By Freedom Road Socialist Organization – Dallas, TX District
Greg Abbott is a lifelong enemy of the working class. His administration has overseen brutal attacks on immigrants, the criminalization of protest, assaults on public education and the systematic weakening of labor protections in Texas.
As early as 2017 Governor Greg Abbott announced a call for legislation that prohibited both state and local governments from deducting union dues from public employees’ paychecks.
In 2023 Greg Abbott signed HB 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, nicknamed the “death star” bill, which barred cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones. It also overturned local rules, such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers.
In 2024 Greg Abbott was one of six governors, including those from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, to support a statement condemning the United Autoworkers campaign to organize the South of the United States. This came after massive victories from the UAW union in organizing workers at the Chattanooga, Tennessee Volkswagen factory.
Greg Abbott, being a huge supporter of “right to work,” has always done his absolute best to destroy the efforts of the working class to organize and fight against bosses.
Greg Abbott has built a career serving the most reactionary sections of the Texas ruling class, oil and gas executives, real estate speculators, private prison profiteers and anti-union corporations, as working people have been left in the dust with stagnant wages and soaring costs of living.
Besides his anti-labor policies, Greg Abbott spent upwards of $3 billion in the deployment of National Guard and State Troopers to harass immigrants. The passing of Senate Bill 4 making “illegal immigration” a crime; busing immigrants out of Texas to Chicago, Washington DC and New York City, and installing razor wire along the Rio Grande are some of the many injustices Abbott has committed against immigrants.
Abbott’s cronies have turned Texas into a testing ground for union busting, attacks on immigrants, and cradling of the reactionaries. Now as Abbott seeks to rehabilitate his image in his bid for re-election, he has turned to sympathetic union leadership amongst the Teamsters in Texas who will do his bidding to enact anti-labor policies.
The decision to endorse Greg Abbott by the Teamster Joint Councils 80 and 58 is totally against the will of the thousands of Teamsters who call Texas their home.
Union members are not responsible for the cowardice and opportunism of their conservative union leadership right here in the heart of Texas. Rank-and-file Teamsters, many of them immigrants, oppressed nationalities and low-wage earners, are among Abbott and his billionaire backers’ primary targets. People’s interests lie in organizing and struggling against Abbott and the reactionary forces he represents, not in being used as political cover for them.
Texas Teamster leaders should take a page from the book of Teamster Councils in California (JC42 and JC7), New York (JC16), or Locals 810, 120 and 25 that have put forward resolutions to protect immigrant workers and oppose raids from ICE. Local unions outside of the Teamsters, like SEIU 26, Minnesota AFL CIO, ATU 1005, and UFCW 663 are a few of the many local unions that have put forward anti-ICE statements and demanded protections for immigrants. The Teamsters leadership in Texas should learn from their counterparts and demand protections for workers who look to them for leadership.
The labor movement cannot hope to survive—let alone win real power—by bowing to reactionaries who despise us. We cannot build power by allowing unions to become a breeding ground of narrow self-interest at the hands of those who collaborate with people whose interests are oriented towards destroying the working class. Labor’s home is on the shop floor and on the streets, not in the halls of the RNC where power brokers like Greg Abbott cut deals to attack the working class.
Union leaders must do everything in their power to protect their members, especially immigrants who face the real terror of kidnapping by ICE. They should put forward a positive demand like legalization for all and lobby against politicians to make this demand a reality. They must make their home in the working class once again and defend the rank and file with tooth and nail.
The rank and file must not only fight against the bosses on the shop floor. It is only by continuing to build a militant movement of rank-and-file Teamsters that we will be able to turn our union into a real fighting organization of the working class.
