What happened at the Teamster convention? From repealing the “two-thirds” rule to the Amazon campaign.

The Teamsters Have Entered the Chat (w/ Joe Allen)

Bonus Episode of the Working People Podcast hosted by Maximilian Alvarez

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Please sign up for the Working People podcast on Patreon, here.

Working People: A lot of folks who are watching this from the sidelines were really excited going into the Teamsters convention. But, as Joe rightly pointed out, we should temper our expectations. We should look critically at what’s going on. Then we can kind of better assess this Amazon drive and where the Teamsters as a union are at. Why don’t I turn things over to you and ask if you could give us a bit of a retrospective report on what happened at the convention?

Joe Allen: Well, there’s a couple of things right off the bat that were notable. It was the 30th convention of the Teamsters. The modern Teamsters union only meets every five years. So, that’s a bit of a clue to who runs the Teamsters union, partly they don’t like having rank and file influence in the convention. They’re stretched out very far apart.

The vast majority of the nearly 1600 delegates from about 400 local unions were overwhelmingly officers, staff, business agents, and the favored rank and file members. Those are the people who make up the officialdom of the union or the bureaucracy of the union. Teamster officials tend to be fairly conservative people.

You can tell from many of the people who spoke and previous conventions, it tends to be overwhelmingly middle-aged, white men. When you look at the delegates, they look like the past and not the future, because the Teamsters are overwhelmingly black and Latino. And, in many cases, recent immigrants to the United States and you don’t get that feel from the Teamster convention.

If you looked at the kind of political alignment. It seemed that the forces led by Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman, who lead a slate called Teamsters United, had a slight edge. It looked like from how many votes they got to be nominated for General President and the General Secretary- Treasurer. They’re the ones who are the most vocal about breaking with the Hoffa legacy.

The handpicked successor to Hoffa is Steve Vairma, who is currently the warehouse director of the Teamsters, and is a figure from the Western conference of the Teamsters. He’s based out of Denver. He’s little known outside the Teamsters, but he’s also not a well-known figure inside the Teamsters. It looks like the reason that Hoffa chose him was precisely because he was so little known and had little baggage.

Hoffa has very little tangible accomplishments for the union. Many of his closest associates over the years, whether it’s the infamous figures like Chicago’s Bill Hogan or Dane Paso to people like Kevin Moore of Detroit, these people have long histories of corruption, terrible records representing workers.

There was a couple of notable things about the constitutional changes that were passed, and those that were defeated are revealing. The end of what’s called the “two-thirds rule.” What that means is that on a national contract vote, if less than 50% of the people covered by a contract voted, you need two-thirds of them to vote a contract down for it to be defeated. This really became a major issue coming out of the 2018 Teamster-UPS national contract, where the membership voted it down and then very quickly Hoffa and Dennis Taylor, who was the chief UPS negotiator declared it passed.

People were very angry about this. The other is that there was a lot of frustration with the way that the national strike benefit fund worked. So for example, if you’re out on strike, you have to be out for over a week before you can start collecting strike benefits. And rightly so, this was just seen as something that just benefits the employers, not the workers.

The fact that both of those resolutions were passed overwhelmingly by both sides at the convention tells you that there’s a lot of rank and file anger around these two issues. But on the other hand, there were several other resolutions that were put up for a vote that were also overwhelmingly defeated. And you can see that they were ways of the Teamster bureaucracy protecting itself.

For example, there was a resolution put forward that said that in order to run for General President or General Secretary-Treasurer, at some point in your Teamster career, you have had to have worked for two years in the craft. That is you had to be working as a Teamster. Everybody knew that what was behind this is that James Hoffa, son of the infamous leader of the Teamsters, who’s been General President for two decades, was never a working Teamster. He was always a lawyer.

That resolution was overwhelmingly voted down. There was an attempt to limit salaries because the Teamsters is probably the most notorious where many union officials collect several paychecks. Both being a local president, sometimes being the head of a particular division, and sitting on a joint council. You’re earning tens of thousands of dollars more as a result of these positions. So, the attempt to limit salaries also overwhelmingly failed.

Richard Hooker, who’s one of the new black leaders of the Teamsters out of Philadelphia. His election a couple of years ago was hailed as a big breakthrough by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) put forward a resolution from a floor that said that if you had been suspended at any point during your time as a Teamster, you couldn’t run for General President or General Secretary-Treasurer.

Everybody knew that this was really about Sean O’Brien, who’s running right now. Because Sean O’Brien had actually been suspended several years ago, threatening members in Rhode Island who were potentially voting against one of his allies.

Fred Zuckerman motivated our proposal to preserve the 5% rule. For people who don’t know, the rule is that you only need 5% of the delegates in order to be nominated to run for the top offices in the union. It was won in the early days of the consent decree which mandated rank and file elections way back in the late eighties, because it was very clear that the only way to get a reform slate out there was to have a fairly low threshold for running for office. So, that was voted down. It could be overturned at a later convention.

When you look at the two resolutions — eliminating the two thirds rule and reforming the unfair strike benefits — came out of real anger within the rank and file of the Teamster. And trying to remove them as campaign issues. That’s another motivation. It was the hope, particularly of Steve Vairma, that these would be taken off the table in terms of campaign issues. Now whether they will be, or not, we shall see. While many other resolutions that were voted down are an example of the bureaucracy protecting itself and protecting its privileges and its prerogatives.

Maybe the strangest thing that was voted on during the whole convention was making the retiring James P Hoffa Jr. co-General President emeritus along with his late father. And that passed overwhelmingly with about 81% or more of the delegates voting for it. So, that’s another indication of how pretty conservative the bulk of the delegates really are.

Working People: Let’s talk about that by taking a step back. I think that was a great rundown of the proceedings of the convention. And I imagine, as we said at the top of this episode, that a lot of folks listening to this probably don’t know a whole lot about the Teamsters. Many of us may know just the kind of cultural reputation.

I think that a lot of folks are trying to push away or delay the sort of tough questions about the Bessemer union drive by latching onto the Teamsters, and saying like, “oh, okay, here’s a much better chance here. We can hope that the Teamsters are going to deliver us from evil, right?”

I know there are a lot of ins-and-outs here, but folks who don’t really know a whole lot about the state of the union.

Joe Allen: I can’t think of a union that has more of a cultural footprint in the United States and it’s purely negative. The Teamsters have had a major part of Hollywood films for many decades. And it’s usually an emphasis on gangsterism or the death of Jimmy Hoffa. The Irishman, came out about a year and a half ago in the fall of 2019. Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro — how can you go wrong there?

It’s a strange thing where people think they know more about the Teamsters and really don’t. Which isn’t at all to be dismissive of the gangsterism and an organized crime aspect of the Teamsters union, because that was a major part of its history for a very long time. It’s also true that that plays very little of a role in the modern history of the union, which starts with the consent decree with the federal government in the late 1980s.

The Teamsters is a union like many of the big industrial unions that includes the steelworkers (USW) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) which have been in crisis for a long time. Many people date different points where that crisis begins, but clearly for all of them, it starts in the mid 1970s.

And during the course of the 1980s, particularly with the Teamsters, they literally collapsed in the industries that gave them the kind of cache as a union. The Teamsters organized the freight industry, which boomed during World War II and after. It was the industry that James Riddle Hoffa, father of the current General President, rode to power on and his greatest achievement was the national master freight agreement. At its peak, it represented 400,000 workers, mostly over the road drivers, but lots of warehouse workers.

And that was the economic engine for the Teamsters from the mid-sixties to the late 1970s. It was also the political flashpoint for why the federal government carried out this long campaign against Jimmy Hoffa, who was found guilty for all the things that he was certainly guilty of, stealing from the pension fund and jury tampering.

It also is true that in a long history of transportation unions powerful, strong leaders who have lots of rank and file backing, whether they’re Eugene Debs and the rail workers or Harry Bridges and the dock workers or Jimmy Hoffa, Senior, and later another Teamster leader Ron Carey, that the federal government doesn’t like workers having strong unions.

In the transportation industry from the eighties onward, there’s a real precipitous decline of the Teamsters, not only do they literally collapse in freight, the freight industry itself gets remade through deregulation. It begins under Carter. It carries through under Reagan. It has these devastating effects on the lives of truck drivers and the union.

Literally the core of the industry really goes from being unionized to non-union. So by the late 1990s, Mike Belzer, who was both a truck driver and then later an academic in the transportation field, wrote a book called Sweatshops on Wheels. That really, I think, accurately, captured what happened to the truck drivers. But alongside that in a way that was counterintuitive, United Parcel Service (UPS), which was a union company, exploded in size and an influence.

Today, the largest section of workers in the Teamsters is UPS with about 250,000 workers making it the largest private sector, unionized employer in the country. But at the same time, the Teamsters made massive concessions in the early 1980s that were particularly devastating for full-time jobs and part-time wages. It was a huge boon to see UPS. And so this kind of shapes and reshapes the position of the Teamsters within the trucking industry in a very peculiar way.

For the most part, the Teamsters is still overwhelmingly defined by being a union of local and small employers. If you go to many Teamster locals across the country there may be a UPS component to it, some cases not, but there’ll always be a wide variety of workers. The Teamsters represent trucking, but also can be public sector workers, hospital workers, food processing workers; things that are very far field from the original idea of the Teamsters union. I think that was going on with a lot of the big industrial unions, which is the crisis in their core industry.

And even though there are aspects of this with the UAW, I think they organize graduate students. I mean, I find that to be very peculiar myself, and other unions decided to organize cops and prison guards. The Teamsters have a whole law enforcement division too. So, you have this union which made its reputation and its economic strength rooted in the trucking business, which still has that primarily because of UPS, but also has become a general union with many competing interests.

The Teamsters are a very decentralized union with a kind of heavy, powerful union bureaucracy that sits on top of that, which makes for some fairly peculiar internal politics. So, you know, local autonomy of unions is very good for many Teamster leaders? But what does that mean in the world of Amazon? Well, not very much.

It means that organizing has always been to try to take on the big, new, aggressive non-union employers in the trucking industry like XPO or FedEx ground, and keeps running into this kind of localism which has proved to be a failure time and time again. And those issues should be up for discussion and debate in the Teamsters. Unfortunately, they’re not.

Working People: Well, this is some that you write about quite extensively. We have, like you said, such little understanding about how unions work. I mean, which is unsurprising given the fact that union density is 10%. So a lot of people don’t know what it’s like to work in a union. Let alone how kind of you know, internal union politics happen and why.

To kind of tease out some of that because it was a very staged fair. Like a big sort of PR production for a number of reasons. Both as the kind of outgoing James P Hoffa administration kind of sings a Swan song, then you also had like The Rock given a speech, it’s hard to know, I guess, what to make of it.

Joe Allen: I wrote an article where I said that based on our experience with last year’s Democratic and Republican convention, you couldn’t help but think that the Teamsters convention is going to be more like an infomercial. And it really felt that way. You couldn’t get around it. It really felt like an infomercial for the lame duck Hoffa administration with lavishly produced videos all dedicated to the cult of personality of the current General President.

Some of it was just embarrassing, beyond the pale. The video dedicated to Jim Hoffa was just God-awful. And some of the guests were incoherent. I think there’s this idea among Hollywood types that the movie crews, which tend to be overwhelmingly Teamsters, are these authentic workers that they rub shoulders with, which is just weird in-and-of-itself that people talk that way.

One of the things that makes the Teamsters union different is it does have the direct election of the top officers, which most big unions don’t have. One of the things about the American labor movement, especially for reformers and radicals, at least for 50 years, if not longer, has been trying to fight for democracy in the labor movement. And I think for most people outside the labor movement that may seem like an odd thing.

But it’s true. And it came into the Teamsters first with the threat of a trusteeship from the federal government and the campaigning of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which at one time was a legendary rank and file group, that faced threats to their life and limb and won the right to vote in the Teamsters. The Teamsters also has a very top heavy bureaucracy, even on a local level.

There are hundreds of officers that make well over 150,000, $200,000 a year. Many of whom haven’t worked for years in the industries that they came out of. If they ever worked in them at all. But, union meetings themselves are fairly narrow and constricted and the ability to change union constitutions are literally like a once in a lifetime events.

Most people’s experience with unions in the United States is almost accidental. So for younger people it may be working at UPS for a short period. You think of the big employers that suck in young people, the big supermarkets, you may end up being a member of the food and commercial workers, or if you work in a warehouse, you might be in the Teamsters, but your experience with the union is either not very good or terrible.

It seems to be this thing that collects dues from you, but does very little for you. And in most cases you’ll never really meet a local officer or a business agent. One of the things that should be up for discussion in the Teamsters is that a large number of young people, particularly Blacks and Latinos is working at UPS. You want that to be an entry point for people to have a good union experience. You work there for a year and you’ll leave. And your experiences is, “I really didn’t get much out of it.”

I think the other thing about the convention itself is that it became something of a hallmark of Hoffa that he would use the convention to announce these big initiatives. One year it was how they were leaving the AFL CIO that just started a new labor federation. So it would seriously organize people called you know, Change to Win that didn’t amount to anything. They announced grand plans for organizing FedEx that didn’t amount to very much XPO; there was some local organizing that got going.

In one, a few places and they got rolled back just as quickly. I’m not telling people to be skeptical for a skepticism sake, but you know, when the Teamsters announced that they’re going to organize Amazon, I think all of us would love it. If there was a serious multi-year commitment by the Teamsters with organizers and money that was particularly addressed to rank and file Amazon workers.

But the record of the current leadership not only makes you skeptical about that, but you wonder if the successors to him, whomever will be. And it’s probably going to be Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman, unless something dramatically happens in the election. You wonder what they will do differently.

And so I think that this is not to tell people to be cynical about the possibility of change, because we can only, we can go back to 1991, where the election of Ron Carey, the first and only reform president of the Teamsters brought about important reforms. It brought about the biggest strike of the era in 1997 at UPS, which was a hands down victory on the key issues politically of the time, particularly the creation of a full-time job. So within our lifetime, we’ve seen the Teamsters be a place where not only can you bring about quite dramatic political shifts.

I think one of the problems right now that’s missing is that we don’t have the type of rank and file movement that can both engage the type of workers who want that type of change. Overcome what I think is a really terrible cynicism. That you find across the labor movement by many rank and file members who want their unions to simply be better, but what’s offered particularly in this election and the Teamsters seems to be more of the same.

Working People: I think we’re touching on something really important here, because that circles back to what you and I were discussing about Bessemer. And I think this applies to those of us in the media as well, you and me and everyone else that we’re connected to because I feel like the scales are just so imbalanced.

How do we walk that line between being critical while also without being kind of like you said, overly cynical about the whole thing?

Joe Allen: Well, to put it bluntly, we need socialist politics among more workers. I think sometimes the way that people talk about union organizing, they talk about it almost in this very narrow way, or like in the case of Bessemer or the UAW’s failed campaigns throughout the South. Because it kind of tack on abstractly, the issues of civil rights, which are very legitimate issues. Don’t get me wrong. But I think that what it does is those, those are almost PR kinds of approaches to dealing with the political ecology of workplaces, which in the United States are riddled with racism, sexism, xenophobia, and, at the same time, workplaces can push people together.

You need some socialist politics to navigate your way through some of these things. You need to develop a cadre of people, so to speak, who can, organize inside the workplaces around the myriad of ideas. Both challenging the boss on multiple fronts that play into dampening, the ability of workers to fight back.

And then we need some more fight back. I mean, there’s a spate of small strikes, right now, in the country, I wouldn’t say a strike wave because I just don’t think the numbers are that big. But what we’ve learned from several strikes, whether they’re at refineries or at the mines in Alabama, and a few of the other manufacturing strikes, is that there’s a sense that things that have been inherited, like two tier wage structures and give backs around healthcare, have to go.

People just went through a year and a half of hell dealing with COVID in the workplace. People want forward movement. But at the same time, when some of these strikes are settled, people find themselves trapped in contracts that are five or six years in length!

I think that we need to have more socialist working class politics, and we need more of a fight back to raise the broader sense of confidence among workers. The real issue is being able to understand the class struggle. And the class struggle in this country as it is in far too many places, it’s still too low and workplaces aren’t going to be organized, especially these huge ones, like Amazon.

What is it that’s going to change our unions, put them in a situation where they can fight on the myriad of issues around race, gender, and xenophobia? To make unions express the aspirations of a new generation, particularly of industrial workers, you need a smaller cog to start turning. And I think that’s where the importance of socialist, anti-racist working class politics come in.

Working People: We have an opportunity here, because if you want a villain that helps you articulate the nature and stakes of class war, Amazon is it.

There are a lot of ways that the Teamsters could capitalize on their size, strength, and their ability to organize across states. That could help them potentially succeed where the organizers in Bessemer were not able to.

I want to throw things back to you by way of rounding up what people take away from this discussion about the viability of the Teamsters campaign to unionize Amazon. What would need to happen and what sorts of things can we all do?

Joe Allen: Well, I would say, I would say a couple of things. First is that major changes have to take place at UPS to present a union workplace as a viable alternative for non-union workers.

Most people make decisions about what they want to do based on very pragmatic, realistic things. UPS should be the model contract for the Teamsters in order to recruit people from the non-union logistics industry and too much of the time, it just isn’t. So that has to change.

I think the second thing is that the Teamsters haven’t organized a major non-union trucking company in many decades. The media talk about the Teamsters being “mighty” and “powerful.” Well, the Teamsters have the potential to be mighty and powerful. But they haven’t used that might or really since the 1997 ups strike. So this is a union that really needs to rebuild its fighting strength before it can take on a company like Amazon.

All across the country it’s only really a handful of their drivers who directly worked for Amazon. They look for, they work for local independent contractors, and I’ve heard numbers that range at a minimum from a thousand to potentially 2000 companies that Amazon drivers work for across the United States. Now that’s a huge undertaking to cope with a thousand employers and requires a multi-year commitment and, and so forth.

I also think it’s important that the Teamsters have to think about organizing something like Amazon in a very different way, and maybe in a way that they’re not capable of thinking about it which is to create not just the division, which is what the Teamsters voted on, with a national director and organizers, but creating a union that is linked to the Teamsters, but somewhat independent of it made up of Amazon workers. Because I think, one of the things I think coming out of Bessemer, and this is also coming out of many other failed organizing drives in industrial settings, whether they’re in the south or not, is that workers are just skeptical of joining unions.

Changing the internal culture of the union, so it looks more like the workforce that’s black and brown, more made up of women than what it currently is. That’s just the beginning of trying to shift a union like the Teamsters, and that’s probably true of all the industrial unions.

Joe Allen is a former Teamster. He writes regularly about the logistics industry. He is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service which is available from Haymarket Books.