Why are the Teamsters Endorsing Greg Abbott?
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is running for reelection. He has a campaign war chest of over $105 million, and he’ll probably be reelected, unless the increasing unpopularity of Donald Trump takes him down. The Abbott campaign, however, is confident of victory, and that they will roll over their Democratic opponent state Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Kim Snyder, Abbott’s campaign manager, boasted last month, with a dash of red-baiting:
“The outpouring of support from across the state sends a powerful message about the values Texans expect our governor to defend. As socialists win elections elsewhere, Texans are stepping up to support Governor Abbott because he protects our way of life.”
Let’s be clear about Abbott: He has no redeeming qualities nor does he support policies that benefit working-class people. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. He has a wide-ranging anti-working class political agenda. He enthusiastically supports Texas’ near ban on abortion or the so-called “Heart Beat Bill.” He supports school privatization and the death penalty. All of these issues are near-and-dear to the Christian Nationalist Right in Texas and the myriad of police and sheriff’s associations that support his reelection campaign.
Abbott has played an important role in bolstering the mainstream Christian Right in the Republican Party and the more shadowy fascist paramilitary right in Texas, most notably pardoning the convicted fascist murderer Daniel Perry in May 2024. Perry murdered Air Force veteran Garrett Foster at Black Lives Matter demonstration in May 2020 in Austin, Texas. Whitney Mitchell, Foster’s longtime partner responded to Abbott’s pardon of Perry:
“Daniel Perry texted his friends about plans to murder a protester he disagreed with. After a lengthy trial, with an abundance of evidence, 12 impartial Texans determined that he carried out that plan, and murdered my Garrett. With this pardon, the Governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan and US Air Force veteran, and impugned that jury’s just verdict. He has declared that Texans who hold political views that are different from his — and different from those in power — can be killed in this State with impunity.”
With such a horrendous political record, why are the Teamsters and a handful of other unions endorsing him reelection?
“Teamsters vs. Everybody”
The Teamsters official Facebook posted on February 5th:
Teamsters Joint Council 58 and Joint Council 80, which represent 40,000 rank-and-file Teamsters across Texas, have jointly endorsed Greg Abbott (R-TX) in his re-election for governor.
“Governor Abbott has kept an open door to the Teamsters Union during his tenure and has been willing and eager to partner with us on job creation and workplace protections,” said Brent Taylor, Secretary-Treasurer of Joint Council 80 and International Vice President for the Southern Region. “As our union has shown on a national level, the Teamsters care less about political affiliation and more about protecting good-paying union jobs. Texas Teamsters are proud to support candidates that support the American worker — and in this race, that candidate in Governor Abbott.”
At a February 4th news conference in Houston, Taylor told the assembled media, “The Teamsters do not care if you have a D, an R or an I next to your name. We’re interested in one thing. Are you ready to help us tackle big issues to improve the lives of working families?”
Yet, Abbott clearly doesn’t care at all about improving working families’ lives. I asked John Palmer, currently serving as an International Vice-President of Teamsters, what he thought of the Texas Teamsters endorsement of Abbott. He wrote to me:
“To my shock and dismay, I found out that the two Teamster joint councils in Texas endorsed Greg Abbott for Governor. The obvious choice would be following the lead of the Texas AFL-CIO in endorsing Gina Hinojosa a member of TSEU CWA 6186. By every measure Greg Abbott has miserably failed the working class in this state. The idea that the two leaders of these joint councils at the behest of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien would take it upon themselves to speak for our members is embarrassing and appalling, I certainly was not asked as a Texas Teamster how I felt. If the thought was to curry favor with the likely winner I would suggest this is a fool’s folly.”
Palmer is running on the Fearless slate against the incumbent Teamsters’ union leadership under Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman. The Teamsters have become notorious for being the most pro-Trump unionsamong the major industrial unions in the United States. But, the Teamsters are not the only union that has endorsed Abbott. The Texas Tribune reported that, “Plumbers Local Union 68, International Longshoremen South Atlantic & Gulf Coast District Association and the Pipefitters Local Union 211 also backed Abbott for a record fourth term as governor last week.”
I agree 100% with Palmer that this is a “fools folly,” but I would add this endorsement follows President Donald Trump’s strategy of dividing and conquering the organized trade union movement, as well as the wider U.S. working class. Sean O’Brien signed the Teamsters up for this in the run-up to the 2024 election and after, and has popularized “Teamsters vs. Everybody” as the motto of the union. Not only does this abandon any sense of solidarity among workers, the Teamsters, like many industrial unions, is two-thirds Black and Latino including many immigrants, whose needs and future are simply cast aside.
Right-to-work
Abbott’s hostility to working class people and unions is not a secret. He’s fearmongered about “Big Labor,”especially public sector unions for years. Labor unions by any stretch of the imagination are not big, at all Texas is a right-to-work state. Union membership is barely 4.5% of the statewide workforce. Abbott aggressively promotes Texas as a “business-friendly” precisely because of its anti-union laws and low taxes to corporations wanting to flee states, where unions are numerically larger and more politically influential. Abbott has seized every opportunity in his long political career to weaken unions and undermine every effort to improve workers’ lives in Texas.
Back in 2013, for example, when he was Texas Attorney General, Abbott attempted to strengthen the state’s right-to-work laws with his faux “Workers Bill of Rights” and to announce his support for Texas H.B. 1524. Abbott and other supporters of the bill claimed that it would protect workers from “intimidation” from unions. Then Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller said the problem wasn’t with the unions, but with the Attorney General, Greg Abbott:
“It is an effort to intimidate workers. That is where the intimidation is coming from, not from the unions. The intimidation is coming from the Attorney General’s office, who is telling you there is a problem, when there is not a problem.”
Most recently in 2023, Abbott signed into law House Bill 2127 that would severely limit the ability of cities and counties to govern themselves in eight areas, “including the regulation of labor, finance, and environmental standards,” according to the Texas ACLU. Lauren Johnson, a policy strategist for the ACLU of Texas, goes further:
“Gov. Abbott just signed into law a sweeping package of anti-worker regulations. These preemption laws give excessive authority to the state which has shown no concern for the needs of working class Texans. The legislation strips power from local elected officials to enforce ordinances that can range from safety regulations at the workplace to renter evictions to environmental protections. The same Texas politicians who keep trying to suppress our vote are now subverting it by seizing control over a wide range of local decisions.”
There are times when Abbott’s policies are straight up sadism. In June 2023, the Texas Tribune reported:
In a week when parts of the state are getting triple-digit temperatures and weather officials urge Texans to stay cool and hydrated, Gov. Greg Abbott gave final approval to a law that will eliminate local rules mandating water breaks for construction workers. House Bill 2127 was passed by the Texas Legislature during this year’s regular legislative session. Abbott signed it Tuesday. It will go into effect on Sept. 1.
Texas is the state where the most workers die from high temperatures, government data shows. At least 42 workers died in Texas between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ unions claim this data doesn’t fully reflect the magnitude of the problem because heat-related deaths are often recorded under a different primary cause of injury.
Workers in Texas suffer under this crushing weight coming at them from all sides because of Abbott. Oxfam America’s “The Best States to Work In The US 2025” reported that Texas is 45th out of 50 U.S. states in wage policies, worker protections, right to organize and the minimum wage, which is still $7.25 per hour. It mirrors the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour that’s been frozen since 2009.
Elon Musk
In sharp contrast, Abbott loves the rich and powerful. The creepier, the better. He’s buddies with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Nazi-sympathizer, advocate for Eugenics, and a serial breeder. Abbott has gone to great lengths to make Texas a haven for Musk’s many companies, including his SpaceX Starbase, X (formerly Twitter), and Tesla headquarters. Abbott and Musk have such a close relationship that Abbott spent months fighting to prevent the release of secret emails between the two of them.
Eventually, Abbott relented and last November released 1,400 pages of emails, yet all but 200 were redacted. What were they talking about? We may never know precisely, but were most likely about how to make Texas even more hospitable to Musk’s business operations. State law and the Texas Supreme Court provide only for the barest of transparency between government officials and business lobbyists. During the 2025 Texas legislative session, the Texas Newsroom reported:
Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.
“Texas is much better than Delaware,” Musk posted on X in early April, after a Delaware judge, in a rare move, ruled against his outrageous compensation package. It was later overturned on appeal. U.S.—based corporations have traditionally incorporated, but not located their headquarters in Delaware, notorious for its lax oversight of corporate criminal behavior, which was extensively reported over the years by Ralph Nader.
Operation Lone Star
Many people outside of Texas got to know Greg Abbott, when he launched Operation Lone Star in 2021. He shipped migrants and refugees on cross country bus rides to “sanctuary cities,” such as Denver, Chicago, and New York. He used these, already traumatized people, including many children, in a cynical ploy to stir up a political backlash in places ill-prepared for such a massive population influx. Abbott boasted that he shipped over 100,000 people to sanctuary cities across the country. The cost to Texas taxpayers for this political stunt was $148 million.
Abbott, like President Donald Trump, relishes cruelty. Trump once “joked” about building a moat filled with snakes and alligators to deter immigrants and refugees to stop crossings at the Rio Grande, but admitted that he really liked the idea. Abbott had a better one, “In July 2023, Caleb Kieffer, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported that Abbott installed a barrier of buoys fitted with saw like blades in the Rio Grande River to deter migrants, which received pushback from the Department of Justice and was said to have resulted in two deaths.”
On top of this, Abbott’s cruelty towards those crossing the Rio Grande was matched by his ill treatment of members of the Texas National Guard, who were deployed against them. Under Operation Lone Star, Abbott mobilized the Texas National Guard for long deployments that broke many soldiers’ lives. According to National Public Radio (NPR), “At least 17 Texas National Guardsmen have died during the border mission, a number [at least 7] of them by suicide.” One soldier, Bishop Evans, drowned trying to save drowning immigrants, and another Dajuan Townes died by the accidental firing of his weapon. National Guardsmen were not supposed to be armed during their deployment.
Abbott scrambled to take advantage of the guardsmen’s deaths. Gabriella Alcorta-Solorio, reported for National Public Radio:
“Abbott was proud to sign a law called the Bishop Evans Act that provides families of dead National Guardsmen a one-time payment of $500,000. But the Military Department told state lawmakers that of the 17 deaths, 10 claims were filed before the act was passed, while six were denied and deemed not mission-related.”
The Teamsters support for Abbott is the latest in a series of highly destructive political endorsements across the country, including far right kook Vivek Ramaswamy for Governor of Ohio. Texas is an extreme example of the dilemma faced by trade union activists and working-class people in general, who are frustrated by the lack of political alternatives. Workers feel stuck in a political cul-de-sac. Gina Hinojosa’s campaign may be supported by the more progressive unions in Texas, and if she defeats Abbott, it will be a welcome change. But, her platform offers little beyond platitudes for working-class people, despite being a union memeber. Disaster swirls around the lives of workers in Texas, as in many other states.
A few years ago, I asked my late friend—and the great Texas criminal defense attorney—Jeff Blackburn, what he thought of the political class in Texas following one of the recurring “natural disasters” that engulfed the state. Jeff thought for a minute and said, “Texas under the Abbott gang is a swirling-down-the-drain disaster.”
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