Some labor union leaders are questioning President Joe Biden’s electoral viability following his poor debate performance in June, according to multiple outlets.
Leaders at the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the National Education Association(NEA) have publicly voiced concerns about Biden’s ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, according to multiple outlets. Behind the scenes, AFL-CIO union chiefs broached concerns with the Biden campaign over the president’s electability during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, three sources familiar with the gathering told The Washington Post.
Biden has called himself “the most pro-union president in American history.”
“In this election, we can’t put our heads in the sand and hide from reality,” UAW President Shawn Fain said on Friday during a labor activist conference in Baltimore, according to Bloomberg. “We tried that in 2016 and it didn’t work. Real democracy and real leadership is about not being afraid of the truth — even the hard truths.”
A day earlier, Fain met with his union’s executive board to discuss grave concerns about Biden’s ability to win the looming presidential election, according to three sources who spoke with Reuters.
The UAW has roughly 400,000 members with an outsized presence in Michigan, a key swing state.
Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson reportedly was among the most outspoken regarding concerns about Biden’s electability at Wednesday’s AFL-CIO meeting, according to the Post. Nelson has since disputed the Post’s characterization of the meeting, saying that her statements were “distorted,” Politico reported. However, AFL-CIO later voted to reaffirm its support of the president, according to the Post.
Some members of the NEA, a 3 million- strong union primarily representing teachers, are calling on the organization to rescind its endorsement of Biden due to his handling of the war in Gaza, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“We are calling for an end to the harm that is happening now,” Samy El-Baroudi, a member of the Des Moines Education Association who founded the NEA’s Arab-American Educators Caucus seven years ago, told the Inquirer. “This is about human rights — all humans. We need to stop this process of devaluing the lives of brown people that get in the way of white people.”
“There’s a lot of us who have doubts,” Aaron Philps, an NEA board member, said about Biden on Friday, according to Politico.
“Everyone’s a little nervous,” a former union president still involved in the labor movement told Politico on Friday, noting that some are “extremely nervous.”
Unions have historically been a core part of the Democratic coalition, spending $1.8 billion on political activities during the 2020 election cycle, according to a report from the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. The Service Employees International Union has already pledged to spend $200 million helping Biden and other Democrats win their elections in November, The New York Times reported.
Uniform support for Democrats among unions could be poised to change, however, as the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters seeks to garner influence among Republicans, with the union donating $45,000 to the Republican National Committee and sending its president, Sean O’Brien, to speak at the Republican National Convention which begins in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Monday.
O’Brien expressed a desire to speak at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, though has not received an invitation from Democrats to attend their convention, Politico reported.
“I pushed every button I know to make sure he wasn’t invited to the DNC,” one former union president told Politico. “Nobody representing working class people should be anywhere near the Republican convention.”
“What type of union leader campaigns against another union member’s right to speak?” a Teamsters spokeswoman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s the type of person who is retired and out of the game, yet still lacks the courage and conviction to speak out without the cloak of anonymity.”
The Teamsters have 1.3 million members and represent truck drivers, government employees, pilots, construction workers, warehouse employees and those working in the public sector, as well as workers in several other sectors.
The Association of Flight Attendants, NEA, AFL-CIO and UAW did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Featured image credit: (Screen Capture/CNBC)
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