Teamsters Leader’s Speech to Republicans Still Reverberates

Sean O’Brien delivered one of the most memorable addresses to the convention, calling out corporations and business groups as anti-worker. It’s divided union leaders.

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Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, spoke on the second night of the R.N.C. in Milwaukee.

Of the dozens of speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, none perhaps was as surprising — or as immediately divisive— as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s on the conclave’s first night.

Business groups recoiled. Many rank-and-file union members were furious. And within the labor movement’s leadership, Mr. O’Brien’s words — both soothing and challenging to the Republican Party — are still reverberating. Was the head of a union 1.3 million members strong actually flirting with former President Donald J. Trump, or was he surreptitiously sticking it to the party of Big Business?

Probably both.

“I, like others, wondered what he was doing,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a staunch Democrat, said in an interview Thursday, “but I listened to the speech, and I was impressed that he gave not only such a pro-worker speech, but at its foundation, he said these greedy corporations are hurting us, and you can’t have it both ways, Republican Party. If you want labor’s support, you can’t just pander at election time. You have to walk the walk and give workers a chance to thrive.”

That’s not how others in unions saw it.

“O’Brien wants kinder, gentler, more patriotic bosses, and anyone that thinks he’s preaching class war is a mark,” fired back C.M. Lewis, president of the Seven Mountains A.F.L.-C.I.O. in Central Pennsylvania, on social media. “He heaped praise on Trump, a silver spoon-fed caricature of the corporate elite — utterly clownish.”

In response to the criticism, Teamsters officials encouraged people to read the speech. In it, Mr. O’Brien began by extending a respectful hand to Mr. Trump, who stocked his Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board with anti-union lawyers and backed a series of court cases to weaken collective bargaining.

“In light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough S.O.B.,” the Teamsters leader said. He then praised other Republicans like Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is running for re-election this year against a Democrat, Lucas Kunce, who has most of the state’s unions behind him.

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