THE TEAMSTERS union has twice roiled the race for the White House this year, first when its leader Sean O’Brien, a Medford native, muscled his way into a speaking role at the Republican National Convention and then again this week when the 1.3-million member union said it won’t be issuing an endorsement for president.
At the national level, the union has a history of bucking the rest of the labor establishment. Notably, the Teamsters endorsed Richard Nixon for president in both 1968 and 1972, and was one of two unions to back Ronald Reagan. This year’s no-endorsement decision is also revealing internal strife, as former leader James P. Hoffa, who has previously sparred with O’Brien, called the move a “failure of leadership.”
When a union declines to issue an endorsement at the national level, that typically frees up the locals to make their own picks. Kamala Harris’s campaign on Wednesday was quick to tout endorsements from locals in battleground states such as Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
But what of the Massachusetts locals, in particular Local 25, where O’Brien got his start? They’ve stayed quiet this week.
The local, based in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, is where O’Brien revved up his career, driving heavy equipment at age 18 before becoming its president in 2006.
In the Harris campaign’s email blast to reporters about Teamsters in battleground states earlier this week, there was also a link to a Facebook post from a Teamsters official who noted that O’Brien’s “hometown nemesis,” John Murphy, is backing Harris. His union, Dorchester-based Local 122, endorsed Harris shortly after Labor Day.
O’Brien still has strong ties to Local 25, as well as Massachusetts. He sits on the board of directors for Massport, the agency that runs Logan International Airport, and he’s been spotted around town hobnobbing with the state’s top elected officials. The local, the largest in New England with 12,000 members, was an early supporter of Michelle Wu when she ran for mayor in 2021, as well as Maura Healey when she first ran for attorney general in 2014.
A phone message to Local 25 went unreturned Thursday, and a request for comment through its public relations firm, Regan Communications, was declined. Given how central the local is to O’Brien’s biography, it’s fair to speculate that the local will likely do whatever O’Brien wants. Its active Facebook page did not mention this week’s national news.
Local 122’s Murphy called the lack of an endorsement at the national level “bewildering,” while acknowledging there is a “sizable chunk” of Teamsters who back former president Donald Trump. “Our union is a reflection of the American population, with different stances on issues and different politics,” Murphy said in a phone interview. “But as labor leaders we’ve got to take positions that are in the interests of everybody, even if some members might disagree with it.”
New gun law in the ballot firing line
Parts of a sprawling new gun law are already being challenged in court, but a coalition of Second Amendment advocates say they are getting closer to potentially stopping the whole thing in its tracks.
An initiative dubbing itself the Civil Rights Coalition – a group of gun rights supporters opposing the recent gun reform legislation that dramatically retooled firearms laws in Massachusetts – announced in a press conference Thursday that they are more than halfway to collecting the signatures needed to suspend the law until it could reach voters via 2026 ballot referendum to repeal the law.
“We’re literally in unprecedented waters here. There’s never been gun control legislation like this passed anywhere else in the country,” said coalition chair Toby Leary, a co-owner of Cape Gun Works in Hyannis. “And we want to let the people of Massachusetts know they could wake up on October 24 and be a felon, having done nothing different.”
Gov. Maura Healey celebrated the law’s passage earlier this summer, calling it “the most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.” It expands “red flag” laws, adds to the list of sensitive spaces where guns are not permitted, includes new ways to combat untraceable “ghost guns,” and enables new licensing rules after the US Supreme Court scrambled the state’s prior permitting approach in its 2022 Bruen decision.
The Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, a local affiliate of the National Rifle Association, filed suit in federal court shortly after the law passed because, according to GOAL executive director Jim Wallace, there “is no hope for any help within the Massachusetts court system.”
That suit is targeting certain licensing requirements laid out in the new law, arguing that they are unnecessarily burdensome and unconstitutional.
Repeal processes are a sprint. This year, a repeal effort would need to submit 49,716 certified signatures to the Secretary of State’s office within 90 days of the law passing to both suspend the law and put it on the ballot in 2026. To simply put the repeal option on the ballot, the campaign would need to submit 37,287 signatures to local clerks by the October 9 deadline and then to the Secretary by October 23.
Taking it to the ballot is far from a guarantee that the law will be overturned. Less than half of all repeal efforts have succeeded in the state, and the two efforts to repeal but not suspend laws since the turn of the millennium – striking down transgender anti-discrimination protections and a new drivers license eligibility for immigrants without legal proof of residence – both died at the ballot box.
Some laws, however, are not eligible to be repealed via referendum. According to the Secretary of State’s office, if the law is an “emergency declaration,” it cannot be repealed on the ballot. It is not clear if Healey will act to fill an emergency preamble for the gun law, which was passed without one by the Legislature.
Leary said the signature gathering is being done by volunteers only, and is an awareness campaign as much as a repeal effort. ”There’s no time to sleep,” he said. “We have about three weeks to get almost 50,000 signatures. We’re well on our way to getting there,” Leary said. “We really need to call awareness, because most people don’t even know it happened.”
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