The latest decision in U.S.A. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, et al., U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska formally transitions the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) away from the preceding independent, court-ordered oversight and with a plan to return disciplinary control back to the union. Federal oversight commenced with a RICO lawsuit against IBT that established a consent decree in 1989. These restrictions began to be loosened in 2015 when the government seized direct involvement and put in place an outside oversight system. This 2026 order designs a plan to end oversight, claiming IBT is now free of mob corruption by having built a lasting democratically voting organization.
IBT has around 1.3 million active members across US and Canada, mostly in the delivery (UPS), transport (school buses), warehousing (Costco), civil service, airlines, railroads and food processing (Sysco) sectors.
There are now anti-mob injunctions, wherein IBT members must agree to avoid associating with a long list of barred individuals, such as La Cosa Nostra. The plan specifies that the role of the external Independent Investigations Officer (IIO) will be terminated on December 31, 2026, when their functions will transfer to IBT’s internal Office of Compliance Standards and Investigations (OCSI). Though federal judge Barbara S. Jones has been appointed to one more final three-year term as the Independent Review Officer (IRO) to oversee if the union is continuing to obey by anti-corruption mandates. And even after this three-year transition, IBT will continue to be overseen by an outside attorney with the title Independent Compliance Professional (ICP), who will sit on IBT’s Audit Committee.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has had an interventionalist strategy against unions since the 80s. Aside for IBT, four other unions have been the subjects of federal lawsuits that have led to consent decreases for monitoring or government takeovers: International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and United Slate, Tile and Composition Roofers. Most of these oversight programs are coming to an end. In related litigation over IBT, there has been recent dissolution in Chicago, after 40 years of oversight, of Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. These attacks on the unions contributed to lowering the overall union membership rates in the US from around 18% in 1985 to 10% in 2025 (CEPR). Though a similar trend is seen internationally, as OECD reports developed nations’ union rates have dropped from 30% in 1985 to 15% in 2023. America is more sharply falling behind on collective bargaining coverage, as workers covered by collective agreements have fallen from 47% (1985) to 33.6% (2024), but in the US this number is down to 11.3%. There have been some similar to the US anti-corruption lawsuits elsewhere that have also installed government-overseers in unions, as with Australia’s compulsory state administration over its construction union CFMEU, and Canada’s trusteeship over its construction unions.
Union membership fees have increased in part to support the millions the federal government has been charging unions for their oversight. Though beyond these RICO litigations that have framed unions as corrupt, there have also been decisions such as Janus v. AFSCME at the Supreme Court that struck down mandatory agency fees for public employees that instantly halved memberships in public-sector unions.
There have been a few other non-governmental entities that have faced similar RICO scrutiny. In 2015, the football FIFA association was indicted by DOJ over accepting over $150 million in bribes to decide who would host its future championship. DOJ then placed its own monitor to oversee its operations to avoid similar corruption in the future. And DOJ filed RICO charges against SAC Capital Advisors ($14 billion in assets), thus forcing it to restructure and pay for a court-appointed compliance monitor in addition to paying $1.8 billion settlement. Back during Trump’s one failed presidential run, IBT’s General President Sean M. O’Brien made the then strange step of being the first Teamsters president ever to address the Republican National Convention (RNC). While O’Brien did not endorse Trump and focused his speech on corporate greed, by breaking the union’s prior exclusive relationship with the Democratic party (as by hosting events with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) O’Brien ingratiated himself to Trump’s administration sufficiently for the current continuation of the shift to liberate IBT from oversight.
