The Teamsters, one of the nation’s largest and most diverse unions with 1.3 million members, unveiled a Substack newsletter Monday, becoming the first major union to use the online forum to reach people outside traditional media.

The move was spearheaded by Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who wants to put the Faster Labor Contracts Act and the impact of AI on American workers at the forefront of Congress’s agenda.

“Prior to us taking over, the Teamsters were kind of stagnant in the news. We came in with a whole new crew,” O’Brien, is the 11th general president of the prominent union, told The Hill in an interview.

“We had some great success with the media early on, the UPS agreement and a bunch of stuff we are doing,” he said, but he added that the positive media coverage he generated early in his tenure as president was swallowed up by “hit pieces” in the legacy media to which he felt the Teamsters weren’t given a real chance to respond.

In particular, O’Brien isn’t pleased with some of the coverage of The Wall Street Journal, which, for example, published an editorial in October calling the union’s 2023 contract with the UPS a “loser for laid-off workers.”

“They don’t tell the whole truth,” he said of media outlets that have written harsh or critical pieces. “When you call them out on it and you want to do an editorial on what they said, that’s completely edited, completely under their control.”

Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, did not respond to a request for comment.

O’Brien said the Substack newsletter will give the Teamsters “to control our narrative” and “target to a direct audience that is going to be focused on our issues.”

“We’re the only union that’s doing it,” he added. “The vision is to put [out] credible information, control the narrative. Look, we’re still going to engage with mainstream media and we have to. … With the emergence of podcasts and unfiltered conversations, [the newsletter] is also a tool for us to grow.”

Lawmakers in both parties increasingly view online platforms that are separate from traditional media outlets as critical to getting their message directly to supporters and potential supporters.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told The New York Times in a recent interview that he’s trying to get his less-tech-savvy colleagues to wrap their minds around the fact that a post on his TikTok feed likely gets much more public exposure than an interview with MS NOW.

“You think about the average person, 18 to 35 years old. Are they getting all their information right now from mainstream media? No, they’re going on podcasts, they’re going on platforms, social media. We think we can do the same with Substack. It’s going to be a great tool for organizing,” O’Brien said.

One of the Teamsters’s first Substack columns is an article on the Faster Labor Contracts Act, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that would amend the National Labor Relations Act to require that employers begin negotiating with a new union within 10 days of workers voting to form a union.

And the bill requires that if a labor agreement isn’t reached within 90 days, the dispute will be referred to mediation.

One of the union’s first newsletter items points out that workers, on average, wait 458 days “fighting for their first contract after voting to form a union.”

In October, Hawley introduced O’Brien at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, where the labor leader said he’s working to cultivate more support among Republicans for labor issues.

“When I took office, I directed the Teamsters union legislative department to confront their own partisan bias. As a result, our union has found new allies on both sides of the aisle,” O’Brien testified at the time.

“There is a realignment around labor taking place within the Republican Party. The Teamsters union wants to encourage that movement by offering multiple paths to support our members and not a single litmus test,” he said.

O’Brien wants to get away from the red-versus-blue partisan lens that collars almost all policy debates in Washington to drill down on the issues in a way that can build support for new legislation and cut across political, geographic and class lines.

“This is going to be a platform where it doesn’t matter if you’re a progressive, a liberal, a Democrat or Republican, independent. It’s going to be strictly based upon the subject matter at hand,” he said.

O’Brien thinks the Democratic Party too often has used high-priority labor issues as a “political football” at election time without making much progress on them during off years.

And he sees potential allies among Trump-aligned populist conservatives, such as Hawley, who want to get things done on Capitol Hill for working men and women.

The newly unveiled Substack highlights another major issue for labor that doesn’t get much attention in public debate — binding arbitration clauses that have become increasingly prevalent in daily American life.

O’Brien’s team wants more Americans to realize that they’re often signing away legal rights without even knowing it when they tap on their phone.

“You order your coffee on an app to save time. You’ve just agreed to arbitration. You tap your contactless transit pass to commute to work. Arbitration. You check the status of a package from Amazon. Arbitration,” the newsletter reads.

It goes on to explain that these arbitration clauses are “designed to live in the background — quiet, automatic, unacknowledged” but the implications are significant because their “fine-print contract language … replaces the right to sue.”

O’Brien said the subjects of arbitration and other hot-button labor issues are “maybe not interesting to the average person” but have widespread influence on people’s day-to-day lives.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Well, that’s boring, whatever,’” he said, noting “99 percent of the people who sign up for a credit card, sign up for a specific service, agree to arbitration, they just don’t know they did.”

The rapid expansion of AI is another top concern of the Teamsters and other unions that want to make sure policymakers are keeping an eye on how new technologies will impact workers — white-collar and blue-collar employees alike.

“AI’s probably one of the biggest threats that we have. Unfortunately, I’m becoming an expert on it,” O’Brien said, calling it one of the “biggest subject matters.”

“A lot of our members’ jobs could be threatened by the implementation of technology and artificial intelligence. It’s great to get an open dialogue on where we see it’s going,” he said.

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