Organized labor comfortably lives in the broader house of the political left — something Republicans like Josh Hawley should remember.
The ties between O’Brien’s union and the left go deeper than political cash.
M issouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley presents himself as a conservative champion of working-class voters, attacking wokeness in corporations and the workplace. But that doesn’t fit the recent coziness between Hawley and Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
True, the cagey O’Brien is picking up headlines across the political spectrum for his openness to working with Republicans. However, while he’s reaching across the aisle, his union continues to support left-wing politics. The proof is in the numbers. The Teamsters Union’s 2024 political spending broke 93.03 percent Democratic against 6.97 percent Republican, according to OpenSecrets, a spending rate that appears centrist relative to other labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which gave 99.89 percent of its political spending to the Democrats and their causes.
And the ties between O’Brien’s union and the left go deeper than political cash, revealing how cynically the union boss is playing Hawley and any other Republicans who get sucked into his orbit. Consider how Hawley has criticized the “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG) investing movement, which fights for the woke agenda at big companies, including demands for “LGBTQIA+ nondiscrimination reports” and “racial equity audits.”
Well, one of the key players promoting ESG is Mr. Hawley’s new friend, Mr. O’Brien. Indeed, O’Brien dedicated the cover story of the winter 2023 issue of his union’s agitprop magazine to the ESG investing his union was doing with members’ pension funds. And while the propaganda focused on making union organizing easier, which some dues-paying union members — or at least those who bother to open the union’s propaganda magazine — might generally support, the Teamsters’ involvement in ESG goes beyond the “S” for “social.”
For instance, in 2024 — shortly after the publication of that magazine issue — the Teamsters introduced a shareholder resolution targeting Amazon, demanding that the company issue a “just transition” report so that investors might have more information on the company’s “role in supporting social fairness as the world attempts to decarbonize.”
If O’Brien piggybacking on environmentalists is surprising, it shouldn’t be. The Teamsters Union partners with two very important institutions that are all-in on the progressivism that Hawley normally opposes so fiercely: 1) Amalgamated Bank, the ideologically motivated bank whose clients include the Teamsters, numerous other left-wing interest groups, and the Democratic National Committee, and 2) the nonprofit As You Sow, a leading activist group in the ESG investing movement.
Those not involved in campaign-finance or organized-labor policy should still know Amalgamated Bank, a union-founded and largely union-owned financial institution, because the bank is on a mission to use its power to push left-wing policies throughout corporate America. To choose just one notable recent example, it was Amalgamated Bank that pushed a policy to create a “merchant category code” for firearm purchases, which Second Amendment advocates — including Hawley — have argued would make it easier to enact de facto gun control without legislative authorization.
Another Teamsters ally is As You Sow, an advocacy group that functionally leads the ESG movement. Funded by major left-wing institutions such as George Soros’s Open Society philanthropies, As You Sow supports the filing of shareholder resolutions at companies and corporations on issues ranging from climate change to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates.
Hawley may believe that Sean O’Brien and his Teamsters Union speak for a new faction of a political coalition he hopes to one day lead. But in an era when fewer than 6 percent of private-industry workers are unionized, O’Brien does not. For that reason, organized labor comfortably lives in the house of the political left — no matter what rhetorical blandishments union bosses like O’Brien contribute in Republican Party meetings, no matter what chump change union PACs give Republicans like Hawley who abandon the party’s traditional labor policies, and no matter what union members like the majority-pro-Trump Teamsters might want their dues to do.
Big Labor, including the Teamsters union, is not politically neutral. It is liberal, left-wing, socialist, in bed with enviro-extremists, gun grabbers, and militant activists who fight against the Senator Hawleys of the world every day. Every Republican should remember that.