Can Harris Win Blue-Collar Union Members? [View all]

From email.

The decimation of the labor movement makes that a very uphill climb.

I don’t doubt the results when surveys of blue-collar union members—white blue-collar union members in particular—show them supporting Donald Trump. The polling of Teamsters, released by union president Sean O’Brien shortly before the Teamster executive board followed his lead to make no endorsement in this year’s presidential election, showed that members preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris by a 58 percent to 31 percent margin. The polling was conducted by veteran progressive Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, whose polling is widely respected by fellow pollsters and politicos, not to mention by me. I have no reason to question the results.

What I do dispute is that such polling should be determinative of a union’s endorsement decisions. I grant that if a union’s leadership has provided all the relevant information about the choice of candidates to its members, then the members’ preference should carry real weight. But such is hardly the case at the great majority of unions and is surely not the case at the Teamsters, where the differences between Harris and Trump, which are of existential importance to the union’s future, are not likely apparent to rank-and-file members.

At the most obvious level, Harris cast the tie-breaking Senate vote to enact a bill that bailed out the Teamsters’ largest pension fund, as part of an omnibus appropriation bill that Trump opposed. Less obvious are the differences between the Biden-Harris National Labor Relations Board and that board when it was controlled by Trump appointees. The most prominent of those Trump designees was the Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, who did everything he could to thwart unions’ organizing drives. The Biden-Harris general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, by contrast, is the most effectively pro-labor figure the Board has ever seen. Of particular importance to the Teamsters, she has prompted the Board to resurrect a joint-employer standard (which Trump’s Board had discarded) that makes Amazon the legal joint employer for the Amazon delivery drivers who are nominally employed by businesses with which Amazon has delivery contracts.

Inasmuch as the Teamsters’ chief organizing target is Amazon, that joint-employer designation is indispensable to the union’s efforts to organize those drivers That designation requires Amazon, not just the contractors, to enter into bargaining, and it holds Amazon, not just the contractors, liable for illegal violations of workers’ rights, among which the unlawful firing of workers during an organizing drive is a common practice.

In recent weeks, two NLRB administrative judges have found Amazon liable for those very practices. And in recent weeks, for the first time, the Teamsters have successfully organized drivers at several firms that are in a joint-employment relationship with Amazon—victories that have been possible only because of the fact that the Biden-Harris NLRB—noting that the drivers work full-time driving Amazon trucks, wearing Amazon uniforms, delivering Amazon packages—has called a duck a duck.


I very much doubt that more than a small share of Teamster members know about any of this, and I think the smart self-interested play by O’Brien and Teamster leaders would have been to explain such matters to their members as part of their campaign for Harris—a choice they didn’t make. I don’t think, however, that the low awareness of such developments among the rank and file is peculiar to the Teamsters. The official educational apparatuses of most unions of working-class members have seldom provided that kind of information to large numbers of those members, though a few unions—most particularly the UAW in the 40 years following World War II—have managed to do so. (Perhaps the most notable of the UAW’s election campaign achievements came in 1968. When initial polling showed that significant numbers of its white members were planning to vote for third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, the union worked feverishly to talk to members about Alabama’s and Wallace’s union busting—an effort that resulted in Democrat Hubert Humphrey coming from behind to narrowly carry Michigan that November.)

Informally, however, in the years when unions were prevalent and a union presence suffused members’ lives, unions found ways to share a basic political orientation among their members. As Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman demonstrated in Rust Belt Union Blues, published last year, the Steelworkers union was the social and cultural center of members’ lives across Pennsylvania from the 1940s through the 1980s. It clearly ceased to be so when the mills closed and the union locals disappeared. As Newman’s research showed, however, even when a mill still operates and the local is still there, the union no longer has the kind of enveloping presence it once had. Under those conditions, workers’ peer groups of fellow workers aren’t likely to informally convey their union’s worldview as they did in former times.

With the unionized share of the private-sector workforce now down to a bare 6 percent, it’s not easy to find places where a union culture is pervasive enough to help shape their members’ politics. An exception that somewhat proves this rule is that of UNITE HERE in Las Vegas—a 60,000-member local of hotel workers in a city where hotels dominate the economy, a city that’s hundreds of miles from any other big city. In that kind of environment, workers’ appreciation of the importance of maintaining and expanding the union’s strength is very real. That level of worker understanding, of course, is also the result of decades of union leaders’ strategically savvy and constant efforts to create the kind of intra-union culture where such understanding is widespread.

But there aren’t a lot of Vegases in blue-collar America, and while some unions still do a pretty good job of helping members understand the stakes in elections, it’s a very uphill battle. And so, the current division we see in the political orientations of college graduates and non-college workers applies to unions as well. In recent elections, exit polls have tended to show Democratic candidates outpolling Republicans by relatively small margins among union members. Roughly one-third of American union members belong to one of the two teachers unions, where support for Democratic candidates can regularly top 80 percent. Balance that against the blue-collar workers who may support Republicans, if not necessarily by the margins we see in that Teamster poll, and the result is that single-digit advantage for Democrats among union members that all too regularly appears in exit polls.

Which makes it all the more mandatory for Democratic candidates to craft compelling appeals to blue-collar workers, unionized and not. It’s not clear that Kamala Harris has done that yet, and there’s not a lot of time left for her to do that.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON