Republicans and the Teamsters, a Bad Relationship

Our interest was piqued when National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg posted a snapshot of the program inset for American Compass’s recent gala featuring Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It has been widely documented that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a major funder of economic and non-economic left-wing movements on issues ranging from environmentalism to abortion, is the largest known funder of American Compass, a policy shop that dresses European socialist policies in “America First” drag to sell them to conservatives.

What wasn’t known until the gala was that American Compass’s funders likely included one of America’s largest labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (listed under “presenters” alongside a national-conservative technology advocacy group). For good measure, BlackRock, the investment house led by Larry Fink that earned the moniker “King of ESG” from the right-of-center Daily Caller, was listed among the “sponsors.”

Mistakes Made Before

If the officeholders who headlined the American Compass gathering (or their allies in the Senate) follow the think tank into the arms of the Teamsters union, they will be repeating an error of their predecessors from the Eisenhower era. They would do well to learn history and reconsider repeating it.

In the 1950s, at the peak of Big Labor’s power and influence, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president and tried to kowtow to organized labor. He named a union boss to his Cabinet, but Martin Durkin of the Plumbers didn’t last. His agenda collided with the reality that Eisenhower had been elected by pro-business Republicans, not Big Labor Democrats, and he quit.

But there was another union boss Eisenhower and his allies in the “eastern Republican group” (whom today one might call “RINOs”) were eager to court: Dave Beck, a titan of Washington State and leader of the Teamsters. They courted him well: Beck received invitations to the White House, and Ike hailed him as the “Republicans’ labor statesman.” Ike’s re-election campaign was rewarded with an endorsement; Beck’s union was rewarded with stasis in advancing Republicans’ agenda to curb union power.

Or at least it was rewarded until Beck’s defection from the Democratic camp drew the attention of Congressional Democrats to Beck’s union’s finances. A young Democratic Senate staffer, Robert F. Kennedy, saw a way to help his brother John’s political career. Under sponsorship from Senator John McClellan (D-AR), Kennedy began an investigation into labor-management relations amid rumors and reports that the Teamsters may have been compromised by the Mafia.

Beck’s downfall was bycatch. While inquiring into Teamsters national union funds, Kennedy’s investigators found that Beck was using a fixer, management consultant Nathan Shefferman, to take gifts and kickbacks from bosses with whom Beck was negotiating. Unlike other Teamsters (this is foreshadowing), Beck wasn’t a Mafioso or necessarily in league with them. He was a classical thief, and Kennedy’s men proved it.

Summoned before Congress to answer for his conduct under oath, Beck pleaded the Fifth. Pursuant to an AFL-CIO rule created to ensnare him that would last until Big Labor’s left wing needed it to go away in the 1990s, Beck had to resign. The “Republicans’ labor statesman” was out. He would later go to jail and be pardoned by President Gerald Ford.

But Wait, It Gets Worse

Kennedy’s actual target had been the Teamsters regional boss in Detroit: James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa, whose name would enter American criminal infamy. (His name would not enter Teamsters infamy; the union hails Hoffa to this day as “a worker’s hero.”) Like Beck, Hoffa was both corrupt and occasionally friendly to Republicans. Unlike Beck, Hoffa was not just a thief but compromised by the Mob.

Kennedy nearly nabbed Hoffa before he could top the Teamsters. Hoffa attempted to put a mole on Kennedy’s staff, but the would-be mole turned double agent. The would-be mole, Kennedy, and the FBI set up a sting implicating Hoffa in a payoff. Hoffa managed to beat the rap thanks to a sloppy prosecution and cynical defense strategy, but the congressional investigation implicated him in all sorts of financial and other misconduct.

Republicans on the McClellan Committee were in a bind. Many of them, like conservative-faction talisman Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), had no particular love for organized labor, but they enjoyed promoting the Teamsters as an alternative to the left-wing unionism of Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers. Given the chance, the Republicans tried to turn the inquiry away from the (very guilty) Teamsters and toward other, more Democratic and left-leaning unions like the UAW. The problem? The Teamsters, while not uniquely dirty, were notably dirtier than the other unions, and Reuther’s UAW, very unlike what it would become under a subsequent Democratic Party-loyal regime, was clean, so far as could be determined.

Committee Republicans ended up looking like morons (at least in Kennedy’s retelling, The Enemy Within), but Republicans did get a policy advance out of the McClellan investigations. The Eisenhower administration responded to the McClellan Committee revelations by backing the Landrum-Griffin Act that constrained the coercive power of unions like the Teamsters more aggressively than alternative softer legislation led by Sen. John Kennedy (D-MA). The legislation also sought to guarantee members’ procedural rights in union administration including a “union members’ bill of rights” backed by Sen. McClellan.

That move, combined with Kennedy’s Vendetta (to borrow the title of journalist James Neff’s book on the Hoffa-RFK feud), left Hoffa and the Teamsters bosses politically adrift in 1960. The union could not endorse incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, as the administration had encouraged aggressive curbs on union—and especially the corrupt Teamsters union’s—power in Landrum-Griffin, and Nixon had voted for the union-anathema Taft-Hartley Act while he was in Congress. But his Democratic rival was Sen. John Kennedy (D-MA), Robert’s brother. So the union sat out.

After John won, Robert was appointed attorney general and convened a “Get Hoffa Squad” within the Justice Department to nail Hoffa for his crimes and finally put him in jail. And while they couldn’t get Hoffa before President Kennedy’s assassination, the feds ultimately sent Hoffa to prison despite Hoffa backing Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign against Sen. Goldwater.

A Most Cynical Clemency

In 1968, Richard Nixon once again failed to secure the Teamsters’ backing for the presidency in his second try for the office. He won regardless, but then spent his administration working to make sure he wouldn’t lose it a third time. As Nixon was taking office, Hoffa was leading his union (in title) from prison, where the feds had sent him for jury tampering and fraud. Day-to-day management of the Teamsters fell to Frank Fitzsimmons, who like Hoffa was friendly with the Mafia.

After two bids by Hoffa to obtain parole failed, Hoffa did not stand for reelection to the Teamsters presidency, which Fitzsimmons took over. By the end of the year, President Nixon had commuted Hoffa’s sentence, in a maneuver that has been the subject of controversy and conspiracy theories ranging from Fitzsimmons having orchestrated the clemency to various Mafia figures bribing Nixon to condition Hoffa’s release on his not holding union office for a decade. (No payoff has ever been proven, and some claims were dismissed as fabricated at the time they were made.)

Surely only coincidentally, the Teamsters endorsed Nixon’s reelection in 1972. It probably helped that his opponent, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), was seen as such a left-wing kook the AFL-CIO also didn’t endorse him.

The Teamsters would also endorse President Ronald Reagan in both his campaigns, despite his efforts to reform American labor relations in line with the Republicans’ Taft-Hartley Consensus. President Jimmy Carter’s signing a trucking deregulation bill that limited the Teamsters’ cartel power in the industry probably helped the Teamsters justify leaving the Democratic camp again.

Crackdown, Regime Change, and Republican Begging

In 1988, George H.W. Bush became the last Republican presidential candidate to secure the Teamsters’ endorsement. But as the Teamsters were endorsing the then-Vice President, the administration he served was setting the stage for such an endorsement not happening again in the subsequent four decades.

In June 1988, the federal government, led by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudolph Giuliani, filed a civil racketeering case alleging that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was controlled by La Cosa Nostra, also known as the Italian Mob. A little under a year later, the Justice Department and the Teamsters reached a consent decree settlement that amounted to a compulsory regime change, as the Mobbed-up ancien regime would have to stand for election before the whole Teamsters membership for the first time ever.

The membership, understandably and unsurprisingly, elected not to maintain the Mob-backed regime when given the chance. Instead, in the textbook case of the wages of bent unions being Red unions, they handed the Marble Palace to Ron Carey, a liberal-left activist backed by the Trotskyism-influenced faction Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

Carey’s regime would endorse Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and endorsed his reelection campaign in 1996. That latter endorsement came with the corruption to which the Teamsters Union had become accustomed, for Carey needed to secure his own reelection to the Teamsters presidency. Carey’s aides (it was never proven that Carey knew or ordered the actions) passed Teamsters dues money to various left-of-center activist groups for left-of-center political activities, with some of that money eventually being directed toward support for Carey’s personal reelection. Such use of the union treasury for union officers’ electoral benefit is forbidden, and Carey’s reelection was thrown out and he was later expelled from the union.

Carey’s successor would be James Hoffa. No, not the infamous James R. Hoffa, who had disappeared under extraordinarily suspicious circumstances from the Machus Red Fox restaurant in 1975, but his son, James P. Hoffa. Hoffa the younger would prove a reliable ally of Everything Leftism, sidling up to the Service Employees International Union’s Andy Stern in the creation of the failed Change to Win rival labor federation.

While Hoffa fils was joining Stern’s Everything Leftist cause, Republicans hoped he would act politically more like his father. The George W. Bush presidential campaign and first administration repeatedly sought to bring Hoffa into the Republican camp, but he stayed loyal to Stern and the Democrats. In each election in Hoffa’s over 20-year reign, the union loyally stood by its Change to Win partners the SEIU and backed the Democratic national ticket, no matter how much the Republicans tried to appeal to the union leadership as it had in the days of the father.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice…

Another regime change closes the Teamsters-GOP circle. Sean O’Brien succeeded Hoffa the younger in the early 2020s, and proceeded to cut his union’s most visible links to Everything Leftism in an attempt to sucker the Right into supporting him. The Teamsters withdrew from the SEIU’s Change to Win. The national union made no endorsement in the 2024 election, even though local and regional Teamsters unions backed then-Vice President Kamala Harris and union members comfortably backed a recommendation to endorse Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. O’Brien did not, of course, sever less visible links between his Teamsters union and Everything Leftism, like its 93 percent share of political contributions to Democrats or involvement in the left-wing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) corporate-activist movement.

By ingratiating itself with the intellectual successors of the Eisenhower-era “eastern Republican group,” both policy advocates like American Compass and officeholders like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the Teamsters hope to break the Taft-Hartley Consensus and secure major privileges for itself and all the other unions that are openly Everything Leftist. American Compass argues to force effectively every single American worker to accept a union contract and a union-dominated workplace, whether they want one or not. Sen. Hawley hopes to resurrect Barack Obama’s not-so-free-choice legislation.

Sean O’Brien is more than happy to provide presenting sponsorships or small campaign contributions to his former adversaries as they make mistakes made first long ago. The rest should learn from history so as not to repeat it.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/republicans-and-the-teamsters-a-bad-relationship/