Fifty years after Hoffa, the Teamsters are still bad news

On July 30, 1975, James Riddle Hoffa—better known as Jimmy—went for lunch at a suburban Detroit diner. The former boss of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, notorious for his corruption and ties to the Mafia, was never seen alive again. Much has changed for the union in the intervening half-century, but despite the begging and pleading of supposed conservatives and Republicans who seek the union’s favor and small amounts of its overwhelmingly left-wing funding stream, the Teamsters remain bad, even as the trail to Hoffa’s body has long run cold.

Hoffa’s immediate successors were as tied into the Mob as he was, and while none suffered the same misadventures as he allegedly did at or around the Machus Red Fox diner, men such as Frank Fitzsimmons, Roy Williams, and Jackie Presser continued to drag one of America’s largest unions and the money it collected, mostly in dues and pension contributions from millions of truckers and railway men, through the mud. Only federal law enforcement, through a Justice Department consent decree, could break La Cosa Nostra’s hold on union headquarters, dubbed the “Marble Palace” for its white-stone exterior.

But with a new regime came new ideological problems. Ron Carey, who came to power in the 1990s, backed by the Trotskyism-influenced Teamsters for a Democratic Union caucus, found himself thrown out of office by federal overseers after the 1996 U.S. presidential election. That black eye was the result of a financial conspiracy involving liberal interest groups, senior Clinton administration and Democratic National Committee officials, and Carey’s union-office reelection campaign that ultimately led to Carey’s reelection being thrown out for violating federal laws prohibiting union officers from using dues money to support their own reelections.

Carey was replaced by James P. Hoffa, Jimmy’s son. Hoffa the younger was not financially and morally corrupt like his dad, choosing instead to imitate another of his father’s projects: connecting with leaders  from Big Labor’s left wing to form a new labor union federation that would end Big Labor’s long decline in membership and reorganize the working class to accept  full-spectrum left-wing activism. His partnership with Andy Stern’s SEIU lasted longer than his father’s partnership with Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers, but the failure of the partnerships was a case of like father, like son.

Hoffa stepped down from his family’s legitimate business in 2021 after more than two decades in his father’s marble palace. Sean O’Brien succeeded him, and with O’Brien came a new political strategy: Convince professional conservatives and elected Republicans that the Teamsters aren’t their enemy, while undermining conservative policy at every juncture.

Under O’Brien, the Teamsters’ national leadership famously declined to endorse the Democratic candidate for president for the first time in three decades. The union had polled its membership, and a comfortable majority of members had recommended an endorsement for Republican Donald Trump; merely refusing to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris is what passes for responsiveness to working men and women in today’s labor unions. As the union wrote, “The union’s extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump,” a clear partisan double standard.

And O’Brien’s union has continued to fund the Democratic political committees that Hoffa the younger funded. According to OpenSecrets, Teamsters union political committees’ top campaign donation recipients in the 2024 cycle included Senate Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC, which received $510,000; the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which received $255,000; and the Democratic Congressional and Senatorial Campaign Committees, which received over $210,000 each. Teamster PACs’ contributions to candidates broke down 92.46% Democratic and 6.53% Republican, which is “bipartisan” only by the standards of Big Labor, where 99-1 Democratic splits are not unheard of.

A few thousand dollars in campaign contributions to a Republican Senator like Josh Hawley (R-MO) or a gala sponsorship for American Compass, the nominally conservative but liberal-funded, economically leftist think tank, does not change the reality that the Teamsters leadership is an integral part of Big Labor, itself an integral part of the organized Left. Fifty years after the infamous Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Teamsters union remains bad news. Given that the union itself still hails Hoffa as “a worker’s hero,” we should not be surprised.