Teamsters President Sean O’Brien slams Kamala Harris’s "I’ll win with or without you" snub, calling her dismissive of labor after she ignored 13/16 questions while Democrats like Schumer (who took a $550K super PAC donation) attack unions. He contrasts Trump’s early engagement with the DNC’s exclusion, blames tech giants for vetoing autonomous-vehicle job protections, and vows to unionize Amazon—accusing Bezos of exploiting drivers via loopholes while Schumer’s daughter lobbies for the company. Citing Hoffa’s unsolved disappearance as a media overplay, O’Brien ties labor’s decline to automation, predatory lending (22% interest rates), and a political class prioritizing profits over working-class wages, pensions, and AI regulation. His old-school union values clash with modern convenience, framing the fight as survival against corporate greed and bipartisan neglect. [Automatically generated summary]
I've sat and watched you in the stands at the RNC, and I don't think I've ever seen anybody give a speech at a convention, a very well-received speech, without endorsing the candidate.
Well, I think Trump and I have a good relationship.
We've got a mutual respect for each other.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think he knew the struggles that we had with our membership.
We've got 1.3 million members, so, you know, that membership is made up of Republican, Democrats, and independents.
And, you know, we knew all along where our membership was trending, and we had to do a lot of polling and everything else.
And we had a lot of communication during the campaign leading up to the RNC. So I think he knew the spot that we were in if we just came out and did a straight endorsement.
But we really couldn't do that because our process, we interviewed every single candidate from the people that entered the race early to the last two standing, which was Trump and Harris.
And we interviewed them in a roundtable with rank-and-file members in our general executive board.
And we provided each candidate with 16 of the same questions.
And, you know, Trump was, you know, like all of them, they weren't strong on some of our issues.
And no fault of their own, because I don't think...
Deep down, they understood what our actual issues are.
But at the end of the day, I think he knew that by us speaking at the RNC, representing the Teamsters Union, that he was actually showing America, the American workers, that he was for labor.
He was for working people.
And my message was clear.
You were there.
I saw you standing up with him.
And my message...
Didn't endorse the Republicans, Democrats, or Independents.
It was clearly about what the American worker needs from the administration.
So, he actually said, say whatever the fuck you want to say.
That's exactly what he said.
And when we went there, it was great.
It was a home run.
And I think part of the thought process from the Republican side was, look, if we get the general president of the biggest, strongest union in the country, that's going to signal to every working person how committed the Republican Party is, the opportunity the Republican Party has to prove that they want to represent American workers.
But conversely, you know, we asked to go to the DNC at the same time.
And you know, and we know that if we ever submitted that speech to the DNC... They would have shit a brick.
They would have been horrified.
Because the people that we were talking about, the corporate elitists and everybody else, those are the people that the Democrats have fallen in love with.
Those are the people I serve instead of the middle class the way it used to be 50 years ago.
So we know that we would have got tremendous pushback.
That's even a bigger story than speaking at the RNC, is not getting invited to the DNC. Yeah, well, that was the vindictive side of the Democratic Party.
And you know I'm a Democrat, but I'm going to call balls and strikes.
They haven't done shit for us.
And when we didn't get invited, it's a funny story because...
Two weeks prior to us speaking at the RNC, we didn't hide from the fact that we were going to speak there.
Listen, I tell everybody all the time, if I get a venue to highlight how valuable our organization is, the Team System Union, to the entire country, I will take any and all venues to do that.
So, two weeks prior to that, Chuck Schumer asked me to meet with him.
And I meet with him.
And he wants $550,000 for the super PAC for the Senate races.
No problem.
And I said, look, I'm speaking at the RNC. He's like, oh, great job.
You know, that's good.
You should represent your members.
Day after I give that speech at the RNC, he gets on Twitter and starts talking shit about my speech.
Remember who fixed your pensions?
And I'm like, this guy's a fucking joke.
Like, why would you do this?
Two weeks prior, you're telling me when you're taking a $550,000 super PAC check.
That's great.
It's great for your members.
That's good.
And then you want to get on Twitter like a tough guy and throw shit out there.
When he said, you know, we fix your pensions, that gave me an opportunity to say, you're the same guy in the same party that 40 years ago embraced, endorsed, and signed off on deregulation in the trucking industry, which we lost 400,000 jobs in 1980. Ted Kennedy, Put the bill forward.
Joe Biden signed off on it as a senator or as a representative.
I'm going to name the things you haven't done for us.
When our members were on strike at the rail, you didn't support us.
You didn't put a letter of support in there.
When we were fighting with UPS in the middle of the street, you wouldn't sign off on a support letter.
When we took on Amazon, which we're taking on now, you wouldn't support our efforts on Amazon.
I said, you want me to keep going?
Because you can tell me what you've done, the one thing you've done for me and my union and my members, but I'm going to tell you all the things you haven't done for us.
And then, you know, he's like, well, I really want this relationship.
I'm like, we're done.
We're done.
And that was it.
He left.
And then, I'm working out at the building on election day.
This is great.
And look, I'm not a person that says, I told you so, or whatever the case is.
He calls, my phone rings.
There's only two people that call me from a private line.
Sometimes it's a commander-in-chief and someone else.
So, phone rings and I answer it.
And it's Chuck Schumer.
And, like, dejected tone.
It was, you know, hi, Sean.
I'm like, hey, how you doing?
He goes, good, Chuck Schumer.
I'm like, okay, what do you want?
He's like, I just want to thank you for supporting, you know, the super pack.
I go, that was like four months ago.
And he says, oh, yeah, I just want to thank you.
And I'm like, okay, great.
It was like a dejected tone.
And I was like, I got off the stand master, and I'm like, this is crazy.
And look, the one thing that we do, and this is a gauge that I pride our leadership on, we don't sit in our office and research all these polls, research.
The opinions that matter to me are the 1.3 million members that we represent.
My general secretary and treasurer and myself are out every single day in workplaces, talking to members, asking them their opinions, find out exactly what their struggles are in the workplace.
And then you get always into politics, you know, this presidential election.
In just the one-on-one conversations, we're in three different states three times a week and multiple industries that we represent.
And when you're talking to people, we weren't just talking to people in blue states.
We were talking to people in red states all over the country.
And we knew just from the rhetoric out there from our members that they weren't voting Democrat.
And that's when we started designing this.
You know, real extensive programming that included the rank and file members.
But I wonder, I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was, you know, well, for a lot of reasons, to get your political analysis, but also just that, the life that you grew up in, I just wonder if that still exists.
It just seems so thoroughly American, thoroughly New England.
But, you know, I have my friends that went to school.
And, you know, they graduated, early 90s, chased the dot-com era.
Yeah.
You know, they chased a lot of money, you know, some of them were in, you know, insurance, whatever, but they were switching jobs every four or five years.
There was no continuity, and they may have made a little bit more money.
I had a four-year head start on a lot of these people, and I bought houses and everything else, but, you know, they were always switching jobs, and I remember an old-timer saying to me, stay with the union.
Stay the course.
It's not a marathon.
It's not a sprint.
It's a marathon.
And today, like the same friends, you know, you take a snapshot of their lives.
They got the big houses, two SUVs, but they don't have pensions.
My father's from Boston, and was a totally legitimate or semi-legitimate person, great man.
But when they caught Whitey Bulger, I think in Santa Monica in an apartment, my father, who was like 78 by this point, called me on the phone and said, fuck, they caught him.
I was like, gee, Pop, you're really rooting for Whitey Bulger?
No, I think the modern world's difficult to navigate through, but like anything else, being brought up the way we were brought up with the values we learned growing up in the industries that we worked in, I think it's more valuable today to have that thought process of old-school ways with modern...
Modern society because everybody falls in love with anything that's convenient that doesn't take a lot of effort, if that makes sense.
Like once, you know, for a Sunday we could be hoisting air-conditioned units by helicopter onto a building in Boston, and then the next day we're moving a piece of art.
With a crane over the Museum of Fine Arts.
And the next day, I might be hauling an oversized crane somewhere.
So every day was different.
You had to use your mind.
You had to use your common sense.
And it was an apprenticeship program I went through.
And I'm still on the seniority list today.
We hold our seniority.
So I haven't been there in 26 years.
But before I retire, I'm going to clock in for a week just to get my six weeks of vacation.
I mean, the Boston that you grew up in, which I remember vividly, you know, so well, was really, it was an Irish city.
I mean, no one would say it, but it's just a fact.
It was like it was run by the Irish and had been since like the 1850s when they came in and took it over from the Yankees because they were better organizers and more intense.
And politics was dominated by it.
Culture and a low-key working-class Boston was Irish.
Yeah, I mean, you look at, you know, take a snapshot of Boston politics 10 years ago and go back even further, like 30 years, and see where we're at right now.
No, Ray Flynn, Tom Menino, Marty Walsh probably couldn't get elected today.
No way, I agree.
So, yeah, it's totally, totally different.
The priorities seem to have changed, and I think what changed in Boston, which is part of the problem that you see, is that no one from Boston that grew up in Boston, or in the Boston area, like Medford, where I'm from, Everett.
Now, if you go down the seaport, South Boston, I mean, you go down the seaport and, look, development's great for an area.
But it's going to be developed with the intent that people that are from there don't get forced out.
They can afford to live there.
The gentrification that Boston has seen over the last 10 years is crazy.
If you went to South Boston 25 years ago, where I used to report to work every day in South Boston, and you took a snapshot of the waterfront, there was nothing down there.
Matter of fact, 1995 or 96, I was working rank and fire.
We were building a crane.
Because they were getting ready to build a hotel right in the seaport, which wasn't the seaport.
It wasn't that we know it as.
And I remember saying, why are they putting a hotel here?
And everybody should be able to have their own opinions on whatever those issues are.
I mean, I think you and I probably have the same opinions on a lot of the social issues.
But from what we do every day, As representing working people and people in general, is we want to make certain that people have the economic resources to buy a modest home, to afford tuition so their kids can go to school, and to plan for a very modest retirement that's not compromised by debt.
And unfortunately, the Boston politics, or the Massachusetts politics, Have taken a road down this social justice warrior path where we're not so concerned with the people on Main Street.
We want to make sure that we're fighting these social justice issues that do not put food on the table, do not keep gas prices normal, do not compromise people when they go into the grocery store.
So lots has changed, I think, as a result of this election.
And look, this election was a perfect example of it.
The Democrats, and again, I'm a Democrat, think about their whole narrative through this election.
It was all social issues.
Our members, who I know intimately, and look, some of them don't agree with me, some of them don't agree with our policies, and that's the beauty of living in America.
You can have disagreements, you can have difference of opinions, but by talking to our members, we knew the concerns were...
The prices at the gas pumps, the prices at the grocery stores, and the ability to afford a home and maintain and keep that home.
And, you know, the Democratic Party, and I've been very critical of them, and I'm going to continue to be very critical of them because I think it's important that they listen for once.
When I have a conversation with you and I don't agree with you, my goal is to not get you to agree with me, but I want you to see that...
Because I have a difference of opinion that it's not going to destroy a relationship and there's going to be many issues that you and I may be able to embrace together and maybe make some change.
Right?
This party, once you go against them, they get so vindictive.
The party, the Democrats now are acting the way that they used to accuse the Republicans 20 and 30 years ago.
So you're trying to, the Democrats are trying to quote us to endorse Joe Biden in January, right?
And Joe Biden has been a good president for us, Labor.
Has he done everything we wanted?
No, absolutely not.
Again, you get into, we fixed your pension.
Great, thank you.
Your first order of business, you shut down oil drilling, you shut down pipelines.
I got 7,000 members that lost their jobs immediately, the keystone, right?
So, you know, I started pointing out some of that stuff to them, which I was quiet about in the beginning.
You know, you're out there jockeying for our support.
And they want us to endorse Biden in January.
All of Labor did.
I'm like, no, we're not doing that.
We've got to talk to our members.
We're going to make sure where our members are at.
So we go through this whole winter getting pressure from, you know, people in the Democratic Party.
We stayed the course.
No, we're not.
We want to interview the candidates, which we've never done before.
And we asked every single candidate in January or December.
To come in and meet with us, the first person to respond was Donald Trump.
I'll be in there, definitely, without a doubt.
And all these other candidates, RFK right away, Asa Hutchinson, Cornel West, all of them, they came right in.
Same format, same questioning like we talked about earlier.
And the struggle was getting Biden in here.
He didn't like the fact that Trump committed early, or the Democrats didn't like that he committed early.
So, long story short, we go through this whole...
And we have Biden in there and, you know, you could just clearly tell he was, you know, not the man he was.
And it was kind of sad, you know, because it's sad because you look at it and I think generally, you know, a nice older man, a nice older gentleman, right?
And what they were doing to him, the Democratic Party, it would kind of look like elderly abuse to me.
Yeah, so we give 16 questions two weeks in advance, the same 16 questions to each candidate.
So, you know, RFK answered all 16 questions.
Probably most of them didn't answer them how we would like them to answer them, but they answered them.
Joe Biden came in and he answered five of them.
Donald Trump answered all 16. And then when Biden drops out of the race, but prior to Biden dropping out of the race, he's in the race.
Around June or May, one of my vice presidents, a woman named Joan Corey out of my local, she sits on our general executive board, was at an event with Vice President Harris.
And, you know, they're going through the line to get the picture and Joan introduces herself to...
Vice President Harris says, I'm Joan Corey.
I'm on the general executive board for the Teamsters.
After we were putting pressure on her, basically, because I was doing interviews all over the place saying, we haven't got invited to the DNC. They haven't accepted our invitation for her to come to a roundtable, so she comes to the roundtable.
Same format, same questions.
Rank and file members are asking her questions, just like they asked every other candidate.
And they were trying to negotiate with us.
She only wants to answer three questions.
We're like, there's 16 questions here.
So she answers three of them.
And on the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me, this will be the last question.
And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time that it was going to end.
Someone this arrogant, forget anything else, but you put your finger in someone's face at an Emily's List event once you find out what the team says, and you say, you better get on board or else.
That's a problem.
And then you come before us, you don't answer the question, you want to dictate what you're going to answer, and then you leave 20 minutes before it's over.
And the one difference between all the candidates that came was that at the conclusion of all these roundtables, we had media set up.
So after the conclusion of meeting with Trump, I did a press conference down in the lobby of my building.
Well, Donald Trump did a...
Did a press conference down in the lobby of my building after he spoke.
The same offer was extended to both President Biden and Vice President Harris, and they refused.
So you're meeting with the biggest labor organization that you want, and you've got an opportunity for media to question you about how you felt the media, how you felt the media went, and what you wanted to achieve, and you don't want to speak to the media?
That's a problem.
But Trump, to his credit, in our building, in our foyer, Had a press conference.
They don't realize that, and I've said this numerous times, when I'm talking to a member, whoever that member may be, regardless of race, religion, color, creed, I know that they give me the opportunity to represent them, and they employ me.
And, you know, what we've been saying for a year, now everybody's embraced and saying, well, the Democratic Party needs a reset.
Well, where were you nine months ago?
Where were you two years ago?
If you were really passionate about putting up a candidate that could actually represent Democrats like they did, or represent the party, why weren't you developing a plan two and a half years ago?
Because you thought, you just had it in the bag, you thought people were going to do what you tell them to do.
So through this whole year, let's say, right, the Republicans, and we've worked with a lot of great Republicans in the Senate.
Josh Hawley's been great with us.
J.D. J.D. Vance has been great with us.
You know, Roger Marshall has been great.
And, you know, I'll give you Josh Hawley, for instance.
Josh Hawley was, you know, we met with him.
We had a conversation.
Didn't know him.
Had a conversation with him early on.
And we were telling him, look, one of our biggest issues is national right to work.
And we explained to him why the right to work is not good for this country, why it's not good for his constituency.
And soon after that meeting, he came out with a statement on X saying, I met with the Teamsters Union, you know, I'm supportive of working people, and, you know, they're basically educated.
We've talked about right to work, and I don't support national right to work.
And then we had a strike with a company in his state, Graybar.
He went out and walked the picket line, and that strike was settled the next day.
Now, I'm not saying because he walked the picket line, but he demonstrated that that's what he's willing to do because his constituency works there.
And, you know, he's been great on our issues, you know?
And I think the Republicans have a great opportunity right now to show working people that what they were saying during the election is going to hold true.
And I think Trump proved early on when he actually listened to us and when we lobbied for Larry Chavez de Reimer to be the Labor Secretary.
Now, you know, I don't think it was a popular decision from a lot of his donors that supported him, but, you know, I went down and I had a frank conversation I'm like, look, this is important to us.
If you truly want to show that you're going to, you know, embrace working people and work hard on their behalf, this is an early indicator that you're willing to do this.
And he did it.
So, you know, people that are saying Trump's anti-labor, he's anti-worker, I mean, look, he started off on a great footing.
Here's one—okay, so obviously the Republican Party is in the middle of this total change.
It saw itself as the party of big business.
It's clearly not.
Its voters aren't, and its donors aren't increasingly.
But I think there are a lot of Republicans, especially in the Senate, like Mitch McConnell, who just have not—well, Mitch McConnell is a really bad person, but— So he's a specific case.
But there are, like, decent people who just haven't sort of made the mental change that they're not the party that they thought they were.
Because there's been such a line drawn in the sand where if you were on one side or the other, especially in our world, Labor, if you're a Democrat, you shouldn't be talking to the Republicans.
A lot of these CEOs at these banks, there's such a disparity between the people that are their customers and what the banks are making.
There should be a platform to regulate these banks and make certain that everybody is playing, have a level playing field, like these credit card companies.
And that what we do as a labor organization, we're not being treated fairly like Amazon or anybody else.
When our members are not being treated fairly, what do we do?
We withhold our labor.
Well, imagine if we, to your point earlier, withheld our payments as a country to these credit card companies and these banks that obviously support these credit cards.
Well, AI is going to have an effect on everything.
I mean, it needs to be regulated.
It needs to not be a weapon against working people.
Technologies, you know, come in fast and fair, especially in many of the industries that we represent.
But again, these are conversations that need to be had before AI is implemented and or dispersed into the workplace.
There's a lot of jobs that can be created as a result of technology, as a result of implementation of AI.
And again, it's, you know, people drawing a line in the sand, not want to have these conversations happening.
The general public or the general perception of the world is they want convenience, they want less labor, but it's not good for the country.
It's not good for working people.
And automation is going to be just as Debilitating to working people, then it's just like AI. And what we've done is we've negotiated contracts where automation has to be negotiated in the industries we work.
If they're going to make a technological change or they're going to automate something, they've got to maintain the job levels and create jobs moving forward as a result of this technology.
You take grocery warehouses where they're having robots pick orders.
Well, we've been able to negotiate contracts where we create jobs.
We maintain the robots.
We program the robots.
We fix the robots.
We build the robots in some of these cases.
So there's always opportunity.
United Postal Service, 340,000 members.
Technology plays a big role in the forwarding of packages and envelopes.
And obviously, it's efficient, but there are jobs created as a result of it.
And that's what the beauty about being in a union is.
But I think people underestimate how technology is going to destroy this country if we don't regulate it, if we don't get in front of it, if we don't create jobs as a result of it.
I mean, we're dummying down this society so much.
You've got college students not doing research papers.
They're using AI. How is that good?
How is that good for your mind?
Right?
People out there, like you mentioned, your union, SAG, screenwriters, you know, they're going to be out of jobs if AI comes in.
So, I mean, we've got to take a hard look at where AI will be valuable to this country and where it will be detrimental.
And, you know, the state of California is betting everything in its budget on AI. He's a ridiculous person.
But why shouldn't, if there's, like, electricity, Or any emergent technology.
Electricity shows up 100 years ago.
It's fair to ask.
Clearly it provides light and powers machines, but is there a downside?
I don't know.
For any technology, nuclear technology, and AI is as transformative as any technology, so why is there no conversation about harnessing it for good rather than evil?
We always made sure that those jobs are protected.
And that was technology back then, right?
Gavin Newsom in California should be the poster child for bad behavior when it comes to protecting against AI and technology.
He's the same guy that working people through the recall election saved him, right?
But he's the same guy that when you work a bipartisan bill...
To protect against technology, AI, and also mandate autonomous vehicles to have a human operator, which is bipartisan, gets on his desk, first order of business, is he vetoes it.
Because he's looking for his next best opportunity with the captors he fell in love with, technology, tech companies, Google, Uber, whatever else, Lyft, all those companies he's bought and paid for.
He doesn't care about how that affects people's jobs.
He doesn't care about how it affects the community.
And it was over wages, two issues, wages and automation, which is AI. And they used the ports in China to demonstrate how efficient it is by using robots and artificial intelligence.
The one good thing was that President Trump met with the longshoremen because they've got a cooling off period until January 15th.
And then they'll go back into negotiations to negotiate the AI and the automation, which I think they're going to be successful in maintaining their jobs.
But President Trump came out and said, I've been studying automation.
I've been studying AI for a long time.
I don't believe anybody should be losing their jobs over that.
So that's encouraging.
So I think to your point, I haven't had a conversation with that man.
I'd love to.
Just to express how important it is to have conversations with people that actually perform jobs that could be replaced by technology or AI. Because that may give a different perspective where we can collaborate and actually create more jobs as a result of it.
Maybe the biggest lie about abortion is that it's just not a big deal.
That's not true.
And studies show it.
A year after having an abortion, women overall had a 50% higher chance of needing psychiatric treatment and an 87% higher likelihood of personality and behavioral disorders.
That's not health care.
It's a tragedy.
Preborn's network clinics are different.
When women choose life, Preborn commits to treating them, body, mind, and soul, as well as the future baby.
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Preborn wants to sponsor 22,000 of those by year's end.
He also owns the most, personally owns, not the company, he personally owns the most liberal newspaper in the United States, most left-wing, for-the-people newspaper.
So I'm a little surprised to learn that he's not welcoming you guys.
So, joint employer is, he hires third parties to move his freight, right?
Deliver the packages.
So you get a company like UPS. UPS has all direct employees.
Drivers, loaders, sorters, part-timers, whatever it is, they're all direct employees.
They're W-2 employees.
Bezos, inside workers, Amazon inside workers, which are going to be our members shortly, are direct employees.
They make far less than our members of UPS. But the delivery drivers are working for a third party.
A third party that has to follow the policies and procedures of Amazon.
Has to buy their vehicles from Amazon.
We actually got a decision in California that stated they actually are the employer of these third-party leasing arrangements.
So we've made a demand nationally to...
And we've got 22 locations that have organized under this model a demand for bargaining.
And he's refused to do it.
And so we've given an ultimatum that...
If he didn't respond by December 15th, that we would take appropriate action.
Now, when that happens, that's up to him.
So, yeah, we're going to get him.
We're going to get him.
And he's not just a threat to the parcel industry.
He's a threat to every working job in this country.
I mean, they've got grocery warehouses.
And look, he should embrace sitting down and negotiate.
Think about what he does every day.
If you don't...
Concede to his demands for him to carry a product and sell them.
What does he do?
He blackballs you, right?
He basically strikes good companies from distributing their products if they don't agree to his low terms and costs.
Well, he should be savvy enough to say that, well, I have an obligation to negotiate with the Teamsters because I negotiate every single day with these people when I don't get what I want.
I strike them, right?
Basically, he strikes them, doesn't allow them in his system.
And he's trying to do the same over here by not allowing us in his system.
So what's going to happen to him at some point?
He's going to get struck.
And, you know, sometimes he's a $2 trillion value of Amazon or him or whoever, but he doesn't really want to reward the people that have made him truly a success.
Like, well, we want to be out there for the Amazon workers, and we want to help them organize.
All this rhetoric, you know, Chuck Schumer's of the world, wouldn't sign on to a letter, and then later find out his daughter works for Amazon as a lobbyist.
We've put together a program that's going to be a four- to five-year program, but every single day we are building momentum, we're building worker power, and he has to understand that he's not dealing with an organization that's going to go away.
We might not have the money that he has, but we definitely have one thing.
We've got the workers on our side, and we've got intestinal fortitude, encouraging conviction to take on the fight.
The part-timers I know that I've talked to, especially in the New York area, they're all in subsidized housing.
Some of them are in shelters.
Some of them are on the state health plans.
And people don't realize when they hit that send button, they're actually paying double for the services because they're actually paying for social services.
Where an organization like mine would demand, like we do with UPS, like we do with DHL, like we do with every other employer, that they not only pay a respectful wage, but they also give them free health care.
They give them a retirement.
They give them a career path to a retirement.
And people that hit that send button don't realize that not only are they paying for the delivery and the product, they're also paying for Jeff Bezos' white-collar crime syndicate of tax evasion and evading his obligation.
And this is where the Teamsters, and I've spent two and a half years highlighting how valuable we are to this country.
And I mean it with all sincerity.
Pandemic was probably the worst thing that we've witnessed in a long time, right?
Where there was so much uncertainty.
But the one thing that was certain, whether you were delivering packages or sorting and loading packages on a truck, whether you were in a grocery warehouse, whether you were working for a healthcare company, our members went out every single day providing goods and services to this country with total disregard for their safety, the safety of their families.
Some of our members lost their lives.
And we were...
Deemed as heroes because we provided these goods and services.
And we were heroes.
Everybody was talking about us.
Everybody was saying, oh, the American worker, the Teamsters, they're heroes.
Well, when these companies are making record profits during the pandemic and it comes time to reward our members, their employees, all of a sudden we're zeros.
So we've been reminding corporate America.
How important the Teamsters Union are, but more importantly, the American worker, especially through a crisis.
Because, you know, like you said earlier, you know, you talk about Irish and Italians.
You know, I think corporate America has what they call Irish Alzheimer's, you know?
They forget the people that provide them the most, but they never forget when they get fucked on a dollar, right?
So, you know, I think...
You know, the team says, yeah, we do have the best workforce in the country.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show.
I know.
Shocking that in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that's true.
It's unintentionally deceptive.
And the way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
Subscribe!
And you'll have a much higher chance of hearing what we say.