‘With you or without you’ – The growing rift between unions and Democrats

A rift is growing between the Democratic Party and the labor movement. It was caused in large part by the party’s inability to move the type of legislation that union leaders want. For decades, Democrats have endorsed but not enacted legislation to make union organizing easier and labor leaders are getting increasingly fed up with this inaction.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) President Lee Saunders recently stepped down from their positions as at-large members of the Democratic National Committee. Weingarten and Saunders represent two of the most powerful public sector unions in the country.

“While I am a proud Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging,” Weingarten said in a letter to the committee. In a separate letter to the DNC, Saunders spoke of the need to “devote every ounce of our energy” to protecting collective bargaining. Notably, both had backed DNC Chair Ken Martin’s rival Ben Wikler in the race for chairman in February.

This follows the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ decision to make no endorsement  in the 2024 presidential election—a move that stunned Democrats who had been counting on the powerful union to back Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Teamster President Sean O’Brien justified the action by releasing internal polls that showed many of the Teamster rank-and-file backed Republican Donald Trump. But in a podcast last week with former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, O’Brien revealed that another factor in the decision was that the Teamsters were feeling alienated by Harris and the Democrats.

Among other revelations, O’Brien said that, during a meeting he had in the summer of 2024 with unnamed Democratic senators and three other major union leaders, he opposed bringing up the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act for a Senate vote ahead of the election. This was despite the PRO Act being a wish list of union priorities. O’Brien assumed that a vote at that time would have been an act of political theater, not a serious bid to get the legislation through the Senate. That would have suited Democrats, who could claim that they voted in support of unions, without actually benefiting them.

“They wanted to introduce the PRO Act, and I’m like, ‘It’s never gonna pass,’” O’Brien told Walsh. “I had a sidebar with these three other general (union) presidents and I said, ‘They’re using this as an issue to weaponize it.’” O’Brien said that the “weaponization” of the legislation made it politically toxic and therefore impossible to get enough bipartisan support.

“We’ve been used as props a lot,” O’Brien fumed later in the podcast, again referring to the Democrats.

O’Brien also revealed that the Teamsters’ non-endorsement followed a short, tense meeting with Harris and her campaign where she only answered a handful of questions the union had. It closed with Harris giving the union an ultimatum. “She said, ‘I’m going to win this with you or without you,’” O’Brien recalled.

O’Brien, Saunders, and Weingarten are voicing a long-standing complaint union leaders have regarding the Democratic Party: That it takes them for granted and that, for all of the party’s rhetoric, does little to advance pro-union legislation and policies.

The labor movement, while always left-leaning, more tightly aligned itself with the Democratic Party and the broader liberal movement starting in the 1990s. It was a relationship forged under then-AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and continued by his successor, Richard Trumka, who died in 2021. Unions had seen declining membership over the last several decades. Sweeney and Trumka saw changing federal law as the best way to reverse that. Their goal was to elect enough Democrats to pass new federal legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act and the PRO Act; laws that would coerce more workers into joining unions.

However, even presidents as pro-union as Barack Obama and Joe Biden were unable to deliver any of these bills. That’s caused the unions to rethink the alliance and instead seek alliances with Republicans, something unthinkable in Obama’s day.

The rift is still in an early stage. A full-scale fracture of the alliance between unions and Democrats is unlikely. Union campaign spending in 2024 was still heavily lopsided in favor of Democrats, though down from its peak in the 2000s, and the Teamsters did contribute to the GOP in the last election. O’Brien says he got considerable pushback from friends and allies for the 2024 non-endorsement.

Still, the fissures are growing and the Trump administration and some in the Republican Party, for good or ill, have presented an opportunity for unions to change direction. Unions are increasingly looking at shaking up the status quo.