O’Brien
By 
One thing people often miss when talking about the horrors of Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters is that in the last election, he was the democratic anti-corruption reform candidate taking on the Hoffa machine. People often just lump in together with all the other terrible Teamsters leaders over history and, well, maybe that’s fair, but you have to understand the context here. Of course I see no evidence that more democracy leads to better outcomes, not in the labor movement nor in the Democratic post-68 primary process. In terms of the labor movement, sometimes union democracy leads to better leadership–Shawn Fain in the UAW is proving a great example. But sometimes it doesn’t and that includes Miners for Democracy in the 70s and the Teamsters today.
Stephen Greenhouse thinks about what is going on here with O’Brien .
Perhaps there’s another reason O’Brien asserted that the Democrats have “f*cked” us over. Perhaps he was having a temper tantrum because his ego was hurt when the Democrats didn’t indulge him and invite him to speak at the Democratic convention. The Democrats were understandably wary of giving O’Brien a big platform after he’d spoken at the Republican convention, where he kissed up to Trump and let Republicans turn him into a show horse to make their not very believable case that they are pro-worker and pro-union.
It’s just plain—if you’ll allow me to use the word—“weird” for O’Brien to accuse the Democrats of “f*cking” over unions when Trump, as president, repeatedly “f*cked” over unions by opposing the PRO Act, viciously attacking several labor leaders, rolling back safety and overtime regulations, failing to enact his long-promised infrastructure bill, and stacking the NLRB with pro-business appointees who were intent on weakening labor unions. Not only that, Trump has said he’d support a National Right to Work bill and once said that unionized automakers in the Midwest should move plants to the South to save on labor costs. What’s more, many union members felt tricked by Trump after he made the wonderful-sounding promise that he’d bring back all of Ohio’s lost factory jobs, and that didn’t come close to happening.
Perhaps there’s one other reason O’Brien said he feels “f*cked” by the Democrats. He feels a need to sabotage the Democrats and help Trump win in order to pursue what some say is his unspoken goal of positioning himself as “Trump’s labor guy”—the grand pooh-bah of union leaders—if Trump wins on November 5. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan and that puts him over the top, he’ll certainly owe a huge debt of gratitude to O’Brien, both for not endorsing Harris and for his words stabbing the Democrats in the back. O’Brien would love to be seen as a kingmaker, which would thrust him into the spotlight.
If Trump wins, it might be great for O’Brien and his ego, but it will be bad news for O’Brien’s 1.3 million Teamsters—and all the nation’s union members—because there’s little reason to think that Trump won’t be just as anti-worker and anti-union in a second term as he was in his first term.
I think this is probably right. O’Brien is a weirdo. I know from Teamsters that he surrounds himself with a security team made up ex-felons. He’s a little egoist. Democrats didn’t play his game. He overextended himself. And now he’s willing to doom the entire labor movement to feed his ego.