When Sean O’Brien, the leader of the Teamsters union in the United States, took to the stage at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday evening, some scratched their heads: what was the leader of a union with 1.3 million members hoping to accomplish with his speech to the Republican Party, traditionally hostile to organised labour?
In his unprecedented address at the gathering of what has historically been the US’s pro-business party, the labour boss made clear that his union was not wedded to the Democrats, a party it has endorsed in every election since 1996.
“We are not beholden to anyone or any party,” O’Brien said in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the same day that Donald Trump was formally nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for the November election.
“The Teamsters are not interested if you have a D [Democrat], R [Republican] or an I [independent] next to your name,” he added. “We want to know one thing: What are you doing to help American workers?”
O’Brien’s speaking slot was the latest sign that the conservative party is trying to pitch itself as a champion of the beleaguered working class after several decades of hewing to a pro-business agenda centred on tax cuts and corporate deregulation.
The party platform promises to bring back manufacturing jobs and states the party must “return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers”.
Teamsters spokesperson Kara Deniz said the speech was a “call to action for our political leaders to stand with American workers above the interests of corporate America” and it was “truly unprecedented” because it was the first time a Teamsters president had addressed the RNC.
A more pro-labour message has proven attractive in the US, a country where wages have stagnated for the majority of workers since the 1980s while the wealthy have seen their average incomes skyrocket. A January poll by the Pew Research Center found that the majority of people in the US view the decline of organised labour as a bad thing for the country.
But some question if the Republicans are a convincing vessel for a message of anti-elite, pro-worker populism. Despite the party platform’s dedication to the country’s “forgotten men and women”, candidate and former President Trump’s economic policies show little deviation from the party’s pro-business orthodoxy.
While “workers” are named 15 times in the party’s platform, there is little mention of traditional pro-labour demands such as boosting labour union participation.
The platform also pledges to make permanent Trump’s largest legislative accomplishment from his first term in office: enormous tax cuts that largely benefitted the ultra-wealthy. Large corporations, for their part, continue to donate lavishly to both parties.
“There’s a fundamental contradiction between the posture of being a worker’s party and the actual policies when it comes to anything organised labour typically advocates for,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a labour historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told Al Jazeera.
“The talk about workers is a mostly symbolic effort,” he added.
Efforts to woo pro-labour voters
If Republican policy is still largely aligned with the interests of business, some conservative politicians have nonetheless begun to lean into pro-worker language that left-leaning figures such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have used to powerful effect.
Conservatives like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Ohio Senator JD Vance, who was announced on Monday as Trump’s pick for vice president, have been at the centre of those efforts, using their platforms to inveigh against corporate abuse and workers left behind by economic growth.
Both Hawley and Vance were praised by O’Brien in his RNC speech on Monday with O’Brien describing the vice presidential candidate as one of a group of lawmakers who “truly care about working people”, and signalling a growing receptiveness from some corners of the US labour movement to Trump and the Republican Party.
Last year, Vance visited a group of striking auto workers at a picket line in Ohio, calling for “good wages for an honest day’s work”.
In recent testimony before Congress, Hawley grilled Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun for “cutting corners”.
“You are eliminating safety procedures, you are sticking it to your employees, you are cutting back jobs because you’re trying to squeeze every piece of profit you can out of this company,” Hawley charged.
“Don’t you think it’s time to get back to focusing on making quality planes and paying your workers well and taking care of the little guys who got you to where you are?” he went on to ask.
In recent elections, the GOP has made some inroads with voters who do not have college degrees, winning that group by six percentage points in the 2020 presidential matchup and carrying them again in the 2022 midterm elections.
“We are a working class party now,” Hawley said in a social media post in November 2020. “That’s the future.”
Not everyone is buying it. In a news release after the announcement of Vance as Trump’s VP pick, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), one of the country’s largest labour unions, said Vance “likes to play union supporter on the picket line, but his record proves that to be a sham”.
Greeting Vance at the picket line in October, Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur took a subtle dig at his pro-worker credentials: “First time here?”
Lichtenstein also said that when it comes to support for labour organising in sectors such as services, retail and education where immigrants and people of colour tend to be well-represented, the Republican position ranges from apathy to opposition.
While campaign speeches of Trump and Vance often reference hollowed-out factories and the collapse of the manufacturing sector, unionisation bids among graduate students, Starbucks workers and Amazon workers receive little mention.
“The Republicans have tried to construct an image of the working class in this country that is really retrograde,” he said. “The US working class of today is increasingly multicultural.”
A tepid reception
Organised labour, traditionally supportive of the Democratic Party, can view pro-worker appeals with scepticism from the right, which are often channelled into hostility towards immigrants and foreign rivals like China rather than support for unionisation bids.
The AFL-CIO, which endorsed Biden’s bid for re-election in June last year, gives Hawley’s record of supporting pro-worker policies a rating of 11 percent, higher than the 3 percent average for Republican senators. The group gave Vance a score of zero percent.
JD Vance's record speaks for itself. https://t.co/xqk5AHTUfL pic.twitter.com/fVS4WGenuC
— AFL-CIO ✊ (@AFLCIO) July 15, 2024
“It’s clear that Donald Trump in the White House would be a complete disaster for the working class,” Shawn Fain, the combative president of the United Auto Workers union, which has also endorsed Biden, said in recent remarks.
Of the large unions, the Teamsters has appeared the most willing to cultivate stronger ties with the Republican Party, donating to Hawley’s re-election campaign and facilitating a meeting between Trump and O’Brien in January.
In response to questions from Al Jazeera regarding the union’s presidential endorsement process, Deniz said the Teamsters “have traditionally endorsed [a candidate for president] after the conventions” after a process that includes presidential roundtables and a poll of members.
Deniz added that the union reached out to both the Republican and Democratic parties requesting a speaking slot at their respective conventions.
“We sincerely hope the DNC will also respond to our request with an invitation, as the RNC did,” she said.
