Teamsters are losing their jobs — and there is one labor leader to blameBy Charles Gasparino
August 12, 2023
Sean O’Brien just might be the worst labor leader in America. If you don’t believe me, just consider his horrible performance last week culminating in the unemployment of thousands of his working-class members, and a sweet payday for Wall Street fat cats.
As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, O’Brien styles himself as a fighter, an in-your-face kind of guy in public and on social media, daring big corporations to mess with him and his members under the handle @TeamsterSOB. He recently negotiated a deal with UPS that averted a strike and won some concessions, so he must be doing good, right?
A closer look at O’Brien’s oeuvre as a labor leader is more complicated: he’s buddies with Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has a habit of praising dictators like Fidel Castro. Nice. He’s a big name-caller during public confrontations. Childish. He also effectively laid off 30,000 people last week because of an idiotically pointless negotiating strategy that put a trucking company called Yellow out of business. Really dumb.
When you think of the Teamsters, you often think of Jimmy Hoffa Sr., its iconic and flawed former leader. Hoffa spent time in jail because he was said to engage with mobsters while conducting union business. But no one doubted his intelligence or his commitment to the rank-and-file.
He built the modern Teamsters from disjointed groups of local truckers into a national powerhouse and the largest union in the country. He knew when to strike and when not to. Something called the National Master Freight Agreement, a set of rules between truckers and employers, was a Hoffa brainchild and it remains in effect to this day.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2023/08/12/teamsters-are-losing-their-jobs-sean-obrien-is-to-blame/
