Checkpoint: Democrats Should Take The Teamsters Donation To Josh Hawley As A Warning Shot

Bill Clark

Nowhere is it written in stone that organized labor groups need to support Democrats and this is a lesson Democrats up and down the ballot will need to learn if they want to regain the support of the working class.

This week the news broke that the Teamsters --- the fourth largest union in America --- gave $5,000 to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the GOP Senate conference’s self-fashioned “national conservatives.”

While these national conservatives mostly pedal lightly laundered talking points that might have been at home in 1930’s Germany or Italy and their own manifest destiny-poisoned version of Christianity they are also making overtures to some in America’s labor movement. Indeed, Hawley himself recently joined both the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers on their picket lines and supported an amendment proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders to add a week of paid sick leave to the rail operators’ contract forced on them by legislators last year.

Now, $5,000 is a paltry sum both for the Senate campaign and the union but the move from the teamsters brings with it significant symbolic heft, it’s a message that support from the Teamsters won’t be taken for granted. The union has overwhelmingly supported Democrats in the past and continues to on the whole. However, the difference is that they’re not only supporting Democrats now.

This year the Teamsters donated some $45,000 to the Republican National Committee’s convention fund, the first time they’d donated to the RNC since 2004. For context, the Teamsters donated some $135,000 to the Democratic National Committee last year and gave Democrats some $1.28 million in 2022 compared to the $30,000 that they gave Republicans. However, the president of the Teamsters, Shawn O’Brien has also met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago as well as Joe Biden. So far O’Brien and the union haven’t endorsed anyone for presidency yet. Still, the message couldn’t be clearer. Democrats will need to work to keep organized labor in their camp.

Maybe a history lesson could help. Before the modern primary election system with Caucasus and barn-burning blitzes of the midwest, the Democratic Party nominee was largely chosen through a series of backroom deals with party insiders and local power brokers who would promise to deliver constituencies in the general election in return for policy concessions to those constituencies.

The exact details of how the nominee is chosen aren’t particularly important in this context. What is crucial to understand, for Democrats, is that while the party boss system may be a thing of the past, politics, at its foundation, is still transactional. This is to say that Democrats up and down the ballot need to make it clear that they’ll be in the labor movement’s camp on policy if they want the labor movement behind them.

To be clear, the Democrats do desperately need America’s burgeoning labor movement on their side. While union membership is down, public opinion of organized labor is up and if Democrats can be the party to deliver greater rights, freedoms, and material conditions to workers through supporting a robust labor movement they stand a chance of winning back the members of the working class who have left them behind in recent years.

The other reason why organized labor is a winning issue for the Democrats is that it is an issue that divides Republicans while it largely unites Democrats.

For example, while Hawley was courting the Teamsters, Republican governors across the south were moving to squash nascent organization efforts at auto manufacturing plants. Just Wednesday, a group of six southern Republicans warned their constituents against the danger joining a union poses to “the values we live by” and deployed scare tactics in an attempt to convince workers not to join the UAW.

“Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy – in fact, in this year already, all of the UAW automakers have announced layoffs,” the governors of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas wrote. “In America, we respect our workforce and we do not need to pay a third party to tell us who can pick up a box or flip a switch.”

The fact that six of the South’s governors would pen this letter as Trump courts union leadership for an endorsement and his most fervent acolytes in the Senate seek the support of unions exposes a rift in the party that Democrats would be smart to exploit.

Democrats, however, can only take advantage of this division if they’re able to secure the support of the labor movement on their own and it’s clear that, at least in the assessment of the fourth largest union in America, they’re not doing quite enough yet.