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We had a brief item on one of the more notable news stories of the week, namely that the Teamsters Union decided not to make an endorsement in this year's presidential election. Slate's Steven Greenhouse has an item and Vox's Ellen Ioanes has another that raise some very interesting points about the non-endorsement.
To start, there is little doubt that Teamsters president Sean O'Brien is pro-Trump (per his speech at the RNC). Certainly, some/much of the rank-and-file of the Teamsters is also pro-Trump. That said, the voting conducted among union members was somewhat less than methodologically rigorous. There were straw polls at various Teamsters meetings, some sort of phone survey and, apparently, a ballot printed on the back page of the monthly bulletin of the union. Point is, that "59.6% of members support Trump, while 34% support Harris" result may not capture things accurately. The fact that numerous local Teamsters chapters promptly came out for Harris lends some credence to this supposition.
Meanwhile, of the nation's 10 largest labor unions, 9 backed Harris. The Teamsters are the only holdout. It is hardly a surprise that most unions are with Harris, as the Biden-Harris administration has been as pro-labor and pro-union as any presidential administration since, very possibly, that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both Biden and Harris personally walked the picket lines. They secured passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO), which labor leaders said was their #1 priority heading into the 2020 elections. The administration also secured passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which will create many union jobs. Harris also supports an increased minimum wage. By contrast, Trump opposed all of these bills (especially PRO) and he likes the current minimum wage just fine, thank you ver much.
Given that Harris is head and shoulders better than Trump on labor issues, what the heck happened with the Teamsters? Part of it is probably that Teamsters are overwhelmingly non-college white men, which is Trump's bread and butter. But Greenhouse argues that the real issue here is Sean O'Brien. One of the most important jobs of a labor leader is to keep the membership well informed about what's going on. If the members of every other union understood where Harris and Trump stand on the issues of concern to labor, and the members of the Teamsters do not, then that can pretty much only be laid at O'Brien's feet.
Greenhouse further argues that if a union takes from a political party, but doesn't give its votes to that party, the the party will move on and stop paying attention to the union's concerns. We're not sure we buy this, if only because it would be rather difficult for Harris to do what the other unions want without the Teamsters coming along for the ride. But we pass it along, in case readers disagree with us. (Z)