Follow Trump 45 Labor Policy, Not the Teamsters Union

Following the election, I noted that President-elect Donald Trump did very little to pander to union bosses on policy substance. Trump’s Vice President-elect, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), gave a campaign speech opposing the PRO Act, organized labor’s Christmas-wish-list legislation to override right-to-work laws, empower secondary boycotts, and increase Big Labor’s authority in numerous other ways. The AFL-CIO was happy to highlight Vance’s speech in the closing months of the election campaign when the union federation thought it would hurt the Republican ticket. So advocates of sound labor policy like that followed during the first Trump administration might be generally pleased with the election outcome.

Unfortunately, Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien is singing siren songs to the incoming 47th administration, seeking to make it more like the Bidenomics of the 46th than the Taft-Hartley Consensus of the 45th. Despite the union not actually endorsing the Trump-Vance ticket, O’Brien is, according to DC trade publication Politico, lobbying for outgoing U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) to be named secretary of labor. For good measure, Randi Weingarten thinks the appointment “would be significant,” a de facto endorsement that should give any supporter of worker freedom and good public policy pause.

Raising Eyebrows

What the Teamsters Union and O’Brien hope to gain from placing Chavez-DeRemer in the second Trump administration is made obvious by one official act she took during her one term in office: She co-sponsored the PRO Act that the AFL-CIO condemned Vice President-elect Vance for opposing. O’Brien likely hopes that a Chavez-DeRemer–led Labor Department would continue the policies of Biden administration Acting Secretary Julie Su, which have targeted independent contractors and franchised business owners, two nemeses of Big Labor.

As for Weingarten, she probably finds significant Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the “Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act,” legislation that would mandate government worker unionism at the state and local levels nationwide and override reforms made to government worker bargaining by Republicans like former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. It should not take a trip to OpenSecrets to understand why Weingarten and her Everything Leftist allies support this; why President-elect Trump would want to reward his opponents is less clear.

The Table of Trust

The second Trump administration has been constituted differently than the first, a reflection of the different coalition that elected Donald Trump in 2024 than the one that elected him in 2016. The first Trump Cabinet was mostly Republican politicians, Republican bureaucrats, and businesspeople. The nominees for the second (as of writing) include Republican politicians and businesspeople, but also a handful of ex-Democrats who conspicuously endorsed President Trump’s campaign, like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and environmentalist activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump’s appointments of these coalitional candidates resemble the assembly of a coalition government in European countries, which can lead to such incongruities as a pro-business finance minister in a German government led by the Social Democratic Party, which included the Greens. That coalition government lasted until it broke up earlier this month. With that in mind, it’s worth asking if the Teamsters boss has earned a place at the table of trust (or, if you prefer, in “the room where it happens”).

The answer is no, unless President-elect Trump wishes to advertise that he is the cheapest date in Washington. Unlike Gabbard and Kennedy, who made repeated public appearances on the Trump campaign trail, Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters Union went against almost 60 percent of Teamsters members and refused to endorse President Trump. And O’Brien did not exactly demonstrate the power to keep his subordinates neutral: Axios reported that Teamsters Union regional councils in the battleground states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin went to work for Vice President Kamala Harris’s election efforts.

By pushing Rep. Chavez-DeRemer for secretary of labor, O’Brien is essentially asking the winner of the 2024 presidential election to concede to the loser on one of the most important pieces of domestic legislation after the winner has already won in exchange for nothing. Rather than taking labor policy advice from a union boss, President Trump would do much better to follow the example he himself set in his previous term.