Mei W.
On February 14, the Teamsters Union posted on social media its support for Trump’s nomination of former UPS and Amazon safety executive David Keeling to the Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Department of Labor (DOL)’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The union stated that it “applauds The White House on tapping David Keeling” and that “OSHA and the DOL […] will continue to benefit from leaders who started in the trades and understand the risks facing working Americans today and necessary reforms and opportunities to protect them.” Workers responded to the posts on social media, pointing out the union’s hypocrisies, with one commenting, “What are we doing congratulating someone from UPS management? Where’s my air conditioning in the truck?”
Keeling’s appointment is awaiting approval from the Senate at an unspecified date. He was the Director of Global Safety Compliance at UPS from 2011 and became the company’s Vice President of Global Health & Safety in 2018. During his three years as Vice President, over 130 UPS workers had been hospitalized and 160 were severely injured due to heat-related illnesses and injuries from falls, according to government data. From 2021 to 2023, he was the Director of Road and Transportation Safety at Amazon, where delivery drivers are injured at the rate that is double the injury rate of Amazon’s warehouse workers, which is already 70% higher than the rate at non-Amazon warehouses.
The Teamsters social media post celebrating Keeling’s nomination calls him a “former UPS worker” despite his main role at UPS being in corporate, and links to an article he wrote praising worker-management cooperation programs. The post mentions nothing about the workers’ struggle for workplace safety.
The nomination of a former monopoly executive to the already-ineffective OSHA indicates an acceleration of the trend of reactionization, which the reactionary bourgeois union heads back increasingly shamelessly. Last week, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien posted on social media in support of Trump’s Secretary of Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer, saying she “crushed” the Senate hearing during which she expressed her opposition to laws protecting workers’ right to organize and her support of states with anti-union laws. In January, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain claimed that his union is “ready to work with Trump” and praised Trump’s tariffs which exacerbate inflation and jack up the cost of living for the working class.
image: David Keeling, LinkedIn profile picture
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