Should the Teamsters Represent Prosecutors?

Taking a break during the recent 2025 Teamsters Organizing Bootcamp Conference held in Chicago, several hundred conference attendees marched down to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. Led by Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, he demanded that Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neil Burke live up to her campaign promise to voluntarily recognize Teamsters Local 700 as the bargaining agent for the seven hundred and fifty Assistant State’s Attorneys (ASAs), who work in her office.

To me this is a continuation of the disastrous political strategy pursued by Chicago’s Joint Council 25 (JC 25), the umbrella organization representing local unions across the Chicago area, in last year’s county and city elections. I previously wrote:

When it comes to the race to succeed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, JC 25 has endorsed retired judge Eileen O’Neill-Burke to replace her. O’Neill-Burke’s rival is Clayton Harris III, who was a corporate lawyer for Lyft. Harris has the official endorsement by the Cook County Democratic Party. O’Neill-Burke and Harris have both attacked each other for receiving money from far right and anti-abortion sources. O’Neill-Burke’s role in the false murder conviction of a ten year old African-American boy in the 1990s‚ later overturned, should alone make her toxic for any union endorsement. If anything is clear from their attack ads is that neither candidate deserves the support of Chicago unions. Harris and O’Neill-Burke campaigns have split the labor movement so much that the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) has decided to withhold any endorsement, and has remained neutral in the contest.

Many of O’Neil Burke’s campaign funders are an anathema to anyone in the labor movement and any promises that come from her should have been greeted with great skepticism. A joint study in March 2024, on the eve of the Democratic primaries, by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, the National Public Radio affiliate in Chicago, reported:

The top 25 individual funders of Eileen O’Neill Burke’s bid to be Cook County’s top prosecutor include no African Americans and no women, a WBEZ analysis of her Illinois campaign filings has found. Those 25 donors — venture capitalists, investment managers, traders, real estate developers, upscale restaurant chain owners, personal-injury lawyers, and so on — account for about half of the $3.1 million in campaign fundraising that O’Neill Burke had reported to the state by Thursday afternoon, just a few days before the end of voting Tuesday.

In another study of campaign that same month, the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ reported:

O’Neill Burke reported $236,200 from frequent Republican donor Daniel O’Keefe, who helps lead the investment management firm Artisan Partners, raising his family’s total for her to $250,000. O’Neill Burke reported another $175,000 from Gerald Beeson and Matthew Simon, executives of Citadel LLC, a hedge fund founded by billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin, lifting to $195,700 the total from their families to her. Beeson, like Griffin, has funded numerous Republican campaigns. Simon in January contributed $200,000 to Paul Vallas’s unsuccessful Chicago mayoral campaign.

Yet, JC 25 went in feet first for her campaign and now find themselves “surprised” that she has reneged on her campaign promise. However, isn’t there a deeper issue here? At the Teamsters 2021 convention, the Organizing for Power resolution passed overwhelmingly by the delegates pledged that, “the Teamsters Union must utilize our collective strength, power and diversity in representation to recapture former core Teamster industries.” Or trucking and warehousing. Where do prosecutors fit into this? Well, they don’t.

The Teamsters bid for Cook County prosecutors is part of a long standing approach by many unions across the country. They use some of their local political influence to win bargaining rights in the public sector to bolster declining membership rolls in the private sector. It does nothing to organize “core industries,” in fact it works against it.

During the recent “organizing boot camp” in Chicago, Teamsters General President bloviated about the organizing victories of the union. The Teamsters Facebook page reported:

In just three years, the Teamsters have brought in over 80,000 new members, with a goal of another 30,000 in 2025 alone.

“We didn’t just move the goalposts. We tore down the whole damn stadium and built a new one,” O’Brien said. “Teamsters organizers are driving the revival of this great union. Because of your work, we’ve reclaimed our place as the strongest union in North America.”

Such boasting is, at best, misplaced, especially following the faux “strikes” at Amazon last Christmas, the loss of 20,000 Teamster jobs at Yellow Freight, and job loss and building closings at UPS. Along with defeats in important regional strikes, like Bigfoot Beverages, the Teamsters don’t appear to be tearing up goal posts, but appear to be as crisis ridden and directionless as ever. One conference attendee told me:

The conference was held at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago — all staff, including those that live in Chicago, were given a room at the IBT’s expense. The “rally” (listed under the IBT event program as “Militant Organizing Action”) held in support of the ASA’s downtown was 95% staff organizers. To my eyes, only a handful of ASA’s attended. Teamsters leadership wants 30k new members organized in 2025, and 100k members every year after that. Not a single organizer I talked to expressed any genuine confidence in their ability to achieve this goal. Even if it was achieved through some miracle, it would most likely be largely negated by layoffs or further company closures.

If the Teamsters manage to win union representation at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office it deepens the union’s connection to the carceral state with all its racism and repression that a large part of the U.S. population find abhorrent. The Teamsters boast of representing over 50,000 law enforcement officers and celebrate National Police Week every year, despite Teamster members being murdered by police officers, such as Philando Castile, whose local represented police officers, and Frank Ordoñez.

Standing on any one of the bridges that span the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago’s West Loop any day, it is jam-packed with trucks of all makes and models traversing the city. The Dan Ryan is only one of several mega-highways that knit together two major airports and rail connections, along with hundreds of warehouses, that make Chicago the transport hub of North America. One could be forgiven for believing that in all of this hustle and bustle and noisy congestion, that trucking and warehouse — booming businesses — might be of a major interest to the Teamsters, rather than prisons, cops, and prosecutors.

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