The Teamsters president has giant plans to forestall your UPS deliveries in August. It’s a get dressed practice session for his not-so-secret dream to take on Amazon.
“How are ya, brotha?” O’Brien mentioned, shaking every hand, his Boston accessory coloring each and every vowel. “You guys preloaders?”
“Yes, sir,” mentioned one.
“So you gonna try to be drivers or not?”
The employee began to provide an explanation for — human assets had taken his utility however gave the impression to be jerking him round. O’Brien listened lengthy sufficient to get the gist. “A lot of that stuff is subcontracted out now. So just go to your local union. Don’t believe a f—in’ word these people are saying.” O’Brien paused to let this sink in. “There’s a big pandemic goin’ on in there with management,” he persevered. “It’s called f—in’ lie-abetes.” Now the employees had been grinning. “Ever heard of diabetes? … Well, they got lie-abetes.”
The employee requested for steerage on some shift-scheduling issues. O’Brien urged him to speak to native officers; a countrywide Teamsters chief couldn’t discuss to the specifics of every store. “But get involved with the union,” he steered.
The preloaders won’t have known him, however the cases that introduced O’Brien to stake out their office — in a prelude to what may well be an economy-rattling, history-making strike in opposition to UPS this summer time — mirror the exertions motion’s greatest tradition shift in many years.
In 2021, the veteran trucker triumphed in an rebel marketing campaign to develop into president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, an election marking the top of the Hoffa generation. James P. Hoffa, this is, the 82-year-old son of mid-century exertions legend Jimmy Hoffa and a attorney by way of coaching who, competitors like O’Brien believed, lacked his dad’s reference to the typical employee and conceded an excessive amount of for the sake of ultimate pleasant with employers.
Hot-tempered, profane and bold, the 51-year-old O’Brien ran a combative marketing campaign in opposition to Hoffa’s counseled candidate. But he hasn’t stopped operating, seeking to win hearts and minds in a country the place union enrollment has been declining for many years.
His rapid precedence is making an attempt to win extra concessions from UPS for its 340,000 Teamsters-represented employees — and he turns out to relish the possibility of the largest-ever strike in opposition to a unmarried U.S. industry. On Friday, UPS union participants voted by way of 97 % to authorize the Teamsters to reserve a piece stoppage once Aug. 1 if contract negotiations haven’t culminated in a deal.
Yet even a UPS strike would function an insignificant checking out floor for what may well be arranged exertions’s defining fight of the brand new century. O’Brien desires to unionize Amazon’s 1 million-plus employees, earlier than the omni-retailer’s tradition of hyper-efficiency and gig paintings — which the Teamsters understand as a danger to exertions aspirations for employee protection, rights and dwelling requirements — takes dangle completely in North America.
Some see the fourth-generation Teamster as exertions’s long-awaited savior — a Nineteen Seventies-style scrapper uniquely able to bringing the motion into the twenty first century. O’Brien will not be the religious reincarnation of Jimmy Hoffa, however Hoffa may just by no means brag he went viral. Video clips of O’Brien insulting Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who has owned a number of companies, in a March committee listening to had been considered greater than 1,000,000 instances inside of per week.
O’Brien: “We hold greedy CEOs like yourself accountable.”
Mullin: “You calling me a greedy CEO?”
O’Brien: “Oh yeah, you are.”
But some see O’Brien’s old-school sensibilities as a legal responsibility. He is looking for to prepare a more youthful era of employees that chafes at Twentieth-century managerial techniques, whilst the Teamsters are nonetheless seeking to rehabilitate a name clouded by way of the venality and illegal activity of its mob-linked heyday. Smaller, nimbler unions are competing to prepare Amazon’s huge community of provide facilities. And O’Brien’s viral second came about after Mullin attacked him over his $225,000 wage and recognition for “intimidation.”
The senator isn’t by myself in that grievance. On the similar day O’Brien used to be sworn in final spring, greater than 70 workers — kind of 19 % of the team of workers — had been hastily terminated by the use of electronic mail, without a severance, and locked out of the Teamsters’ Capitol Hill headquarters. A partial work-from-home coverage used to be eradicated and a get dressed code enforced. Some workers say they in finding the brand new atmosphere stern, uptight and cautious.
“If you open up the newspaper, as a Teamster,” mentioned one former worker, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to keep away from blowback from O’Brien, “and you saw a company that immediately terminated folks with no notice, no severance, no health care, cutting off your email, you’d say, ‘Holy s—! What kind of an employer is this? There should be a public outcry.’”
O’Brien’s group argues that that they had a mandate for sweeping exchange and that the team of workers cuts had been conventional of any political turnover. More extensively, he says, he can’t take on the rustic’s maximum robust store with out an competitive method.
“I’m a conscience, not a bully,” he mentioned. “That’s why they don’t like me.”
O’Brien grew up within the Teamsters the way in which some other folks develop up in a church. His father drove vehicles, his grandfather drove vehicles, his great-grandfather drove vehicles. O’Brien may have had a float trail to a white-collar occupation, because of a University of Massachusetts soccer scholarship, however he dropped out after one semester to haul heavy apparatus on development websites.
“I always wanted to be a Teamstah,” he mentioned.
For O’Brien, union paintings represented activity safety and very good advantages to strengthen a circle of relatives. “I wanted to buy a home by the time I was 20 years old,” he mentioned. “I bought a home by the time I was 20 years old.” Within two years, he’d develop into a store steward. “Here I’m like 22 years old, and grown men with families are coming to me with their problems,” he mentioned. “I’m like, ‘This is great. I can solve problems.’ That was a training day for me.”
In 2006, on the edge of his thirty fourth birthday, he used to be elected because the essential officer of Boston’s Local 25 — the youngest particular person ever to run the most important Teamsters bankruptcy in New England. Veteran exertions legal professional Michael Feinberg, who started representing O’Brien, used to be surprised by way of the younger guy’s air of mystery and seriousness when he first noticed him discuss at a Local 25 assembly.
“He had the room,” Feinberg recalled. O’Brien had the “ability to express in his words what the rank-and-file member was thinking but could never formulate.”
For a century, the Teamsters had helped employees leverage their numbers into wages and advantages that ushered their households into the center elegance. But the tentacles of arranged crime had snaked their method into the union by way of the Nineteen Fifties. Even after years of investigations and prosecutions, the mob nonetheless polluted the Teamsters symbol, if no longer its very tradition. Local 25 used to be related to Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang smartly into the Eighties, when O’Brien used to be a teen with desires of trucking. In the ’90s, when he first joined, some participants had been running a crime ring, robbing banks and armored vehicles; some other member used to be convicted in a scheme to take bribes from an FBI agent posing as a movie manufacturer.
O’Brien recognizes the Teamsters’ checkered previous however bristles when the topic comes up. He argued that politicians and the media exaggerate the union’s misdeeds to undermine its energy.
“There were issues like every other organization,” he mentioned. “I came into this organization concerned about one thing. That was maintaining a career and providing an opportunity for myself and my future family.”
When he took over, O’Brien known that a picture rehab used to be so as. Local 25 raised $5 million for charity over the following decade, a lot of that thru an annual fundraising gala for Autism Speaks New England.
But he didn’t reach his fast ascent past Boston — by way of 2011, changing into the Teamsters’ japanese area vice chairman — solely thru attraction. O’Brien had a name as the man who would do no matter it took to get his method.
Five of O’Brien’s union pals had been indicted for allegedly seeking to extort a nonunion manufacturing corporate for “Top Chef: Boston” with techniques reminiscent of tire-slashing and bullying habits. (Four had been acquitted; Local 25’s secretary-treasurer pleaded responsible to tried extortion.) O’Brien himself used to be suspended for kind of threatening a rival faction of the union, in a speech the place he declared that Teamsters for a Democratic Union had to be “punished” for supposedly seeking to “tear down” a Rhode Island native. (He later referred to as it “a poor choice of words.”)
Still, when James P. Hoffa wanted a proper hand in 2017 to supervise the union’s Package Division as they ready for contract negotiations with UPS on behalf of the Teamsters’ biggest bloc of employees, an competitive recognition used to be infrequently going to be disqualifying. He tapped the pugnacious younger chief from Boston.
Five years later, the Teamsters are gearing up for some other negotiation, however this time Hoffa is long gone. Now it’s O’Brien’s display.
“If we don’t f—in’ win this campaign,” the brand new president used to be telling his team of workers on an August day in Washington, “we don’t have to worry about ever having a conversation with each other again, because we won’t be here in five years.”
O’Brien now occupies the similar mahogany-paneled administrative center as soon as claimed by way of Hoffa father and son within the Teamsters’ fortresslike headquarters, overlooking the U.S. Senate advanced. Legend has it that within the Nineteen Fifties, an bold younger team of workers attorney on the Senate’s so-called Rackets Committee named Bobby Kennedy seemed out his administrative center window within the evenings to peer whether or not Jimmy Hoffa’s gentle used to be nonetheless on: He didn’t wish to be outworked by way of his nemesis. Hoffa began maintaining the sunshine on in a single day.
The 2018 UPS contract negotiations have the entirety to do with why O’Brien is sitting right here now — and the way he’s determined to salary the marketing campaign this time.
O’Brien by no means in point of fact clicked with the more youthful Hoffa, he says. But the partnership ruptured for excellent when O’Brien proposed including Fred Zuckerman, who had challenged Hoffa for the Teamsters presidency the yr earlier than, to the negotiating committee. (Hoffa declined to remark for this tale.)
O’Brien says now that he used to be seeking to make peace with the management’s critics and develop a base of strengthen. But Hoffa’s camp noticed O’Brien’s outreach as natural betrayal — and in hindsight, they regard it as a political finish run. Just months after entrusting O’Brien with the negotiations, Hoffa fired him.
With O’Brien sidelined, the Hoffa management’s technique to the UPS negotiations backfired spectacularly. In October 2018, employees voted by way of 54 % to reject a freelance that created a tier of lower-paid, part-time drivers; Teamsters HQ determined to push it thru anyway, invoking a little-used constitutional provision that required a two-thirds majority if lower than half of the club voted. Amid the rank-and-file uproar that adopted, O’Brien — already campaigning for Hoffa’s activity, with Zuckerman as his operating mate — noticed alternative. Promising a greater contract subsequent time, they defeated Hoffa’s candidate with 67 % of the vote.
Now, O’Brien is taking not anything without any consideration. He is aware of he must get this subsequent contract proper if he desires to stay his activity — and amplify the Teamsters’ succeed in.
It’s the spark for the combative spirit that permeates Teamsters headquarters, the place a whiteboard charts a long-term fight plan on a timeline — “practice picketing,” “CAT trainings” (for “contract action teams”), “identify strike teams” … and after all, on the July 31 spot that marks the top of the present contract: “STRIKE.”
Why strike now? As O’Brien himself said in his Senate testimony, UPS already provides probably the most plum jobs within the logistics trade, with motive force salaries beginning at $93,000.
But O’Brien argues that the pandemic gave UPS employees the best leverage they’ve had in many years. In 2020, union participants risked their well being to stay applications shifting. UPS’s income surged and feature remained excessive, with shoppers nonetheless hooked on the web buying groceries conduct they followed all through the lockdowns. “Our members are fed up” and stay satisfied, he mentioned, that “the only concern that was being addressed was UPS’s bottom line and their balance sheet.”
No higher time, O’Brien causes, for staff to visit the mat to call for wages starting at $20 an hour, tighter protection provisions and an finish to the two-tier employment gadget ushered in by way of the final contract.
A UPS spokesman, Glenn Zaccara, mentioned the corporate is making “meaningful progress” within the contract negotiations: “UPS has worked collaboratively with the Teamsters for nearly 100 years, and this year is no different. We respect this step in the process and remain committed to making progress at the bargaining table.”
On a grander scale, O’Brien believes arranged exertions has a once-in-a-generation alternative to ward off in opposition to the gig-ification of the American group of workers — and he hopes to make this contract into an impressive showcase of what conventional unions can nonetheless be offering.
All of this explains O’Brien’s parking-lot attraction offensive, the place he’s been coaxing participants around the nation to get extra invested in union actions with a pleasant show of his workingman bona fides. (“This is how you drive a f—in’ truck, right there,” he advised a Teamster in Atlanta, pulling out his telephone to sing their own praises a contemporary video of himself working a tractor-trailer.)
Back at headquarters, O’Brien peppered team of workers with technique concepts gleaned from his excursion. When he realized that many UPS drivers detest the cameras the corporate is putting in on some automobiles, he recommended that native officers must emphasize the problem at upcoming rallies. (An organization spokesman mentioned that the majority cameras face outward, no longer on the driving force.) There’s no element too small for O’Brien, who used to be particularly happy by way of a brand new smartphone app for UPS employees, entire with a integrated “strike savings calculator,” to turn how a lot they want to financial institution earlier than strolling off the activity.
He and Zuckerman plan to stay hitting the street each and every week till August to in my opinion rally the employees.
“We’re not taking vacations,” he mentioned. “I already told my family, ‘I’ll see you around Eastah.’”
‘Strike! Strike! Strike!’
The chant stuffed the ballroom as O’Brien took the level in Chicago final summer time earlier than a crowd of greater than 2,000.
Even the emcee on the Labor Notes Conference — a millennial-heavy accumulating that objectives to support grass-roots ties throughout disparate unions — gave the impression greatly surprised. She had simply offered their subsequent speaker as the person who “pledged that 300,000 Teamsters will strike UPS” when the room erupted in a status ovation. (She hastened to explain {that a} strike would come simplest in the event that they don’t succeed in a adequate contract.)
“Thank you very much!” O’Brien mentioned. “This is my first time here, and wow — is this an unbelievable crowd!”
He gave the impression in truth touched and shocked: A yr out, and already his emblem because the Guy (Maybe) Striking UPS had stuck on with a brand new era.
But as he persevered his fight cry (“We are gonna put that company on its knees if it needs to happen!”), it used to be no longer UPS CEO Carol B. Tomé’s title that he invoked. He introduced right into a tirade concerning the “three stooges”: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Howard Schultz, the CEOs of Amazon, Tesla, and Starbucks, respectively. “They are white-collar criminals,” he claimed, hyperbolically, that are meant to be “held accountable” for “the way they treat their workers.”
The crowd booed furiously.
All 3 billionaires are dependable boogeymen in rooms like those. (Amazon founder Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim leader government Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.) But Tesla and Starbucks are any individual else’s exertions combat. O’Brien has made no secret of his starvation to take on Bezos, and Amazon.
With greater than 1 million employees, many in modestly paid, extremely bodily jobs, Amazon is noticed as ripe for group by way of many in exertions. Workers say they have got been anticipated to procedure as many as 350 pieces an hour, with obligatory 60-hour weeks all through some busy seasons — stipulations that some workers say have resulted in orthopedic accidents or urinary tract infections as a result of they don’t have time for rest room breaks. (Amazon spokesperson Mary Kate Paradis mentioned the harm price throughout Amazon warehouses has dropped greater than 23 % since 2019. “We’re proud of the progress made by our team and we’ll continue working hard together to keep getting better every day,” she mentioned.)
Yet the roles include little safety as Amazon more and more shifts towards gig employment. Thousands of Amazon drivers in truth paintings for third-party firms, topic to being reduce with out clarification.
But whose position is it to unionize Amazon? In Chicago, O’Brien shared a level with a more youthful guy with some declare on that turf.
He used to be Chris Smalls, a New Jersey local and previous rapper in his early 30s who had spent 5 years running in Amazon warehouses. While O’Brien grew to become out in a standard army blazer, Smalls wore darkish sun shades, a take hold of of gold chains and a multicolored jacket with EAT THE RICH stitched in yellow thread on the again.
O’Brien has a compelling narrative about coming of age on the similar giant rigs as his grandfather, however Smalls has what may well be the quintessential beginning tale for the following era of work leaders. In March 2020, he led a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse over what he maintained had been inadequate covid protection protocols. Terminated that very same day, he joined forces with 3 different Black employees to check out to prepare the ability.
It used to be the scrappiest of campaigns, with a bus prevent as the bottom of operations and Smalls dwelling within reach in a tent. Amazon confiscated union fliers and fastened a high-powered anti-union PR blitz. But in March 2022, employees on the facility voted 2,654 to two,131 to sign up for the fledgling Amazon Labor Union. (An Amazon spokesperson mentioned its workers “have the choice of whether or not to join a union” and that “as a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees.”)
O’Brien has been fast to reward the ALU. “You can’t take away anything they’ve done,” he advised The Post. “Because they’ve been more successful than … anybody, right?” The Teamsters supplied assembly area and steerage for the ALU. It used to be a no brainer, as O’Brien explains it — after all the Teamsters need each and every union within the logistics trade to be successful, to pressure all employers to stay office requirements as excessive as conceivable.
And but, the dynamics are difficult. Because O’Brien positive would really like to peer a large number of the ones 1 million Amazon employees dressed in Teamsters jackets at some point.
Even whilst lending the ALU a hand, the Teamsters were launching their very own efforts to prepare Amazon employees in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Canada; final month, they negotiated a freelance for California drivers and dispatchers hired by way of a third-party Amazon contractor. And, sure, O’Brien realizes that successful a powerful new contract with UPS would make a marvelous commercial for the Teamsters as they woo possible participants.
Onstage in Chicago, he spoke philosophically concerning the marketing campaign to hand.
“A victory — whether it’s an election, or once you win an organizing drive — it does not end there,” O’Brien advised the target audience. “Because in an election, you make a lot of promises. You make a lot of commitments. And you have to deliver on those promises and those commitments.”
He used to be speaking concerning the UPS fight; however for figuring out ears within the room, it additionally appeared like a subtweet. The ALU’s momentum has slowed; an organizing effort at a 2d Staten Island warehouse failed. With Amazon’s attorneys throwing up demanding situations to the preliminary victory, the ALU is also months or years clear of even beginning contract negotiations. Smalls’s superstar — he and fellow ALU chief Derrick Palmer made Time’s “most influential” record of 2022 — has provoked some backlash inside the ranks, and workers at different warehouses bitch about emails going unanswered once they search ALU assist organizing their very own devices.
Offstage, O’Brien has been extra bluntly skeptical concerning the ALU’s possibilities.
“You can win any f—in’ election, whether it’s an international election, a local election, an organizing drive,” he advised The Post. “But you gotta f—in’ deliver at the end of the day. It doesn’t mean s— if they don’t get a contract.”
The Teamsters, in the meantime, are making an attempt to combat Amazon on a political degree that just a million-member dues-paying group may just come up with the money for — lobbying the White House to finish its federal contracts and packing town council conferences to dam development of recent Amazon amenities.
In an interview, Smalls expressed wariness of O’Brien’s intentions, complaining that the Teamsters’ strikes may just stymie organizing efforts by way of leaving employees at a loss for words over which union to sign up for.
Why no longer simply channel the ones assets to the ALU, he requested. “The old, established unions don’t want to pass the torch to new efforts,” he mentioned.
Publicly, O’Brien is enjoying the gracious diplomat. Other exertions organizations are circling Amazon: The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union aided makes an attempt to prepare an Alabama warehouse, and an impartial workforce referred to as Amazonians United arranged warehouses in Sacramento, Chicago and New York. The AFL-CIO says it desires to spouse with the Teamsters on its Amazon campaign. Onstage at Labor Notes, O’Brien spoke of harmony and collaboration. He stored a few of his warmest phrases for “my man, Chris ‘Big Balls’ Smalls!” and drew giant cheers.
When Smalls took the level, his personal requires unity whipped the gang into much more of a frenzy. “We gotta stay together,” he mentioned. “The labor movement. It’s not just the Amazon Labor Union. It’s not just Chris Smalls and ‘what am I doing.’”
Then Smalls led the room in one among his favourite chants: “F— Jeff Bezos!” O’Brien used to be dressed in a face masks, however it seemed like he used to be becoming a member of in.
O’Brien advised The Post that week he used to be in a position to assist the ALU with no matter it wanted: Smalls had his mobile quantity, he mentioned. Smalls, although, nonetheless hasn’t referred to as. “We shouldn’t have to ask,” Smalls mentioned. “It should just be given.”
For all his shift-change bonhomie and international relations on the dais, O’Brien can also be an abrasive pressure within the administrative center.
“You know, I’m just sick of this,” he declared on the headquarters, half-chiding and half-commiserating together with his team of workers. “I hear all these f—in’ reports about ‘an opportunity here,’ ‘we’re doing this,’ ‘We’re doing that.’ It seems like there’s no f—in’ execution. There’s a lot of f—in’ pressure on the International, and we’re going to do it, no questions asked.”
O’Brien’s drawback at that exact second: the Teamsters had been nearing an settlement that might enable you to unionize as many as 12,000 drivers for the third-largest faculty bus contractor in America — however with faculty about to start out, why wasn’t his team of workers hanging the squeeze on control now?
Numerous veterans of the Hoffa management — together with two who stored their jobs after the transition layoffs and others who’re involved with present workers — say the administrative center tradition is extra stifled and no more collegial, with staffers afraid to talk out or go any person who’s with regards to the brand new boss. In May, the board that oversees Teamster elections chided the brand new management over its dealing with of the layoffs, ruling that no less than 3 had been in truth retaliatory firings of supporters of O’Brien’s opponent.
But different staffers say they in finding Teamsters headquarters extra energized. O’Brien, for his section, sees himself right here as he does typically — a person of the folk. Last summer time, he organized an administrative center occasion on the rooftop terrace, the place many staffers hardly ever ventured earlier than. “Some of them have been here 20 years, and they hadn’t even seen the penthouse,” he mentioned.
Later within the assembly, O’Brien hammered his team of workers on what he noticed as a lagging marketing campaign to unionize auto-transport drivers. (“Do you see my frustration? … Am I wrong to have this conversation?”) By the time O’Brien had dictated detailed directions on whom to name and what to mention, his nationwide director of organizing had stuffed two pocket book pages with blue ink.
“Just keep f—in’ following up with these f—in’ people,” O’Brien concluded. “Because at the end of the day? When I gotta blame someone, I wanna make sure I’m blamin’ the right f—in’ person.”
This is the Teamsters in 2023. In the Sean O’Brien generation, no person wishes to go away their gentle on in a single day to faux they’re outworking the opposite man. With a couple of existential battles on the horizon, the white-collar administrative center tradition is not any much less intense than the scene on any wooden line.
“We’re not complaining,” mentioned Lindsay Dougherty, an L.A.-based former movie employee elected with O’Brien’s slate as Western area vice chairman, who now reveals herself touring relentlessly to rallies throughout 13 states. “We just go — and make sure we have a lot of coffee in us.”
She added: “We all have, like, the Sean O’Brien in us now.”
correction
A prior model of this article incorrectly described Fred Zuckerman as a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. The article has been corrected.