It was a remarkable moment Monday night at the Republican National Convention, surely creating some amount of confusion among longtime Republicans, when Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, delivered a stemwinder of a speech in prime time. He called former President Donald Trump a “tough S.O.B.”
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Also Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, the anti-union Tesla boss who has endorsed Trump, would be showering a pro-Trump super PAC with $45 million per month in cash.
But it is notable, as O’Brien pointed out, that a handful of Republican senators, including Trump’s new running mate Sen. JD Vance, have joined picket lines in recent years.
Vance and other Republican senators, however, oppose the Democrats’ proposal to pass a nationwide law, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, supported by labor unions including the Teamsters.
If there was an overriding theme in speeches at the first night of the Republican convention, which were supposed to focus on Make America Wealthy Again, it was an anti-corporate and anti-elitist message, with frequent mentions of helping workers.
In a nod to that episode, O’Brien namechecked Mullin and said he was paraphrasing the senator with this line: “‘It’s time for both sides of Congress to stand their butts up.’ We need trade policies that put American workers first.
Government worker unions are a strong part of the labor movement and unlikely to be getting any overtures from a new Trump administration, which has tried to paint the federal bureaucracy as an organized deep state opposed to him.
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