In one of the most surprising Cabinet appointments of his transition, President-elect Donald Trump announced last week that he intends to nominate Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) to be secretary of labor.
The announcement was significant for a few reasons, but especially because Chavez-DeRemer was the preferred choice of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the nation’s largest labor unions and, until recently, a perennial ally of the Democratic Party.
In a much-publicized decision, the Teamsters announced in September that they would not be endorsing a candidate for president for the first time since 1996. It was a shocking change for an organization that had endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate in the 21st century.
Instead, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien requested that both parties allow him to speak at their respective conventions. But only Trump and the Republican Party granted his request. Meanwhile, the leaders of other major unions, such as United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, eagerly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic ticket, continuing the long tradition of labor unions refusing even to speak to most Republican politicians.
After Trump won, the Teamsters, liberated by the fact that they had not taken a side in the contest, began a public and private campaign for Chavez-DeRemer, who lost her reelection bid to a Democrat, to be appointed to run the Department of Labor, which oversees the implementation of most labor laws.
If her appointment to run the agency proves anything, it is that the Teamsters’ refusal to engage in partisan politics paid off in spades. By refusing to align themselves with one party over the other, the Teamsters were able to build constructive relationships with anyone who was willing to work with them, including Trump.
Other labor unions offered tacit endorsements of Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination, but their input was completely ignored in the selection process because they decided that partisanship was more important than forming constructive working relationships with anyone.
The role of a labor union is to advocate the economic well-being of its members. This means securing higher wages, better working conditions, and retirement pensions. But the AFL-CIO and other unions have dedicated their organizations to advocating causes such as abortion, illegal immigration, and other issues that have nothing to do with their members’ interests.
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This uncritical willingness to embrace partisan social causes has hurt organized labor’s ability to work with lawmakers in advancing the causes they exist to advocate. One only needs to look at the cozy relationship that Republicans enjoy with law enforcement unions as proof that the party will work with unions that are not reflexively Democratic. Republicans in Florida even gave police unions a carve-out in a law that substantially limited the ability of other public sector unions to maintain their status.
If labor unions want to achieve the goals that they claim to pursue, they should look at the Teamsters as a model and remember that by embracing partisanship, they close themselves off from working with a party that represents half the country and make any legislative advocacy efforts entirely reliant on the whims of an electorate that just gave the Democratic Party its most decisive loss in a generation.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
