from ASR 91 (Winter 2025)

Several business unions are flirting with the incoming Trump administration, hoping that they can gain special treatment through obsequious flattery and cash payments. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien went so far as to speak at the Republican National Convention and donate union dues money to the Trumpsters. Now he claims this strategy has paid off with the appointment of a Teamsters-backed candidate for Secretary of Labor, former Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer – who made occasional statements of support for workers during her single term. (Her voting record tells a rather different story.)

O’Brien was elected to head the Teamsters with the support of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, formed 50 years ago as a rank-and-file caucus trying to transform the mob-ridden outfit into a militant, fighting trade union. This strategy of boring from within has long been favored by radicals seeking alternatives to the difficult, long-term work of building unions controlled by their members and committed to a program and practice of workers’ control. It has had some successes in electing less-corrupt officials, winning better enforcement of union contracts, and the like. What is has not done – what it can never do – is build real workers’ power or prepare workers for the vital task of dumping the bosses off our backs.

Meanwhile, two union-backed senators (both on their way out the door, no doubt to take lucrative lobbying jobs) blocked efforts to restore the National Labor Relations Board to full strength, ensuring that Trump will be able to immediately pack it with flagrant union-busters.

But the NLRB and its very limited protections of the right to organize may not exist much longer. Three Texas federal judges have ruled that the Board is unconstitutional and barred the NLRB from hearing complaints of employer violations of workers’ rights. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals – the most reactionary in the country – has accepted the cases involving SpaceX and two other firms, and almost certainly will agree that the bosses’ right to fire workers for organizing and other union-busting tactics is sacrosanct. The question is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn 90 years of precedent and force unions to return to the era of sit-down strikes, mass picketing and similar tactics if they wish to survive. Many hope the Supremes will instead further whittle away at labor rights while giving Trump unfettered power to remove hearing officers or other NLRB officials if employers object to them. If the business unions continue their current strategy they will soon be declawed and caged while the bosses gloat – forgetting that the Wagner Act was passed precisely to manage workers’ struggles and channel them into a bureaucratic maze.

Unions were essentially illegal in the US into the 1930s, constitutional “guarantees” of the right to assemble, petition for redress of grievances and be free from compulsory labor notwithstanding. Workers were routinely jailed for organizing unions, striking, refusing to work with scabs, and advocating direct action at the point of production. Gun thugs – government and private – routinely shot up picket lines and broke up union meetings. And yet workers organized unions, struck, enforced union standards on the job through concerted direct action, and forced working hours down from 10- and 12-hour days to 8. The rights we enjoy were not gifts, they were wrested from the bosses through bitter struggle. And if unions are to avoid extinction, we will have to return to building and exercising power on the job. There is no other way.