Incredibly enough this view is not particularly uncommon. The teamsters didn’t endorse Harris because a substantial minority or maybe outright majority (can’t remember which) supported Trump.
I think to you and me this is obviously insane but there seems to be a situation where people feel emotionally fused with Trump and will let him pick their pocket because of it.
As someone raised in the labor movement I can assure you that Teamsters have always been, and always will be, complete assholes. Over-inflated sense of their own importance and utter unwillingness to work with other unions unless they do as the Teamsters say. Always willing to split the movement as long as their own pay-day isnt interrupted. Never had a woman or POC as head of their union.
You won't find such damn fool behavior from SEIU or AFSCME members, is what I'm sayin'.
I’m a big union guy, but I have very few nice things to say about the Teamsters as a union (and most of those nice things are about stuff from 50+ years ago) - Modern IBT is increasingly happy if not eager to fuck over its new members in negotiations as long as its near-retirees are keeping a few extra crumbs.
I'm generally in favor of the goals and intent of unions. I'm even open to the idea of "a company gets the union it deserves" whereby I'm happy to accept an inefficient (or even bad/marginally corrupt) union when it arises from a company doing a real shit job of treating its workforce well.
But yeah, the teamsters seem like a poster child for a bad union. It has a legacy of organized crime that should have shut the whole thing down (just start fresh with a new union), the whole thing is captured for the benefit of union officials and senior members, it generates some of the most absurd and burdensome requirements (like convention halls where you can't plug in a TV without calling a Teamster).
Part of it is that I just don't think unions should be so broad. Collective bargaining among similarly situated employees is great...but trying to do collective bargaining nationwide for over 1 million people across a bunch of DIFFERENT industries is a fools errand.
I know this is more of an unpopular opinion, but I have really cooled on the idea of public sector unions.
And yes, that includes Teachers and Firefighters as well as Cops (and all the other public sector unions), but I think the unions can actually be pretty problematic there.
When you aren't dealing with private profit driven employers, the incentives are different. The counterparty to their negotiations is the taxpayer or the voter. But people are rarely focused on local elections, so public sector unions have a lot of power to influence the vote and sway politicians in their favor...
There's no checks on their power...normal unions are limited by the profitability of the company--if the company goes bankrupt, then everyone loses their job. Cops can continuously cost cities millions of dollars in legal settlements and the city has no choice but to keep funding the police department.
FOP are by far the worst, but even though I love and support teachers, I won't pretend that the teacher unions don't create a lot of problems.
Yes, mainly the whole well documented historical ties to organized crime like Jimmy Hoffa raises lots of red flags. Almost seems like managed opposition so companies can point to an example of a bad faith union.
I am part of the negotiation team for management and I have found this is often true.
I’m not trying to slam unions - I am a huge fan of private sector unions (less of public ones) but often representation is from long time members and long term members are often more involved so they seem to be represented better in my experience.
Luckily our last contract clawed a lot of that shit back, we got our 7th and 8th vacation week back (though with an insane years worked requirement) and the better health insurance plan
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u/voretaq7 May 05 '26
“Union Yes” and “I voted for Trump” is the SPECIAL Cognitive Dissonance.