly socialist politics into union work, whether members of revolutionary groups should run for union office, and how closely the caucus should align with other external political formations—came to a head.

One notable outcome was the splintering of the I.S. This was driven in part by differences over the conception of the rank-and-file strategy and the role of political organization inside TDU, and the labor movement, in general.

Beyond formal splits, TDU’s leaders and organizational culture placed practical limits on socialist political activity inside the caucus. Pushing political arguments that were also clear class issues such as anti-war resolutions or recruitment to socialist organizations were discouraged as divisive or strategically counterproductive.

TDUs aversion to socialist politics was never simply a product of its gradual bureaucratization. Rather, there was an economistic trend within TDU — one that overly focused on narrow economic issues and counter-posed these to more explicit political demands—pre-dating the turn toward reform-from-above. The history of this trend must be included in the story of TDUs rightward turn. While not enabling conservatism, it certainly made it easier. Conversely, the rightward turn only led to a more pronounced stifling of politics and internal criticism.

In sum, TDU was born from socialist-rooted activists who early on eschewed socialist party politics in favor of a broad, pragmatic rank-and-file reform strategy. That choice helped propel growth and key victories, but it also produced internal conflicts—splits, expulsions from affiliated socialist groups, and the sidelining of members who wanted a more explicit socialist orientation. It also led to the abandonment of the most advanced workers to the politics of the labor bureaucracy—especially in the late 1970s—as TDU defined itself as a non-sectarian movement focused on union democracy and contract fights. And crucially, TDU gave up on building a socialist base among the Teamsters rank-and-file —as well as sidelining crucial questions around issues of oppression that affect so many of its members.

TDU victories through the 1990s

Nonetheless, TDU won some substantial early victories for the union in the 1970s and 1980s, spearheading fights to vote down concessionary contracts in freight and at UPS. In the 1980s, TDU continued to grow by exposing the corruption among the IBT officialdom—particularly the Roy Williams and Jackie Presser administrations—who had ties to organized crime and were deeply embedded in class collaborationist structures. This was no small feat. Given the presence of the mafia among Teamsters leadership, defying it often meant risking your life.

In 1989, in the context of the U.S. Department of Justice preparing to place the IBT under a trusteeship, or government control,  TDU successfully won the right for members to directly elect officers and convention delegates.

TDU also won another big victory for the union in 1989 when it led a fight for simple majority rule on contract ratifications for the membership, overturning the old-guard policy requiring a two-thirds majority to reject a contract.

In 1991, TDU mobilized rank-and-file militants to elect Ron Carey as IBT president Carey was a former UPS driver and leader of New York’s Local 804, a historic bastion of reform politics within the IBT.

In 1997, with TDU initiating a grassroots contract campaign, the IBT struck UPS with over 185,000 workers on the picket lines and won the first major strike in over two decades. This was considered the high-water mark of TDU strength in the union. That year, TDU experienced its largest convention since the organization’s founding in 1976.

In the wake of the UPS victory, Carey was deliberately witch-hunted out of office on charges of fundraising irregularities, of which he was later acquitted. But Carey’s purge ushered in the Hoffa Jr. years, allowing a conservative backlash which included repression of reformers—that still continues today.

TDU’s evolution: strategic choices and industry changes

The questions we must ask are when and why did TDU begin its conservative journey from radical rank-and-file caucus to NGO with rank-and-file characteristics? In other words, what were the forces acting on TDU that led it away from a class struggle orientation in the workplace, to a top-down one primarily focused on elections, legal reforms, moral appeals, and “watchdog” functions?

TDU’s radical potential was undoubtedly undermined by the decline of membership militancy during the 1980s, as the industry was deregulated. In the long period between the late 1980s-to-2010 there was a discernible shift in the nature of TDU as an organization.

Many in and around TDU, like Tempest member Sam Friedman, argued as early as 1982 in his book Teamster Rank And File, that the danger of TDU moving in a more bureaucratic and conservative direction was a distinct possibility if the primary focus was shifted toward union elections, as opposed to workplace organizing.

The structural damage to the freight industry after passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 radically altered the terrain for rank-and-file organizing. Deregulation, the legislation’s aim, opened the door to a flood of low-cost, non-union carriers, drove heavy price competition, and produced waves of bankruptcies and job loss in unionized trucking firms.

This collapse shrank the pool of militant freight drivers and union trucking barns that had been TDU’s core bread and butter as a recruitment ground and base of organizing. This pushed many Teamsters into other sectors or out of the industry entirely. With fewer truckers working in long-haul freight, TDU’s early focus on building out local chapters centering the workplace began to lose traction.

With shifts in the industry, the Teamsters became increasingly concentrated within UPS, and to a lesser extent, other package/warehouse work with very different employment structures than the old-school freight haulers. UPS now accounts for roughly one-third of all U.S. Teamster membership and represents several hundred thousand union members.

This also means that the union today depends heavily on large, centralized bargaining units and national contracts. This has created a different strategic logic within the union encouraging centralized campaign and bargaining tactics—creating incentives for access to power from the top-down rather than grassroots, democratic mobilization.

In the face of a smaller, more stratified freight rank-and-file, and a union now dominated by UPS package car drivers, TDU tactics evolved in a more traditional direction —which was only sped up in the wake of the ‘97 strike, the longue duree of the Hoffa years, and the repression of union reformers.

Where once the most sensible form of organizing, and quickest source of leverage, came from mobilizing shop stewards, wildcat strikes, and local workplace coalitions, TDU began investing more time and energy into winning local union offices and endorsing slates. This was aimed at installing sympathetic officials who could then wield union machinery and resources. Many TDU members essentially went from being workplace organizers to campaigners.

While TDU’s membership statistics aren’t available to the public (due to security concerns with organized crime when it filed as a non-profit in the early 1980s), it’s widely understood that its membership has dropped over the years. Historically, TDU is thought to have fluctuated between 5,000-10,000 members, but it is likely that its active cadre number in the hundreds today.

This is symptomatic of a gradual shift toward nonprofit logic: limited resources, a dependence on grant money, an emphasis on publicity, and cautious messaging. Without a steady, mass infusion of new, young, militant and class-conscious workers—particularly those shaped, in part, by broader political movements like BLM, Occupy, or the new eruption of rank-and-file militancy—TDU leadership has aged demographically and politically.

Orienting nearly exclusively to elections and legal actions saw the activity among TDU’s many members drastically reduced. An orientation on even small-scale struggles in workplaces—crucially, around the most pressing issues animating most workers, but also around the numerous political struggles that, over the years, have ignited around questions of oppression, war, etc.—could have helped reduce the downturn in militancy, and perhaps even helped reverse it.

Instead, what we saw with TDU was a conscious scuttling of socialist politics. Therefore, while TDU’s evolving strategy can definitely be chalked up to larger economic and structural realities, at least some of it can be laid at the feet of its economistic political calculus, and its attempts to gloss over, and even suppress, socialist politics and internal criticism.

The road to O’Brien

In the 2010s, TDU’s course shift could be visibly gleaned through its approach to elections for top Teamster offices. In the absence of a mass, activated base in the rank-and-file, TDU would shift toward alliances with the fraying old-guard.

In 2011, TDU backed Sandy Pope for IBT president. Pope was a genuine reformer with close ties to TDU. She was the first woman to run for the Teamsters’ highest office. That same year, Fred Gegare, a long-time Hoffa loyalist, did an abrupt about-face and ran as an independent candidate. His shift was treated with understandable derision by TDU but foreshadowed the end of the Hoffa coalition leadership.

Over the next two, five-year election cycles, TDU’s choices became more and more questionable, as it began to move away from an independent, oppositional stance in the union.

By 2016, Hoffa’s bureaucratic coalition was definitively unraveling. Hoffa became more unpopular among the ranks due to unnecessary contract concessions, while among the IBT officialdom, the coalition cracked as personal fallings-out with various loyalists led them to pursue their own career tracks in Teamster politics .

Fred Zuckerman, another ex-Hoffa loyalist with no prior connection to the reform movement, ran for president that year, with TDU support, and nearly won.

Fast forward to 2021, TDU endorsed Sean O’Brien for union president. Not only had O’Brien been a Hoffa supporter, but he was also a reactionary hothead with a history of intimidating and threatening reformers on Hoffa’s behalf, including TDU members. While TDU refused to support Gegare in 2011, there was little apprehension with regard to O’Brien, who became a “reformer” nearly overnight.

As Joe Allen writes inTeamsterland, TDU’s experience running union election campaigns, and its prestige within the ranks of the IBT provided O’Brien with “another route” to power after being fired as the chief UPS negotiator. TDU provided the only credentials O’Brien had to claim the mantle of “reformer.”

TDU portrayed the endorsement of O’Brien as a strategic alliance, and downplayed his past conservatism and bigotry, adopting a pragmatic tone focused on ‘winning’ and ‘getting results.’ But was this the logical outcome of pragmatism ?

The fact is, even if O’Brien had been the militant reformer many of his supporters strangely claimed him to be, only by having built up a rank-and-file movement prior to taking office could a militant leadership hope to have had the power to transform the union. And this is precisely the approach TDU had long abandoned.

O’Brien won the election lopsidedly, albeit with record levels of voter abstention. Since then, TDU has been completely uncritical as O’Brien has cozied up to Trump and defended some of the worst of his anti-labor actions.

It’s a cruel joke that a group with “democratic” in its name is backing a right-wing union leader who supports a U.S. president with fascistic politics hell-bent on being a dictator. That TDU is now moving to silence its members who have the temerity to speak out against it shows its abandonment of independence and any semblance of political principle. All has been traded for an inside track to power, as TDU has effectively become integrated into the union bureaucracy.

The fruits of TDU’s subordination to O’Brien came in 2022-2023. Broad layers of Teamster militants and labor activists in other unions believed that the IBT was preparing for a major confrontation with UPS—the largest unionized employer in the US—that would reverse decades of concessions.

Instead of a repeat of the 1997 strike, O’Brien canceled strike preparations and agreed to a contract that the Wall Street Journal said was a victory for the company and that did little to reverse give-backs. TDU defended the new contract, and actually suppressed dissidents in its own ranks who called for a “vote no” campaign.

Learning lessons from the cautionary tale of TDU

The conservatizing path of TDU, however, was not predetermined. The turn to an overemphasis on rote union elections and transforming the union from above aided and abetted a process of bureaucratization in TDU itself. For example, there have only been two, non-elected organizing directors of TDU, including Ken Paff, from 1978 until 2023.

While TDU couldn’t will class struggle into existence, its shift in focus away from the workplace ingrained a completely counterposed set of ideas and practices more in-line with traditional bureaucratic unionism.

For instance, it has been a very long time since TDU “campaigned for a national strike.”  More recently, TDU went so far as to remove its “Rank and File Bill of Rights” from its program while campaigning for O’Brien, and at least four members of TDUs International Steering Committee are now paid employees of O’Brien’s administration.

The O’Brien administration and TDU have also moved to silence critics. O’Brien hired a union-breaking law firm to shut down TeamsterLink, a website run by reformers, while TDU has barred members of Teamsters Mobilize (T.M.) from attending their conventions. T.M. is a small rank-and-file network of Teamster activists composed largely of UPS part-timers. TDU has also expelled John Palmer, a long-standing member and outspoken critic of O’Brien, and barred him from attending their convention.

Tom Leedham, Tim Sylvester, and Bill Zimmerman, three long-time reformers who created TeamsterLink with a total of 120 years of experience in the IBT, wrote, “TDU, once considered the watchdog, is now the propaganda wing of the O’Brien IBT.”

The good news is there has been ongoing opposition from a number of long-time Teamster militants and TDU members. In early September, an Open Letter was circulated online calling for TDU to break with O’Brien, signed on by a number of notable longstanding TDU activists

For this reason alone, we can’t completely write off the best elements of TDU—which still contains many good, young rank-and-file activists, as well as dissident veterans, who would surely have an important role to play in any movement to resuscitate the Teamsters from below.

For socialists, however, TDUs evolution is a cautionary tale. Without organizational and political independence, a clear class analysis, and a core of activists with a revolutionary perspective centered on the rank-and-file, even radical movements can become instruments of the status quo.

Labor movement strategy must center the rank-and-file in their workplaces, and must be tied to a political vision of class struggle and socialist transformation, or it runs the very real risk of becoming a tool of institutional repair, not a method of class struggle or liberation.

While socialist organizations shouldn’t control rank-and-file caucuses, neither should socialists completely forgo the critical work of educating workers to socialist politics either—if we agree our goal is building a socialist movement based on the self-organization of the working-class. The key lies in how we do that.

Certainly it might be counterproductive to make your first order of business getting workers to accept socialist ideas rather than helping push them into action around the most compelling issues in the workplace. It’s through workers moving into struggle that they become more receptive to radical ideas. But we should not completely abandon winning workers to socialist ideas, either—particularly the most advanced within our unions and workplaces. This is the surest road to transforming our unions, and the system, in general. TDU, however, dispensed with politics altogether.

Right now, faced with the real threat of far-right MAGA authoritarianism, we need movements and organizations that meet the urgency of the moment—accommodation and pragmatism aren’t it.

For those of us who believe we need a new rank-and-file movement within the Teamsters, we must reckon with what happened to TDU, and draw the necessary historical lessons.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ted Merriman, Gage Skidmore; modified by Tempest.