The SEIU and the Teamsters Changed to Lose

In 2005, Andy Stern and James P. Hoffa, the leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), led their massive unions and five other national labor unions out of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions. They called their new rival federation “Change to Win” and vowed to reverse the Long Decline in labor organizing that had, at that point, been going on for a half-century. They failed; they changed and lost.

Nearly another quarter-century later, Change to Win—since rebranded “Strategic Organizing Center” as its pretentions to challenging the AFL-CIO dissipated—has lost its last pillar. The Teamsters had already left when Hoffa exited union office and was replaced by the combative, mercurial, and politically savvy Sean O’Brien. This week, the SEIU, now under April Verrett, threw in the towel and rejoined the AFL-CIO as the union federation prepares an all-out offensive against the second Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies and plans to reform federal government efficiency.

O’Brien’s Strategy: Special Interest Politics

The divergent paths of the SEIU and the Teamsters in the post–Change to Win era are instructive to those interested in where Big Labor goes from here. Start with O’Brien’s Teamsters, which he is directing to play the new political field defined by Republicans’ Current American Plurality. Under Hoffa (the younger and leftist, not the elder and corrupt) and within Change to Win, the Teamsters was a fully committed party to Everything Leftism and Big Philanthropy’s political strategy of activating a progressive rising American electorate to advance a left-wing New American Majority. Thus, under Hoffa, the union invested deeply in Democratic get-out-the-vote groups like America Votes, and in the past three and a half years of Hoffa the younger’s union presidency (and first few months of O’Brien’s), the Teamsters directed roughly $4 million to left-wing consultancy Berlin Rosen and millions more to left-wing advocacy groups like Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight Action.

Enter O’Brien. His new regime has offered nothing substantive to Republicans. The union has not softened its advocacy positions on independent work, freedoms to refrain from union participation, or general freer-market economic policies. The new regime hasn’t even cynically supported the Republican Party’s electoral leader, as O’Brien rejected the view of a near-supermajority of his members who wanted the union to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and instead remained neutral in the election. Meanwhile, a number of his lieutenants, including in swing states, put their political machines behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign anyway.

But merely by showing puppy-dog eyes to President-elect Trump and throwing trivially small contributions to statist Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), O’Brien might get his pet candidate confirmed as secretary of labor. Thanks to O’Brien’s influence, the situation at a second Trump National Labor Relations Board is far more uncertain than the situation in Trump’s first administration for the same reason.

O’Brien is playing a new game that advocates of independent worker rights need to be aware of. Rather than following traditional ideological unionist principles that underlie the 90-year-strong labor-progressive alliance, O’Brien—like other cynical union bosses such as International Longshoremen’s Association leader Harold Daggett—is operating like the head of a “normal” special interest group, currying favor with the new administration to avoid being an exposed target.

SEIU and the AFL-CIO Recommit to Everything Leftism

Meanwhile, the now-united AFL-CIO is channeling the Everything Leftist #Resistance energy that defined the first year of President-elect Trump’s first administration. In reporting on the announced reunion between Liz Shuler’s House of Labor and Verrett’s SEIU, the New York Times characterized the pair as “cit[ing] an expansive list of concerns, including the possibility of mass deportation of undocumented workers, cuts to Medicaid, attacks on protections for federal employees, a rollback of investments in green energy and a commission empowered by Mr. Trump to slash government spending” as among the concerns of the new united federation. In yet more evidence that Oren Cass’s dream of a nonpolitical labor union is a myth, Shuler rejected any distinction between focusing the union federation’s activities on organizing and worker representation as opposed to political and legislative efforts, calling it a “false choice.”

This is the sort of labor union advocacy strategy that has prevailed since John Sweeney (of the SEIU) took over the AFL-CIO in 1996. As labor unions have declined in membership, their ability to show independence from other left-wing interest groups has also declined. Likewise, as the balance of power within organized labor has shifted from private-industry workers to government workers, the union movement has followed government-worker activists’ greater commitment to socialism and non-economic Everything Leftism.

Will Either Strategy Work?

Give O’Brien credit as an adversary; he is at least trying something new, even if it is for the same old Big Labor policy program of forced dues, forced representation, rigid work rules, and government control of the economy. His shift in tone—only tone—has already paid dividends for him and his fellow union bosses, including such left-wing luminaries as Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, in the coming second Trump administration.

But a secretary of labor like Lori Chavez-Deremer, who as a member of Congress cosponsored Big Labor’s Christmas-tree PRO Act bill, only lasts as long as he or she has the confidence of the president. Previous pro-union Republican labor secretaries were not guaranteed long tenure. Dwight Eisenhower’s first labor secretary, ex-Plumbers Union boss Martin Durkin, lasted eight months. Richard Nixon’s second-term labor secretary, ex-New York building trades union official Peter Brennan, was ineffectual before being ordered to resign by Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. Ford would undermine Brennan’s successor, John Dunlop, by vetoing pro-union legislation that Dunlop had said that Ford would support. If President Trump decides that Bidenomics with conservative characteristics is not the economic policy he was elected to pursue, Chavez-DeRemer will need to either change her policies or resign in favor of a successor more aligned with the president rather than a union boss who rejected his members.

As for the rest of Big Labor, now united in a happy house of Everything Leftism under Liz Shuler’s AFL-CIO, expect them to spend the next four years at least confirming what Capital Research Center readers already know: Big Labor is the full-spectrum Left and will never be anything else. Whether that strategy will finally pay off for unions after nearly three decades likely comes down to whether the Current American Plurality decides it made the worst mistake of its life in 2024 and shifts further to the political left on all issues than an American governing majority ever has. It’s not impossible—just very, very unlikely.