This is the stupidest fucking thing a union could do because it's going to cause internal conflict and deter people from wanting to work with teamsters. It could even deter people from joining it.
I wouldn't want to join a union if I knew 60% of the membership were fucking tories.
The Maoist Communist Union is like “if we just organize the teamsters” and as a member I’m just shaking my head.
These drivers are gonna make up the brown shirts.
When I heard that guy on Rev Left radio say that I nearly burst out laughing. The understanding most leftists have of the labor movement is pathetic.
Yeah, the labor standards that existed in the pre 2000s are vastly different to how divided and diverse labor is today. There is a clear divide in labor between what one would see as "youth labor" not highschoolers but younger people working in non traditional labor settings (Starbucks, Whole Foods, Amazon, etc), these individuals are most commonly politically opposed to the usual political leanings of "older insular labor" these are the old unions filled with mainly male workers (commonly older and conservative) who have at best "traditional democratic" values and at worst are chuds in everything but name. The Teamsters, though they may have younger members, are a traditionally male and older worker union that sadly has a lot of trappings preserved from the 1960s-70s with no clear coherent understanding or unwillingness to understand historically what has been done to labor unions over the last four decades (or they just don't give a shit).
If we elect Frank Sobotka to get them to start dredging by the old grain pier, well be back on top
Given the situation in Palestine, getting in bed with the Greeks might not be a bad idea if the money helps with harm reduction.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for thinking of a plan to have a successful revolution in America, but winning over the teamsters to help form a vanguard party (especially on the ideas of internationalism) to me feels as fantastical as a communist winning the presidency and dismantling the empire from the inside.
The Maoist Communist Union
Wait, do communists have a union to fight against their exploitation by the communist functionaries?
Yes. Communism doesn’t mean exploitation no longer exists, it just means you seek to reduce it as much as possible. Inequality will always exists, and it can be as local as your manager forcing you to work uncompensated overtime without knowledge or consent from the party or government. You can have all the communist laws and theories, but you still need people to make sure those laws and theories are understood and practiced. Shitty management will exist regardless of ideology because not everyone is cut out for it.
https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-no-endorsement-for-u-s-president/
The end of that basically says "Harris is better but we're afraid of upsetting our members so no endorsement".
I totally agree. This seems like an "uh, oh, we fucked up. How do we reverse this?" kind of decision after posting their polling results on Twitter.
Really shouldn't have posted results, or polled at all. That information is only likely to make workers less likely to join, whether it leans one way or another it's likely to make the other side less likely to join. I would not join a union that is full of tories, full stop, I know most well-meaning libs that support labour wouldn't either. But I also know that tories wouldn't join a union if they knew it was like all lefties or whatever.
It's just not a good way to organise. It's publishing information that you know will cause division.
recently quit my union because it was sending money directly to labour (UK) and they advocated for a 3.6% wage increase this year.
I quit and explained my rents going up by 12%, my bills by more and that they should be ashamed for accepting the lies labour told them that there 'is simply not any money'
The other union that represents my interests just voted to strike instead, guess where im going
The other union that represents my interests just voted to strike instead, guess where im going
hell yeah
I'm hearing that AOC is endorsing Trump, it's what the unions wanted her to do.
This is a result of a political system that only allows dissent against the neoliberal economic order to be amplified if it’s crouched in ethno-nationalist terms.
its true. The Stormcloaks are an op - Ulfric is a Thalmor intelligence assset. 
the Jarls don't want you to know. Wake up sheeple!
I’m a teamster (non driver) and I don’t participate at all because it’s literally the worst people among us. They would probably kill a stranger for an extra 5k when they already make 150,000k plus. Life is a hustle in their eyes and if you aren’t, you deserve death. I’m not joking
A slight majority of rank and file drivers in my local have attempted to vote for a local president that would liquidate non drivers as members, because the drivers think unskilled labor deserves to be min wage and unprotected, and they feel embarrassed to share a room with us at meetings.
look it takes a lot of skill to make that "beep beep" noise consistently when you are in reverse
Makes sense. If they hustle at the factories hard enough for 7 years you can become a coveted delivery driver
Interesting that the strawpolls at the meetings hours one way while the phone survey goes another. Seems like there's a correlation between how active the members are and their likelihood to vote Republican
Maybe I'm too woke but I'm pretty sure it's because Harris is black, Indian, and a women that the results flipped so hard
Union members aren't all far left on average or anything. Cops have and support their unions
Joining a union directly and clearly improves their own situation. Can the said be said for having a black, indian women be president for the white and/or male union members?
Are you confident there is a complete insignificant number of teamster members that have no racial biases at all? And that they all believe women as just as capable leaders?
Are you confident there is a complete insignificant number of teamster members that have no racial biases at all? And that they all believe women as just as capable leaders?
I strongly suspect that a very high percentage of the members that would flip when their candidate turns out to be a woman and/or minority were already solidly in the Trump camp even when Biden was running. I really do not believe that 40% of the teamsters currently in favor of Trump preferred another option before the democratic candidate was changed to a minority woman.
Not identical, but I don't think I've encountered anyone IRL who thinks more highly of Biden than of Obama without loathing Biden.
Fair enough, but the perception of black women is a far fall down from black men in America tbh
I'm not saying that being an active union member makes you totally leftist, but it's clear from these polls that the mood of the halls is different from the mood of the general membership in some measurable way.
Like where I'm at, the Teamsters and IBEW share their halls with DSA, PSL, and SRA. The average member of those unions is pretty centrist, but the leadership and active membership is very leftist.
These polls don't say anything about the mood because the candidates to vote for are different
That's fair, I was just ignoring the candidates and instead looking at it as Red/Blue/Neutral thinking the method of the poll was getting a different subset of the membership and not thinking that the actual candidates were effecting anything.
I don't understand why unions feel the need to endorse candidates in bourgeois elections.
It makes sense for a union to say "this candidate is better for our workers". They're not revolutionary parties.
It makes no sense for a union to have the members decide that rather than the union leadership fully immersed in working out which is best.
On the other hand, leaving political matters exclusively to the leadership is a sure way to get a yellow union.
Because they're not revolutionary, they are the wage treats on leashes. They're lead gets a little longer to placate the workers. It'll get shorter when they've become to self important.
I haven't done this analysis my self but I have a hunch labor was far more militant before the creation of the DOL, and far less after. I would wager a bet that labor made more gains on national labor laws before the DOL then after.
Roughly, what I've heard is that they made gains under the NLRB regime of the Wagner Act but, at the price of having that be dependent on the state, which has the power to certify and decertify unions. The period of significant gains was short, lasting from the mid 30s to Taft Hartley. Then you had the post war labor compact, which lasted until the profitability crisis of the 70s made capital take away the seat they gave labor at the table to help recoup profitability.
the red scares (in the 1910s and 20s, and in mccarthy era, but also it never really ends) directly explicitly criminalized communism and being a communist, and forced the purges of communists and anarchists from the ranks and board of every union, every civil rights organization, every school faculty and schoolboard, every local government position, and even in media and entertainment; purging any and all militance. The DoL makes deals with liberal remnants who agreed to purge the communists, and the ones that didn't were maligned, marginalized, criminalized, punished, arrested, crushed. This predictably left in its wake in the unions complacency, class collaboration, and corruption, which is why organized crime cozied up alongside the more unsavory class collaborators starting in the 50s, which added to the reactionary politics.
Any time any class consciousness and obstructive action raised its head, they were crushed. Reagan crushing the airline union and thatcher the miners unions was the death knell and last gasp of the any old unions' agency in working class struggle. these labor unions being what they are now is much more a legacy of all of that than anything else. Now the only good unions are the independent ones and militant dual-carding ones like the IWW. Teamsters aren't even the worst. The AFL-CIA--er I mean AFL-CIO literally flew to LatAm and Europe, most impactfully to Brazil and Poland to train their reactionary unions to undermine communism (including Poland's infamous Solidarnosc).
You also still have to fill out forms that ask if you're a communist or are/have been a member of a communist party for many governmental forms. Even citizenship applications. you can be denied for being a communist.
At this point basically all most unions do is political work, mostly fighting right to work so that they can collect revenue without having to organize anyone.
As much as I dislike how unions bow before Democrats for crumbs, you gotta be a special kind of dumb to support Republicans. At least Biden staffed the NLRB. I'm not expecting the PRO Act or Card Check to happen under Harris, but come on.
liberals enraged that workers are not organizing for the purpose of more effectively propping up the democrats
or
organized settler labor aligns with conservatives in dispute between liberal and conservative wings of settler politics
That difference between Biden-Trump and Trump-Harris is crazy though.
The Biden-Trump poll voting period was April 9-July 3, and the Harris polls were July 24-September 15 and September 9-15. So the disparity probably isn't a perceived difference between Biden and Harris as much as the result of things that happened since the Biden poll, like Teamsters president Sean O'Brien speaking at the RNC on July 15
Fuck Biden, but I can understand why a union member would think he’s pro labor. His reputation doesn’t really involve labor in either way. But, before Trump was president, the number 1 reason why people liked him because he was a piece of shit who cheats, cons, and lies. He was the people’s asshole because his whole demeanor was cartoonish enough for people to not believe he was a real human being. Why would you believe someone with this reputation will help you lmao
Because Trump still says reasonable things once in a while that is not completely detached from reality
Like today in the middle of his speech where he said no taxes on tips or social security benefits.............before diving right back to anti-immigrant racism
I thought the majority of Chinese people who like Trump because he’s an idiot who tries to punish China but ultimately fails and benefits China instead
I think at least since COVID its clear its as much anti-Biden than pro-Trump. For both of them actualy its more about what the opposition says or does than your own rethoric, not to deny that is important, but clearly some people vote more based on what they hate the most.
So we look back and Biden spent 4 years gaslighting people that everything is fine even if your rent doubled. They repeat Fed shit through the liberal media as if people not only understand but agree with all the punching left/down they're doing.
"Inflation is under control", "robust jobs market", "excess savings" lol you know the memes I'm sure.
Look at the OP, Biden won the Teamsters membership vote before he dropped out by 8%, now Kamala's losing the same vote by like 30%.
Not surprising at all. Blue collar workers tend to lean right-wing in the US.
Reminds me of what Micheal Brook said about global north workers in his video on wallerstein’s world theory
