With the Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s (TDU) annual convention rapidly approaching, a growing number of Teamsters are finding themselves banned from attending it. Past TDU conventions were seen by many as a haven in a hostile and notorious repressive union. While this may be looking at past TDU conventions with rose-tinted glasses, it was true enough. Thing have changed, however. Veteran Teamster reformer John Palmer, one of the banned, told an interviewer last year, “TDU looks a lot like the Teamsters now.”
Palmer would know. He is currently serving as an International Vice-President at-Large and member of the Teamsters’ General Executive Board (GEB), elected with TDU’s support in 2016 and 2021. From such a perch in the union leadership, he has seen the bloom come off Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman’s leadership of the Teamsters, which was elected with great fanfare and high expectations in 2021. A former member of TDU and its International Steering Committee, Palmer has found himself isolated in the union’s leadership by being the only public and consistent critic of Sean O’Brien’s slavish devotion to President Donald Trump.
Teamsters Mobilize
Palmer may be the best-known critic to be banned from the TDU convention, but at least five members of Teamsters Mobilize (TM) have also been banned. TM is a small radical network of Teamster rank and filers, mostly but not entirely made up of UPS part-timers from across the country. In an online petition, TM laid out the situation:
Over the past month, five members of Teamsters Mobilize (Colleen, Jennifer, Jess, and Kat from the TM steering committee; and Chloe from the general membership) registered and paid in full for admittance at the 2025 Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention. As proclaimed on the TDU website, this convention is “open to Teamsters who want to work together to build our union’s power from the bottom up.”
Within days, Colleen, Jess, and Kat received emails notifying them that their registration payments had been refunded. No explanation or further message was provided in any of these three cases. Jennifer and Chloe both received personal emails from David Levin, the paid Staff Director of TDU, informing them that they would not be allowed to attend, on the false pretense that TM members were planning to “crash” the convention.
Chloe works a forklift in a warehouse in New York, having recently moved there from Chicago. I asked Chloe to tell me something about their history in the Teamsters. Chloe told me:
I’ve been working in warehouses for over 5 years now, and I’ve been a member of TDU since September 2024. I’m also a member of Teamsters Mobilize and have been since for roughly the same time period. Since I’ve been a TDU member, I’ve helped their efforts to get a reform slate elected in Local 731, I tried to regularly attend meetings when they occurred, and I participated in the 2024 TDU convention and the 2025 Chicagoland regional conference.
This sounds to me like someone who could be a valuable member of a Teamster rank and file reform organization. Yet, Chloe was banned from the TDU convention. I asked if the TDU explained why? Chloe said:
To the extent that they have even offered excuses for these bans, the reasons that TDU people give for these bans are extremely revealing. We are accused of heinous and unconscionable acts such as ‘talking to people about our ideas at the convention’ and ‘handing out leaflets that describe our point of view’. We are accused of trying to replicate the 2023 convention, where Teamsters Mobilize activists attended, discussed the issues, put forward resolutions, and generally participated as TDU members without the convention room bursting into flames. Basically we are accused of what appears to be the ultimate crime – treating TDU like a democratic organization.
Palmer on the other hand, received a lengthy, grievance laden explanation. In a letter to Palmer dated July 18, 2025, that denied his membership request, TDU steering committee co-chairs Antoine Andrews, Frank Halstead, Sean Orr, and Antonio Rosario, self-righteously told him :
For some time, you have denounced TDU and called on TDU to be replaced with a different organization. TDU is a democratic group and we embrace a wide range of opinions. There are TDU members who oppose positions adopted by TDU and who are critical of TDU leaders. Debate and differences of opinion are welcome in TDU.
So, I went searching for that offending interview that riled up these guys so much and found this interview with Palmer from Steve Zeltzer’s work week The Teamsters, TDU, Trump and the Upcoming Workers’ Struggles posted last year. When asked by Zeltzer what happened at the previous [2023] TDU convention when it failed to pass a resolution in support a ceasefire in Gaza and Sean O’Brien meeting with Donald Trump, Palmer replied:
It’s almost hard for me to believe that they still call themselves TDU because there is nothing democratic about what just transpired. Number one: they tried and succeeded in keeping a couple of the Teamsters Mobilize people who proposed the amendment or the resolution, by the way, it’s a resolution which you alluded to. A resolution you know is non-binding, it’s a resolution. If you’re a democratic organization put it up for a vote, don’t table it. Let it stand or fall on its own merits, and then move one. But, I think, you know, TDU looks a lot like the Teamsters now, they’re deciding who can come to their convention. They’re black-balling people. Telling them, they’re not welcome. And, now the cat’s got their tongue, they apparently can’t say anything bad about the current administration.
Zeltzer: So, What should people do, who are in TDU, demand?
Palmer: Demand that TDU find itself or tell them look I’m going to find another venue to make change in because TDU used to be a place you come and make change.
This sounds pretty reasonable to me. But, Palmer is right, the cat’s out of the bag. Talking to many of the banned people over the last few weeks, the prime motivation in their minds for the pruning of the convention’s attendees is to ensure that TDU easily endorses Sean O’Brien for a second term. O’Brien gained notoriety over the last two years as the most pro-Trump trade union leader of the largest unions in the United States. TDU’s endorsement of him in 2018 was an important step in his path to victory. Overnight, he went from a violent, threatening bully to a militant reformer because of TDU’s blessing.
A long decline
TDU has been in a long decline, but its 2018 endorsement of Sean O’Brien was for many longtime supporters a disastrous turning point for the once noble organization. After all, the Teamsters was a terrible union when TDU and its predecessor organization Teamsters for a Decent Contract (TDC) were formed in the mid-1970s. Jimmy Hoffa, its most famous or notorious leader depending on your point of view, was killed by his Mafia buddies in 1975. Many Teamster members lived in fear of violent retaliation for speaking up in union meetings or filing lawsuits. I know that from my own experience.
Living in New York in the mid-1980s, I worked at Yellow Freight in Maspeth, Queens. I was very much in work and politics, a casual Teamster at the time. I was a member of Teamsters Local 707 and my business agent was Nicolaus (“Nicky Black”) Grancio, a soldier in the Colombo crime family, who also doubled as vice-president of the local union. Veteran labor and Newsday reporter Ken Crowe captured Grancio quite well in his book Collision: How the rank and file took back the Teamsters:
Grancio cut a frightening figure, with his shaved, bullet-shaped head and reputation for violence. He had been the prime suspect in the 1986 murder of Bruno Bauer, a mechanic in a Queens trucking company, who had the temerity to complain about Local 707 to the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) and to U.S. Labor Department investigators.
News of Bauer’s murder spread quickly and soon afterwards it was announced that Grancio was going to visit the Yellow Freight barn, a huge building that took many minutes to cross if you walked at a fast pass. Early in the work day, one of two Italian-American brothers, who were much older than me—I was in my mid-twenties—came up to warn me. “Now, Joey. Nicky Grancio is visiting our dock today. They call him ‘Nicky Black,’ but you don’t call him that!” “No problem,” I said.
I write of all this because this was a very common experience, even for a casual Teamster like me, across the vast empire of the Teamsters during the worst days of the 1970s and 1980s. And, at least for a minority of members, TDU stood out for its integrity, honest reporting, fighting for democratic rights, and contract campaigns, and somehow surviving. Yet, even in those early days of my episodic interaction with TDU, when I was moving around the country and jumping from one Teamster to another, I thought something was off the mark about it.
Despite its undoubtedly heroic work, it seemed overly self-important to me at times. I knew that most Teamsters didn’t know who they were, and if they did, it was because of the well-orchestrated red-baiting by mobbed-up Teamsters officials that cut into their support. While there were prominent African-American TDU leaders, the group seemed stuck in a milieu of older, white, male truck drivers in the collapsing unionized freight industry, very similar to working class Reagan voters in the 1980s. I thought this had a conservatizing influence on it.
I was a friend and comrade to Pete Camarata, probably the best-known Teamster Rebel of the 1970s, without whom and with handful of others, first Teamsters for Decent Contract (TDC) founded in 1978, and later TDU, would have never gotten off the ground. He expressed to me many times during the 1980s and 1990s, that he thought TDU was going in a wrong direction. Though he wasn’t clear about what wanted done differently. Pete told me he clashed with Ken Paff repeatedly in the early 1980s. During those same years, Pete Camarata and Doug Allan, co-chairs of TDU, wrote the forward to Sam Friedman’s book Teamster Rank and File: Power, Bureaucracy, and Rebellion at Work and in a Union, where Pete and Allan wrote:
The 1981 IBT Convention proves that the officials of the union aren’t going to challenge the employers. They didn’t even care to address the issues at hand. This includes ‘reformers’ who have won office on a reform program across North America. The defense of the rank and file thus depends on our own actions.
Where they hinting at a deeper problems faced by TDU at the time? Possibly. I was always told that Friedman’s book was frowned upon by Paff.
Yet, Paff, who began his political life as a student radical around the Independent Socialist Club at UC Berkeley, was undoubtedly a talented and dedicated organizer, who played a key role in making TDU into a coherent organization. I remember the first time I went to a TDU event. It was a TDU dinner in the mid-1980s,where Paff was the key speaker that probably followed a day-long educational conference back in late 1984. I was working at UPS in Watertown, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where I was a member of Teamsters Local 25. Paff did a presentation on the state of the Teamsters, that focused on the deregulation of the trucking industry, and the Teamsters’ officialdom paralysis and corruption in the face of these historic and gut-wrenching changes.
When someone in the audience asked him how we can win and when companies can pick and just leave, Ken responded by saying that companies like UPS can’t service their customers in Boston or New York with distribution hubs in Mexico, Taiwan, or Alabama, they have to keep their building here. I thought Paff’s answer was quite smart and insightful. I never thought about it that way, but when I approached him afterwards to ask him a question, his mood turned dark and dismissive. I’ve lost track of how many other people have told me similar stories over the years.
For many Teamsters, how people view TDU depends very much on when they came into contact during the last five decades. Long gone are many of the Teamster rebels that gave it a vitality and living connections to the rank and file rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Pete Camarata, Bilal Ckaka, Sharon Cotrell, Steve Kindred, who played the key role in knitting together the original rank and file network that created TDC and TDU. Ken Crowe wrote in glowing terms about Kindred’s original cross-country tour, where visited nearly two dozen cities on a Greyhound bus ticket:
Kindred was on his way to his next stop, Dayton. The scenario was repeated—waiting time in the terminal, a meeting at a coffee shop, and onto a bus to the next city. There wasn’t time to go to people’s houses or money for the luxury of hotels. Kindred brought along a little pillow and a light blanket. He slept on the bus, shaved and washed in public restrooms, and ate most of his meals on the largess of the Teamsters he met along the way, with his peanuts and raisins as fallback provisions.
Many of the original Teamster Rebels also saw their activism as part of project to build a revolutionary socialist presence in the U.S. working class, especially those who were members or joined the International Socialists (I.S.). The roots of I.S. trade union strategy stretched back to William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Education League in the 1920s, the Trotskyists role in the Minneapolis Trucking strikes of 1934, the Workers’ Party opposition to the no-strike pledge during WWII. Stan Weir had a big influence on how the I.S. viewed its trade union work. There’s not a hint of this in IDU today.
A vote for O’Brien is a vote for Trump.
This “Wobbly spirit” of Kindred and other early Teamster Rebels is something to be admired and emulated by today’s young radicals. Anyone who may think that trading this older spirit of rank and file rebellion for a comfortable niche in the O’Brien’s teamsters is lost to the radical movement.
There are a small number of determined TDU veterans who are planning on attending the TDU convention with the hopes of denying Sean O’Brien an endorsement for reelection. Some of them signed the Open Letter to TDU Members earlier this month and hoped to put forward resolutions and amendments to right the ship they helped found and sacrificed to build for many years. As the signers of the Open Letter asked:
We must ask, how can any organization with the word “democratic” in their title endorse a union leader that has allied himself to a want-to-be dictator proving to be the most anti-worker president in history? In the first seven months of his second term, Trump has gone after unions with a vengeance, following the “Project 2025” playbook without comment and often with support from SOB [Sean O’Brien].
O’Brien’s has also openly courted far-right political figures, such as Sen. Josh Hawley and Vice-President J.D. Vance, and supporters of Israeli genocide in Gaza, such as Tucker Carlson and News Nation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon. While the convention is in Rosemont, IL, the whole Chicagoland region is being terrorized by ICE and other federal forces. As the delegates debate many issues, it is inescapable that Sean O’Brien is collaborating with the increasingly authoritarian regime of Donald Trump. Fascism is more than in the air, its troops are on the streets. A vote for O’Brien is a vote for Trump.
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