They are enemies of labor and of the working class
Today Kim Kelly returns to write about two contrasting speeches by labor leaders this week: UAW President Shawn Fain at Netroots Nation and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention (not great man!)
Previously Kim wrote for Hell World about her Last Normal Day before covid and we talked about why cops do not belong in the labor movement.
More recently she interviewed Maha Shami of the D.C. hardcore band NØ MAN about her new record and being the child of Palestinian refugees.
Find more from her on her newsletter Salvo here.
You know the deal. If you enjoy what you read in Hell World please help pay our great contributors like Kim with a subscription. I appreciate you reading as always.
Did you miss Rax King's stunning and funny essay about sobriety from the other day. Man it was one of the good ones.
"Life with a drinking problem had been easy in that I wanted very little. The appetite itself may have been big but, directed towards a single end, it felt manageable and logical. I pursued only men who went well with bourbon and coke. Professional achievements felt good enough, but celebrating them with a blackout was what I really looked forward to. Alcohol subsumed every interest I might have had outside of it, all of which only got in its way. I’d become a rudimentary creature, chasing only one instinct and jettisoning whatever didn’t help me catch it. In sobriety, my want has swelled to fit the much-bigger me it’s contained in. I don’t want nothing anymore, I want everything."
A Republican shot a Republican with a gun beloved by Republicans and Democrats looked themselves in the eye and said we're sorry for doing this we gotta be nicer to Republicans. Perhaps stop campaigning so hard.
On the plus side it did provide a respite for about two days where they stopped texting me five times an hour begging for money.
It was another example of how as always Republicans play by soccer rules flopping around after a light shin graze and crying to the refs. Democrats play ultimate frisbee rules calling fouls on themselves out of respect to the spirit of the game.
(Yes I played a lot of ultimate in college.)
It's so obvious it's barely worth mentioning but the right believes political violence and punishing their enemies and violent protest is for them to do to the left and it is an affront to the natural order if done to them. That's it. The hypocrisy is part of the thrill.
It does seem kind of strange though that the once and perhaps future president was nearly assassinated on live television and it doesn't really feel like that much of a story a few days later. Provided that there's no forthcoming right wing mass shooting in retaliation – and in America that's never a safe bet – so far the biggest fall out from the whole thing looks like it's going to be losing Tenacious D. (Cowardly shit here by Jack Black to throw KG under the bus immediately by the way). It reminds me that after the summer of 2020 liberals' biggest response was to take a couple of 30 Rock and Always Sunny episodes down.
Now I don't know anything but it remains my position that replacing Biden with Kamala or any single Democrat JAG would bring with it a huge surge of voter enthusiasm. Just any sign that they're aware of the moment and ready to fight. Donald Trump having micro-dosed getting assassinated does not change the fact that he represents a grave threat to the future of this country. This is an existential crisis we're told all the time. I don't understand why they aren't acting with more urgency then?
That said I do still sort of think Trump is going to lose to be honest. Mind you if he does it will have nothing to do with Joe Biden – the worst man for the job at this moment. Trump will always have his 30% but I think the vast majority of people are just fucking sick of having to think about his bullshit every day of their lives. "Get this dude off my TV" could pull in 330 electoral votes easy.
On the matter of "political violence" you already know what I think but let's take another look anyway:
The Supreme Court and politicians and their defenders think they should be able to start up the Rube Goldberg machine of pain then walk away and by the time the boot at the end kicks us all in the balls we'll forget who inserted the ball at the top. No! I saw you put the little silver ball in the thing! I saw you do it. It didn't just happen by magic it was a decision that was made by people.
Politics is making decisions that send people to suffer and to starve and to scrape by and to slowly but surely die. It might take a bit longer than other more reliable forms or killing but it is killing all the same. Almost every single utterance from a Republican (and plenty from Democrats) about their intended policy is an attempt to set real violence against real people into motion by someone else's hands (usually cops but also doctors and landlords etc) which is ok for some reason under the rules of the civility game.
All that said please do not ever assassinate anyone.
They are enemies of labor and of the working class
by Kim Kelly
When United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain stepped up to the podium at Netroots Nation this past weekend, it’s likely he knew not to expect an overly enthusiastic response. It wasn’t really his crowd, inasmuch as he speaks to (and often for) the labor movement’s more dynamic, militant wing. The conference is a yearly gathering for people who identify as “progressives” – liberal Democrats, slightly-more-left liberal Democrats, and various elected officials, plus staffers for a stable of nonprofits, startups, left-friendly publications, voting organizations, campaign software companies, and assorted mysterious entities with the word “democracy” featured prominently in their name. Labor usually has a visible presence at the event, and 2024 was no exception; it was sponsored by CWA, AFT, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the Steelworkers, and Fain was brought in to speak at the Friday plenary. The audience greeted his remarks politely, with occasional bursts of approving applause, but it was clear that many of the attendees were not entirely sure how to react to the union leader’s trademark fire-and-brimstone speechifying on behalf of the working class.
There was much uncomfortable shifting in seats when he came perilously close to (maybe) saying that the party needed a new presidential candidate, and when he castigated the Democrats as well as the Republicans for not doing enough for workers. When he mentioned how the UAW had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, he was met with only a smattering of applause (though his lines criticizing Trump brought the house down). It was all to be expected. After all, this wasn’t Labor Notes; this was a well-established stop on the Democratic election circuit, and the things he was saying may have cut a little close to the bone for some of its sponsors. Fain himself seemed a little uncertain onstage – he’s used to speaking to autoworkers and labor activists, not the D.C. nonprofit class – but he pushed forward, winning a rousing cheer when he roared “We are planning a general strike for 2028!” He won them over in the end, even knowing that the majority of people in the room probably didn’t quite get the message.
Huge round of applause at @Netroots_Nation when @UAW President Shawn Fain says plainly: “We are preparing for a general strike in 2028.” #NN24 pic.twitter.com/LzXDUtBXnh
— Kim Kelly (@GrimKim) July 12, 2024
Contrast that, then, with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican National Convention earlier this week. He too accepted an invitation to speak to a large crowd of political animals, many of whom were sure to disagree with the bulk of what he said by virtue of being professional oppressors. But that’s where the similarities ended, and the entire episode spiraled into a wickedly shameful display of something much uglier. Some particularly myopic pundits have commended O’Brien for his choice, arguing that laying out his version of labor’s case to an unpredictable audience (of fascists) and sharing his message with people who would otherwise never hear it (because they do not support unions or workers) was somehow good for the labor movement. They are, of course, wrong.
Was it ego that compelled him to don his little suit and trot out onto that stage and chirp his little speech to an audience of feral hogs who would love nothing better than to deport and imprison and generally pummel every Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, and trans member of his union? Was it hubris? Naked self-interest? Sheer bad judgment? Whether his speech – which included lines praising Trump’s “toughness” and shout-outs to mealy anti-worker rich boy Rep. Josh Hawley – served as a genuine effort to soften Republican power brokers’ centuries-old animosity towards labor, or was simply an audition to be named Secretary of Labor in a possible Trump administration, it was a bad look. On paper, O’Brien had been invited there to represent his union, the 1.3-million strong force that is the Teamsters, and to serve as a mouthpiece for the American labor movement. In reality, he ended up making a mockery of both.
The Teamsters headman had been playing footsie with Trump well before the RNC slithered into Milwaukee, and labor world observers have long been puzzling over why he seems so determined to build a cozy relationship with the world’s worst boss. There are already plenty of op-eds explaining why another Trump term would be disastrous for labor (here’s a good one) and only a very stubborn, very ignorant, and very foolish person would willingly ignore all of that when doing any kind of political calculus around the election. As the head of an American labor union, he has been presented with two choices in our diabolically useless two-party system. Both want his, and by extension, the Teamsters’ endorsement. He wants to get as much as he can out of whoever lands in the hot seat post-November. It is not a complex problem. Do the Democrats suck on a wide variety of issues? Yep! When it comes to labor, do they suck a million times less than the Republicans? Yep! The whole system is broken and gross and bullshit, but as long as we’re collectively trapped within it, the people who do hold power within our movements should at least err on the side of basic logic.
Some might say, well, what if Trump wins? Doesn’t it make sense to get on his good side, make friends with populist-ish Republicans, and try to use that to labor’s advantage? To that I would ask what is it like to float so blissfully through the world unburdened by the weight of reason or sense? To assume that Republicans will suddenly switch over to actually acting like the mythical pro-worker party they so desperately pretend to be is to assume that everything about the Republican Party – its leaders, its policies, its platform, its donor base, its overall goals – will completely change in a way that does not materially benefit them. Supporting workers and strengthening unions runs counter to the party’s entire political project of domination, subjugation, and white supremacy. They will not do that, especially if they’ve managed to seize power.
Ah! you might say. But aren’t a lot of union members conservative? They’re going to vote for Trump, and they elected O’Brien to represent them. Don’t they deserve to see their own political views validated or at least acknowledged? The answer there is simple: no. It is not a union leader’s job to make a union member feel good about their voting choices. It is a union leader’s job to enforce their members’ rights as workers, to protect them, to support them, and to be an advocate and a warrior on their behalf and for the working class writ large. There are indeed many conservative union members; there are also many union members who are progressives, liberals, socialists, anarchists, and every other political identity under the sun. A proper union leader should represent all of them fairly, or at the absolute least, avoid actively showing support to a political project that seeks to crush, kill, and destroy vast swaths of their own membership.
Here, O’Brien failed – and then failed again immediately after by publicly boosting a truly wretched op-ed by his new pal Hawley, a pale Ivy League grifter in ill-fitting workin’ man’s clothing, that blamed “DEI” and trans people for the death of American manufacturing (???). With friends like those, O’Brien barely needs all the new enemies he’s just made. It is true that not every worker views their membership in a union as a political act, or cares much about the idea of working class liberation. But guess what? Republicans hate them all equally, and are champing at the bit to rip away as many of their rights as possible.
That is the most basic point here. It was bad for Sean O’Brien to speak at the RNC because the Rs in question are anti-worker, anti-labor, and anti-human. They are enemies of labor and of the working class. He may have made some grimy new buddies, but they will not be there for him when it comes time to save the Teamsters’ pensions again, or to pass the PRO Act, or to protect the immigrant workers who make up a hefty chunk of his own membership. His old friends in labor will, and if by some miracle the Democrats manage not to fall completely ass over tits in this election, so will at least some of them.
But you can only spit in your friends’ faces so many times until they stop picking up the phone. If he keeps this up, he won’t have very many of them left. Labor’s power is fragile at the best of times, and no matter what happens in November, it will only get more difficult for workers in this country to survive. Intentionally weakening our chances now is not just stupid, it’s unforgivable.
Kim Kelly is a labor reporter for In These Times, a labor columnist for Teen Vogue, and a freelancer everywhere else; her book FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor is available now. She also runs Salvo, a leftist heavy metal newsletter.