So the Teamsters declined to endorse him, even though two polls of the union’s members showed strong support for the former president.
The Teamsters promised “the most inclusive, democratic, and transparent Presidential endorsement process in the history of our 121-year-old organization.” Yet, after Donald Trump won not one, but two polls of Teamsters membership with 59.6 percent and 58 percent of the vote, the Teamsters announced that they will not be endorsing anyone for president.
It should come as no surprise that the Teamsters don’t really believe in democracy. Historically, their idea of “elections” was “have mobsters set up fake local unions to make Jimmy Hoffa president,” and plenty of their members have dissented from the union’s down-the-line progressive activism for years.
The Teamsters have a decades-long record of criminality and corruption. It took 25 years of federal-government oversight, which concluded only in 2015, before the union met the bare-minimum standard of not being integrated with organized crime.
“Since 2019, the Teamsters have spent more than $9 million of union dues to support everything from left-wing think tanks to a nonprofit founded by the failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams,” Akash Chougule wrote for NR earlier this summer. “The Teamsters even gave $20,000 to the ‘Alliance for Global Justice,’ which was cut off by payment processors like PayPal after the media reported that the group was providing material support to Palestinian terrorists.” Nowhere have the Teamsters said they would stop this progressive activism in light of their members’ different political views.
The key sticking point for the Teamsters with respect to Trump is that “Trump would not commit to veto national ‘right to work’ legislation if he returned to the White House,” according to a statement from the union explaining the non-endorsement.
“‘Right to work’ laws only exist to try to kill labor unions,” said Teamsters general secretary-treasurer Fred Zuckerman. “It is a red line for the Teamsters and must be for any union when a candidate for elected office does not oppose such anti-worker legislation. It’s too important an issue for the labor movement as a whole to be left up to state legislatures.”
Catastrophism about right-to-work laws is par for the course from unions, who denounced the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that allowed them to be passed as the “Slave Labor Act.” Right-to-work laws, currently in force in 26 states, simply say that joining or financially supporting a union is voluntary. If guaranteeing that membership is voluntary kills unions, that says more about the unions than it does about the law.
When right-to-work laws are described, voters overwhelmingly support them, even union members. According to a recent poll from the National Right to Work Committee, 82 percent of all voters and 79 percent of union members agree with the statement, “Workers should never be forced to join a union or pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.”
As to whether right-to-work should be left up to state legislatures, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says it has to be. Congress could pass a national right-to-work law, a simple one-page bill that would amend the National Labor Relations Act and Railway Labor Act to guarantee voluntary unionism for all private-sector workers. (All public-sector workers already have right-to-work protections due to the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision.)
Such bills are regularly introduced by Republicans every Congress. The most recent ones are from Representative Joe Wilson (S.C.) and Senator Rand Paul (Ky.). Together, they have 163 co-sponsors in Congress.
If such a bill were to make it to Trump’s desk as president, he should sign it, and it is encouraging to see that he refused to cave to the Teamsters’ veto demands. Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) has flip-flopped on right-to-work and been rewarded with a campaign donation from the Teamsters. But so far he is largely alone on giving up on this longtime Republican priority.
Workers need to be free to choose whether to join unions precisely because unions often don’t represent their interests. They take their dues and use them for progressive politics, even when a majority of their members say they support Trump.