‘A slap in the face’: progressive anger as Teamsters union chief meets Trump

In an unexpected political convergence, Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, announced he had met privately with Donald Trump – raising questions about who the Teamsters will endorse in 2024 and drawing anger from the union’s progressive members.

The meeting came amid efforts by Joe Biden and the thinning field of Republican challengers, led by Trump, to appeal to workers and labor organizations. And it followed three years of declarations from Biden and his administration that it would deliver to workers the most pro-union presidency in US history.

The Teamsters, a union of 1.3 million members in sectors including packaging, trucking, manufacturing and logistics, promoted the meeting on its official channels, thanking Trump for “taking time during this private meeting to listen to the Teamsters’ top priorities” and announcing an upcoming roundtable with the former president and rank-and-file union members. In a separate announcement, Trump shared a photo of himself and O’Brien flashing a thumbs-up from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago quarters.

But Teamsters leaders on the left say they were caught off guard by the meeting. When O’Brien was elected in 2021 to lead the union, it was in part due to the support of a progressive labor coalition that viewed O’Brien as a hopeful alternative to the union’s old guard, affiliates of the famed Hoffa family, whose control of the union, once known for its militancy, had ushered in an era of corruption and scandal. The O’Brien slate promised to restore the Teamsters as a fighting union.

“I still can’t believe it,” said Richard Hooker Jr, the secretary treasurer of Teamsters local 623 and vice-president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO board. “As leaders, we have to do a