When Vice President Kamala Harris met with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 16, she was hoping to walk away with a major union endorsement. The Democratic nominee offered plenty of reasons why she was better for labor than Donald Trump, but she returned to one issue more than once.

“She reinforced the pension thing over and over,” said John Palmer, a member of the Teamsters’ executive board who was in the meeting.

In 2021, Democrats attached an expensive pension bailout to the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package they muscled through the Senate on a party-line vote at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The inclusion of an estimated $74 to $91 billion to shore up troubled multiemployer pension funds was a small legislative miracle for the Teamsters and other unions – and it never would have happened without Harris.

At the time, the Senate had 50 members caucusing with Democrats and 50 with Republicans, with Harris, as president of the chamber, serving as the tie-breaker to end deadlocks. She cast the deciding vote in a crucial step known as the motion to proceed, allowing the stimulus package to advance with zero Republican support.

But two days after the meeting with Harris, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien announced that the 1.3 million-member union would not be backing Harris or Trump. The controversial non-endorsement effectively boosted the Trump campaign, since it marked the first time since 1992 that the Teamsters didn’t support a Democrat for the White House. O’Brien also gave Trump a lift by releasing internal polls showing members preferred the former Republican president over Harris.

Many O’Brien critics are angry that the union could look past the pension rescue, to say nothing of Trump’s hostility to unions during his first term. The Teamsters’ Central States pension fund was the biggest plan facing insolvency, with thousands of Teamsters facing benefit cuts so steep it would threaten their retirements.

“The Biden-Harris administration carried out their promise to solve the Teamsters’ pension problems,” Jim Hoffa, the union’s former longtime president who preceded O’Brien, said in an interview. “That alone should be enough to cement a commitment from the IBT.”

Local Teamsters councils covering a majority of the union’s members across the U.S. have since come out for Harris, often citing the pension issue, among others.

Kara Deniz, a Teamsters spokesperson, said there were a number of factors that played into the executive board’s decision to stay out of the presidential race. She cited conflicting surveys of Teamsters membership: Early town hall straw polls suggesting members backed President Joe Biden when he was the presumptive Democratic nominee, and later online and phone polls showing they backed Trump over Harris after she replaced Biden atop the ticket. (Town halls would tend to draw a lot of union activists, which could partly explain the discrepancy.)

Deniz also said the union couldn’t secure important commitments from Harris in their Washington meeting. That included a guarantee to keep Biden antitrust chief Lina Khan atop the Federal Trade Commission, and a promise not to intervene in potential Teamster work stoppages like the rail strike Biden and Congress preempted in 2022.

She said the Teamsters shouldn’t be beholden to Harris or Democrats just because they bailed out the pension funds.

“If a party does one thing, does this mean that we owe a single party forever?” she said. “There were a lot of other issues that were important that were discussed.”

Deniz said O’Brien was not available for an interview. After announcing the non-endorsement, O’Brien told PBS NewsHour that Democrats helped create the Teamsters’ pension problems in 1980 by voting to deregulate the trucking industry under then-President Jimmy Carter, leading to an influx of non-union firms that reduced Teamster membership. “Should I look for praise for fixing a problem I helped create?” he asked.

O’Brien himself is a trustee of the New England Teamsters Pension Plan. That plan was on track to run out of funding by 2028, but now it will receive $5.7 billion in federal money due to Democrats’ stimulus package, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-run entity that insures defined-benefit pensions. Without that funding, the plan’s 72,000 recipients could have seen their benefit payments slashed by roughly 75%.

Palmer, who plans to challenge O’Brien for the union’s presidency in 2026, said he was one of three executive board members who voted to endorse Harris, while 14 voted to endorse no one. (Trump received no votes, he said.) O’Brien made the case that backing Harris would defy members’ wishes, Palmer said, and he believes O’Brien’s position influenced the thinking of other board members.

Palmer argued the non-endorsement would prove to be “very costly.”

“We’re not here to reflect members’ polling,” he said. “We’re here to make sure facts are put forward to members so they can make an educated choice.”

‘Playing Sweden’

The Teamsters executive board’s decision not to endorse has put headquarters at odds with its many local bodies that have come out for Harris.

That includes Joint Council 43 in the critical swing state of Michigan, with 32,000 Teamsters. The council’s board had voted unanimously to back Harris before O’Brien announced the Teamsters would stay neutral, said Kevin Moore, the council’s president. He said they decided not to go public until after O’Brien and leadership made their call.

“I’m not going to second-guess the general president,” Moore said. “I just know this: in Michigan there was never another choice for us.”

Moore said electing Harris and other Democrats is crucial to maintaining union strength in his state. He noted that Democrats repealed Michigan’s right-to-work law last year after wresting control of the statehouse from Republicans, the first time a state had done so in nearly 60 years.

But the pension issue loomed large in the council’s decision as well, he added. After all, Michigan Teamsters are part of the Central States plan that Harris and other Democrats voted to rescue.

“That’s why there was so much anger here in Michigan about the [non-] endorsement,” Moore said.

O’Brien’s relationship with Trump goes back to at least January, when he met with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. O’Brien later sought and accepted a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, a controversial move given Trump’s anti-union record and attempts to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results. In his speech he urged both parties to support labor, and praised Trump as “one tough SOB.”

Some Teamsters believe O’Brien’s public overtures to the GOP started out as an attempt to solidify support among the union’s conservative-leaning members. It also couldn’t hurt to get on the winning side — when O’Brien addressed the RNC, Trump was polling ahead of the Democrats’ then-presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, making it seem likely the union would have to deal with another Trump administration.

Others theorize that O’Brien felt snubbed by Democrats when they turned him down for a speaking slot at their own convention.

Deniz called such speculation “absolutely absurd,” and said internal politics played no role in O’Brien’s Republican outreach. She said a Teamsters survey indicated more than two-thirds of members thought it was important for him to address the RNC.

Chad Bartholomew, a Teamster and delivery driver in Washington state, said he was glad to see the union stay out of the race. Bartholomew supports Trump and believes he’d be better at handling the economy and keeping inflation down. He doesn’t see it as the union’s job to get involved in national politics. He was annoyed when his local threw its backing behind Harris.

“We’re better off to play Sweden in this and be neutral,” Bartholomew said.

Kevin Brisky, a former Teamsters shop steward who retired from a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Minnesota in 2018, said he was dismayed to see many younger, male coworkers drifting toward Trump during the 2016 election. He felt they needed to be schooled on “what party does what for us, and what party does nothing for us.” He viewed the non-endorsement as a cop-out.

“You’re an elected leader,” he said of O’Brien. “You’ve got to make decisions.”

The phone survey of 900 rank-and-file members, run by Democratic pollster Lake Research Partners, found Teamsters preferred Trump to Harris, 58% to 31%. Lake Research’s Joshua Ulibarri, who oversaw the poll, said they were “robust surveys” with sample sizes “in the usual range for union memberships.”

“This was solid work and I think pretty good snapshots of how union members felt and — at the time — planned to vote,” Ulibarri said in an email.

Some local union leaders don’t believe the figures.

“I guess I’m not buying it,” said Bill Carroll, president of Joint Council 39 in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

Carroll and the rest of his board voted unanimously to support Harris, a decision he called a “no-brainer.” He doesn’t doubt that plenty of the council’s 15,000 Teamsters support Trump. “I’ve got some members that absolutely had their hair on fire over our endorsement,” he said. But he doesn’t believe they back Trump to the degree shown in the internal polls.

He also said an endorsement is about more than the candidates’ popularity.

“We get elected for a reason: not only to represent our members, but to safeguard our organization,” said Carroll, who’s been a union official for 25 years.

Republicans under former Gov. Scott Walker decimated public-sector unions in Wisconsin, repealing collective-bargaining rights for most government workers, including thousands of Teamsters in public works, Carroll noted. And like those in Michigan, many Teamster retirees in Wisconsin might have received a fraction of their Central States pensions if Democrats didn’t intervene.

Carroll said he and other board members didn’t weigh cultural issues — they just considered what another Trump presidency could mean for unions like theirs.

“We’re dealing with old man Trump here,” he said. “It’s not like a John McCain or a Mitt Romney that might have some middle-of-the-road leanings. The stakes are much higher.”

Boots On The Ground

The real-world effect of the union’s non-endorsement might never be clear, though just about anything could tip the election if it comes down to a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.

The Teamsters aren’t known for having the robust political operation of some other big unions, but in years past, the union has sent staff to help get-out-the-vote efforts for Democrats in the battlegrounds, officials said. Union employees take leave from their normal duties to do campaign work paid through the Teamsters’ political action committee.

A Teamsters spokesperson confirmed that this year’s non-endorsement means it won’t be putting any such resources into the presidential race.

“It basically takes them out of the ballgame,” Hoffa said. “It’s a big help to Donald Trump because the international has decided to sit it out and stay on the sidelines.”

But the joint councils are autonomous bodies, and leaders like Carroll said they do some of the most critical get-out-the-vote work. That includes running phone banks to call members and meeting them on shift changes and in break rooms to hand out fliers on the election. He said his council will be running for Harris full-steam through October, and he expects others around the country to operate similar ground games.

But even Carroll is concerned about the lack of unity and wishes the entire union was moving in lockstep.

“When we speak with one voice, we’re the strongest. When our members are divided and things get chaotic, that’s what causes weakness,” he said. “I’m not sure what the result of all this is going to be. But it certainly isn’t solidarity-forming.”