O’Brien sweeps to victory to succeed Hoffa as head of Teamsters union

The insurgent team of Sean O’Brien from Boston and Fred Zuckerman from Louisville has earned an overwhelming victory to become the next president and vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) for the next five years.

The O’Brien-Zuckerman (OZ) Teamsters United slate won about two-thirds of the votes cast in a race against Steve Vairma, who had the endorsement of current IBT president James P. “Jim” Hoffa. The 80-year-old Hoffa, son of the legendary labor leader who disappeared in 1975, has been Teamsters president since 1999. Hoffa backed the Vairma and Teamsters Power slate.

The final vote tally was 115,573, or 66.6 percent for O’Brien. Vairma collected 58,012 votes from the 1.4 million-member union. O’Brien swept all four U.S. geographic regions, although Vairma won in Canada.

O’Brien, 49, head of Teamsters Local 25, will take over in March to begin a five-year term. Zuckerman is head of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, home to the UPS air freight hub.

O’Brien is just the second leader of the 118-year-old Teamsters union who was elected as an outsider or without the backing of the current union president. The only other one was the late Ron Carey, who was succeeded by the younger Hoffa.

Teamsters, which once numbered more than a half million in the freight sector, now make up just about 5 percent of the total work force in trucking, mostly at companies affiliated with Yellow Corp. and ABF Freight.

The largest Teamsters employer is United Parcel Service in its small package and air freight divisions. The contract covering more than 300,000 UPS Teamsters, comes up in 2023.

Officials at the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the dissident wing of the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union, summed up the landslide for the O’Brien-Zuckerman “OZ ticket” in one word – turnout.

They believed the slate of candidates on the “OZ” ticket were better at engaging members—and at turning out voters. That could possibly spell bad news for union organizing targets such as Amazon and FedEx, both of which have been fiercely anti-union and so far successful in holding off union organizers.

“We’ve got to negotiate the strongest contracts possible so that we can take it to workers at Amazon and point to it and say this is the benefit you get of being in a union,” O’Brien told the New York Times.

But the “OZ” ticket seemed to be able to energize the Teamsters rank and file. In locals led by Teamsters United candidates, or the OZ team, overall voter turnout was higher. The average turnout among the 165,000 members in locals led by Vairma candidates was 13% of eligible voters. Average turnout among the 171,000 members in locals led by OZ candidates was 23%, or nearly twice as high as the Vairma candidates.

This helps explain the landslide win, TDU officials said. The Teamsters United leaders led by O’Brien and Zuckerman knew how to engage members and translate that enthusiasm into votes.

It also shows that, among those 337,000 Teamsters who know the candidates close-up in their own locals, the Teamsters United candidates got 91.0% of the vote, and the Teamster Power candidates got just 65.7% in their home locals.

So the OZ candidates’ home locals turned out in much bigger numbers and also gave them a much higher percentage vote. The Vairma-led locals only gained a winning margin 6,761 votes. The OZ-led locals racked up a winning margin of 36,857, just in their own locals.

It was a landslide because Vairma’s more-of-the-same message didn’t attract members. Whether the union has more success organizing large non-union freight interests than it had under Hoffa remains a big unknown.