What Teamsters Class Solidarity Looks Like

In the film, Bridge doesn’t sing the line: ​“Without our brains and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.” But she has embodied the themes of the 1915 union anthem ​“Solidarity Forever” in representing the class solidarity that underpins labor organizing. Workers don’t automatically band together because they share a common employer — social solidarity must be painstakingly built through organization and unified political action. A strike is the ultimate test of that class unity, enforceable by massing on picket lines and not allowing a single vehicle to cross.

Spoiler alert: The strike isn’t called. Members ratified the tentative agreement by a 5-to-1 margin; nearly 60% of the membership participated in the vote, approving a new five-year contract set to expire on July 31, 2028. So the film was deprived of the sexy stuff of swelling picket lines. Instead, it explores the boring yet indispensable stuff that makes it possible for thousands to mass at an employer’s gates: the social bonds among workers.

Like the 2024 documentary Union, which chronicled the stunning organizing victory of Amazon workers at a fulfillment center on Staten Island in New York City, Who Moves America (producer Mars Verrone was involved in both films) shows what organizing looks like in practice in the buildup to a potential strike. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien makes a few cameo appearances, using wink-and-nod militant rhetoric to prove his union reform bona fides, which were burnished after he took office in 2022 by traveling the country with Sen. Sanders to denounce the billionaire class and speaking at the Labor Notes conference to rapturous applause.

In the film, he’s recorded at his stately desk at Teamsters headquarters in D.C. on the phone relating an anecdote of how leaders in the Laborers were surprised by the size of the UPS National Negotiating Committee, which was expanded by appointing rank-and-file members, though they had to sign nondisclosure agreements. Since then, though, O’Brien has alienated many in the labor movement by appearing at the Republican National Convention and giving the union’s endorsement to a number of GOP candidates, even as the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced subpoenas of the Teamsters’ rail divisions, along with leaders of the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers. President Trump continues to make history as the biggest union-buster in U.S. history, destroying workers’ job security and workers’ right to engage in collective action.

Thankfully, the filmmaker’s gaze doesn’t track the moves at the top, but the ferment below. O’Brien waged a vociferous war of words, but that bluster remains offscreen. We see Teamsters walking along a beach on the shore in California as part of a blooming mentorship — half of organizing is morale-boosting, overcoming fear, divisions, confusion, and apathy. We see fellow Teamsters talking at a diner across generations while dipping French fries in ketchup. We see them shifting in their chairs during training at various union halls. None of that happens spontaneously: The work of organization involves weaving relationships into dense knots over and over again, forming a rank-and-file network that can take action. As longtime Democratic Socialists of America organizer David Duhalde has written, that’s largely the work seen in the film of the rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU).

People talk a good game about the rank-and-file workers from below, but it’s often hot air, a floating signifier without any material anchor. The enraptured words can become a kind of incantation divorced from actual organization and the concrete realities of people’s lives. But it’s the relationships between workers in all their specificity that makes a union, plus rank-and-file organization. In the film, we meet Justin Alo from San Marcos, California, who is classified as a 22.4 worker on a lower tier, meaning he delivers packages for fewer dollars than regular drivers but with even fewer contractual protections to guard against excessive overtime. (The 2023 UPS contract eliminated that tier.) Alo has banded together with his co-workers to hold meetings at a local coffee shop to learn about their contract and prepare for the fight with UPS. We watch him and his wife talk about how they are saving money in case he goes on strike, while also weighing their autistic son’s need for therapy. That’s the stuff of real sacrifice that built a fighting labor movement, and a reminder that every strike forces on workers these difficult collective choices to beat employers’ ownership advantage.

TDU organizers helped cohere these meetings to educate members with no strike experience. Practice pickets to build the muscle memory to strike, leaders at the gates educating members about their contract – these are aspects of a strike readiness program the Teamsters adopted across the union. That’s a credit to TDU’s tireless work building a bench of worker leaders, and the know-how in rolling out these educational campaigns in a national contract fight. Alo is among the newbies, but he has helped organize these social gatherings alongside other UPS Teamsters with experience in the 15-day 1997 strike, almost three decades ago. That strike was transformative, reducing the reliance on subcontractors and boosting wages. But it also contained a concession: a five-year contract term, instead of three or four years. Now that the contract terms are longer, workers have fewer opportunities to strike than earlier generations did.

As workers debate whether to ratify their tentative agreement, a worker in California compares the momentum they built up to a wind-up toy car whose wheels spin but never take off. Workers wonder if by not striking, they’ll miss out on the transformative experience their coworkers had in 1997, especially as the institutional memory fades once veterans of that strike begin to retire. Former package-car driver and TDU co-chair Antonio Rosario says he was a knucklehead who was schooled by old-timers and the union saved his life from a potential life of crime and drugs. We watch him play handball, the poor man’s tennis, where you slap a blue ball with your opened palm against a wall, in Brooklyn. We see him at the entrance to the UPS hub, chatting workers up and slapping flyers into people’s hands, marching in a circle during practice pickets: a regular worker turned organizer.

In Louisville, Kentucky, two Black workers mirror Rosario’s early experience as a part-timer in the 1990s; they are going to college while juggling a job at UPS. ​“You know how many times I passed by this in my life and never knew,” Nailah Webber says to her friend Angel Baduo as they drive past their union local. We watch them pray in a kitchen as the strike vote looms. They are stand-ins for the vast majority of workers in the country who have little experience or understanding of what it means to be part of a union but whose lives would be vastly improved by joining or organizing one.

At the family barbecue, a family friend who’s a Teamster spoke to my nephew about his union options. His uncles told him about the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Communications Workers of America, and others. We told him about how important job security was in this job market and how the best way for him to have a future was to take his trade certification and enter a union apprenticeship program. He nods and asks questions as men in the family gather around him, chiming in about their union experiences. 

I remember all the anecdotes I’ve heard from fellow workers about their journeys into the union world. What a skyscraper is to the laborer who thumbs the sky to point to his work on the New York City skyline from the Staten Island ferry, power steering is to a UPS Teamster in the storytelling of class culture. ​“If you notice, back in the ​’80s and ​’90s, most UPS drivers had pretty big arms,” Rosario told me in 2025, ​“and that was from turning that damn steering wheel.” At Crotona Park, we are adding to that knowledge base across sectors, weaving and reweaving stories that add up to worldview and a potential class politics.

The majority action necessary for a successful strike demands unity and camaraderie. As lifelong organizer A. J. Muste once wrote, ​“the trade union seeks to combine within itself two extremely divergent types of social structure, that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.” In the lead-up to a strike, these divergent forms can temporarily work together through the picket line discipline of the union as a combat organization and the union hall as a democratic town meeting where workers deliberate about their contract demands.

Who Moves America takes us to the lower frequencies where workers educate each other on what it means to move like a class.

For where you can watch the documentary or request a screening, click here. Disclaimer: I have a short cameo in the film.

This story first appeared at Lower Frequencies.