WASHINGTON—An Oregon Republican lawmaker opposed by organized labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who narrowly lost her U.S. House seat on Election Day is apparently in the running to become Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor—with the backing of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien.
Politico reported Chavez-DeRemer, the daughter of a Teamster, won O’Brien’s support, though the union is publically silent on that. O’Brien garnered headlines during the election campaign when he became the sole union leader to address the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after O’Brien wrote to Trump seeking a speaking spot—and Trump agreed.
In her House career, Chavez-DeRemer actually became known as one of the few remaining moderate Republicans willing to work across party lines, and also willing to back pro-worker legislation, even when it was obvious the measures were going nowhere in the Republican-run Congress.
But taking no chances, the Oregon AFL-CIO backed her Democratic foe, State Rep. Janelle Bynum, who won the seat in the state’s sprawling Fifth District, a more rural area east of the Cascade mountains.
The prospect of a sometimes pro-worker Republican running DOL in the coming Trump regime upset two radical right anti-worker lobbies, including the vicious, venal, and corporate-funded National Right to Work Committee. The other is a business front group, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.
Both lobbies rail against “forced unionism,” scream about union dues and “union bosses” while conveniently not mentioning the millions in pay and perks for each of their corporate controllers—or the dictatorships such bosses run at worksites nationwide.
O’Brien, who backs Chavez-DeRemer, fits Trump’s stereotyped, outdated image of a union leader: A middle-aged blue-collar white guy with a heavy Boston accent. In his prime-time speech on the first night of the convention, O’Brien blasted some Republicans, and their corporate backers, for their reflexive hatred of workers and unions.
The content of O’Brien’s speech didn’t matter to Trump, however. His appearance at the GOP convention was all that he wanted to give the appearance that he was a pro-labor presidential candidate.
The Teamsters, over objections from many of its own large districts and locals, including their biggest, in New York, were neutral in the election. Dissenters backed Trump’s foe, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Republican delegates didn’t listen to O’Brien’s pro-worker statements, and Trump and the GOP platform, also known as Project 2025, carry on the anti-labor hate. Chavez-DeRemer says she doesn’t. That drew the right-to-work lobby’s ire. It posted a picture of Chavez-DeRemer above a headline and tweet about O’Brien’s backing.
Tweet came from the Buckley foundation
The tweet that the right-to-work lobby repeated was from Dominic DiPino of the William F. Buckley Foundation, named for the founder of the National Review, the longtime bible of Republican—though not Trumpite—conservatism. “Sweet, now Trump knows who not to pick,” DiPino wrote.
Chavez-DeRemer signed onto two of labor’s top legislative priorities. Both sank from sight: The Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. And
she recently defied GOP leaders by being one of the needed few Republicans to get another pro-worker bill, restoring millions of dollars from Social Security payment offsets for government workers and retirees, to the floor and passed, Northwest Labor Press reported.
The public service bill is the top legislative goal of AFSCME. It orders state and local governments to bargain with unions that win recognition votes, even in so-called right-to-work states.
That bill would partially negate the five-year-old Janus decision by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-named majority making every state and local government worker nationally—including Fire Fighters, AFSCME members, nurses, and Teachers–a “free rider” able to use union protections and services without paying one red cent for them.
Corporate sponsors of the RTW committee, which funded and provided the lawyers for the Janus case, freely admitted they want to use the court’s ruling in their favor to financially cripple unions.
The public service bill was “considered to have zero chance of passage while Republicans continue to hold the majority,” the Northwest Labor Press reported. “But then it didn’t have much luck when Democrats were in charge either…That suggests the measure is what’s known as a ‘messaging bill.’ That’s a bill a sponsor introduces knowing it has no chance of becoming law; instead, it’s meant as a statement to a constituency to show lawmakers are on their side.”
The then-Democratic-run House passed the PRO Act in 2020 and 2021. It went nowhere in the Senate due to a Republican anti-worker bloc backed by filibuster threats and a vile corporate campaign.
Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., got the PRO Act out of his committee in this Congress, but Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., refused to bring it up because Sanders couldn’t produce a majority for it, due to two defecting then-Democrats, Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginian Joe Manchin.
“Given today’s Republican majority in the House, co-sponsoring the PRO Act is even more symbolic because the bill is considered to have no chance of a vote,” the Northwest Labor Press noted. It drowned without a hearing in the Republican-run House Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., a worker and union hater who once told Carolina media she doubts unions are legal.
“Unlike most House Republicans, Chavez-DeRemer worked to build relationships with organized labor, but last year she told the Labor Press she had concerns about some elements of the PRO Act,” the Northwest Labor Press reported. She particularly was concerned with legalizing joint employers—a corporation and its local franchise holder—as being jointly responsible for obeying, or breaking, labor law.
The AFL-CIO’s voting scores, which extend only through last year, give Chavez-DeRemer a 10% lifetime score and the same score for last year. The average Republican’s lifetime score is six percent.
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