Appendix: The TDU Degeneration and What It Teaches
A reader writes: ‘Any discussion that holds up TDU requires a more recent balance sheet given the role that it is playing.’ They recommend Tim Goulet’s recent piece in Tempest, ‘The Conservative (D)evolution of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.’
The critique is correct. Far from undermining the argument above, TDU’s degeneration sharpens it: the methods worked, but only while TDU maintained independence. The moment it became what Goulet calls a ‘junior partner in the Teamsters bureaucracy,’ it reproduced bureaucratic methods against its own dissidents.
What Happened to TDU
The trajectory is damning. In 2021, TDU endorsed Sean O’Brien for Teamster president. O’Brien had been a Hoffa loyalist, ‘a reactionary hothead with a history of intimidating and threatening reformers on Hoffa’s behalf, including TDU members.’ He became a ‘reformer’ virtually overnight. As Joe Allen notes in Teamsterland, TDU provided ‘the only credentials O’Brien had to claim the mantle of reformer.’
The 2023 UPS contract, which the article above cites as a TDU victory, is contested. The Wall Street Journal called it a victory for the company. Critics argue it ‘did little to reverse give-backs.’ TDU defended the contract and, crucially, suppressed dissidents in its own ranks who called for a ‘Vote No’ campaign. The weapon TDU forged against the bureaucracy was turned against TDU’s own members.
O’Brien has since aligned himself with Trump. At a recent press conference alongside J.D. Vance and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, he blamed Democrats for the government shutdown and demanded they drop opposition to Republican cuts to social welfare programmes. TDU hosted him as keynote speaker at its 50th anniversary convention and secured his endorsement for a second term.
Critics have been barred from participation. John Palmer, a long-standing member and outspoken critic, was expelled. TDU’s paid staff director, David Levin, played a key role in denying entry to dissenting members. At least four members of TDU’s International Steering Committee are now paid employees of O’Brien’s administration. The O’Brien administration hired a union-busting law firm to shut down TeamsterLink, a website run by reformers critical of the leadership.
Tom Leedham, Tim Sylvester, and Bill Zimmerman, three veteran reformers with 120 years of combined experience in the IBT, created TeamsterLink to document what was happening. Their assessment: ‘TDU, once considered the watchdog, is now the propaganda wing of the O’Brien IBT.’
A cruel joke, as Goulet puts it: a group with ‘democratic’ in its name backing a right-wing union leader who supports a president with fascistic politics, while silencing members who have the temerity to speak out.
How Did This Happen?
Goulet identifies structural and political factors. The collapse of the freight industry after deregulation in 1980 destroyed TDU’s original base among long-haul truckers. The union became increasingly concentrated in UPS, with centralised bargaining that created ‘incentives for access to power from the top-down rather than grassroots, democratic mobilization.’
But Goulet’s most important argument concerns TDU’s deliberate abandonment of socialist politics. The founders ‘eschewed socialist party politics in favor of a broad, pragmatic rank-and-file reform strategy.’ This economism, Goulet argues, ‘was never simply a product of its gradual bureaucratization. Rather, there was an economistic trend within TDU pre-dating the turn toward reform-from-above.’
The shift from workplace organising to electoral focus was decisive. ‘Where once the most sensible form of organizing came from mobilizing shop stewards, wildcat strikes, and local workplace coalitions, TDU began investing more time and energy into winning local union offices and endorsing slates.’ TDU members ‘went from being workplace organizers to campaigners.’ Sam Friedman, a Tempest member, warned as early as 1982 in Teamster Rank And File that this shift toward elections would produce bureaucratic conservatism.
By 2016, TDU was endorsing former Hoffa loyalists with no connection to the reform movement. Fred Zuckerman, an ex-Hoffa loyalist, ran with TDU support that year. By 2021, TDU endorsed O’Brien despite his history of threatening TDU members. The organisation that built the ‘Vote No’ campaign into a strategic weapon now suppresses ‘Vote No’ campaigns against contracts it has endorsed.
Goulet notes that TDU even removed its ‘Rank and File Bill of Rights’ from its programme while campaigning for O’Brien. The abandonment was complete.
What This Means for the Argument
The article above presented TDU’s history as a success story demonstrating what independent rank-and-file organisation can achieve. The Goulet critique requires qualification: TDU’s methods worked during the period when TDU maintained structural independence. Financial autonomy, ‘Vote No’ campaigns, One Member One Vote, refusal of staff positions: these built power that forced even the most entrenched bureaucracy to retreat.
But TDU’s degeneration demonstrates that even successful rank-and-file organisation can be absorbed if it abandons those methods. The moment TDU shifted from workplace organising to electoral focus, from structural reform to alliance with ex-Hoffa loyalists, from ‘Vote No’ campaigns to defending leadership contracts, it ceased to be an independent force.
The strategic lesson is sharper, not weaker. Independence must be actively maintained. It is not a one-time achievement but a continuous practice. The pressure to integrate, to trade independence for access, to defend ‘our’ leadership against critics, operates constantly. Without political clarity about why independence matters, even the most successful rank-and-file organisation will eventually be absorbed.
The Missing Element: Socialist Politics
Goulet’s most important argument is that TDU’s economism enabled its conservatisation. TDU ‘gave up on building a socialist base among the Teamsters rank-and-file’ and sidelined ‘crucial questions around issues of oppression that affect so many of its members.’
Without a political framework that explained why the bureaucracy behaves as it does, TDU members had no ideological resources to resist integration when the opportunity arose. When O’Brien offered access and alliance, there was no political tradition within TDU that could articulate why this was a betrayal of rank-and-file principles rather than a strategic victory.
As Goulet puts it: ‘Labor movement strategy must center the rank-and-file in their workplaces, and must be tied to a political vision of class struggle and socialist transformation, or it runs the very real risk of becoming a tool of institutional repair, not a method of class struggle or liberation.’
This is the element the article above understated. The structural recommendations remain valid: financial independence, ‘Vote No’ campaigns, structural reform demands, refusal of staff positions. But these methods require a political framework that explains their necessity. Otherwise, they appear as tactical choices that can be abandoned when circumstances change, rather than principled commitments rooted in understanding bureaucratic interests as a structural phenomenon.
The Good News
Goulet notes that opposition continues within TDU. An Open Letter circulated in September calling for TDU to break with O’Brien, signed by notable long-standing activists. Teamsters Mobilize, a small rank-and-file network composed largely of UPS part-timers, organises independently. TeamsterLink documented the degeneration until the union hired lawyers to shut it down.
As Goulet argues, ‘we can’t completely write off the best elements of TDU—which still contains many good, young rank-and-file activists, as well as dissident veterans, who would surely have an important role to play in any movement to resuscitate the Teamsters from below.’
The methods TDU pioneered remain valid. The organisation that pioneered them has abandoned them. The task now is to rebuild independent rank-and-file organisation that learns from both TDU’s successes and its failures: the structural methods and the political education that makes abandoning those methods unthinkable.
Implications for Unite
For Unite activists fighting to implement Palestine solidarity policy, TDU’s trajectory is a warning. Building independent organisation is necessary but not sufficient. That organisation must be grounded in political education that explains why the bureaucracy, including ‘left’ bureaucrats, will resist implementation; why independence must be maintained even when sympathetic leaders offer alliance; why structural reform matters more than personnel change.
The United Left in Unite now positions itself as the champion of Palestine solidarity against the Graham administration. But the United Left’s history of bureaucratic bonapartism on financial governance, its factional methods, its deployment of left credentials as political smokescreen, all suggest that a United Left victory would reproduce bureaucratic dynamics under different management. The Graham administration’s reforms on financial governance are real, but its Palestine suppression demonstrates the limits of bureaucratic reform.
Neither faction deserves uncritical support. Both will deploy democratic rhetoric when it serves their interests and bureaucratic methods when it threatens them. What TDU’s history teaches, including its degeneration, is that rank-and-file organisation must be independent of all factions, grounded in political education that explains why independence matters, and committed to maintaining that independence even when attractive alliances are offered.
The methods work. But only if you keep using them. And you will only keep using them if you understand why they work: because the bureaucracy is a distinct social layer with its own material interests, not simply ‘timid allies’ who need encouragement or ‘bad leaders’ who need replacement.
TDU forgot that. Unite activists cannot afford to.
December 2025
