The leadership of the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters said in a statement Wednesday it would not back a presidential candidate, a blow to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has the endorsement of the country’s other powerful labor unions.
The decision by the Teamsters board, while short of an endorsement for former President Donald Trump, vindicated Trump’s strategy of wooing the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, a leader who has repeatedly signaled his willingness to chart his own path. The board’s vote was 14 for not endorsing and three for Harris. No board member backed Trump.
O’Brien’s openness to Trump — who angered other unions by appointing anti-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board and praising Elon Musk recently for a willingness to fire striking workers — has divided the union.
The Teamsters’ National Black Caucus, more than a half-dozen Teamsters locals, and members of the union’s national leadership have endorsed Harris over O’Brien’s objections. After the national union declined to endorse Wednesday, two Teamsters joint governing councils in the West, which cover 300,000 workers including those in the swing state of Nevada, announced they would back Harris.
The union endorsed President Joe Biden in 2020, as well as Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
On Monday, Harris held a roundtable with Teamsters leaders that was at times tense. Allies of O’Brien pushed her on the role Biden played in averting a rail strike in late 2022 and the ways the White House could have been more helpful in a Teamsters dispute last summer with United Parcel Service.
Harris said she would like the union’s endorsement, but she also said she would win in November and would treat the Teamsters fairly with or without it. Declining to endorse in the presidential election leaves the union officially on the sidelines, depriving both candidates of organizing muscle in the final weeks of the campaign.
The decision not to endorse reflected divisions within the union’s rank-and-file. Leaders who backed Harris noted that the Biden administration had done much to like. But working-class voters, especially white men, have favored Trump.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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