The article talks about how union leadership has gotten so soft and corrupt that they squandered a lot of what they could have been accomplishing for the last four years, with the hardened rank-and-file members often clamoring to try to get more to happen, and the leaders slow-walking everything, apparently for reasons of laziness.

O'Brien is quite a bit worse than the norm, but he's also apparently not some weird singular exception. He just made himself more visible by allying himself with Trump.