Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Teamsters Deliver the Goods 3

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Amber catches up with teamster Matt Maini. They discuss Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s (TDU) victory in the recent Teamsters leadership election, and what their win means for the direction of the 1.4 million member union in the near future. Listeners can help by donating to TDU and its sister organization TRF. You can also buy a super cool vintage "TDU: a Cause Worth Trucking For.... Rank & File Power" t-shirt online at https://tdustore.myshopify.com/collections/apparel/products/tdu-cause-worth-truckin-for-t-shirt

Howdy, folks. Amber here. Now, do you maybe remember an interview I did very recently with Teamster Matt Maney? Something about a world historic election coming up with Teamsters leadership, huge changing the guard, that kind of thing? Well, they had their election and new leadership will take the wheel of the Teamsters Union on March 22nd. Members elected Sean O'Brien, Fred Zuckerman, and the insurgent Teamsters United slate to lead the 1.2 million member union over the old guard slate, which was, of course, assembled by outgoing Teamster president and business unionist extraordinaire James Hoffa, Jr., little Jimmy. The Teamsters United victory was powered by years, and I mean years and years and years of grassroots

organizing, thanks in no small part to an organization you may have heard me mention on the show roughly like 8,000 times in my duration podcasting. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, TDU for short. Now, TDU is a nationwide network of rank and file Teamsters who want to take back the union and get the labor movement back in fighting shape. TDU and the Teamsters United campaign are all about going on the offense, and this is North America's most powerful union. They've got deep roots at every point in the supply chain. We're talking package delivery, trucking, warehousing, rails, and airlines. So in 17 months, the largest union contract in the country covering more than 300,000 workers at UPS will expire. TDU

and its UPS Teamsters United campaign is gearing up for a potential strike with the goal of reversing two-tier givebacks at UPS and igniting job actions and organizing across the supply chain including Amazon. So that could be the kind of strike that makes me go silent, that I can't, it's so, look, it would be a good thing. It would be a good thing if that kind of strike happened. I would like that to happen and for it to be executed very well and for the labor movement to get a little goose, you know, but it won't happen without a lot of grassroots organizing and pressure from below. Now, if you want to help, you can join me in donating to TDU and its sister organization, TRF, and you can also buy a

super cool vintage t-shirt, TDU, a cause worth trucking for, rank and file power, t-shirt online. So we will have the links to all of that in the show description and I hope that you will enjoy the return of Matt Maney who's going to give us a little debrief on the elections and what we have to look forward to. Good fights ahead. Thanks so much in advance for buying one of these cute t-shirts and donating. All right, without further ado. Hey there, Choppa listeners. Very special update today for all you Maniacs. We have Matt Maney again and here to talk about the Teamsters and their recent win, their election of TDU. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing?

Good and you, Amber. Thanks for having me back. Pretty good. Thanks for coming on. You're a favorite. I think for starting out, you guys won. TDU won the election. I wonder if you want to talk about that, sort of the strategy or strategy. Talk about both, if you feel like it. And you know, how you got to the fishline. Well, the strategy paid off. Boots on the ground, fighting for rank and file power and getting people energized and empowered and getting those ballots back and getting those ballots back for us was proven to get the job done. This was a huge victory for Teamsters for Democratic Union. You know, as they now have GEB seats, they have vice

president seats, they have a lot of seats. And that's a good thing for democracy within our union. And that's a good thing for the Teamsters going through, going into the future as democracy will be the utmost importance. And taking on corporations, well, it's back. Where Mr. O'Brien is going to have a long agenda of what he's going to be doing against the upcoming UPS agreement, the upcoming beverage agreements, construction building trades, all that is about to be taken in a new, transparent, more militant democratic process with this union. And that's exactly what the rank and file wanted. They wanted to be empowered and they wanted to be militarized and they wanted to fight back and stand up against corporate

America. Fantastic. So I guess if you could sort of refresh us on what the platform kind of was, it was going to be a more aggressive union or a more sort of maybe not aggressive, maybe we don't like to use those words or pretend that we don't like to use those words, exactly. But we're active union, not just clinging for what little has been left from the vestiges of labor battles long since past, but new fights, right? Right. I mean, the dynamics of UPS and the 330,000 rank of files that are there that overwhelmingly rejected their contract last time and yet got caught in a loophole of a

two-thirds majority, old rule, and then basically had the contract crammed down their throat. So now obviously we changed those rules in the delegates. We voted to change the teams to the Constitution. We did so. We lived up to that end of that deal. And we are now moving in the right direction and we now have won the election since then. And now the general president who has a very good relationship with TDU and has a good relationship with the GEDB and people that want to take boots on the ground and take on corporations, well, we're right here and we're ready to do it. And there's a long line of companies that we're willing to take on right now. Amazon being one of those companies, we have a general

president has announced a huge campaign strategy that he's going to have against Amazon and how we're going to go about doing that. And it's fantastic to see I've been a teamster, you know, 30 years and I've never seen anything like this. The only one that came close to this but still wasn't quite at this level was Ron Carey. And it's even better than those days. And I remember that. And those were wonderful days when Carey was general president. Well, I know TDU has been slowly building up its support and came so close to winning last year. So we were like, or last election. So I was like, this time they're going to get over the line. But it's been it's been a slow build. I will say it's interesting

the turnout. It wasn't a huge shift from previous years. But, you know, like every other election in America, voter turnout is kind of slowly drifting away. Does TDU have sort of a plan to sort of invigorate and, you know, get people more involved? And because ideally, right, everyone would would want to vote for all of these elections and be at least actively aware of the politics that are going on with the union. Right. I think the plan currently is basically to get people energized and get them involved and prove to them that you being a union member and being active within your union really pays off. And by showing them that this current administration is dedicated to every day doing

the job showing up being held accountable and earning their trust back because that was a big deal, right? A lot of the ranking file felt like their trust was violated by the, you know, the local union officials, which there's some truth to that. So, you know, that's a big deal. And 251 was a good example of that. When we took office, we basically earned the trust of the ranking file back to get more empowered, to get more energized and show them that we're here to serve them and we're here to work for them. So you've got a while before the next contract renegotiation. When is that, by the way? Each year, UPS expires August 1.

Right. So you're laying down a lot of track. What are you planning on doing between now and then? You know, what is TDU planning on doing between now and then to get prepared for this renegotiation? Well, we're going to do what we always do, right? We're going to reach out to the most active members who want to get involved, who want to help their union become a strong, powerful shop and try to energize and educate those members in the same process. That's where TDU is the most valuable, is the education process of things. So finding these members, getting them educated and getting them on the same page and understanding what

this fight is going to be all about. I think a good way of this is we're going to open up with the Cow Hall division, where their contract's up this year. So that will generate some real boots on the ground, getting people energized, building that network and leading up into the UPS agreement. Cow Hall, as you're well aware of, under the old administration was really neglected, got really a terrible deal. And, you know, we, the current incumbent, the current general president, Sean O'Brien, is very committed to fixing a lot of those blocks with Fred Zuckerman and TDU is as well. And there is a large amount of rank-and-file power within

that division that wants to get involved and energize. So that's a good starting point to build to bigger things. Yeah, that's great. So it's also a particularly weird time to be a teamster with supply chain things. You know, it seems like COVID is sort of like under control or whatever. I, you know, it's at least stabilizing in some way. But at the same time, I think the American Trucking Association said there's a historic high shortage of 80,000 drivers. What are the teams you're talking about with regards to that? What do you think about it? What's the internal debate, you know, within maybe your local or what have you heard? This is

crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. I've been a truck driver for many years, and I've never seen anything like this. There's a few big variables of why this is happening. One is that a lot of younger kids who are coming up out of school that go to trade school don't necessarily want to drive truck and work 60, 70 hours a week, pumping and lumping boxes. That's a big, big problem. Problem number two is the weedification of America, right? So there is a large amount of population that consumes marijuana on a regular basis because it's legal in a lot of states now. Unfortunately, the federal motor carrier doesn't allow that.

And so if you're a truck driver, you can't smoke weed. So that's been a very big hiccup. And I'm not really sure how we get around that. I personally believe they should allow marijuana as a controlled substance and let people drive truck, I mean, and just develop a more accurate test to decide what the impairment is. And I think that's where that lies. Now, hopefully there'll be more information coming in the upcoming year. But again, truck driver, tough job, right? You're outside all day. You're alone. You work long hours. It's not easy to get these people to understand that, yeah, you can make a lot of money doing this and you can live very well. But a lot of them just don't, you know, they're not interested

in that type of stuff right now. So the plan is to go to states, like we did at Local 251 and like other locals have done and get these trade programs to pay into the local unions and help train people that are seeking employment that want good, prevailing wage jobs and train them through state funding and then put them out onto the road and see if we could do that. Yeah, it seems like there's going to have to be some kind of, you know, push and pull with the employers because again, it is a good job. It's getting more and more grueling and they're sort of trying to chisel away benefits, you know, expanding hours, that kind of thing. But also America over the last two years has become even more dependent on

trucking as if that was possible. I mean, it's a huge country and we don't make a lot of stuff domestically anyway. So, you know, there's something's got to give at some point, like we need our goodies. Yeah, no, something's got to give and they need to figure that out. And you hit it on the head employers, employers, employers and a lot of employers are not willing, UPS being one of them, you know, they don't want to talk about conditions. They think, well, you know, working somebody 70 hours a week is okay. No, it's not okay. Most people don't want to do that. They want to go home and within a 10 hour span and that's their day.

They don't want to work 14, you know, so it starts with employers, it starts with some other law changes too to understand that the times are changing and a combination of everything together also talking about bringing workers wages up and making it even more money because we need these jobs. If you don't have these people delivering these goods from the ports, now you know in California, look at those ports they destroyed. We don't have enough truck drivers to move the goods to and from the rail systems are inundated with over goods. It's just it's a never ending cycle that we can't seem to catch now because we don't have enough assets for the seats.

Last time we talked, you know, build back better was still on the on the docket. People were very boy oh boy, I hope I hope we get some of this. Obviously, none of us were too optimistic that we get like a great deal for America's workers. But Biden has done some things. I was wondering if you want to sort of like catch us up and sort of give us your your evaluate grade Biden for us. If you're in charge, you get to say how he's doing and why. I will say that Joe Biden has been very pro union and pro. He's probably the first president in our history or our lifetime that has used the word Union in fair wages as a as a opening

statement from a president. I think he's done well with the Bush Lewis act, which was huge, which Lewis in case anybody's listening was a TDU man. And he was a man that had his pension sent and I owe you to him. He fought and basically died in the process of fighting the same pensions that that happened because of Joe Biden and because of the Democrats. They made that happen. And there are a lot of families in this country teams to families included that are grateful for that. There is a lot more work to be done, though. The pro act needs to happen. Workers need more of advice. I am very impressed with what Joe Biden did with the NLRB and the way the

direction he's taking the NLRB now, which is very pro worker, very pro union. It has different penalties. It has a lot more teeth to the NLRB now than they ever had. And don't forget we had an NLRB that was run by corporate America. That's basically what Trump did to our NLRB. So he is overall I give him a B plus right now. I think there's room to grow. I think he's surrounded himself with some very pro union people. Marty Walsh being one of them. Marty's a great guy. He comes from the building trades. He knows what it is to be a rank and file or work his way up. So, you know, as long as Joe keeps doing those things, America's

going to American workers are going to be in a better place than they were under the orange clown, as I refer to them. So I mean, obviously, like labor's relationship to electoral politics is, you know, widely varied across industry, across union and even across like locals within the same union. And teachers are very famously like idiosyncratic. They vote all over the place. Do you see much interest with TDU now sort of getting an electoral focus to, I mean, obviously, contract negotiations probably top priority. But do you see a shift in, you know, the team's sort of relationship to electoral politics? I mean, obviously, it's not the old days where you'd have like

some speech and send someone out and say, all right, we're all right, voted for this guy. But, you know, what's, what is there going to be a shift in the relationship? There kind of wasn't much one beforehand. I mean, it was people just weren't, people just aren't very engaged with their union. So it's, you know, for better or worse, there's not a lot of sort of like centralized decision making on that. I absolutely think that both the IBT and TDU are going to be more focused on politics as a whole. Because we learned of anything from 2016 on, we learned that, you know, elections have consequences, right? And we know that if we don't protect our interests at workers,

now that could be a Republican or a Democrat, by the way, it's not necessarily that we're stouched one side. It's whoever represents the interest of a worker and has legitimately voted that way for workers, we will represent and get behind. And I think there is a bigger role in that now, because of Trumpism, we really learn that we are responsible as unions, locals, and union, to educate our members on the importance of what elections are, what's the process, why we're voting for this person, protect your interests, you know, the rich have no problem going to the ballot box and voting for their interests. The workers have to do the same. And that's where we come in. We had a long history of that prior to 1980s

or so, and that's when the kind of we've lost touch of that, but we need to get back to that. And yes, the general president and TDU are very committed to doing that exactly that. Myself, my local included, 251, we have an election committee that meets the candidates, we come in, we talk with them, we look at their voting past, what they believe in labor, we make them sign pledge codges to us that we say that they are pro worker, that they'll stand on these issues with us, you know, so we do all that now. And it's important. It's absolutely important. And if we don't do that, we won't survive. So the fights ahead, obviously, there's a lot of local stuff going on on the ground.

Here in California, there's like, I think, 400, the local 400 Huntington Beach, it's like, they're sanitation workers. They've been on strike for a very long time, because they have incredibly long, arduous conditions. And it's, people don't get this like, sanitation is a really unsafe job, because you're getting off and on a truck all the time, and have the compactor and bottles going to explode in your face. There are all these, like little locals, you know, with their own sort of battles going on. And you know, they're obviously like, yes, is the big boy. But like, what, I mean, is there kind of a more of a unification that you're going for here? Obviously, you have the most active locals, but, you know,

it's a huge country, and a huge union. And some of their teamsters in Canada, like, like, you know, what's the, what's the sort of idea going forward for having kind of a unified teamsters? Absolutely. If anything, General President O'Brien is all about unification of the whole entire union, and quite often reminds the union that not just because we have 330,000 members at UPS, there are other members elsewhere, white paper agreements, as we refer to on local contracts, that need our support, the beverage division being one of them, right? The beverage division has been, has been slaughtered in the last, you know, 10 years or so has really

taken a beating. And there's a lot of white paper contracts with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and your local distributorship. We, we are definitely committed to getting boots on the ground and giving resources to each of those locals that need those resources to take on those fights. We know being from local 251, prior to Sean O'Brien being elected, we had no support. We've been able to strike at Johnson Brothers now for 10 months. You know, brewery division, no response prior to that. We know with Sean coming in, there is going to be a response because we saw how we handled the Joint Council 10 in New England and how he always had backup support and gave a profit assistance and ate all the locals in New England. That same concept

that you saw in New England will be applied to the whole entire country where, hey, you got a battle going on in Seattle, local 174 with the ready mixed drivers right now. We're sending support. What does this local need to win this fight? How do we keep this contract to an area standard or raise that standard for these guys? So it's definitely a top priority. We want to get all trades and all divisions of this union unified on the same page, working together and empowering them the whole process so that they understand that the union is only as good as they are. So again, it can be done. He's going to do it. I've seen him. I know how he is. He's a militant. He's a work, he's got, he's a workhorse. He won't

back down. And I'm just really, really confident, more confident than I've ever been in all my years as a team up until today. This, this, this is really a game changer for the union. It's a game changer for workers in general, because if the teams, the mighty teams, we are that, right? The mighty teams to succeed, all the unions succeed. And that's the other bridge that we have to reestablish, like having relationships with the building trades again, having a relationship with the AFL-CIL, yet reaching out to unions that we maybe haven't been doing so for whatever reason, but we need, we're all part of that community and we're all in this fight together. And he's definitely committed to that.

That's fantastic. I mean, on that note, I don't know how you can, how you can top that as a closer. So, I mean, we're going to be keeping an eye on the teamsters and sort of keeping an eye on, on, on, I guess, like UPS and what, what they're doing. Obviously, a lot of attention is going towards Amazon right now. That's on the horizon. We should talk more about that another time. But right now, I just have to say, you know, congratulations. I, I am incredibly excited about this win. I do think this is, this is the beginning of something, you know, something old and something new. Right. Yeah, definitely is.

And we need to get back to it. PDU is what, PDU is what made this possible for me in my life. So, I want to stress that to your listeners that PDU is a, is a symbol of democracy. It's a symbol of education and it hasn't, and the general president understands that those people who use PDU to educate themselves are valuable resources to this IBT union. And I can't, I can't thank PDU enough for my life, but it's done for me. And I hope that if you're not a PDU member, you join PDU because PDU changed my life. Right. And our, our lovely podcast listeners can make a donation to PDU. We will have a

link for that and the episode description. And we will be absolutely sure to keep you abreast of, of, of Teamster news. It's, it's all happening, folks. Thank you so much, Matt Mayney. Thanks, Amber. Stay warm. Thank you. You too. Bye.