A labor leader courts Republicans — will they respond in kind?

One day in early October 2016, I was staffing the local Republican campaign office in Cedar Rapids. On any given day, we’d get visitors looking for candidate signs to put in their yards.

One of the people who stopped by that day was a member of a large labor union. He had come asking for a Trump sign.

“You’ll appreciate this,” he told me. “The guys and I were all standing around before work, and I was saying how it’d be awesome if Trump got elected. And our union rep had come in and heard me, and he gave me some crap about it. He was like, ‘Hey, we endorsed Hillary, and we need to get behind her, so I don’t want to hear talk about voting for Trump, got it?’

“So I walked up to him and I said, ‘Before you come in here and give us crap for talking about Trump, you might want to look around the room and ask yourself how many of us there are.’

“And then a bunch of the guys said, ‘Oooooooh,’ as if I had just started a confrontation, but I think he saw the others’ faces and realized I was probably right, ‘cause he just left without saying anything.”

The guy was correct on two fronts: Indeed, I appreciated the anecdote; and indeed, Donald Trump took home a decent share of the labor vote, despite what labor unions’ 2016 endorsements — or the performance of previous GOP presidential candidates — would have otherwise suggested.

It is well-known that labor unions have for decades now been very loyal to Democrats — and especially in Iowa for the past seven-plus years, very hostile to Republicans. (Something about “Chapter 20,” I think.)

So I was quite surprised when I read in June that Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the country’s largest private-sector labor unions, had been invited by President Donald Trump to speak at the upcoming Republican National Convention.

O’Brien’s time behind the GOP microphone wasn’t wasted. In one speech, he complimented Trump as “one tough S.O.B.” who had the “backbone” to put a union boss on the GOP stage and admonished the same party for their “active opposition” to organized labor. He also fired off a warning shot to Democrats by declaring that his union was “not beholden to any party.” Whoa.

O’Brien even included a not-so-subtle swipe at organized labor itself when he said, “I refuse to keep doing the same things my predecessors did.”

National Democrats and other top labor bosses around the country were less than thrilled. I was impressed. For better or for worse, O’Brien recognizes that organized labor’s loyalty to Democrats over the last couple of decades hasn’t yielded enough in return, and he’s declared that the Teamsters will work with anyone in government, from any party, in pursuit of their interests.

Ironically, that’s what makes organized labor just like the special interests and corporations from whom they supposedly exist to protect workers from exploitation. Like Big Commerce, Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Pharma, Big Labor isn’t afraid to influence government and elected officials by doing their bidding with the same type of lobbyists and big-dollar campaign contributions — for the express purpose of getting what they want.

And what does Big Labor want? Power.

Will they get what they want? I wouldn’t count on (most) Republicans to give it to them. Nevertheless, Big Labor has been trying for over five years to tip the power scales in their favor through legislation deceptively named the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO Act.

If passed, the PRO Act would, among other things, force employers to violate their workers’ privacy by giving their contact information without their consent to a union that desires to organize their workplace.

When it comes to decide whether or not to unionize, the PRO Act would strip workers of the right to vote by secret ballot in some circumstances, replacing the ballot with the easily coercive “card check” process in which a worker’s position on unionizing would be revealed based on whether they sign an authorization card.

It would allow unions to intimidate an employer into unionizing by targeting a separate company with which the employer does business and pressuring that company to cease doing business with the employer. Such tactics, called secondary boycotts, are currently illegal — and have been since 1947.

It would strip freelancers of the right to work as independent contractors and force them out of their professions if they are not able or willing to be hired as full-fledged employees by the companies they contract with, which would upend the entire job market and destroy hundreds of careers.

And the PRO Act would undercut right-to-work laws in 26 states that protect employees from being forced to join a union as a condition of employment, driving up union membership and revenue at the expense of unwilling workers.

Why would a union force a worker to join if they don’t want to? Labor unions derive their collective power from individual members and the dues they pay. The more workers who join the union, the more collective power and financial resources they have to wield when negotiating contracts — and influencing policymakers.

Unions have already had some organizing wins in the last few years without needing to resort to forced membership. Workers in some retail and restaurant businesses like Amazon warehouses and Starbucks have voted to join unions. And after failing for decades to organize anywhere in the South, the United Auto Workers finally managed to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

But the new success hasn’t been enough to make a dent in the big picture. Last year, union density reached an all-time low, with only 10% of American workers belonging to a union. In the private-sector, only 6% are unionized. In states with right-to-work legislation, where workers cannot be required to join a union as a condition of employment, union membership is as low as 2.3%.

In other words, despite being tolerant of labor unions, the vast majority of workers don’t have the desire to join one.

There could be many reasons why. One is that unions have less appeal than they did 50 or 100 years ago, now that many of the worker protections unions played a role in securing are now enshrined in law and will apply regardless of whether a union exists.

If unions went defunct, would 40-hour work weeks and overtime laws disappear with them? Would health and safety standards cease to exist? Would children be sent back to meatpacking plants to work in conditions reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle?”

Simply put, no. A repeal of fair labor laws and occupational safety laws would never achieve a legislative majority, for it would risk a death blow to the career of any legislator in favor.

Corruption and intimidation problems also don’t help unions appeal to the non-unionized. A recent UAW scandal resulted in felony convictions for 17 UAW officials and Fiat Chrysler executives and involved charges including wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering and embezzlement.

Such scandals serve to defeat the purpose of a union. Prospective members won’t join if they can’t confirm that the organization that wants to represent them is any less greedy or corrupt than their supposedly greedy and corrupt employers. Before they were caught, UAW officials certainly hadn’t been representing Fiat Chrysler employees properly — rather, they were in cahoots with Fiat Chrysler executives in exchange for kickbacks.

A federal monitor was appointed in 2021 to oversee the UAW as part of a consent decree reported that despite improvements in some areas of compliance, a culture assessment conducted via an anonymous survey revealed that over 100 UAW staff members reported witnessing “unethical behavior or misconduct,” within just the last year. Yet 40% of all staff members surveyed said they would “decline to report out of fear of retaliation.” The monitor’s July report stated that a phone reporting hotline revealed similar concerns from workers.

Also in July, the federal monitor reported that UAW President Shawn Fain is under investigation due to allegations from two senior officials who each claim they were stripped of their roles as retaliation for refusing to honor certain demands from Fain and others in his presidential office, including those that would benefit Fain’s domestic partner and her sister.

It’s unfortunate, but it reveals an ugly truth: Unions and union bosses are just as capable as corporations and their CEOs of placing their own interests — and greed — above the well-being of their workforce.

And unions — and their bosses, including O’Brien, who on behalf of the Teamsters has expressly endorsed the PRO Act — put those very interests above the well-being of their workforce by advocating to take advantage of workers to grow their ranks.

It’s hard to hate the player when the game is the same one of power and politics that everybody else plays. O’Brien at least deserves credit for reaching out to Republicans to achieve his goals.

It’s just too bad that some of those goals — the PRO Act in particular — don’t deserve to be achieved. And that Republicans have to be the ones to ensure they aren’t.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com