Sean O’Brien is in hot water as rank-and-file Teamsters speak out against his appearance at the Republican National Convention this week. The International Brotherhood of the Teamsters President was the sole union president to make an appearance at the RNC, and the audience’s tepid reception to his anti-corporate message might help explain why he was the only union man around. Rank-and-file members have attacked O’Brien’s appearance as undemocratic, harmful to union members of color and LGBTQ Teamsters, and politically unproductive. Longtime Teamsters organizer John Palmer sits down with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez to discuss the speech, and why the union deserves better.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us.
On Monday, July 15, on day one of the Republican National Convention, Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters became the first Teamsters president ever to address the RNC. Invited by former President Trump, O’Brien’s speech was no ordinary RNC filler.
And to anyone watching or anyone paying attention to the political reality in this country, this was no ordinary RNC, either. As my colleagues Stephen Janis and Taya Graham have shown with their on-the-ground coverage from Milwaukee, this year’s RNC has felt and looked like a religious reckoning more than a political convention.
Following the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, supporters on and off stage repeatedly spoke of Trump as a kind of messiah, anointed and protected by God to carry the MAGA movement back to power — Not just for another presidential term, mind you, but for decades to come.
And inside the RNC, where many delegates sported fake ear bandages in solidarity with Trump, and attendees wave signs with slogans like “Make America Strong Again”, and “Mass Deportation Now”, Republicans did their best to present their party as the true party of the working class.
And Sean O’Brien’s very presence on the RNC stage and the contents of his speech, which lasted 17 minutes, was a central pillar of that message.
But while certain lines from O’Brien’s speech garnered cheers and applause from the conservative, traditionally anti-union crowd at the RNC, many lines from that speech emphatically did not. And while many Republican voting and conservative-leaning union members have expressed excitement about O’Brien’s speech, O’Brien has faced an avalanche of criticism from within his own union and across the labor movement.
Even before O’Brien took the stage on Monday, however, John Palmer, a vice president at large of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote a fiery op-ed entitled “Teamsters President Sean O’Brien Should Not Speak at the RNC”. And I’m honored to be joined on The Real News today by John Palmer himself to talk about all of this.
Now, John became a Teamster in 1987 when he started working as a driver for ABF after serving in the US Army as a medic. He became an active member of Local 657 in San Antonio, Texas, before becoming a full-time organizer for the union. Prior to becoming international vice president at large, John served as international vice president for the southern region of the Teamsters.
Now, lastly, before we get rolling here, I want to remind you all out there watching that The Real News is an independent, viewer and listener supported, grassroots media network. We lift up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world, and we can’t keep doing that work without you. So subscribe to our channel, become a donor today by heading to therealnews.com/donate. I promise you it really makes a difference.
All right, brother John, I am going to bring you in here and I want us to dive straight in.
Now, in this op-ed that you wrote for New Politics, you said, and I quote, “A speaking engagement at the Republican National Convention by Teamster President Sean O’Brien, regardless of the message, only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and president I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable. Teamster members and leaders have the right to demand an answer to the questions: What does the general president intend to say? What does he hope to achieve from such an appearance?”
So here we are, days after O’Brien actually delivered his speech at the RNC. What are your thoughts on what he did actually say? What do you think he hoped to achieve with this appearance, and what do you think he actually achieved?
John Palmer: Well, Max, first of all, thanks for having me, and also thank you for the work that you’ve done trying to help the folks in East Palestine in that tragedy. It’s very, very worthwhile. And I hope that no one forgets the tragedy that’s occurred there, and the families, and how they’re affected.
To carry on to your point about Mr. O’Brien’s thinking, first of all, I never attempt to think for other people or think what’s going on in their minds. There’s an argument to be made that you have to talk to both sides in order to achieve an end. I think that day and time in our current politics left us a long time ago, a very, very long time ago, probably when I first started driving a truck some 30 years ago. And it’s only degraded itself. It’s even gotten worse over the years.
To the actual appearance, I think we live in a society where perception is reality. And there’s more than one instance, here. I refused to meet with Donald Trump at the round table. There’s no reason for me to sit down with Donald Trump. I know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. His actions speak louder than words, or his words as well. We know that he’s crossed picket lines. We know that he weakened the Labor Board. We know that during his term they did nothing for labor.
And we know that the party that calls itself the Republican Party now has completely hitched his wagon to him. He’s the leader. His family runs the convention.
So by standing in front of those folks and delivering a speech like he did, which was a two part speech, one part was basically really, really praising Trump and his courage, if you want to call it that, to invite him to the convention, which was, in my estimation, not needed or necessary, and actually made us look like we’re pandering to the Republican Party.
The second part was the talking points. I mean, we all say these things. We all know these union issues that need to be addressed. And I think the interesting part about this whole conversation or speech was when that came out, it got awfully quiet.
When you start talking about corporations, he was talking to corporations. That’s who these people are in the room. These people have no desire to hear that commentary. The very people they want to export from this country, they profit from that. They profit from cheap labor. They profit from workers not having rights. They profit from unsafe working conditions at the cost of workers, at the cost of people’s environment.
Again, back to the East Palestine issue. I’m going to say it in polite terms, the railroad craps in your backyard, they set it on fire, and they leave. Unfortunately, I’m not as polished as many would like me to be, but I think I’m tired. That’s what’s wrong with politics right now. It’s polished crap. It’s just people really aren’t delving into the issues.
I believe he knocked a lot of folks that were wondering whether they should support a Republican, I’m talking about union folks, probably got pushed into doing this, and it was very clever on their part. Elections are won on margins and they know that they’re digging into the Democratic base here. So I think it was a large mistake. And I think, honestly, he was a tool for the Republican Party.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and you mention East Palestine, which I think is a very apt and horrifying example here, because as we’ve covered endlessly here at The Real News Network, both Trump and Biden have a lot to answer for in terms of siding with the railroads, not regulating them the way that they should, allowing these massively profitable and powerful companies to essentially regulate themselves at the expense of communities like East Palestine.
And yeah, Donald Trump is just as guilty of that, if not more guilty than other presidents. And yet, the very fact that he symbolically went to East Palestine before Biden did, a year before Biden did, that’s enough for a lot of people. That symbolism is all that they hope for or expect from the powers that be.
But when it comes to actual policy that will help them and help our communities, that’s when you really get to the meat of the issue and you see who really does stand with working people and who doesn’t.
Now, O’Brien’s speech, to go back to that, it set off a firestorm of intense reactions within the labor movement and within the Teamsters Union itself. I mean, we’ve been getting flooded with folks reaching out to us to share their views. And Mel Buer and I actually just recorded a massive panel podcast with a lot of other rank and filers to get their thoughts on this.
But people have been asking us all week how much the Teamster’s leadership and the membership support O’Brien speaking at the RNC. Now, I really don’t want to ask you to try to speak for everyone here. You guys are a big union with a lot of members. But what can you tell us about how the union is reacting right now?
John Palmer: Well, in large part, the bubble of people that I speak to are very upset about this. People that are dialed in — You don’t have to be an official, either. If you’re a job steward, working, and you understand what happened during the Trump administration, some of your rights as a job steward were stripped away by the board. You see the effects of this. Anybody that’s had to deal with the Labor Board knows how difficult it is.
What we need in this country — And you alluded to it, we’ve got two parties, and there’s issues with both of them. And I understand, we’re stuck with a two-party system, which I frankly think is problematic, because they’re owned by corporate America. There is a stark difference in the two parties, but change is going to come. Unions are agents for change, and that’s the very reason that we shouldn’t be doing this.
My position has been, as a veteran, as my dad is a retired first [sergeant], and every male member in my family served in the military. Everybody has the right to vote. People died that we might have that right. But as a labor leader, both on the international and local levels, I think it’s our responsibility to garner the facts and relate that to our members.
Now, people are going to do what they’re going to do, but if we fail to educate and inform people as to why it’s harmful to support Donald Trump and the Republicans as they are currently made up, that’s our fault, and we’re failing ourselves and our members, and I think that’s where we’ve really failed.
We’re career politicians. Many of my peers on that executive board draw multiple salaries. They live a very good life. Most of them are, frankly, removed from the life of, let’s say, someone at a meat packing plant in Colorado who’s exposed to all kinds of hazards, both physical and contaminants, you can only imagine, I’ve seen that work.
Now, those folks aren’t making $300,000 a year. Those folks are probably making $50,000, $60,000 a year. They need our help. And they don’t need a party coming to power that’s made it clear in their 2025 project, 2025 writings that the plan is to weaken labor unions and create faux unions in the workplace.
We’re just now making gains in getting on top of wages outstripping inflation. And that’s because the last few years, labor unions, including my own, have done a nice job of winning wages. But we’ve got a long ways to go. And if they destroy the unions, and without unions, there’s nobody to pull the safety standards and the wage standards, and we all want to live that middle-class lifestyle.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I want to pick up on that point you made about educating your members about what this is all really about beyond the surface level stuff. Because that’s all I’m seeing on mainstream media, and I’ve been watching it obsessively. It’s my job, which sucks.
But every time I turn on the TV, so many mainstream media pundits and politicians out there, they keep talking about this election, and electoral politics in general, but this election specifically, as if it’s all just a matter of people with differing opinions campaigning passionately for different visions for the country’s future.
But they never really talk about what the real world consequences will be if and when these opinions become policy. So let’s bring this down to the shop floor level, here. What would a second Trump presidency mean for your members and for working people in general on a real, tangible day-to-day level?
John Palmer: Well, for one thing, I know that Sean was impressed with the election denier J.D. Vance and the insurrectionist Josh Hawley and their commitment to not supporting right-to-work legislation. First of all, I don’t know of any time that I’ve watched Donald Trump tell the truth, literally, and I don’t know of any time in my working career as a Teamster that the Republican Party did anything that would benefit labor. That goes all the way back to Reagan, union busting, firing the air traffic controllers.
So those are really emblematic of who we’re dealing with. You learn people after a while. I’m 65 years old, and I know who to trust and who not to trust. And there’s no reason to trust these folks. Based on their past behaviors, I would expect that first of all, right-to-work, unless something odd happens, I think it takes 60 votes in the Senate to get it. So that’s not our biggest issue.
Our biggest issue is getting rid of career people that do good work in places like the EPA, the DOL, the DOT, the National Labor Relations Board, all these places that are backstops for working men and women, safe, clean drinking water. And then replacing them with lackeys, political lackeys, and people without any … What was the guy from Bush’s administration, a horse judge or something that did the Hurricane Katrina relief thing?
We might’ve learned something from that, I hope, but it’s really important that most of these people, like the people in our building at the International Union, these are career people that are there because they want to do a good job and they really don’t want to get caught in the politics.
But these are dangerous precedents, and they’ve made it clear what they want to do. It’s 900 pages, Project 2025. But if you just step back, and there’s plenty of places to summarize it, quoting much of the language. If you’ll read this, it will tell you what they intend to do.
And card check, we should be getting card check neutrality, where, in many countries, if you get enough cards to sign workers up, they’re in the union. You sign a card, that’s part of your election process. And now they get beat up from us by a union buster.
This union busting’s not going to stop. It’s only going to get more intense. And our rights are going to be more difficult to maintain in the auspices of the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act — Which by the way, you mentioned the rail strike, and that’s a very different venue, the National Mediation Board.
The processes are very different. It’s very hard to get the right to strike. And that’s not fair to these workers. If people understood what they were really fighting for, they would sympathize with them.
And there we go. We should be educating the public about all the things that go on. And so I don’t see anything historically that would give me any confidence in these people as truth tellers and as advocates for labor. I mean, that’s just not the Party.
Maximillian Alvarez: Man, I could talk to you about this for hours, but I know I got to let you go. And I’ve got one more question I want to toss your way. But we’re going to have to have you back on to keep digging into this.
But Real News viewers and listeners have been following Teamsters struggle specifically very closely and supporting y’all throughout these past few years. We helped get folks engaged by, as you mentioned, covering the railroad contract struggle a couple years ago. And there are a lot of union railroaders who are Teamster members.
We also covered Teamsters unionizing at Amazon and in the cannabis industry. We covered the reform movement that elected Sean O’Brien to the presidency.
And of course, we intensely covered the UPS contract fight last year. I know for a fact that a lot of our audience, because they keep telling me, they’re feeling betrayed after supporting O’Brien and the Teamsters, and then watching O’Brien go up on the RNC stage on Monday and bash the left.
And many viewers have expressed that they see the Teamsters just following the old, sad playbook here that gave a lot of folks a bad opinion of unions for many, many years. It’s playing into the stereotypes that a union will throw vulnerable workers and vulnerable communities under the bus. They’ll throw concerns about climate change, and immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights out the window if it means that members can benefit from some trade policies and job creation programs. That’s basically what a lot of folks are seeing right now.
And many have expressed to me that Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, is the labor leader that they hoped Sean O’Brien would be. And Fain’s statements on Trump and the Republicans are vastly different from O’Brien’s. They’re much more closely aligned with what you’ve been saying here.
So I just wanted to close this out by asking if you could talk directly to folks out there who are feeling this way, what would you say to them? Do you think that they’re right to have these concerns about labor? And what can the labor movement do to actually, really address these concerns so we don’t just go back to where we were 20 years ago?
John Palmer: Well, number one, the good portion of my career was that of an organizer. And the one thing you learn in organizing is we don’t do that for any other reason than to help people. And you can’t help people if you don’t listen to them. And you can’t help people if you’re selling an agenda that’s not relative to their problems.
You mentioned the reform group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. I was on that steering committee for many, many years, and we aligned with Sean O’Brien on the promise that this was going to be different. This was going to be open to the membership. There was going to be no behind-the-door dealings, which turns out that’s exactly what happened during the UPS negotiations. That this was going to be member driven. That their leadership was going to be more accountable.
And so people are tired of politics. People are sick of people saying, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. Once they get your vote, they’re going to do whatever they have to do to stay in office.
So what I’ve got to say is we were sold a bill of goods, Teamsters for Democratic Union has decided just to… They’re totally silent on everything that’s gone down, determination of organizers of color, the whole direction that we’ve gone.
The UPS contract, I submitted a proposal that we study automation, use our education department, political, legislative department, and go educate our members. In that UPS agreement, we failed to really mitigate what’s a threat to not just Teamsters. This is going to be a problem for every one of us. Technology’s going to get good enough to reproduce what you and I are doing here right now.
So we need to be ahead of this. And we’re losing jobs to automation. UPS threw some money at our drivers. I’m happy for the drivers and the money, but the real issues, the air conditioning was sold in a very deceptive manner. Those air conditioners have to be in vehicles purchased after the beginning of this year. They purchased a huge fleet the last two years. The majority of guys are probably not going to see air conditioning for another 10, or 15, 20 years. These vehicles have a very long life. You pull a motor out, you stick another one in. They’re relatively simple vehicles. They’re rugged, they’re tough.
But that —
Maximillian Alvarez: That’s affecting people right now. We are in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave. It’s been 100 degrees here in Baltimore for like a week straight, and I’m seeing these UPS drivers without air conditioning still.
John Palmer: Right. I saw it in the freight industry. They won it in a contract. And the ironic thing about it was they sold the contract. It was when the manufacturers actually said, we’re not building trucks without air conditioners in them anymore. So I found that to be…
But at least we knew. We knew that if you had an old truck, until the new one came in you were driving a truck with, what is it, 260 air conditioning: two windows down, 60 miles an hour. So we knew that.
But I’m going to finish on my… To summarize the whole conversation, we need to quit depending on agencies and governments and entities to do what we know needs to be done. We need to breed an attitude of activism in this country that holds people who run for office, who holds them accountable?
Certainly the Supreme Court’s not going to hold anybody accountable. How in the world can the president be immune from trying to overthrow the United States government? I’m at a total loss. I don’t understand.
But we the people have to stand together, and our unions need people with a fighting mentality, not just people who speak the words and then go hire a PR firm.
We spent well over a million dollars last year with a PR firm to help sell contracts, help actually paint Sean O’Brien as Mr. Wonderful. Our members, that money could be used a lot. You want to be Mr. Wonderful? Do the right thing.
Maximillian Alvarez: So that is John Palmer, vice president at large for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. John, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, man, I really appreciate it.
John Palmer: Thanks, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I want to thank all of you out there for watching, and thank you for caring. And please, one more time before you go, we are in the middle of our summer fundraiser right now, and if you want to see more important coverage and conversations just like this, please head on over to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
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